GRASS WIDOW a Thesis Submitted to Kent State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of F

GRASS WIDOW

A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts

Barbara Wilson-Battles

December, 2014

Thesis written by Barbara Wilson-Battles B.A., Shawnee State University, 2012 M.F.A., Kent State University, 2014

Approved by

______, Advisor Mary Biddinger

______, Chair, Department of English Robert Trogden

______, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences James L. Blank

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... vi

POEMS

Vulnerable ...... 1

Mr. Peabody’s Coal Train Done Hauled it Away ...... 2

At 5 ...... 3

Dragonflies over Mineral Springs ...... 4

Dark ...... 5

Marquette Cement Company Pond, Elizabeth, OH ...... 6

Country Matters: The Fair...... 7-8

Weapons Inventory ...... 9

Letters to the Blind ...... 10

Naval Air Station, Pensacola, 1997 ...... 11

Possum ...... 12

The Weight of the Human Skeleton...... 13

For Ted Hughes After the Publication of Birthday Letters ...... 14

For Whitney Houston, Dead at 48 ...... 15

Maybe Emily Dickinson Stayed Home Because She Liked Crack ...... 16

Ode to Liars ...... 17

Grass Widow ...... 18

Time’s Left a Wreck ...... 19

Sonnet for the Fucked Up ...... 20

8th and Boundary ...... 21

iii

The Car, the Car ...... 22

Wrecked Impala on the Renegade Horizon ...... 23

Diva in the Desert ...... 24

Barn Full of Panthers ...... 25

Shelter in Place Warning ...... 26

The Days Pass and Meander Like a Drunk Daddy on the Highway ...... 27-30

Fooling Around with Ex-Sonnets ...... 31

Every Poet Knows a Junkie ...... 32

Country Matters: Mistaken for Wasps ...... 33

Grass Widow: Slight Return ...... 34

Dear Distant Spouse ...... 35

Sinking Sand: All Other Ground is ...... 36

Cold Cook by the Little Scioto ...... 37

Blow Up Doll ...... 38

Dead Girl near the Road ...... 39

You Didn’t Forget the Old Sailor Songs ...... 40

The Things that Made the Sun Bearable ...... 41

Lost Tackle ...... 42

Camp / Fire...... 43

I Ate Peanut Butter M&Ms ...... 44

Contrasts ...... 45

My Therapist Has Cautioned Me Against Catastrophizing ...... 46

Double Abecedarian for a Dying Region ...... 47

The Narrow Way leads Home ...... 48-49

Charm Against Alzheimer’s Patients Wandering Off ...... 50

Hymn ...... 51

Unveiled Threats ...... 52

Last Word ...... 53

Impervious ...... 54

NOTES ...... 55

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to my thesis advisor, Mary Biddinger, for her guidance, as well as her involvement in the revision and sequencing of poems; and, most importantly, for her keen understanding of what I hoped to accomplish with this manuscript. I would also like to thank Catherine Wing for her recommendations on craft, form, and clarity, and for her ability to rein in my worst poetic impulses. Thanks also to Phil Brady for serving on my thesis committee. My NEOMFA workshop peers and friends have provided a wealth of useful feedback both in and out of class. I will miss our workshops.

My amazing partner, Scott Battles’ emotional and technical support has been invaluable to the completion of this manuscript. My Antioch girls—Erika Curtiss, Malika Evans, Kristine

Herman, Jennifer Labut Cannon, Samantha Ohrman, Kathy Wilder, and particularly, Jane

Rago— inspire me daily. I remain grateful for their belief in my work over the last 22 years. My

Shawnee State friends’ and professors’ encouragement played a significant role in my decision to enter an M.F.A. program. Finally, thanks to Sean Frank for his friendship and support throughout my two and half years in Kent, and to Leslie Risin, whose patience and reassurance alleviated my fears of making certain poems public.

POEMS

Vulnerable

1. capable of being physically or emotionally wounded 2. open to attack or damage:

ASSAILABLE 3. mascara haunting her eyes 4. the roadmap of blood and bruise, the stiff access road of spine 5. the hands bent into backward-twisting wrists 6. the mouth, an eclipse of moths

7. the regulations of intimacy 8. the startled melody of pleas; that last line on the page, subject to erasure 9. the motions the morning after, arms bruised with disaster 10. the odd other end of a pornographer’s eye—the tilt of hip, flash of thigh 11. the crushed trumpet of her minor cry

12. the thing forgotten, allowed to wallow in disrepair 13. the dark wound puckering at touch

Mr. Peabody’s Coal Train Done Hauled it Away

Hills are containers for the unspeakable, seeping capsules of jagged memory, the sawed-off nub of time. Houses seeping into bedrock forego that last blotch of sun, turn to empties littering the ditch.

Trees run a little rusty here. Fall, ridges are brittle as osteopeniac bones. Out broke-banked curves, girls, shotgun and blue, commit suicide methodically as cleaning house.

Eyes, abacus beads calculating damage. Strange dictionary redefining face and place. Blood root and elderberry wine, the memory of taste. An atlas of mouth, directionless, a grimace metastasized.

Land of dark and green, pained breath of heifer, the mare who pondered lying down near last dots of houses freckling hollows by the Green River where Paradise lay. The place where blue herons turn to albatross wronged, reeking and grateful for the passage elsewhere.

At 5

After midnight mornings came and went with the crush and fly of gravel snapping the windshield of a “56” Chevy ringed by last smashed cans of Red, White and Blue, she’d find him hunched in the kitchen, half-dead over coffee, a dented empty crammed between unfiltered Camels and Butter Rum Lifesavers he grabbed from the rickety machine just before the third shift whistle. Saturday morning war stories littered rooms with the clutter of short pay, peeled beer tabs and candy, stale, unrecyclable.

Dragonflies Over Mineral Springs

Alarming at first, when I could not grasp the flash of glimmer wings, the round agonies in their eyes.

I’d wince at the noise of their whirring, the delicate ways they allowed themselves to slightly touch.

I found one once, dead as diagrams, that last stilted flinch embedded in the skin, and placed him against pinned, sad specimens. I traced the sharp talisman of his body, the neat triangle mouth, fingers wandering his wing, until I lost my nerve.

Dark

People are afraid. Splicing memory of November, shade— season of minimal coverage, season of a man smoking alone, season of a woman weeping without shame. Suppose they had a gun.

Dogs bay, slink, recall weather. Who can you believe? The home with askance curtains a rotary phone? A salesman, a pointed smile? The guard dog behind door #1? People are afraid.

I was afraid to approach her tow zone, her stockings, her space on the fire escape crying alone. Didn’t think I should. Suppose she had a gun.

We got lost. For a long time, I didn’t understand that. No bars. People are afraid. I tried to hobble along. Frigid cigarette, the half-dead dog tore my stockings, too. Love for sale. It was beginning to get dark.

Marquette Cement Company Pond: Elizabeth, OH

We were wild to see a town without people out the dark roads of Buckhorn-Superior, where the Busch cans and Camel packs glut ditches with remnants of parties long gone. If you need to ditch a body, drop it here in dim pits rutting shattered walls of hillside. Half restoration and equal part decay, the kind of place where pups and toddlers slip over the ledge after little more than shadow of squirrel. Once, the ridges were nine hundred feet tall; now, the space between rise and quarry is sixty feet from lump of slag to slurry ponds breeding cats and craters, the trash that drags us down. Cloddish with bits of swallowed town, silver carp flop, ponder the spider line between cruelty and bait: the nightcrawler turned to rubber after drying on the hook, a softshell tangled until his leg twists off, the sunfish that missed its target, croaking from the arm of a knuckled oak. Here, great blue herons are the shocking opposite of a blank census as last figures scramble in the dust after that telltale tug. Watchtowers wince under wounds from odd stars, as their pierced sides offer glimpses of chalk-dusted pasts, while the baby hauled along (in an effort to make her fierce) teethes on a bullhead, grubbing the heaving gills, twisting whiskers between pink fingers.

Country Matters: The Fair

i. Balloons for Sale

We waited for them to blow— rapid, swelling bodies, taut as a tied off vein. Bright mouths knotted against tilt-a-whirl exhale as the shady silk of their skin allowed little but empty tension, those innards cracked, crazed as the rest of us.

ii. If I Owned Alpacas

If I owned alpacas, I’d feed them with cheer, would not abandon them to nuzzle at phantom hands or grub seed from clay. I would ponder the vacancy of their faces, provide space from snarling hounds. We wouldn’t sweat our way through the county fair.

iii. Arcade: Video Safari

A blonde boy was killing elephants at $2.50 a game. Peppering the sags of their eyes, grinning at creatures staggered, as ridges bent at rigged howls of grey calves cringing. His father nodded, noted lopsided patterns of ammunition, the screen sirens warning shooters against picking off elephants. The boy’s mouth bloomed from pink to laser sight, as he dotted a canvas of calves craning. Trunks, pixelated, curled like nailed deer, while he reloaded with the smirk a later girlfriend or stray cat will flinch against in their sleep.

iv. What Liquor Opens

Cabinets, Coolers, Kegs

Mouths Zippers, Legs.

v. Morning After

Woke up not dead. Drove to the dam. Did not jump. Removed shirt. Exposed ribs, hips to anyone willing to look. Cut grass. Killed no snakes. Ate ice cream that tasted like him. Drove away. Did not remove pants.

vi. A Good Snake’s a Dead Snake

Something nasty in that sliver sketching scenes she could never stand. The writhing left her jaw clenched at a startle of leaves or limbs laid wrong. Tactical maneuvers carried out under dual threats of early spring, a stirring in the twigs, kept her collapsing holes, crushing her teeth to silt.

Weapons Inventory

Tongue: split, recruiting words as militias. Fillet knife: brown-blood-blue, scales tweaking the blade like scars. Prozac: tactical only in large doses. Louisville Slugger: ash splintered under the crack of history smashed. The old man’s 12 gauge: rifled barrel buckshot ruined. Two-by-Four (2 feet long, rotting): twisted from the neighbor’s hands before the Sheriff took him away. Liquor cabinet dwindling: used wisely, there’s enough left to do the trick. A-R 15: in the closet on my side of the bed. 5.56 millimeter ball ammunition: each grain is code deciphered as dread.

Letters to the Blind

Her very skin troubles the window. Lips strung taut, cracks against her smile are tragedies her lovers never saw. Slim bits of her cheek grazing glass, the gaze transfixed by a glimpse of an act where she barely knew what to do, are similar features, identifiable parts, a shared jailhouse tattoo. Needles have seethed their way through the closest, softest places. The canvas of flesh, the pages stained beneath him, a reenactment of bodies thrown together against the cringe and singe of force left unattended.

Her pores weep dropped pigeons of silence imposed. Her hands curled as remnants of unnamed disease, she hauls disparate limbs from one end to the next, grinning after reconciliations. Picking her way through tangled sheets, she salvages shards among tangled streets. Now, linen yellowed under sun, discarded pieces of the flawless seeking perfection, the wired-together bones of accident victims. Suicide, homicide, rebuttal to it all, her pen rigid between her fingers, a penis in a creature too whipped to disobey. Poems to document this are long gone.

Naval Air Station, Pensacola

No coffins will be made up there No graves on that bright shore.

Lovers and fishers stretched under sun quivering at clouds. Only the gulls fly unmarked, silvering the bay across faces of hospital ships. One may carry my father, the lost gunner who drifted ashore after forty years at sea.

Possum

The O in O’possum should remain silent. Other pronunciations seem a whimsical, revisionist history of a species fingered as teeming with disease. The infraclass, closer to kangaroo than sewer rat, more likely than cats near dark ditches. Twitchy and drunk as bats at the moonlight. Vacant in headlights, a wild eye refracts shattered bodies of things trapped, or never missed to begin with.

One rooted a broken vole, his plotting pupil pressing close, as if the reduction of distance and bleary specificity of vision compensated for resorting to the exposed and fetid alike. The spear of his mouth rummaged against the damp creature contracting, breath imperceptible to an animal starving in an arid summer short on fruit, the better remnants of trash.

Known for adaptation to hazards beyond its control, when attacked, the possum slips into immobility. The foaming mouth allows this hoarder of sad and sweet a temporary fugue telling of the creature’s terror. These are the enactments of passivity and survival that disgust. Replication of the lurch and clamp of their attacker’s jaw, the skittering coexistence with the specific bend of knuckle, as acts of subsistence marking them untouchable. Permanent terms cringing against immunity to rabies and snakes, the things that poison us for good.

The Weight of the Human Skeleton

Because we stopped irrigating our parched places, the ferns of our fingers curl under the hard sun. Instructions for care twist in cursive vines as our eyes roll, caught between ecstasy and ache. Next, we saw off our arms. Without them, we cannot hold. Words hesitate, befuddled by the puzzle of our ears. Halting legs, wilted fronds, might survive if not for the pull of flesh that tightens the thighs. A bloom of organs falters, turns down. The bruise of our hearts yellows with neglect. Now, the wither of bright against bone.

For Ted Hughes after the Publication of Birthday Letters

This rush, crush to bury small abortions, your devotion discovered decades down the road, does not ring true when you are the surgeon, cram-knuckled, specializing in the art of removal. How many times can you slice and malign? Given shovels and opportunity, you would excavate most of London. Dredge rivers for slivers of bone, strand of hair preserved, carbon-dated love. Dime a word, dollar, sweet souvenir, hard-covered, ISBN black stamped, the fruits of your morbid scavenger hunt. Easy to silence anyone too dead to disobey, smudge here, juvenilia there, the voice you left too loud for comfort. Volumes later, your wives, lives, breath uncertain as fidelity, you dropped your valentine to the dead, ditched it suffering in snow. Your children stand still, deciphering a stone tattooed in revisionist pen. You’ve planned your end, this dress rehearsal for absolution.

For Whitney Houston, Dead at 48

In the blank hours of afternoon, they found you undressed for the party. The safety of stages and sequined gowns gave way to the treachery of bathtubs and a weird luck stagger conspiring to close your throat when all the rock in Newark only left you hoarse. Sometimes family are the ones who let you do as you please, leave you on the tracks as the train barrels in, leave you piloting planes plunging through clouds— the hard fall of three octaves.

We will never piece together the pitching time line of powder and 100 degree water, the shrieking yaw of your descent. The voice as big as the sea, then, too soft to register outside the luxury suite financed by humiliation, the ill-advised tour. Jesus, upward mobility, and cocaine no longer negotiable without a power note, a key change to satisfy the pressing crowd.

When the spotlight left you shaky, without benefit of stage fright on swollen cord nights, nosebleeds, clipped notes, the gasp of the crowd, you were no longer in love with the noise of your voice. Black girls don’t get the Streisand treatment. Later, sweat and desperation drowned backstage roses, the incidents unspoken in polite company. You thought you’d retire, open a florist shop, but forgot the easy negligence with flowers once the petals wilt.

Maybe Emily Dickinson Stayed Home Because She Liked Crack

She shrouded the windows in muslin, wouldn’t set foot from her father’s house. Sources, swapping rock for verse, kept this starkest Madness anonymous.

She ginned pipes from bits the servants missed: utensils slipped from maids, sundries improvised to lifesaver for a creature close and clawing after a life to save.

A shady friend – for Torrid days— Higginson got the goods in Worcester—folded gold in replies to dashes, poems smoking like dirty Chore Boys at ends of stems darkened to the color of Puritan hats.

Her hearth still filled, stayed littered in spills1 twisted with potential to sustain flame— a preventative against a disappearing stash notorious for shunning heat and connection.

Whispering at hinges, she hit that shit with caution, saving her bounty from an obscurity not unlike her own.

The stern color of her eyes glaring from her portrait, refracted from the pipe— suggested the compression of joints associated with the taupe silence of the daguerreotype.

That wistful bitterness seethed recluse—the fringe of the power to kill, to torch her father’s study. No drug for consciousness can be as effective as the goodies out of Boston snapping and spiking at her staid lips, like that hidden silver—a Loaded Gun— set aside for the apocalypse.

1 Spill: 1. a splinter of wood or strip of twisted paper with which pipes, fires, etc., are lit. 16

Ode to Liars

Like processed cookies, you make the days addictive and tasty. The brazen package, a container for separating fact from fiction, keeps us patrolling the aisles, slipping between glossy items designed to entice. The sweet expanse of your grin is as disconcerting as the day Giant Eagle shifted the coffee aisle, left us blinking at eye contact, temporarily blinded as if staring into direct sunlight, pondering which grounds were real.

Grass Widow

Grass Widow: n. 1. An unmarried woman who has cohabited with one or more men; a discarded mistress. 2. A married woman whose husband is absent from her. 3 .temporarily living apart from one's husband.

When your throat spit symbols spelling shit and bitch, shifted definitions of residence, and abandoned load-bearing walls as structures unworthy of our faith in their capacity for endurance, I could not extract the glass from your tongue, or mend the ragged larynx ticking within the dim skin, indifferent.

Here, boxes in the attic have tilted too, formed their own grimace in small patterns of slippage bit by bit, while our mouths swell with fury, the spite of an enemy, a starving man flinching at potential kill. When your hands cramped, bent into our skin conflicting, our touch slid into ritual, a torching of letters we quit reading, an unpaid bill.

We’ve lost the skill of discerning beauty from filth. Our tightened palm is a reversion to coal, its seams spreading the last of a balking foundation. An artesian well scatters pebbles formed in the shape of a man weeping, as our fingers snarl fabric and skin, unfit to dry the damp of injury.

Time’s Left a Wreck

There's an old, old house that once was a mansion on a hill overlookin' the town, where time's left a wreck where once was a beauty, and soon the old house will tumble down.

Man, monster, mansion, from a distance it could be anything. Various parts foundation or wires suspended and sad as abandoned webs.

They torched a joint like that a few years back. Stained trailer, thin place for space heaters and babies. A mishap of the logistics of warmth.

Come strange spring, drawers are known to harbor snakes, tiny copperheads seething between rolling papers and bras. Encroachments on intimacy.

I was raised to understand that you get the hell out of a house where dust and slipped skins scab the windows, and never glance back.

Sonnet for the Fucked Up

The cracking of a robin’s egg, hands crude as clods of dirt, boulder crushing bone. Fragile shell, remorseless lands, spatter of river-soaked stone edging the split lip of fire ring. Busted like my mother’s brain, my father’s heart. Reconfigured hillside of flooded spring; the crash of structure, anatomy of apart. The gutted treasure, dark souvenir, hoardings of a woman breaking things. Clumsy attempts at righting disrepair, a place to tie my hands, a frame that clings to splitting sills, the crazing roof, sad waste, where cup nests cling vulnerable as faith.

8th and Boundary

8th street down past Boundary on the 88th county on the map, 8 blocks flat from railroad/needle track. Smokestack lightning belching bad breath of high gravity Steel Reserve reserved for dirty deeds outside the Fishbowl Bar and Grill. Across hill, dale, nasty river from Greenup, Kentucky—that W-Hollow spot between ridges.

Back roads grimace their way through broken fields, men beating at buildings, homeplaces useless as dead factories, hookers shoved into sad spaces where property is no longer bounded by fences and borders blur into ashes, dementia.

Bad girls, drunk uncles, strange maiden aunts, attics, static lines private on the 80 acre farm. 30 years later, land half dead in sad back yard funeral of batshit and beer and folks who let it all go in favor of town, twenty-five thousand hoarding ‘scrips, snatching shovels, digging graves.

Corporation gone public: short shorts as markers of trade, bartering as byproduct of the vocabulary of bad womanhood. Mystery messed in her hair, the lips confettied in Oxycontin crumbs. Shame, drunk in public. The feral cats of memory.

The Car, the Car

She let him in the car, thought things were cool ‘til fingers closed at her throat. These are the fragments that flicker and mar interstates and encounters, nights at the bar.

Power locks depressed, hands at the throat, (stars waltzing out in blue and red. Vague noise of denim tearing in the car, breaking locks; splayed in gravel & tar.

The places he opened her detached—the body remote as foggy headlights in bad film noir. The limbs in all directions like a brittle star waltzing hard, the breath clipped as the half note

speed of hands tearing at her hips (under the car). The rearranging of bodies; escape is hard. The dark loss of air, each time he broke her in a blur of dawnish dark.

Away, put up for the season, off, gone, far. The startle of words she never wrote: (Let him in the car). memory, a splitting scar, the car. The car. The fractured pieces flicker and mar.

Wrecked Impala on the Renegade Horizon

Double Cab, double drab Caballero driving wrong ways down one-way streets.

If we had a Coronet, we could blare it from here to Cheyenne as a

Cyclone warning against this Caliber of car and driver just out of the Club Wagon wearing the rust Shadow of scotch and bourbon club soda won’t clean up.

Outside the Equinox, there’s an Estate for failure to curb one’s driving Impulse, a Cavalier establishment of Fair Ladies and LeBarons, Sienna with rum and weird Esteem.

If I had a little Brava and a Bobcat, I’d reconsider my own Passport to naked and brilliant, check out my Fury, check myself into the Park Ward like a diva, Holiday,

Legend taking the stage in a Limited appearance in Monte Carlo.

Diva in the Desert

Whitney Houston is not dead; instead, Whitney Houston is touring the Middle East leaving a trail of sequins in the wake of that last grand note she couldn’t place among odds and ends, crack stems, tarnished bits of that last Grammy. Diva in the desert swallowing diamonds and sand, the texture and sadness of each on her tongue like the tail end of a song whose words she’s damn tired of singing. First Church of Belief in the endurance of those pipes even when belief was as foreign as flats and sharps. Found her own pipes to worship—dropped that voice backstage where sound turned to carved vowels in a broken throat. The grin grim at the brevity of redemption in standing ovations. She didn’t always love you, flinging it out there as the bombastic key change reconfiguring silence and space for melodies gone astray. The ways of providing mercy as a talisman against garish expectations of blue Bic flames. Whitney

Houston is not dead; instead, she’s on 250 date, clandestine tour, practicing high notes with shaking hands, wasted voice.

Barn Full of Panthers

The World Wide Web snarls me hard; bright writing spiders knot bits of limb into small unstable hieroglyphics. I am indecipherable as Jean Harlow’s abortion, her FBI files—faint umber with dark talk of urine littering the air after her breath. Despite these odds, I keep lurching after stardom: The cherry bomb possibility of showing my face on Being Bobby Brown—raving, waving Keats and a gun in a scrawled effort to restore Whitney’s cords to their former glory. I plan to pop up backstage with the unexpected fireworks of an unplanned pregnancy. I’m a woman who has picked her way to Elkhorn City, childhood home of Patty Loveless, a place of hefting High Lifes—elbows cramping and cheers confined to the slim space between hills. I’ve lurked the library, rewriting genealogy. I am descended from women of severe browlines—gals whose book-stained retinas glint below a crumpled arch speckled from overplucking.

Increasingly poor decisions, like napping in a barn full of panthers, are as natural as a Jello shot of Morphine. Surely, there’s a payphone around the next block.

Shelter in Place Warning

“This is a precaution aimed to keep you safe while remaining indoors. (This is not the same thing as going to a shelter in case of a storm.) Shelter-in-place means selecting a small, interior room, with no or few windows, and taking refuge there. It does not mean sealing off your entire home or office building” (Department of Homeland Security).

I was conceived during a tornado. The implication of which is frequent recall of turbulence.

On my refusal to shelter in place during the last disaster: It was a political statement.

Mushy plum, badly-textured fruit on the fringe between exquisite and decay.

The possibilities of a home on a hill filled with flung dishes, bibles, the wishbone unfulfilled.

Immobility abandons us to a porch table steadfast 10 years in, a lame duck flapping, a knee that comes and goes.

Retaining walls, slungover, without possibility of repair— missing two-by-four, rebar.

The Days Pass and Meander like a Drunk Daddy on the Highway

i. The inner rib cartilage of hollows closes the bones, circles the wagons slashes trailers lurched downriver— rotgut as the rudder easing the narrow way home. 18th birthday. The white trash swerve against the dark. Tattoo trashy, identifying mark. A botched forearm as red flag. The badly drawn bird whose talons cleave the left shoulder blade, permanent as obituary. Albatross in twisted script, bad paths, back roads, caution signs, speed freak grip. They’ve marked the body in wounded creatures, traced murky lines forming strange glimpses of scenes, things we do not speak.

ii. Shut your trap, sister, the protruding wound of mouth, unexpected nose, odd border of hairline won’t help now. Blondeness startles— unexpected dye. The strange glare of jaw signals the rise of lips, teeth, the eye.

iii. We move with the caution of tarantulas. They say a Chinese Bird Spider snatched

a baby in a basket, left a slash near the rib precise as a V-Cut Valium.

iv. Circus life is rough. The unsuitable collage of body, the rickety ride, the jaundiced crash in the stands. Busted merry-go-round tones of wallowing in poor health.

v. Stick figure squatters in an old, old house, and memories crafted by perplexed others. Silverfish build kingdoms among bibles, sentimental poems. Incalculable pasts, pages here or there, silly tourists milling among boxes, ruins. Fingers, clenched with the precision of separating trash from treasure, bear the crease and grease of this futility—this clawing after forever stamps—and tap twisted, impatient for anything to straighten their bones.

Minutes slow as birth accumulate while this parturition yields sweat only. Immobility marks time in wax of Pall Mall smoke, the forgotten fish fry. Floors sag in uncomfortable scavenger hunts for offset centers of gravity. Languid as awakening from light anesthetic, dust scabs crevices, forbids the air, leaves scars spidering, marked mortar, deductibles.

vi. Short skirts, well-worn heels— the things that simultaneously bear, redistribute weight. Nasal cripple. Terminal agitation. Scurvy, rickets, hysteria, River Blindness, Tonic immobility the long pause.

vii. It took a crane to hoist him from his living room to the sovereign nation of front yard: that bright land of expanse and trinketry heaving beyond the confines of a room dank with sweat, regret— available now in a swath of big-eyed discovery of all he’d missed in those days of averted eyes and the seep of dust motes through caving cushions, those murky decades of accumulation. Deep peek of sunlight glaring at transformation, the hoarding of flesh, those sores, flab, the eyes fixed to the floor.

viii. They say years ago she lost a finger to the blade. Now, ceiling fans hold nothing for her but the tick and whir of fantasies left unattended.

ix. Come all ye fair and tender ladies.2 Stock yard for the burden still present. She was observed salting slugs, mouth clenching at serpents writhing. Take warning how you court your man.3

x. They’ve come mobbing together at each other, birds wintered in. In quarters closer than pain, they’ve carved unplaceable initials. The grate of beak against dermis paint peeled from the chin, corneas relieved of brutal skies. Perched here amid last bits of brick, balance precarious as trust, the blood feathers clipped, cured of flapping. The ritual bandaging of wounds.

2 From “Fair and Tender Ladies,” a public domain ballad also known as “Little Sparrow.” The ballad, like many of its era, warns women of the dangers of immorality or choosing the wrong husband. 3 Ibid. 29

xi. They teetered on the Fuck-Me-Red lip of ridge, hanging on for that last 40. Malt liquor glinty, reflecting ways of slipping off the edge. The big spike hammer of home place nailed them down 500 feet above the tracks.

xii. Blank slate, blank mouth agape as stage for the congregation of clicking carnival folk. Teeth catapulting, capitulating, camouflaging the fresh edge of gum to jaundiced liver of old linoleum. This is some show y’all got here. Writing poems is like smoking a crack pipe, best done alone.

xiii. The plague between lovers rampant, and demanding of mask and plastic, the spatter of mosquitoes—souvenir— a trace of wing at the thigh.

xiv. Dead wrens will not offer instruction on inflicting injury. You’ll have no evidence of the snip of bones detaching.

xv. The sawed-off faces won’t bring you coffee. The precision of grout will not soften the floor. Sprung sparrows lurch, tip to the side. Tile remains inhospitable. A man to your left wants to fuck you. The bulbous head without bill. Get out while you still can.

Fooling Around with Ex-Sonnets

Shifty scent of snow in town, sad tufts turned bruise of exhaust where side streets leave us limping door to glaring door for shelter from huddling, from torn gazetteers mapping intimate exchange.

The heat of the furnace is not an embrace, is, instead, space where we congregate between walls, where detours and drinks are served, sharp as sleet.

We are statues in the drifts, our mittened hand turns to greying thumb, the ways of flesh and frost.

We pock the ground with proof of life, turned out, trench-footed, lost in the soft.

Every Poet Knows a Junkie

Every poet knows a junkie—is fascinated by means of filleting veins against the old slow complacent choke of pill filler clogging phrases and blood spaces; the tell-tale purple arm, twisted wrists as antidotes against the tweak of poems forming the abscess of the unspoken. Drying out days, decades of scribbling, excising shards— pesky fibers left behind at crime scenes— marked by blurry maps of vein and scar grinding pathways back toward that very first time. Researching the milligrams of the fatal overdose is a futile fingering of lines between buzz and death, a spotting of hashmark where gag and kiss connect after that last shot, last bottle, last slash through the quilt of taste exposes shredded bedsheets, the aging face.

Country Matters: Mistaken for Wasps

Wasp: 1. The common wasp (Vespula Vulgaris) 2. Victorian slang: A prostitute with venereal disease, especially gonorrhea. 3. Wasp: An infected prostitute, who “like a wasp carries a sting in her tail.”

The shrill contour of abdomen, crisp humming at the nest, cylinders crammed with insects, an ovipositor coercing eggs.

Crisp humming at the nest, spiders as reproductive hosts. An ovipositor coercing eggs, the menace of social wasps.

Spiders as reproductive hosts, treacherous spaces for breeding. The menace of social wasps, the bright blade of wing flashing.

Treacherous spaces for breeding, tight linkage, threadlike, terse. The bright blade of wing flashing, petiole cinched, the waist of a short skirt.

The tight linkage, threadlike, terse distinguishing abdomen from thorax. Petiole cinched, the waist of a short skirt. Entombed larvae, the gruesome hatch.

Abdomen distinguished from thorax, rear receptacle drooping from overuse. Entombed larvae, the gruesome hatch. The degraded nest, seldom reused.

Rear receptacle drooping from overuse, cylinders crammed with insects. The degraded nest, seldom reused, the shrill contour of abdomen.

Grass Widow: Slight Return

Witch grass, twitch grass, panic grass

It was warmer in the barn, the safety of straw for incantation, utterance, ode, listing litanies, as the smile caved under grasp.

Uncertainties of identifying reproduction the vigor of sudden growth. Taxonomy of weeds forcing bulbs, cramping seeds; each failures to anticipate time and sun.

The mathematics of intimacy solving the story problems in her neck Puzzles come undone. Ovaries gone wrong, a wreck of body. A rabid critter picked off.

Her presence stains niceties, disclaimers. Nowhere to address the letter. Fading kitten syndrome, slipping away after coffee. The line clicking into wild code.

The dorsal fin folded. The mirror has a zipper. Split of teeth leering at dresses wadded, winding at the feet, undone. Ways a dope sick woman might drop her dress in hard times.

Teeth as the rubble of troubled sleep. Magenta intertwining of vulgared skin, bones crumbled to dust. Deal sealed with a fifth of Single Barrel Jack— exchanged shots like vows of fidelity.

Dear Distant Spouse,

Sun spiteful at the window exposes unminded gaps, the spectacle of separate beds.

Marriage twists its stale form into the sheets, refuses to face the day.

My letters disintegrated in the space between delivered and opened, then crumbled without contact.

Emails lunged through a hostile cyberverse, hauling mark as unread like suitcases heaving with souvenirs.

We’re left with stoved fingers too cramped to dial, and ears pinned back at the blank other end of the line.

Sinking Sand: All Other Ground is

Maneater marsh cats, salt lands secret, snakes constricting beneath soft grounds. Each subject to sinking sands, curled hands

of strangers grasped twice.

Bloody Mary in the bathtub,

Flannery O’Connor on the curb, snapshots on Little Tybee, high beam crooked headlight exposing flatland forty miles down the beach.

We are all subject to sinking sands.

Tinkling glass, tipped drinks lodged in place,

Jack and Coke the prop keeping legs upright in the vicinity of stumbling men yelling and swelling against her.

Backhome, she shuddered at shameful crevices innate in the build of hollows gaping with bits of dinner, foul drink and hard kisses speckling the mouth.

(All other ground is sinking sand.)

Rummage the gritty purse of discomfort, relocation—claim remnants of croaker, matches & shell casings. Crab shacks & palms, scrub pines, burial land. Sea islands ravaged to miles of marsh and clarity.

Sinking Sand.

Cold Cook by the Little Scioto

When the Ohio, my love, compresses into a manageable body, forms the slim hieroglyphic, tributary, brain wave seized,

I will press my remnants—lopped arms, punctured veins—against your ribs, sharing brake fluid and blood, plundering sandbars, snapshots of our eyes until faces blur, unify.

Each creature straggling amid dark spills is a kindness glimpsed or missed in the twitchy exchange of chemical and fluid—hands as mutual machinery.

Trash pebbling the hillsides is simply the last days of the tweak. Bells and bats when those odd, old days leer with the glint of poison newly synthesized.

When the red dread of last filtration turns jar to liquid, when we uproot—pry the shell from the terrapin as token or souvenir—

When we scavenge, rummage after small flame to light dank spaces of stumbling memory, we become scrappers of biography—clutching cans, tilting at substations, squinting after copper wire.

Blow-Up Doll

Police in Australia arrested a man accused of breaking into an adult shop and having sex with blow-up dolls. The 23-year-old Caucasian male broke into the Laneway Adult Shop in the northern Australian city of Cairns for the purpose of sex with a doll named “Jungle Jane” (CNN 2009). The lower-case “O” of the mouth, working-girl wide, marks even a top model of woman doll as suspect. The bright smear spread into semblance of surprise, a tongue engineered into extinction as irrelevant; each, evidence of the anatomy of alone.

Seventy years ago, Himmler issued soldiers Synthetic Comforters, blonde gynoids, Aryan specifically, replacing Parisian prostitutes of questionable ethnicity. Folded like gear serving as barriers against syphilis, strange.

Clutching the newest model, head and torso only, extraneous parts lopped for portability, pleasure, he pondered the blank spots of her eyes, the spring of breast under blue-lit nights, artificial with distance and release.

The absence of flesh, the damp way it stumped against his skin, amplified sterile vacancies, as he ordered her face into a sort of recognition— a position other than the dropped bones of her jaw forming the wound where there should have been teeth.

Dead Girl Near the Road

They gave you no name. Nomenclature for bruised thighs would not suffice. Sensitive material, those terms handled with a grenadier’s touch, the private arsenal swelling for the revolution.

Flak-jacketed against twitch or imposition, head swiveling in vigilance against shrapnel and all removal entailed, we’ve all hunkered down in refusal of orders, scars disorganizing assigned positions. The small militant force we would not face.

They pieced you together—field dressed damage that did not translate to print. Shoring taut threads of random anatomy into a patched statue of resistance; endurance was the powdered, spent shell— the sad, smoking remnant of ways getting even.

Improbable as closing trenches with gauze, the severed head, mark dark at the face, the silenced muzzles, movements through landmines of soft tissue, shifting to exercises in the lost art of forgetting.

Slipshod maneuvers render grey corpses fouling the theater. The last of your eyes seeps into a swamp of quick graves bulging with artifacts that can’t be placed. Amputations, here, no longer viable. I am returning to drag the bones home.

You Didn’t Forgot the Old Sailor Songs

The battle lines of your face redrawn, eyes the shade of the Pacific under clouds. (Poems to document this are long gone.)

You didn’t forget the old sailor songs, the taste of salt, the blood of boys unfound. The battle lines of your face redrawn.

Your knees rattled with shrapnel, you thrashed along fifty years later, a gunner in the aching crowd. (Poems to document this are long gone.)

Rescue boats and peg legs cobbled from palms, floating corpses of shipmates drowned. The battle lines of your face redrawn.

Beer never eased the noise of kamikazes on the listing ship, the deck unbound. (Poems to document this are long gone.)

Flames of crude oil indistinguishable from dawn, shrapnel reshaping the body—twisted, bowed. The battle lines of your face redrawn. Poems to document this are long gone.

The Things that Made the Sun Bearable

I know almost nothing of Guam, and need an atlas to solve the slim riddle of island chains pressing through the Pacific. I do know my father limped her roads three miles, his 18 year old knees cringing to untangle the dense knot of airframe fibers— weeping at the dark heart of war-is-hell shrapnel, the bits of tendon and wedding rings; the morphine producing peg legs cobbled from palms, fractured and thrusting in all directions like a compass smashed for its glass.

The listing Fletcher-class Destroyer, inadequate refuge from spinning Zekes breaking waves with the useless movements of boys he couldn’t save, as hospital ships gleamed with the promise of shoring slashes from planes whose noses peeked and grumbled through his skin. A quick splint, salvation in Kentucky bourbon and a five dollar bill, his last companions as they numbered the dead. He said these were the things that made the sun bearable.

Lost Tackle

Days when stripers shift with disinterest, it’s easy to stray in search of lost tackle tangled, luring creatures to their death.

Afternoons when the bobber dips with the big one on a small, polluted scale. Toxic stuff down here.

I do not avert my eyes. Absence treble hooked, little lead ball sinker deep, barbed, locked without possibility of release.

Old men tottering in johnboats snip the line, polish up their gear as a tattoo of history, empirical evidence of the snag; that moment when you had him, and his dying touched off the rod tip twitching quick.

Fish stench in your pores, simply proof of now and last breath in slashed gills that collapse, exhale simple rituals of distance for fatherless daughters or bass gasping at chance.

Camp / Fire

You burned for strange purposes in the limb-wild, half-light of crazy. You were learning to exchange trash for treasure. Beer bottles softened, liquefied into brown smudges of creatures whose odd legs curved in the blaze. You liked having evidence of your efforts. We both liked being warm. Embers latched your lashes. We stopped sweeping ashes. Then, we misplaced your eyes. Your fragile beasts’ spines formed new shapes made of slipping heat, smoke, and later, made spidered flasks with sudden, sharp ribs.

I Ate Peanut Butter M&Ms

I ate Peanut Butter M&Ms three hours after he removed himself from me. My friend, who sequestered her ghosts for the occasion, chose chocolate over cigarettes because there was no indoor smoking and the nasty force of November showed little sympathy for what he made me do.

These are the things I can discuss if asked: candy and the jingle of small change— the festive air they lent to the funeral of me huddled, spent in an ER long after the emergency had passed. Some minor body damage was the report after the crash— a few small repairs would take care of the rest.

I allow myself to ponder the paperwork involved: the words used to describe the crimes against me, their precision and futility grim as touch gone awry, the nurse misspelling assault— my quiet correction, an ever-gracious contestant in this spelling bee of loss. Spouting letters, as if their order could erase the bruises on my thighs.

I have intimate knowledge of the tools of the trade: the interesting term ultra-violent light— its use in pinpointing places marked, the glint of a speculum gaping at my hips. My flesh, his flesh, my flesh girded in caution tape. I recognize the doctor as a rogue detective, prodding.

These are the facts as I know them now, stripped of dim details, slipping like feral cats. The thin clothing of memory dingy, The Payback in the speakers cracking funky drummers through your skull, as you signal left toward his last known address, popping M&Ms like Seconal.

Contrasts

When the Bradleys’ house was torched, women brought clothes and bath supplies. Posses were formed, collections taken.

When Pat’s leg snapped after a wayward curve, we flowered her cast in greens and blues, marking her wound as a thing of value.

When he was accused of inappropriate touch, there was no soap or sweaters, only quiet gasps of denial.

Over the years, incidents happened: a wayward pit shot by a farmer protecting his flock, a drunk driver who left a girl from Swauger without an arm.

Each time, we paid visits, tsk tsk-ed, made pies.

My Therapist has Cautioned Me against Catastrophizing

I exchange slim threads of dread for noose, a sailor’s knot on the package of my throat.

The scrape nest edging dunes must rely on asbestos to shore trash into shelter.

Hills are rigged to collapse; the keening of found rabbits gives way to their strangle at strange water.

A lit match turns to house torched, rooms bruised with terrible ways fire and hose altered them.

The face worried into deep camouflage. The fallow field. A handled kitten left mewing.

Double Abecedarian for a Dying Region

After lurching dark hollows abuzz, bothered by an absent sky, calculating noon like timing procreative sex, dread becomes our gap, the odd draw enticing us to burn bridges—a Molotov flaming, bottle bidding adieu, goodbye darkly to hill scraps hardly intact. Here is where the road slips from ridges in busted toy shapes of squalor. Jammed spaces, nostrils crammed with tranq, knot the hollows in webs, a trap luring us in like early years of radio— murmuring, hissing bits of information naming the world up North, the outer rim of Chillicothe, the first capital. Portsmouth teeters at the Ohio’s bank. Quelled shots at making it. Hope seized up. The hajj reaches Turkey Creek, the legend of Yeti slogging out the last winter—blah, torn from decades of dodging hunters, slipping under cliffs, gagging in slurry runoff. Verifying purpose of place written off in ink distilled from aging blood. Xanthophyll, the evidence of clear cut, an atrophic yew. The arm turns to scar, to stub zagging at the dead, the hills in soft plea.

The Narrow Way Leads Home

The darkest hour is just before dawn. The narrow way leads home. Lay down your soul at Jesus’ feet. The darkest hour is just before dawn.

Dialect down in the County, narrow way of displaced Kentucky. Twangs displayed the narrow way like pinned butterflies. Shape-note hymnals, the narrow way, twisting roads back where a grandfather’s voice lines out the narrow way of salvation between crumbled hills. The narrow way of old, high tenors wailing for bright stands of pine sliding when narrow ways don’t pay the bills. Glory shouts, the narrow way of jailhouse sermons. The narrow way of slipping under baptismal rivers. The narrow way across rocky creeks, copperheads riddling the banks, the narrow way. The narrow way of a grandfather propped in his chair— body spent, cheeks rutted as blown mines. The narrow way of his spine. His brain, the narrow way, strokes severing scriptures, the narrow way hushing the voice to a child’s speech. The narrow way of his small voice.

He’s coming back to claim us. Will you be ready to go? The narrow way lost its charm after years of riding its edges— narrow way, drunk-driving the narrow way home over tipsy ridges. Narrow ways where thin bodies litter hillsides. The narrow way of pill trade rising up in the vein. Narrow way of sandbars, of tires bobbing in the Ohio. The narrow way, the twist in a hollow’s mouth. Sharp pattern of clear cuts, of levelling hills, the narrow way of elimination. Narrow ways of sliding trailers,

men’s lungs reduced to narrow ways. The narrow way of her body. Crushed up, busted down Route 7, a narrow way driving out snapshots, contours of small fires.

Charm Against Alzheimer’s Patients Wandering Off

Place items of interest back from the door Umbrellas, odd reminders of springs past, offer the temptation of threshold, the light escape. The doddering vanish after yellowed pictures, the 40 year old dog.

Hymn

To the girl who reeked of earth, breath fetid across my wrist, I miss the startle of your skin.

I kissed your scars. My lips a poultice drawing bright stars glittering to the surface—their points tinged gray in bloody show.

You placed kindness in the light strands of my hair, traced letters on my stomach— sleep poems imprinting small clouds of disaster slipping, weeping against a new horizon.

Unveiled Threats

The tendency to imagine snakes between rocks alters who I am outside. A clutching hazard in shadow of weeds, I approach with equal parts stealth and clatter. Dark startle of writhing keeps the Johnson grass sprouting. A maple harbors dead robins. A nesting wild turkey flails at the thrash of a retriever. Orphaned rabbits dehydrate in the home of a madman. A heave of ground where oaks are known for biding slow time, signals the ragged beginning of a grave. What they turned up was a small body, graveled as the road through a ghost town. A skirt on the forest bottom where serpents clutch and thrive.

Last Word

When sleep falls sweet, slumps helpless, mornings lose the raw startle of red sun.

The way leaves deaden, regenerate fire. Memory, foreign as a home lost to flood.

Appraisals at the eyes, marks at the thighs. The last of the familiar stumbling.

Initials of speech are carved vowels in her mouth ringed by parenthetical citations, a blue flame of language dressed for retaliation.

We’ve laid down words, burdens alike, last wrenchings of sound spent.

The shattering volta, sparrows veering at sliding glass doors.

Impervious

1. not allowing entrance or passage : impenetrable b : not capable of being damaged or harmed 2. not capable of being affected or disturbed 3. The small country of her body 4. knees clenched against invasion 5. the hermitic heart 6. silence, the oxygen that sustains 7. the defiant wave from the thin shore 8. movement cautious as tarantulas 9. the press of rain over a protruding grave 10. hips familiar as memory 11. the fingers still, undone 12. an undisturbed sleep 13. the loaded gun

Notes

The title of “Mr. Peabody’s Coal Train Done Hauled it Away” is taken from John Prine’s “Paradise” (1971), a song detailing the effects of strip mining on an extinct Kentucky town (2).

The epigraph used in “Naval Air Station, Pensacola” (11) is from “Gloryland,” a public domain hymn now attributed to Ralph Stanley.