Circulatory systems beneath the once-prairie,

now cul-de-sac, now-charter school,

below Oak Meadows, a new suburb

in the once-outback of the West.

Underground infrastructure unmapped,

a vast unknown universe, intricate

ruins from forty-three years of fracking,

abandoned and top secret.

We frack as fast as possible.

We boom and bust. We rush,

bleed out natural gas,

empty the earth’s arteries

and parse out acceptable risks.

No one inhabiting the orbit

of skyscrapers, where such decisions

are made, will smell char

or deal with the concussive explosion

or fireball flaring like Etna in Italy.

Another Anadarko accident ash falling,

the way snow inundates Oak Meadows,

the smell of burn and singe envelop

clear smoke alarms, all stay-at-home

moms carpooling.

A home improvement project turns

sinister, incinerates two people,

burns a third, and finger pointing

commences. The edge

of the Rockies to the Nebraska border

is blackened like the sky above the house

in Firestone.

The subterranean arteries,

transporters of combustibles,

are the purview of the National Transportation

Safety Board and oil and gas companies step

Aside and offer apologies

and we-thought-it-was-safe.

Odorless gas may fill other basements

only one spark away from end times,

an improvised explosive device

ready to detonate at any minute.

The smoke lifts

and we survey a map of northeastern Colorado,

and see for the first time or time and time

again that multitudes of small black dots

indicate fracking sites we and try to come to terms

with the cartographer’s redaction

of our sector of the world.

Add this abandonment

to our long list of anxieties

as to the safety of each welding joint,

or the possibility pipes that snake the prairie

will leak into our futures.

As archaeologists of the aftermath,

we are denied a map of ruins dormant

and seething and we wait for

the next inevitable flashpoint and blast.

Photo credit: Simon Fraser University, Creative Commons, Flickr

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