I have a soft spot for poetry, art, and music that creates a sense of motion through a landscape. I attribute this interest to too many hours looking out the bus window on my trips home from school as a kid or my more recent work as a landscape archaeology.

Whatever the reason, I was drawn to Bud Sturguess’s poem from NDQ 90.3/4: “Amarillo City Transit.”

Amarillo City Transit

On wheels of smoldering mud—
VA waiting room
Social services
Human resources department
Pentecostal church
Speaking in tongues
Lap of luxury for nuthouse exiles
All on wheels
Its captain salty, surly, and abused
Floating dark continent with jolting stops
An unseen float in the street parade
A ship desperate for land
Or torpedo
An exclusive club
They’d eat you alive
You and big bad AOC

~

Bud Sturguess was born in the small cotton-and-oil town of Seminole, Texas. He has self-published several books, including the novels Sick Things and Saint Calvin the Cannibal. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Longleaf Review, Ekstasis Magazine, and New Pop Lit, among others.  

90.3/4