The gums of the windchime curtains the trailer molded kitchen. Amid a blackberry winter we defaulted on the loans. I killed the snake. I dismembered it and mailed it to all my friends and family. I said see what you are worried about. Birds still died on the porch last night. A sick calf hid under the fence. The moon’s face waited slouched howling in the kitchen like an overdose. As if the mountain’s arms could touch mars and in fifty years all the trout will not die. The pigment of red. Distance destined to erupt into new distance. Eyesore after ridgeline. Eyesore after dollar store. Eyesore after bum-fucked Egypt. Eyesore after puppy mill. To be in hell with your back broke. To sit here for one more century. In the dream drunk morning you drew a cartoon inside a hymnal. We shot firecrackers after the sermon then sat in the backseat as the car corroded into the hayfield. It was its own story. I showed them in poetry workshop. They called me flat footed. Said people like you don’t have grocery stores. They laughed till their nose bled. Said people like you don’t live on paved roads. Said they’d go crazy if they had to live here. I crawl into a rattlesnake’s brain and claim its skin as my own. I am simply just unable to articulate my words like my wrist. I hush up and lay around the house all winter. The sphere of dying bones whiff out the chimney in Bare Creek. Just call me when the fire is pissed out. I pray the mind becomes smooth as a mothball we can smell. Puke out drunk behind Phipps Store then I’m sick in bed with my boots on. Just like my father I have his feet and nose. See the sky is just tapeworms in the place of galaxies. Stars are just taxes. How about we don’t talk till New Years. Hang up on the IRS when they call and start coughing. Go out drinking near the gas station. Be spotted out drinking near the gas station. Take this name down on the piece of paper. Say to your lover that you were just out loafing around. There exists a type of confession here. To dream of cars when you finally drift off. Yes they do something for men the way dead leaves alert the hunter. The way my lover kisses her wrists when she tells me in a bathtub to forget it. Until a room is vacant this is a diary of control. Each phrase spawns a character from the hills. A down power line kills them. A pit of gravel buries them. Farms idle then fall apart. Nothing but empty throats sounding out letters. Spell this is your home. Two miles down at a rest stop mirror see it all gone. My heart goes cha-ching! at the Salvation Army for in real life there is no bomb or quickness just a slow motor whirling down. Only sleeping Fraser firs and hot dogs fed to stray cats. I am eight years old with a gun for Christmas. I am reading this in the good book. I can do nothing but owe for the strange stains in the sun. The more I am alive the more I am sleeping. Poems spilled out of Judah’s mouth. Poetry and the living of scattered sound cut me some slack I was just a kid. My femur no bigger than a hammer my eyes closed outstretched on the floor crying. You approached me rising from the mud just to say that these are the things I love.
—
from Issue 8 of Mercury Firs
Read more here
—
Evan Gray is a poet born and raised in the mountains of North Carolina. He is the author of Thickets Swamped in Fence-Coated Briars and three chapbooks. His individual work has been featured in Denver Quarterly, Yalobusha Review, Joyland, Afternoon Visitor, Annulet, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine and more. Currently, he is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Appalachian State University. Reach him at www.evan-gray.com
Poetry Nightly 
Leave a comment