The below poems in various versions were published in the following journals: “Gigolo:” Exquisite Corpse; “Fire:” Southeast Review and Verse Daily; “Birth:” Meridian; “Convergence:” The Adirondack Review; “Why Should I Stand for Jesus:” Harpur Palate; “Hallows: New York Quarterly; “The Lost Supper:” The Cortland Review.
“Aristocracy of the Plow:”Southeast Review; “Aunt Louise and Space Shuttle Challenger:” Exquisite Corpse.
My family fell apart, so I needed to get away.
How and by what means I didn’t know,
so I stole from department stores,
stuffing my sacks with brand name clothes.
Such balls I had, speaking to the clerk,
asking for different sizes, only to buy
a pair of socks. I refunded those clothes
to other department stores until arrested.
I wasn’t always a hustler, but I had to leave,
so I learned to do whatever to get by.
It’s not that bad in a rest area stall,
being blown by an old guy, even if he’s gumming.
Not bad at all. With no teeth in the way,
there’s sure, pure sucking. Grandma told me that I’d go
to hell for fornicating, but it’s hell being poor.
Poverty may be the mother of instruction,
but that education sucks, especially when
stuck in a rural town with a congregation
bent on frightening sinners into heaven.
Plus, I wanted to see how far
decent looks and my pathetic, vulnerable act got me.
I surely succeeded, some life in New Orleans,
August heat, dancing on a bar, men
fucking on the pool table, balls on balls
in every corner. With Oh yea, daddy, harder daddy,
harder, fuck my hole, pop my brown cherry,
it’s hard to determine who wants a tea bagging,
who wants to dry hump me, smell my ass,
my boots to the brim with cash, beer bottles,
all across a sweaty, stinking bar,
my dick flapping from Viagra and stay-hard cream.
Near fainting, I was saved by an old man
who sprayed me with a water mister,
which I gladly welcomed, for he took notice,
said I reminded him of him when he was a young man
needing a place to live, tired of sleeping on someone’s couch.
He moved me into his guesthouse on Rue Dumaine,
paying for all my meals while he told his life story,
his husband dying young, a motorcycle accident,
how he met him like he met me.
He only wanted me to jack off.
Gosh, I said, is that all?
I’ve been doing that since yay tall,
pointing to a mutt on his hind legs:
I started on the lawnmower, the seat a bobbing,
so much vibration I came, so good,
I lost control, ran over Grandpa’s grave.
I shot my load in every room, on the Lazy Susan,
in the toilet, in the tree house, in the shed,
in the crevice of vinyl seats in a Ford Fairlane,
in a Sunbeam bread bag, a spoon handle up my ass.
I didn’t know his guesthouse’s a set for shooting porn.
Must be my big chance, I thought,
when offered $2000 dollars to do a 30-minute segment.
I even picked out a name: Brick Bailey,
hard as a brick, guaranteed a lay.
But the shoot didn’t go my way—
Who knew I was lactose intolerant?
Can happen anytime, anywhere, in one’s life, my doctor later said—
I felt like an overburdened cow, dehydrated, near death.
I heard Grandpa’s voice, Time to put ‘em down.
I moved out. This porn is fuck fest, not shit fest,
the director said, the old man too embarrassed for me to hang around.
I joined Pamela, the one-armed prostitute on Dauphine Street.
That circus freak got all the action—
men love cumming on her nub—
so I got a gig at the Corner Pocket
known for pimply boys in stained underwear
dancing on the bar. I had blackheads
but not pimples, both disgusting.
Buy hey, if you’re into that, man, so be it.
Who am I to pop the natural order of things?
I quit when Ms. Do, the owner,
ends up dead, her throat slit, her Cadillac
nearly pushed into a bayou.
That could happen to me, I thought, drinking,
taking any drugs that people give me,
just hoping, they’ll be the only one for me.
But she taught me something.
When anyone asks me, What do you do?
I respond, I don’t do you.
Who am I kidding? I’ll do anybody,
even fuck the cottage cheese of a fat lady,
eat the ass of an old fart with dingle berries, fuck the armpit of a retard.
I just need to get paid.
I could complain, but haven’t I done enough?
But my life’s good, by God.
I can go anywhere, some how,
as long as I’m needing and still willing.
I give them what they want, and that’s what I know to do.
We burn the fields, and it seems the whole world’s on fire,
as if the seventh seal opened to a silence in heaven.
Weeds and lilacs rise in air, moving like the cremated—
no more to be travailed in birth and pained to be delivered.
I’m told to watch for flames that jump the guided path,
and to be weary of the heads of horses that will be as the heads of lions.
I learn how to burn, so the grass returns like the blunted tail of a lizard,
the herb yielding seed after seed,
the corn, so pure, no weevils crowd its teeth,
and watermelons when thumped echo the Holy Ghost.
This time,
lost with the thought of worshipping the beast,
his head on my hips and gently turning me over,
I forget myself.
The fire gets out, blackens the siding of our house.
I hose what I can, but fire’s a be-headed chicken,
not knowing where to go, just going.
In the air, honeysuckles and a polecat, rife and wild.
I witness a birth:
a cow’s belly swollen solid, a calf’s legs half out.
Sliced open, her calf flops out with a membrane,
a cord round the neck.
I watch their legs chained to a tractor and dragged to trees
scratched by antlers, left with velvet.
Atop and between those trees where they rotted,
I lie on a hammock of vines that loosen,
lowering me to their bones,
her face with briars, her calf with fungi.
Nearby, a pond with algae, so thick, how do fish breathe?
And on that bank, crows gorge on a moccasin.
I walk knowing that the body betrays us all.
I’m thirteen and allergic to cockroach saliva
when he buys me a Huffy with a digital speedometer.
From then on, life explodes,
like drinking a hormone Molotov cocktail—
peach fuzz, crop-eared haircut, pencil mustache—
At the top of a hill, we hold hands
and prepare for the worst,
legs lifting above spinning pedals
at an unregistered speed.
The coasting is too fast,
and I let go.
Sex will be different for me,
than for him:
a backward and brakeless pedaling.
Why Should I Stand for Jesus
When I win four hundred dollars at the National Tobacco Spitting Contest, I buy a Civic, the paint peeling. I feel a Holy-Ghost freedom when I pass the fat, grinning, rich, daddy’s boy who calls me Buckteeth Ugly, laughing at my fake Reeboks. When he passes me in his silver Trans Am, bumper sticker Eat My Grits, I floor it; my motor blows, and I coast to the side of the road, fat boy flipping me the bird, driving on, most likely to Wards for a Big One.
I walk down a hill to a porch where an old woman stitches a quilt; she tells me to take it slow, just as she is, sipping on a glass of warm milk, sitting in her rocker, waiting for her dogs, already in heaven who met their fates on the road. I call Dad on her phone, a red rotary box, just like Grandma’s, which hangs on her wall under a stuffed sea bass that Grandpa catches while honeymooning on the coast.
Dad arrives, tractor chain in hand, and I drive attached to his beat-up blue Chevrolet with dents from pulp-wooding, the truck that my cousin and I drive to downtown Magee. It’s Crazy Day—wooden ducks, benches with heart-shaped backs, peanut brittle, hotdogs and powdered doughnuts—that kind of crazy; people crowd the streets to show off fancy cars, sparkling rims, spoilers, Motorola antennas. We never score a date, only invitations for mud-bog, beer-guzzles.
After months of looking, we place a newer-model motor in an older-junk frame. Dad loans it to me after my brother wrecks his car, skidding off the road and hitting an oak; the body’s not completely totaled, so Uncle Ulmer and Dad repeatedly pull the car with a tractor into a pine until it’s beyond repair. When we realize that the pine won’t live, the sapling my brother won as a prize for selling the most pies for Smokey-the-Bear Awareness Week, it’s a cold morning before school, the day my classmates swear to a walkout when our teachers don’t get a raise.
I crank the car, such God-awful screaming. I pop the hood to find guts, stool, hair, and fluffy tails splattered all over that newly installed motor. Another kitten, its butt bald without a tail, wobbles out from under the car that dies and won’t crank, so I have to ride the bus, bus 125 where I fight Tanya.
Four years prior she slaps my glasses off, calls me Sissy. I slam her on the floorboard and commence to punch, then her tall brother’s on my back, scratching me, kids screaming, Kick that bitch’s ass. Till this day, I don’t know if they were referring to me or to Tanya.
Her father comes to our house, and Dad whips me with a switch, tells her father that I won’t cause any more trouble. I’m confused. I’m just standing up for myself. But Dad says if I’m doing any standing up, I should be standing for Jeeeazuss. He drives a forklift at a plant all day. He knows the importance of standing. The walkout is a success. We make it on T.V.; Principal Bowen asks us to return to class, but we say, Hell No! We Won’t Go all the way down Main Street.
I hear that Tanya has a lazy eye with stigmatism, like a team of horses pulling in two directions at the same time. She’s married, wearing Dollar General makeup and feeding her kids bologna and welfare-cheese sandwiches. That serves her right, I think. Maybe, she’ll think twice before slapping another sissy.
Who knows where she and fat boy end, but I know Uncle Ulmer’s tilling gardens and Grandpa’s spilling heavenly seeds, that old lady taking it slow, stitching, sipping on a glass of milk, alongside her dogs panting with purring kittens, all watching Dad driving a forklift, praying I choose to stand.
I don’t want to live or die.
I want to be.
Hallows
I can’t trick-or-treat, so I hand out pocket-sized bibles instead of candy, but my church hayrides to Boykin Church known for lynching on a dead end road of owlish woods and oil pumps, fog passing by.
I pass out when my brother holds my cat’s head, ball-peening her tail, then he pisses on my teddy bear I named Ezekiel. After he’s washed, he’s missing a nose.
People turn up missing in Mize during the Watermelon Festival. The biggest, echoing melon wins a shared seat with the watermelon queen in a chauffeured convertible where she waves to fans, fellow enthusiasts. This event, I’m told, calls evil spirits, like those from televisions and dirty magazines.
I find a burned magazine under a shed, all but a page of hairy guys fucking a watermelon. Best to keep it in the sun all day so it’s warm and juicy, my cousin says. Won’t it dry up? Isn’t it better cold? When I ask him if it’s a sin to do a watermelon, he says, It kinda says we shouldn’t waste the seed.
The Lost Supper
I ask if she’s eating and her answer is beans.
If anything breaks, she says, it means to.
This is her childhood tattoo:
hours full of shelling beans—sorting the undeveloped from the developed.
walking on her father’s back, before cancer.
hazy face in a hospital gown,
bald head in hospital air—
a clean cold.
She says, I’m ready to go.
Delirium, I say, This too shall pass, as I carry her to the river.
Bailey leads the way, barking and chasing the shadow of his tail under the moon.
I undress her, easing her into the water,
Look how much disturbance you cause.
She doesn’t know that she’s as lovely as forms passing in skies.
I paraphrase Shelley: let’s take a jet where butterflies dream.
Coleridge suggests that in order to achieve a soul
one must suffer.
Then there’s Buddha:
the move from happiness and suffering is genuine bliss.
Sometimes, I, too, want to wake to sleep, but I’d rather not be the dead alive.
Aristocracy of the Plow
1.
After scaling the fish, their heads nailed to the barn,
the grass glimmered with pearl-like shavings.
2.
We walked the field where he spoke of the sycamore
the tax collector climbed, the dogwood a remembrance of our sins.
3.
The yelp to lead Beagles home: heeeeeee upbp.
4.
We ate sandwiches under a yellow plum tree
and cane-poled the highest plums down,
then headed back to check the trap for owls.
5.
Speaking in tongues, he baptized me
in his catfish pond. Every year, we’d drain that pond.
We ate fish eggs for weeks.
6.
He had a vision of a revival:
cars for miles, parked on the sides of roads, in both directions.
People dancing in the spirit,
blessed with tongues.
7.
Grandma wailed over the casket, which I helped carry,
a pocket bible under his armpit,
First Psalms 1:3 stuffed in his lapel:
like a tree planted by the rivers of water.
8.
On a white stretcher rolling down a pebble-cement step,
he turned his head: pray while tending to the cows.
Aunt Louise and Space Shuttle Challenger
No matter how much faith she has in her,
she’s scared of strong wind, but when weather’s fair,
she rocks on her porch, sipping some sweet tea,
Old dreamer’s drink, she says, Spirit water,
where she once visions a clock spinning on
the nose of a space shuttle rising like
cornbread in a hot, iron skillet, smoke
billowing to the ground where people stand
in shock, their heads upward, and she’s there too,
her hands raised in prayer, as now in church,
in the front pew where she prophesizes, time introduces us to dust.
