On Junkyards

The rusted old Chevelle Monte Carlo 1957 Buick with the high metal fins and patinaed outside red bullseye headlights the German Shepherd choking on her chain except there was no guard dog at my father’s junkyard and my father never really had a junkyard it was just our backyard that he’d lined with rotting cars for parts that he sold when other jobs didn’t pan out—the aluminum pans he filled with cat litter to soak, the foam interiors were always soaked in April when the rains came and flooded the back forty as we called it and pulled a Pontiac into the stream the mold the mice the rain the stream the moon came out and made it look like the shadowed headrest was a person the water running through the hubcaps the undercarriage and spurting out the doors the Pontiac is still there my father pulled the steering column from it just yesterday to replace mine.

Olivia Jacobson is an MFA candidate in poetry at Syracuse University. She is the non-fiction editor at Salt Hill Journal, and is originally from Sheridan, Indiana. She is also a painter and stained-glass artist. Her work is forthcoming in The Shore and elsewhere.

A Song for Olivia