gas station

It's August
and so all the cicadas are exhaling together.
The air is boiling above the gum-speckled asphalt,
shapeless blobs turned black from
tire-treads
and muddy boots.

It's August
and oily water leaks from grumbling trucks
muttering lazily in their torrid disgust,
forming rainbow toxic pools left to sizzle
under the globed fruit that burns
and burns in the blue.

The attendant plunks
on cash register keys with sinewy fingers,
the whorls of which are lined with
russet dirt and money soot.

These august pumps
his empire, these perspiry bodies,
his serfs.