Blue Mountain Arts Poetry Contest

A View of Concrete Ribbons
by Sally Clark

Nineteenth Contest
First Place

I remember when I was young
and driving thirty miles in sixty minutes 
of rush hour traffic twice a day so
I could work for eight hours two cities
away from my children in an
office that afforded a view of concrete ribbons
screaming in every direction with 
people who knew my name but that's
all and climate control that kept everything
uniform in every season;

I used to think about my grandparents
tucked away in the piney woods in 
their small, wooden house with a 
screened-in porch for summer sleeping
and their tiny kitchen with a green Formica 
table top and a clear plastic cover over
the floral sofa so you could see the bouquets underneath;
with a vegetable garden and a chicken coop
and a trout pond and an old pickup truck
the oil company gave my grandfather
to drive to check their wells, twice a day,
his job,

and them waking up together and working 
alongside, him hoeing the garden while
she did the laundry and sitting down for lunch
together, every day, bowing their heads to
say thanks for the sweet corn and the leftover
fried chicken and the coupons for paper towels 
in the newspaper that day and how those 
vinyl chairs clung to your flesh and never wanted 
to let your legs 
go anywhere else.