Mostly dumb, but hens are finely tuned to length of days, won’t lay in earnest till after the equinox, sliver of additional light they measure from their mud yard, heads cocked to the sky. Same gut process, spin of tumblers unlocking a stock of promise...
Sunday we lay hands on a girl of ten hand on hand on cornsilk hair. We sing the secret language sung the day the tin roof of the tower beat on God’s floorboard he got cramp in heaven. Like our crying and our fornicating so close to his...
We lived in a stone farmhouse at the edge of town. I’d been assigned to process asylum claims and you’d come to write about the abandoned homes in the island’s interior the government was selling cheap. A family of barn swallows lived inside our...
Sauerkraut festival, sauerkraut ice cream from a tiny paper cup. Places you could get lost in. Bike path that wound by the old airport, abandoned playground with its huddle of bouncy animals on their oversized springs. In the slough, Doritos bags flashed from the...
Sweet Mary, the first time she ever was there, Came into the Ball room among the Fair; The young Men & Maidens around her throng, And these are the words upon every tongue:
“An Angel is here from the heavenly Climes, Or again does return...
then the clouds rolled in young is the night that is to say a cellophane softness ensued which blew across the sky like wisps of straw their firearms—a job well done young is the night
and when the circus tent begins to blaze beneath the eyes speak...
Growing up in a rural factory town I watched my creative family extend the grind oft monotonous jobs outside the factory walls and into their lives until they were no longer capable of accessing their artistic abilities. The factory essentially...
from the soil We make our son. From the soil we make our son biscuits. From the soil we make our son biscuits stored in ceramic bowls. From the soil we make our son biscuits stored in ceramic bowls made with...
Too black, too much indulged, living in clover, all little withers, all air, all charity, all crumbling, all massing in a choir— damp clods of soil, my land and liberty...
With early plowing it is black to blueness, and unarmed labor here is glorified— a thousand...
Take me to the holler. I want to see the cows Big Mamaw’s grave and something about tobacco fields.
I don’t recall all you said at Barley’s, but you introduced yourself with an anecdote about toothbrushes made from chewed-up willow branches and coyotes loping along a wooded backyard—Uncle Clark’s and...