Fulfillment
We’re passing the Hollingsworth Fulfillment Center, big box wedged between the fields and trailers, then paved lots of rebar and mulch, cedar boards being showered under sprinklers, awaiting use in construction. We’re passing a treeless mobile home development named Almond Groves.
Sometimes, after the heroine’s desire song is sung, she doesn’t get what she wants. Then she sings it again but in anger. Writers call this the Dark Reprise. There’s no escaping her want, and what she might do to grasp it.
We cross over the North Fork of the Tuolumne River, then over again, bisecting its curve, on our way down the mountain where we planted incense cedars and big leaf maples to cover the Rim Fire’s scar.
In the flats, we pass Century Communities, 55+, now selling: half-built houses spreading across fields facing the highway.
The kids want to talk to Siri, want their own Alexa, a woman waiting to answer every desire.
I watch for a place to pull over and collect mistletoe so that we can hang it in doorways and make the kids gag when we ambush them with kisses—they’re old enough to hate it and that makes me want it more.
We have to spot it in a live oak outside a fence line, low enough to reach. I can see the balls of it hovering, but it’s too high in the near branches, only low in the trees far into someone’s pasture: the yellow-green tinge of it thriving as it siphons nutrients from the tree. I crane my neck. Tell my husband: drive slow, get ready to swerve off the road.
Rachel Richardson is the author of two books of poetry, Hundred-Year Wave and Copperhead, both selections in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. She has been awarded NEA and Stegner fellowships, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere. Rachel teaches in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College and is co-founder of Left Margin LIT, a literary arts center in Berkeley, California.
Read four poems by Rachel Richardson appearing in Terrain.org’s Lookout: Writing + Art About Wildfire series. And read her Letter to America, “Our Road,” also in Terrain.org.
Header image by Antje Eipper, courtesy Pixabay.
