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ISSN: 1941-4137 |
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Volume Six Issue Two |
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Quitting Ohio Where you grew up, the farms are lacquered in smells of turned cream and cut hay. I like to think of you there — flying through a field, sweet corn cobs grasping your white fine hair as their own. You, beating a dog path between your house and the house of the shut-in Ned Lucius — spying on his ochre-haired hands and fog-eye. I like to think of you crouching near your father, tapping the maple trees, your nose rasped and filed by the end of winter, glistening threads of syrup from the oatmeal scarfing your neck. You, the teenager, Bucyrus Beauty at the Dairy Queen five times a week with the boy you'd maybe marry, then later, in the sun-split haymow under a buttress of planks. He laid his jacket over the dust before he led your cheek fondly to his groin. So in the city now, when you follow that plaid shirt down a spiral staircase to the edge of a lonely pool table, and his twang gluts your mouth and his fingers troll your frayed shorts, it starts to feel familiar. Starts to feel like an unfurled night sky and the furied heart of an open bonfire — ancient, silty arms plowing you to him. If this was home, you would spread apple peels across his thighs, introduce him to your Ma, curlicue his name on the face of a rock. But you aren't quite certain if you're home or not, not sure if you should scour your tongue with Maker's and his slackening cigarette, or open up, red-star and flushed like trillium back behind the chicken coop. |
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