Caroline Giles Banks
Round and Roundabout
Wanting to avoid crowded airports, planes and COVID-19, I take my first road trip in many years. Oklahoma in August. Seeking respite from the 100+degrees heat, the AC is on full blast. I’ve set the cruise control to 78 MPH, just above the speed limit of 75, not high enough to avoid the whiplash of passing trucks. I am amazed to see acres and acres of wind farms, gigantic blades pinwheeling ‘new’ energy far over the horizon. Beneath these megaliths a few fantastical rust-brown birds mechanically peck the earth, hungry for liquid gold buried ever deeper in the ground.
car trip tank filled on credit fossil remains
Tribal casinos hug the interstate, oases offering a buffet, a suite, luck for those who stop,
and jobs, revenue for resource-deprived Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee. Needing a break, I take the off-ramp to the Broken Bow casino. Masked up I wait in line for sweet iced tea and wonder if another road trip is in the cards.
rock paper scissors trying to keep a hand in the game
About the Author
Caroline Giles Banks, born in Boston, Massachusetts, is a cultural anthropologist, and her poetry is often informed by her anthropological training and research. She is the author of six books of poetry, including The Clay Jar: Haiku, Senryu and Haibun Poems, The Weight of Whiteness: A Memoir in Poetry, and Picture a Poem: Ekphrastic and Other Poems. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.