As Much Land as You Wanted for Humphreys, Oklahoma, formerly a town, now an unincorporated community A name for Humphreys is “early-day cattleman,” is post office status, is “have as much land as you want.” The plow roused us, made the fissure ready for a new word as a section of dug out prairie. Touch the wooden wagon nervously entering a wall of miles seeing nothing human. Made of force: a new home freezing in the earth, a thin herd of unfed and dying stock, a leased dawn. A wrung out shred of this county is a practiced desert, and people worry courageous at the dry dirt raised through years of red storms settled over a farm, the air heating endless caustic embered teeth. At the end of fumes is a site we call home, and loss is a big part of that booming stop. A lot for Humphreys is filled in with coming and ending, is ground pasted to a train track, a land of loose ordered hurt waging a way forward, a hardware store drug out of the rocks. What is site in this radius of struggle, in this inverted sheen of horizon. For the scene is a mirror unfolded, and my eyes made everything I ever wish for or imagined could be seen in the image enunciated in the movement of room the prairie offered. A young line of rays shook and severed the stasis of the real leased to air and land identified as taken. Ain’t the eye enough, made in the resilience of roads stepping toward doors speaking porches. Ain’t the earning of rain water caught in ready gutters a relief in the background of the house, this out-of-sight-ness lit by kerosene lamps and stacks of cobs soaked with oil. To the West the house is a small plant fighting a stem through a sere place. A surface is generally not a home; Humphreys is an end-to-end chain.
Great Western Cattle Trail, 1874 − 1896 (II) From the time of its formation up until the time when the land was transferred from Texas to what became the state of Oklahoma, Greer County sat along the Great Western Cattle Trail, where cattle were driven north across the southern Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River and up through the North Fork, running through the eastern part of the county. Here is cattle become line, become crease, head turning forward long-horned from Texas into something other. The sand at the river wraps itself into fur at the crossing, and they feel this harden on their legs as they move in the grass they find arriving under their hooves. We call this Greer County, this careful sensation of a body on earth crossing space. Is the trail a cow just miles wide, just a humming desire to feel unnamed the faint touch of their existence in the real.
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Ryan Clark is obsessed with puns and writes his poems using a unique method of homophonic translation. He is the author of How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press, 2019), and his poetry has recently appeared in Yemassee, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tahoma Literary Review, HOLD, and riverSedge. He currently teaches creative writing at Waldorf University in Iowa.