Our Survey of Western Dirt, by David DeGusta

Photo by Emma Swoboda

“Most states have designated an official state bird, flower, and so forth. Similarly, each state has designated a state soil.” -Soil Science Society of America

Oregon Jory red soil

births Willamette wine

stains your wedding dress

grape vines crowd us out

our tires spit hometown mud

east to Idaho Threebear

where ash fell on ice

firs root and tar sticks

dry spring tempts fall flame

we burn hot in our cabin

pink Nevada Orvado

blushes the desert

Vegas a junk bet

our neon vacation

spending money like water

Utah Mivida calls us

barren, addicted

we take a dry faith

to leach our toxins

but rootless, we erode fast

blow back to Oregon Jory

thin shoots search weak soil

to find a good vein

locate sustenance

to give the ground back good dirt

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David DeGusta is a writer and translator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned his MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has received support from MacDowell and Yaddo. His writing has appeared in Boulevard, the Cincinnati Review, and the Masters Review, among other places, and he translated the Ethiopian novel Oromay by Baalu Girma (Soho Press / MacLehose). He can be found online at www.davidwrites.net.