The place where we stack, bury or decorate our trash is a place of unnatural physical freedom. There you can run at top speeds and for great distances, with almost no hesitance. There the ground shudders often, footed and soft, and a plume of particulate rises, color of iron oxide over sunset.
You can bury your trash in the mountain’s sternum or you can burn your trash in a pyre of relief. I’ll be in the foothills reading a tabloid magazine, purselip of shade lapping closer into evening, apparition of smoke from a hill.
The streetsweepers agree; the city tends to alternately gleam or rust. Beyond its limits – sun rot and wet heap – and there’s also the myth of how natural water may ferment into beer and back under biblical or apocalyptic conditions, just ask your local janitor, or in the valley of a mountain of trash, or in a piney canyon studded with the flattened reflective bones of appliances and the tarpskins of nomads and numberless other stringalongs and unrecognizable marginalia…