Vox Populi
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Pablo Otavalo: Scorched Earth, Illinois
The town once hummed, pneumatic
hammers beat the slag out of iron, chimneys
billowed like chain-smokers mid-shift,
dreaming of somewhere else, where the sun set
the other way around, where their asthmatic
children could breathe. And those were
the halcyon days. Now it’s empty parking lots,
boarded strip malls, and the Stop-n-Shop
with that giant wooden bird the high school built
to commemorate the bicentennial. So when
a bear sanctuary opened on what used to be
a pig farm, some thought maybe it’ll draw
business off the highway. And every few weeks
the bears escaped, and soon be spotted
by the dumpsters behind the Waffle House. It
startled folk at first, but they got used to that,
too. And the bears never seemed to wander
far, they just milled around town, knocked down
a few garbage cans and waited to be brought back
to their pens. As though whatever was once wild
in them was gone. There was talk of changing
the varsity mascot to the Grizzlies, but when
the Millers’ son went missing, they all
had the same fear. How foolish they had been,
to trust a good thing. Then they found the body
under an overpass: Painkillers, the sheriff said.
And Mrs. Miller stopped going to church. And talk
started up again about closing the sanctuary.
And they started locking up the dumpsters. And
Mr. Miller bought a rifle, because he loved his son.
~~~~
Poem copyright 2024 Pablo Otavalo
Pablo Otavalo is from Cuenca, Ecuador, and now lives and writes in Illinois. A recipient of the 2013 and 2014 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition prize, his work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, RHINO Poetry and other publications. He says, “We must find what we revere in each other.”
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This very fine poem is all kinds of sad. What a country we live in.
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Trump and his cronies encourage us to blame immigrants for the corrupt system they and their Democratic colleagues have created.
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Wow–what a powerhouse of a poem.
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Isn’t it?
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Thank you for your comments. How do we deal with grief, with loss, with dissapointment? And what can we get used to? And what can we blame?
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I’m commenting here for the second time, after more contemplation. We readers have focused on the insanity of the father buying the gun, but way before this, before the bears were imported to hopefully revitalize the town through tourism, the heart of the place had already collapsed, as the first part of the poem describes. The place was hollowed out. The death might have been caused by fentanyl, not prescription meds (who knows?). The father’s insanity might be wanting to go after the local drug dealer, still untouched by the legal system. So tragic.
The community of the small town was already gravely wounded through outside economic forces. It reminds me of the playing out of events in Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead, but with the bears added. Rural America, except for the megafarms, is being left to fend for itself. sorry for my need to rant. the poem is a gem of narration.
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Well-said, Jim. Rural America has been decimated, and the residents have become political radicals. Young people see no future for themselves, so they turn to drugs and guns. Voting for Trump, the nihilist, is a like a last-resort act of desperation.
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Mindbogglingly good. Thought provoking. Sparse. Telling our contradictions and failure to come to the right conclusions, the bears, the non reason why death by OxyContin would make the father buy a gun. The perfect remedy because he loved his son. Where are we all going? Madness all.
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Posted to Facebook and Bluesky ( I hope)
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What a poem! (I plan to read it over & over and add it to my “Poems to Teach” file!) Thanks Mr Otavalo, thanks Michael.
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Yes, there’s a strange cause and effect in the series of events which is illogical but still a good description of the way we experience the world. The father buys a gun because his son overdosed? This is the way we act in extremis even though our actions make no sense.
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Beautiful and painfully sad description of how a scapegoat comes to be.
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Exactly!
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A wonderful poem, with its microcosmic look at our current scorched earth.
The twisted direction of events: Bears forage garbage cans, then a son of the town overdoses, his mother loses her faith, his father buys a gun. The bears turn into scapegoats. Like other animals in similar situations…again and again. But rarely described so well as in Otavalo’s telling.
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I agree, Jim. The concatenation of events are rolling the town to tragedy.
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Bought a rifle because he loved his son. Metaphor for what our country has become.
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Yes.
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