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. |
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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.