My Mother Tells Me to Move My Father’s Truck, So the Yard Man Can Mow
Shane Allison

I don’t know what happened, but we agreed on Monday

That she would wait a week to get the yard cut,

That it wasn’t at the top of the priority list of bill-paying.

We haven’t spoken much since our fight about her getting her pneumonia shot.

The grass is high and thick enough for snakes to hide in,

Which is what my mother fears.

Two-hundred bucks she pays this new guy

After the old yard man retired for some reason.

Every two weeks my mother would slip him a check

Written for forty-five dollars as they spoke on the porch

About a snake he ran over on his riding mower.

We assumed he got snatched up by ICE or something.

It’s the end of days where everyone is running scared.

No grass grows in the spot from where I moved my father’s truck,

But just a patch of death starved of sunlight.

My friend Daniel sends me a reel of a dead baby Palestinian baby in a box.

I thought it was a loaf of bread until I could make out an arm.

Generations mowed down like the thick blades of grass around my parent’s house.

“Does anyone care?” Daniel asks, as he sobs in his TikTok video.

This week he’s showing off his six pack, pictures of him with friends

At a masquerade ball.

I want to tell him that the reason westerners don’t care

Is because it’s not directly happening to them.

If bombs were being dropped on a family of five with a Trump flag

Waving with the kisses of a Texas breeze,

Someone on the other side of this country,

At the other end of this world would say, “Better them than me.”

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Shane Allison’s Comments

“Yard Man“ was originally going to be a poem about my mother, which has been a theme for the past three years. I honestly was feeling frustrated about what was going on in Gaza, so the anger I was feeling about that made its way into the poem. I’m pretty proud of the outcome in this piece.

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