I’ll never sympathize with those boys
I’ll never sympathize with those boys who drive around our mud roads in their pickup trucks and wave their red, thirteen-starred flags with pride.
And I don’t think I’ll ever feel wholly comfortable in this island town with only four stoplights and one main road.
But it’s fall now, which means that mild December snows are approaching fast, and all the people are starting to look fragile
And thin and sort of sad in the way that shrubs seem to know they won’t make it long through he winter.
Before the frost comes, though, it always rains real hard here, like we’re stuck in the middle of an unnamed hurricane,
And once the rain settles, the air tastes a lot like tobacco. It’s times like these that I have to resist the urge to stoop down and claw at the earth
Until my fingernails are the same color as the sandy Carolina soil. I’m afraid, I guess, of taking some part of that soil
And making it part of me. Because then, I might be tempted to start to grow roots and pull some nourishment out of the soil.
See, you’ve already got me drinking Kentucky bourbon more often than wine and it feels like everything’s starting to shift
As if we’re all in a sort of whiskey haze and watching from a vantage deep in the Appalachian mountains.
On Placing Ships in Bottles
Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the opposite of that that is really life.
-Joyce, Ulysses
Last night, I dreamt that I read the last chapter of Ulysses
in its entirety while waiting for you to decide how you took
your coffee: heavy cream, no sugar, was the response,
designed, I believe, to make me think about the soft,
taught whiteness of your thighs.
In that same dream,
we spent an hour clinging to each other before a Warhol
diptych, painted in reds and greens before we went home
to the kitchen and you leaned over the counter, heels planted
firm, and swayed to distract me while I, bobby pin in hand,
glued the last bits of rigging to the mast and unfurled
cloth sails on a model ship in the relative vacuum of a bottle.
Carpetbagging
It’s fall now, with December snow approaching fast, and everything’s
starting to look fragile and thin and sort of sad in the way that the shrubs
seem to know that most of them probably won’t make it through the winter.
Sometimes, though, once it warms up a bit, it rains real hard here,
like we’re stuck in the middle of an unnamed hurricane, and once
the rain settles, the air tastes like tobacco; and I have to resist the urge
to stoop down and claw at the earth until my fingernails are the same
murky color as the sandy Carolina soil. Because if I take some part
of the land back home with me, I might start to put down roots and
pull something out of the soil that’ll make these barrier island beaches
start to resemble home; I might start to sympathize with those boys
who drive around with their sons down back-country mud roads in pickup
trucks and wave red-and-blue striped flags; or I might start to feel comfortable
drinking Kentucky bourbon instead of imported vodka, and feel comfortable
in a town with one main road, four stoplights, and a damn lot of leisure time
with nowhere to spend it.
Topographical Map of the Milky Way Galaxy
Now, we spend summers smoking cigarettes on the beach
and improvising cocktails from the 20s, which we shake and drink
from clear plastic tumblers. They are not microwave safe, and neither
are we, and try as I might, I can’t remember my formative years
as keenly as I’d like to; and when I bring that up in conversation,
we take turns wondering about the future and how we’ll remember
sitting here, in pink plastic deck chairs, talking about the sky,
and the particulars of the Milky Way: how bright and eager
it looks in the naked night sky, stretched out over a black horizon
of crashing waves; how its edges looks better in infrared, painted
in reds and pinks instead of the murky blues and yellows that our
eyes assign to it; how we’re not at the center, but instead spiraling
around its galactic core, in the orbit of the Local Spur; and how it’s expanding,
accelerating at some alarming rate calculated by physicists and
confounded by conspiracy theorists and stoners, all of whom sit around
large tables and pontificate on how long we’ve got left, how long it’ll
take until the Galaxy spirals out of control and destroys itself. We
decide that we’re racing it to the bottom.
Kneejerk
Try as I might,
I can’t remember knowing her
as I had wanted to:
poetry brooked
timid hints of skin
– degenerate humanity
hidden behind mirror
shades – metaphors for
the blind, going blind, groping
arches, kneeling
in stone grit,
trading
blows with humid air
ghosts.
I need to stop writing about sex.
She started,
“Write what you know.”
One more rewrite before I get around to posting new ish.
Blue Crab Claws
As he ate, blue crabs, fresh,
stripping glistening meat from
cracked claws with bared teeth,
his elbows grazed the shell fragments
gathering on the table like barnacles
stuck fast to waterworn, shipwrecked
wood: barrier island coral.
Pulling on a cigarette, he imagined
the smoke swirling around each tooth,
flavoring his tongue, gums;
he felt it in the mucus of his throat
that thickened in his lungs as he exhaled grey
ideas of slave cotton and civil war.
Pausing to steal a breath,
he realized that the air tasted like tobacco:
salty, smoky, Southern,
full of Bible quotes, barbeque, coleslaw,
dreams of flight, and pampas grass.
And as he cleaned the empty shells
from the wooden table on the porch,
he talked cream-colored sand, with hints
of pink and red, flaked brown with
shells and history and, finally,
some semblance of home.
Rewrites
Here are a couple (literally, a couple: two) rewrites from the end of the year. I haven’t written a thing since. But I feel like posting. Yeah:
Union Pacific
We sat, seventeen, wrapped up
in the steel trill of traintracks,
the dank of farm air caught
under the cuffs of our jeans.
You whispered wanderlust
in between hollow whistles
as we walked back, ryegrass
nipping at our knees, our backs
turned to the trains chattering
transience behind us.
In your car, we kept time
on the dash and counted stagnant
green road signs of the cities we’d escape to,
where Orion paled to skyscraper-lit skies.
And at each pit stop, we’d grip fast
the leather of your seats,
planning roadtrip summers,
marveling at the snaking maplines
we traced with our fingers, touching
nails, biting lips, and nervously tonguing
the future caught between our teeth.
Coal Dust
Your house tasted green,
like the cabbage roiling away
on the four-burner stove, white-baked-
brown from spills and scrubbings.
As you cooked
gwumpkies, stuffed thick
with beef, rice, tomatoes,
onions, grown outside
in soil turned by your hands,
you were forced to switch pans,
back and forth, so as to leave space
for the potatoes that you had left
for me to peel under the lip
of the laminate counter.
And as I learned,
grating horseradish, rolling
out pierogi, punching down
warm, rising sourdough,
the stove boiled away,
the broth and the water simmering,
whistling the same, even tones.
In the spaces between chores,
we danced to polka records
on your old turntable,
the brittle black discs so scratched,
they relied on your humming to remind them
of their rhythm, the accordions and fiddles
whining in step with your feet,
which danced patterns colored
with the grey and blue memories of your
Pennsylvanian coal dust childhood.
Union Pacific
As we sat wrapped together,
the dank of the field catching
between the wrinkles and under
the cuffs of our jeans, the indigo
seeping onto our legs and fading into
our laps, we spoke the steel trill
of traintracks and you whispered
the melancholy of wanderlust
in between hollow whistles.
The train chattered transience
as we pressed back to your car and
further home, keeping beat on the dash
as you counted stagnant green
signs of places we’d visit, and places
we’d never see.
In the space between songs
and at each pit stop, we’d grip
the leather of your seats, planning
roadtrip summers years in advance,
marveling at the map lines we
traced with our fingers, touching
nails, biting our lips, and
nervously tonguing the future
caught between our teeth.
Clorox
With quivering fluorescents
Casting outlines on the pale,
Concrete block walls,
He separates the whites
From the darks, from the delicates,
Scaling each tiny mountain
Of shirtsleeves and pantcuffs,
Avalanching sand and grassclippings
Over his gnarled, root-like feet,
To the cement floor, painted, worn,
And now flaked, grey.
He fumbles through the dust
And the chitin carcasses lining the pressboard shelf
That sits in the corner of the basement,
Knocking over detergent,
Roach killer, mouse traps,
Before finding the stale,
Now empty bottle of bleach.
He digs his hands
Into the pile of underwear,
Socks, and undershirts,
Catching small chips of paint
From the floor under his fingernails.
And he swears, flinging the colorless
Heap into the empty drum.
He closes the lid,
Jabbing at the oversized button
On the top of the machine,
Letting water, powder,
and the last few drops of Clorox
Tug at the stains
From his armpits, neck, and feet,
Muddying the water,
And yellowing his whites.
Squatting
The banister our elbows scraped
Was black, flaking from rust,
And weather, and people
Just like us, who would rather
Pass time trading stories outside
Than on the squat, tanned leather couch,
Torn and matted to a patina.
We talked the same language,
With native fluency,
Bathed in greys and blues,
Trading drags on a cheap menthol,
Coughing in rhyme, alternating
Sips, gulps of the same skunked
Beer sloshing over the sides
Of a cracked, clear plastic cup.
We spat casually on the rocks below
As the smoke wrapped around us,
Ran its fingers through strands of your hair,
And tainted your perfume.
The room retched its pie-eyed occupants,
Expelling sets of two and four.
We were dizzy,
But your teeth tasted of stomach acid,
And you had smoked all of my cigarettes.