"How is the truth to be told?" -Gwendolyn Brooks

A Surplus of Days … Commentary on my Remixed Trailer Park Fragments

Looking at the photos of my grandparents' trailer park outside of Springfield, MO, I notice the sun comes down gauzy yellow, touching everything with slow fingers.

Even though I wasn't born into that flat and bare aluminum place, I find myself soaking it up through the memory syringes of my sister and brother. They yanked rocks from the tough Midwest ground as my dad helped drill the septic tank and swore to high hell like the south Chicago teenagers he left behind in 1958. I can feel the gravity of my grandfather's voice, his mean mouth, the nightly whiskey he swirled in his Church of Jesus Christ Scientist teeth. The last of my great-grandfather's bubblegum patent money went down the drain in that Missouri heat, in tornado alley and steel bathtub jitters.

The memories don't jet across 40 years like a spry butterfly or sudden inhale but instead gather round like a reservoir filled with infant light. Somewhere my aunt gathered her Aqua Net cans, my uncle looked at used cars before running off to the GE factory, and Mom drove the kids to the roller skating rink and let them touch the hot dogs. Meanwhile, Dad reluctantly sold insurance and tried not to think about the fat flying roaches he left behind in El Paso while cleaning toilets in the army.

These Polaroids, which my parents used to wave in the humid afternoons to dry, both unzip the past and shield it like not-so-clean ice. If you lean into them, if you linger for a moment in their chemical skin, you can feel the nightshades and thighs, the nearby cow skull pastures and five cent Ike and Tina Turner records, rust bellied cars and my brother's first charcoal nudes…

Everything is in there—the bleach and sparrows, telephones and Ed Sullivan. The truth is caught between flickers of sun on that naked campground, between the ragtag trees that ring the trailers, like huge green moths bunched together. The poems are ways to survive the surplus of days that unspool from that place.

Trailer Park Fragments © 2009 David Ensminger. Pieces originally published in Stirring, BlazeVOX, and NOÖ Journal. Navigate by clicking pictures to the left.