(This is a piece I wrote for a class a few years ago. It is probably the moment I started thinking about the idea of Fromness, which I explored in some length in A Texan Theory of Fromness.)

I am of the red dirt.

The basketball post set with a bag of concrete into a flat spot of grass and gravel. Rusted. There must have been a net at some point.

The fillin’ station on the right that hasn’t been anything but a hollow shell for fifty years, when they used big chunks of green glass right along with the hewn stones.

I’m from the evangelical church where no one shows up anymore.

I’m of the railroad tracks.

I’m from where the bluebonnets start and the hawks swoop and the buzzards sit in the road, hard working janitors.