A poem by Will Burns.

We passed through the flattest country—

the very middle, most inland of it all.

We went practically nowhere 

at previously impossible speeds. 

It was orchid season in the acid grassland of home

and we’d been given departure times too.

Old material was being re-purposed,  

but we couldn’t recall how anything had once worked.

We still felt a certain pull, like it or not,

along the freshly-minted train line,

that dragged us past the unremembered churches,

the cattlefields and their grim corvids,

odd ducks on puny little bodies of water 

that had appeared on the field margins 

in the rains and so were not yet fit for naming.

*