Three Poems
Ian Hall


 
Foxfire
 
In pictures
an old pensioner holds his spoon
like a shovel. In the stoked light
of the hearth fire he might be a hunchback
bent over a bowl of gruel, or a halfwit
washing behind his ears with fingers
freshened in filthwater. A woman nails roots
to the spindly wall of a shed and leaves them
to shrivel. Inside the shelves are cluttered
with canned goods—small clots of goop
petrified in jelly like pickled stillbirth.
Two men hold up arrowheads, clay-caked
trophies in their scabbed palms. Their shoulders
stooped, their jaws slack
with success.
 
Strange entries. Slick ceremonies
punched in black type tell of boys
who throw dynamite off rail trestle bridges
to bless the winter solstice. Of sifters
squatting astride gold seams, one of them
holding a gritty nugget the size of the molar
missing from his gumline. Poultices and strongbrews,
guesswork recipes, vapor to treat tinnitus, wet plasters,
ginwhacker remedies, parlor tricks, trinkets and widgets
to wrap in waxcloth and bury
in the fine print of a last will
and testament.
 
Further on in the white field
of pages, where the deepest ruts
of words are ripe with the rank fruit
of hate, hexes drafted in the dark
drippings of a grudge—angry ink, black
blots like acid rain riling the parchment
alive—old veins of the oak popping through
its thin skin. Mix a dollop of blood
from the thumb whorl with muscadine squeezings
and it’ll fix any and all who pester you. If you want
to wilt a man’s member pick a night to waste
all his seed and while he sleeps put a thorn
through his wart. Wait for the thunder
to flinch. Wait for the dog to forgive
its fleas.




GPS
 
This mailbox
is twenty crowfly miles
from a paved road
and two counties away
from the bland neon
of a moviehouse marquee nailed up
vulgar with ‘vote for me’ signs.
 
Five hundred screams
from a siren and fifty thumps
to the chest with shock paddles
before the ambulance
finds a hospital. Fifteen steps
from the porch for tiny feet
to lay a wreath of wildflowers
on a headstone.
 
A thousand or so paces
from the property line
depending on who’s asking
anyway? They send a fresh census man
every decade—dime a dozen.
Mister, you’re a snide question away
from the business-end
of this gun barrel.
 
Took only twelve casts
to catch a whole stringer’s worth
of crappie. Thirteen days
dredging the creek
for a drowned man. Thirty minutes
on your knees in the garden
begging for rain. Still waiting
on FEMA three years after
the flood.
 
Hush. You’re one funny wheeze
from waking the old man up. He’s the eight
days a week kind of drunk. I’m afraid
the landline might ring again
and make him mean. Four houses
down the holler someone’s listening in
on the party line. A few thrashings
past the last straw.
They say a sturdy thumb is all you need
to get out of here. I swear to God
I’m a new pair of sneakers
and a set of nuts
from flagging a freight truck
and riding.



Holler Hobbies                                                     
 
Here there’s nothing
to do for fun
but feed the billy goats.
Watch them chomp chalk,
long-cut chaw, sheet metal, rusty nails, pellets
of rat poison. Two holler boys once cribbed
a chrome fender from the foundry yard
and fed it to a goat. That ornery thing
gnawed till its teeth cracked
and fell out. I saw one down
a whole bottle of drain cleaner—its eyes
crossed and spun in their sockets
like penny slots. I’ve gleamed goats
besotted by all sorts of grubbiness. At the drop
of a pin they’ll hop on their hind legs and piss
a puce stream into their own mouths
or take their tiny tufted cocks between forehooves
and jerk like a jackhammer—bleat in pure bliss.
I don’t blame the goats for their gross joys
anymore than I begrudge the holler boys
their nasty hobbies—boys who filch bullets
from the army surplus and shoot
their surnames into brick walls, who boast
about the singe wens on their skin
from wrapping hands around the live
wirework of a high voltage fence
without flinch, boys who snoop around
the sow pens to peek at the sleepy pigs
as they rouse and rut in their slop pits, who count
the spine bones in a spindly girl’s back
in a stalled S-10, then try and tie her tubes
to quell the quickening. And it shouldn’t take
a headshrinker to see that in this tired town
boys and goats are one
and the same—beasts bound in brotherhood
by their boredom.








​

About the Author: Ian T. Hall was born and reared in Raven, Kentucky. He is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Tennessee, where he serves as the associate poetry editor for Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts. He has published poetry and fiction in Kentucky Monthly Magazine, The Louisville Review, Heartland Review, and Modern Mountain Magazine, among others.

---