California's Big Brother

Across the sci-fi novel with California as a plot,
beyond the bad-hit aspirin Salt Flats,
Americans, touring on a permanent tire blowout,
drive the Idaho truck down an art painting.

Somewhere in Oklahoma's counties without fiction,
out of reach of the avant-garde bus stop,
nobody who recalls the Styrofoam of the coffee cups
or the Crazy Beat of the jukebox numbers--

Nobody forgets America, California's big brother,
the last hitchhiker along the one true interstate
where a call is coming in to the blue telephone booth
that marks the exact center of the uncharted Heartland.

by Richard Novacek