Crop rows turn like flip-book pages. The story goes,

a combine paces in a wheat field, and the sun

overhead breathes like a stepfather. Another drought

will wake soon, stumble down walnut rows, and knock

pictures from hallway walls. In a pear grove,

a boy and his sister finger-draw

on a dusty Honda Civic. Their mother’s

day won’t end until she loads

two-dozen white buckets with almost-ripened

pieces of a land now called “California.”

Another young mother in a place like Akron, Ohio,

eats some California on her fifteen.

Outside Coalinga, I think of my own mother,

and, for the first time, consider what it really takes

for a twenty-seven-year-old who’s just left her

abusive husband, the only town she’s ever lived,

and her mother and father and brothers—

a twenty-seven-year-old with two children under ten

to feed and house and clothe with almost no money—

I consider what it really takes for her to break

the silence with a fart joke, as my mother did

when we passed the feedlot. Cows

squeezed to the trough. My sister and I laughed

in the backseat. My mother’s eyes held us

in the rearview mirror of our Toyota Starlet.