Carlos let’s the smoke curl from his lips creating the fog that always seems to prelude a memory. He points to a docked ship on the pier next to us and tells of how when he was a boy, he wriggled himself from his mother and, bored of the chatter above him, he escaped from the restaurant and down the dock. The ship swayed, adrenaline pumped euphoria as he climbed the mast to the top clinging proud, fist to hip while onlookers
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It’s easy to imagine in Appalachia—the summer brushes in like a blade of grass between my lips, tasting just as sharp as it is sweet. I mistake a banana peel in the road for a black snake. The crushed bud light for a pool of water. I dive deep into the rhododendron plumes of baby shoe pink and visceral violet explosions. I’m running again, past the nettle and maypoles. Running faster yet down the
Randy parks the boat next to the bus and we both rock our way into summer. Fred and I ride bikes up and down the sternum of the hollar, watching Mother Nature’s chest rise and fall with each breath around us. It’s festival season and the music in town is better than our pale legs and sunburnt cheeks deserve. I go dancing. I go dancing eight days a week. The crescendo grows
Read MoreI wake up and it’s three years since Liz passed and I don’t want to feel it so I write to forget who I am. April bursts from the ground and the smell of flowers mixes with the scent of freshly shed jackets making the whole town cough gardenias and B.O. Mountain folk wear T-shirt’s and think about the possibility of open toed shoes, while tourists sip americanos and talk with an accent that would convince you their first word was “tinsel”. Wood splits itself. Sticks gather at the front door waiting to be burned alive. There’s good music
Read MoreI dream of ripping a motorbike through the kudzuued backroads of Crozet, Virginia with little gas and two 5s in my pocket. I dream of finding a litter of wolf puppies with no mama in a cold barn and taking them to a lukewarm bus. Of walking a painted pony in Wyoming. Driving the bus with no brakes... A gun shot sound rips the wild imagination from the underside of my eyelids, breathing the
Read Moretell me again how the note in your pocket became a freight train
and tied an earthquake to your feet.
how it was too early for talking, and everyone sitting like statues, made you forget
the boxcar so you could fall
asleep in dream garden.
how you imagined each finger as a thumb
and everything pointed up, and promised to carry the load.
how your lips parted in prayer when you realized,
you were your own Hail Mary.
.
sweet darlin’,
It’s raining on the bus. Indian summer waves its headdress across the sky in a powdered white cotton. Water drops differently in the cold—heavy, weighted iron balls clip the yellow lipped gutters along 9 slip-down bus windows. The fire pops inside the black stove like a tongue clicking in the closed mouth of a dreaming giant. The heat rises slowly in the dark and, cupped between two duvet covers, my furry head listens to the music muffled by a thin piece of clear glass. I am so close to it—so close to reality, two quick clicks and I could physically touch it. But why
