overture
the colonies are never not restless,
walking on gravel, shoeless and gas-lit—
a quick-stop parking lot, the light,
sodium and one lamp removed
from the consequences of what they rehearsed
once or twice a week
just before the child took her weight off the lawn chair
she paused, almost calm,
and spoke to her neighbors, about to hang her
we will go back to the old gods again
I breathed in like I do when I want to show off my muscles
(title from line by Frank Stanford)
and the water still froze in stiff tongues
along the highway’s cut into someone else’s hills.
We were hungover and long friends
and that weekend was a good crowd. Narrow
bars and the shakes that the coffee and beer chase out
—the bullshitting until the floors buckle under bluegrass
yips and yells—if hurry is death, then I’m doing donuts
in the iced-up Walmart lot—Charleston Chew
lodged in my throat. I bust out a line of carts
—they scatter like poor kids leaving the nest,
skid sideways, clip, catch cold air for a moment,
before grinding every elbow and jaw on the same cold asphalt.
She felt around the wide backseat for chewing gum
and the cracked-leather assurance—
I’m just looking
to fill the gap behind my ribs
and above the blurred grasses—
the same size as a small wren on the sill or the rush of light—
a sunset snuck under weeks of low, low clouds.
a short film planting milkweed
We open for a farm-lean body—
their oversized sweater, wet-eyed camera.
Where the lens would be they’ve left a note—
never mind the mess, sometimes bareness don’t feel too good—
they tell us it’ll be okay.
They fall soft for windrows and side creek caves that wink androgynous.
A small, spotted boy born for a field or some other made-up place—
in the brush are so many eyes and summer tongues
that each night is a community choir of sleeplessness.
Expose for the tender greens of the new ragweed.
They fall for the symmetry in a barbed-wire fence.
Three thin rips appear along their scalp.
One rip is mended by being seen.
The second is still scolded nightly.
The last continues down and just kisses their eye—
their raised beds would be parched without it.
Another long distraction—a river-worn semi chassis
I’ll never touch again.
The first rip re-opens every other day like an old, dry corral.
Their soft, chemical rhythms—discontinued.
Their framing, slightly tilted, underthought.
All that’s left is some blown out shot of a blue Jeep in the brush.
This Sunday the horseshoe pits are dug out again.
The Jeep’s already gone. And the weeds.
And the little, spotted boy.
They tell us it’ll be okay.
in boyhood, I can remember feeling very charitably toward my fevers
(after Karen Russell, “The Tornado Auction”)
the next heartfelt letter to you was supposed to matter more, move brighter,
but I looked for an hour and it’s sitting sallow, twitching in the shower—
that ain’t her superpower though,
Barbe dodges bullets sparking out
the trash fire—Barbe can sense
a tree’s about to be blizzard tossed—
can conjure some new, smooth seam to rip
then slip into like she believe she’s all healed up
and got no need for touch or gut feelings—
here’s to how the newly not-quiet farm…
this ain’t the first time someone called soft Barbe out
to the dusky street—pacing something half-drunk
and so needlessly freaked—she’d forgotten the sneaking strength
of a baseball bat clenched, you’d think she didn’t think,
but that hip twist and swing had been stress-tested,
tweaked, until she woke it up overtop the tar-n-chip,
to fully. fucking. sing.
a light sketch, blue pencil
after a short landscaping day—I relent,
let honeysuckle leap out, throat out
through fences, I begin to understand why early-Kanye floats
low over backyards like a frantic, lilac buzz—
I look square at her lens, warm.
My slender, my lead paint defense scraped out
in a single frame—this time good pain,
this time walking out of the thicket
with only a few tendrils of poison ivy
clinging to my mouth and eyes;
a rough gearing of the physical to the forgotten—
touch without olive curtains
drawn—cantaloupe, salt, whisky, sweat—
no story to cling to.
the back porch, the threat of cold rain—
pollen shook over the table like a sugar
no one has discovered, not yet
