Rust Never Sleeps

by Annie Neugebauer

after Neil Young’s
“My My, Hey Hey” & “Thrasher”

The tractor sleeps in yellowed fields of hay,
deprived of rightful color, tires flat,
and isolated there is where he’ll stay,
for oxidizing orange has wrapped his back
in obscurity that will outstay
my best attempts to stop him fading black
amidst the stranded fields in my mind’s eye
where memories—and tractors—go to die.

Annie Neugebauer is a short story author and nationally award-winning poet living in Texas. She’s had poetry published in the Texas Poetry Calendar by Dos Gatos Press, Wichita Falls Literature & Art Review, Eunoia Review, Adrent! Poetry, Versifico, the Poetry Society of Texas’s A Book of the Year and Voices de la Luna. She won second place in the 2011 Edwin M. Eakin Memorial Book Publication Award sponsored by the Poetry Society of Texas and has work appearing or forthcoming in The Spirit of Poe, Underneath the Juniper Tree, the British Fantasy Society journal Dark Horizons and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies’ prize anthology Encore. Neugebauer is also vice president of the Denton Poets’ Assembly as well as president of the North Branch Writers’ Critique Group. Read her poem “Nights in Texas,” published in Deep South in March and her guest post for National Poetry Month today The Poetry of Place.