Untitled ("I am the girl along the dusty road")

A brief poem of gendered toughness, where poverty, military money, and urban violence all arrive in a single roadside stance.

A short, hard poem whose title-line self-definition ('I am the girl along the dusty road') gives way to a body that opens 'And I can count military money / like fence posts.' It warns that 'If you don't give a rat's ass, / you end up in the corner,' then gauges its own distance from spectacular violence: 'It is probably different / in Los Angeles killing in / real time.'

The governing simile is rural and precise: counting 'military money / like fence posts' measures wealth or pay the way a farmhand measures a property line, post by post, an image that makes the military economy as countable and as bounded as a field. 'My sweet side has work to do' admits a softer self kept on duty, held in reserve behind the toughness. The folk-aphorism 'If you don't give a rat's ass, / you end up in the corner' frames apathy as a losing move, a survival rule for someone with little margin. The poem ends by comparing its own world to a distant one, 'Los Angeles killing in / real time,' where violence is immediate and televisual; against that, the dusty road's violence is slower, more economic, conducted in fence posts and military money rather than in 'real time.' The self-naming holds throughout - she remains 'the girl along the dusty road' even as the poem prices out what that costs. The phrasing and spellings are the source's and I have preserved them.