Lake Creek History
for Lake Creek, Oklahoma, formerly a town, now an unincorporated community

In the early years of farmlung,
the Lake Creek community was several plots
of families alive in the work of land. They were
houses full of children running out into fields,
earn arm flung for love of motion; were hands
simmering their water in the loud sun
for a corn on the cob at the end of the day.
A large school is gathered over this,
is a unity with brick we call a people.

Then what is called a Lake Creek
when the school gradually surrenders
children to the city, when the thread
of a future drawn in students untangled
dissolves. Say you call it decrease, the fade
the class is as the last to graduate from home,
as a corner bite in the brick, where even
the last creased hands ruminate, believe it
to be a good place just short of family.

Author’s note: Each poem included here comes from a longer manuscript, "Old Greer County," which traces the history of a section of southwest Oklahoma that (until 1896) was part of Texas and which today includes many rural towns that have disappeared or on the verge of doing so, as a result of drought and the systematic destruction of small-scale agriculture. In writing these poems, I used a unique method of homophonic translation which relies on the re-sounding of a source text, letter by letter, according to the various possible sounds each letter is able to produce (ex: “cat” may become “ash” by silencing the ‘c’ as in “indict,” and by sounding the ’t’ as an ‘sh-‘ sound, as in “ratio”). The source texts for these poems include archival materials from the Old Greer County Museum in Mangum, Oklahoma, the 100th Meridian Museum in Erick, Oklahoma, and the Museum of the Western Prairie in Altus, Oklahoma.