A Modern Harvest

Drive a thousand miles from the left/right coasts and you reach the sporadically populated plains, the supposed heart of the United States.  But this flatland organ is sick and leaking, the young are fleeing, and consumerism, the addiction to purchase, has replaced the pride of working the land, growing crops and communities.  And exploring these small American towns, reaching into the houses and malls and streets, is a modern harvest. This interactive digital poem harvest those objects from the living room gardens, the acres of shopping centers, picks the gaudy attachments of our lived environments.  Through five sections, the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, the garage and the mall, readers can harvest these modern croplands, the trinkets and objects filling our surroundings. And in the heart of the US, “to purchase” replaces “to create”, a crippling harvest of plastic and ceramic.