Stuck Behind a Tractor Trailer Carrying Chickens to Dobson, NC, I Contemplate Civil Disobedience, by Aaron Poller

Stuck Behind a Tractor Trailer Carrying Chickens to Dobson, N.C.,
I Contemplate Civil Disobedience
by Aaron Poller

Mind driven
I set them free

burst
the tiny cages

bloody fowl
excrement

pissed off
ambience

downy sweep
perplexed

breath hot
unswerving silence.

Author’s Comment: I wrote this poem during the time I was teaching at a rural community college and was often traveling the backroads to get there. I had already developed a healthy disregard for these types of vehicles during the years I lived in Pennsylvania where several meat packing plants where located off the same exit of the Pennsy Turnpike as my home and I always seemed to get stuck behind these slaughterhouse trucks and eventually I became a vegetarian. Still am. Sometimes, however, that does not seem to be enough. As a poet, I hold some strong social and political beliefs that often find their way into my work as they are a part of who I am and what I do.