Four Poems: Dustin King
Seven seasons of the honeylocust in godwin cemetery
The whole hill is iced over. I almost slip into a grave. One headstone reads Lemon. Another Crush. Lemon Crush. The Smiths. The Painters. The Thrashers with their own graveyard out towards Buchanon badly overgrown. The state insisted on last names and the tradesfolk’s descendants became my friends. Fincastle and her five steeples. 700 peoples. Methodist. Presbyterian. Southern Baptist. Episcopalian (That’s me!). Catholic. A sixth steeple on the east side of town only visible when the trees lose all their leaves: the African-American church. My mom told me my kindergarten teacher with her crimson lipstick sang something special in the choir. What if I wrote a line here like, the roots, the roots hold our bodies in place so we don’t reach for each other? Silly as a casket. Silly in our Sunday Best. Silly as the incinerator. My 11th grade biology teacher, lazy asshole that he was, said, toss me in a meadow. He was cremated. The moon in the center of a pink hole of clouds in the sky like a springtime meadow perfect as no tree may be. The honeylocusts like arthritic hands. Like all the cadavers’ final collected calcified exhale. During the Fincastle Festival some conscientious community member ratted me out for smoking Marlboros up here. I smoked a lot of pot here too. Snickered at the headstone that said Stoner. Had sex once but I can’t remember with whom. Attended Bible camp. Played hide and seek. Aimed
my sled between the dead. Ate the bitter berries off the dogwood despite my mother’s warnings because they looked like Tic Tacs. Puked. Watched deputies park down at the public library and labor up the hill to arrest me. They thought I’d vandalized graves. When I was seven at a church in another town I vandalized a grave. Climbed on top and it crumbled beneath me.
SMALL TOWN, SHORT FILM
Shad Fry Sunday, Bologna sandwich Wednesday.
* Troutdale, full blast.
1,322 residents if you count cattle.
* Laudanum laughter.
Heartworm and ringworm and bloodworms. An inchworm on warm nights for entertainment.
* Barrel of brown sugar. Sider and Appels like the sign says.
* Gumball moon. Clouds like chewed gumballs. The general store sold out of coffins.
* Livestock hidden in the mountains, troops roving. Walter dragging his dead horse home.
* Roving white men.
Freeman, escapee, quick as lampwick. Patrols fast as a mill race.
*
There’s Sunshine & there’s Lunar Reflection. Under an amethyst sky we partake in that infinite wretchedness.
* At The Cricket. The Elkhorn.
* Uno, you know if you know, Lightning Rod Peddler, Gentleman of Leisure.
* Warring post offices, neighbors in opposing political parties. Peace be with you, peace be with you on Sunday.
* Footwashers. The men do the men & the women, the women.
* Are we hungry? Hell, we’re all Hungarian. German. Irish. Some don’t know where they came from.
* The melon sky scooches left. Your sister in lavender dress slides on down the pew. One candle flickering, flicking wax across the altar.
* Clay red as river sorrel thumb-pressed into tobacco pipes & on up to the Baltimore Bargain house.
*
Brightleaf seed preserved in pine needles, in sawdust, in ash.
* Ethel loves Williams scribbled on a dozen eggs, cracked into a skillet, Shenandoah-fired, in Washington D.C.
* Ice cream and pork rinds at the agricultural fair. Come one, come all ye animal fanciers.
* Meet me at the moose lodge for the hootenanny. Rendezvous down at the frog pond for a french kiss.
* Oh, on a honeydew night over cavern country, I’m suspicionless. I’m suspended in bliss.
* Call from Kentucky. Plug one plug in another plug and crank it. Whole community’s eavesdropping.
* What watercress eater steps off the passenger train this Saturday to pose in our gazebo, to soak in our hot springs’ purgative salts?
* Don’t no one own nothing after a hard rain, after the courthouse ablaze, when the bank bought out.
*
In they come from The Land of The Self-Important, their Ways and Means Committees.
* Vampire crop, Cardinal Living Care. You can smell the landfill from here, an American flag on every crane. We got graveyards we don’t use anymore.
* Fame, infanticide, summer squash, dilly bean. A billboard for that big city lawyer.
* Somewhere they bore a hole in your head to get you closer to god. Here we dunk the kids down at Pecks Pond, crack a hole in the ice if we have to for the baptism.
* My brother, your great uncle, left home angry, road the train that cut him in half all the way to Roanoke.
* Your little cousin scratches limericks in the railway spikes that shake loose.
* Oh, your auntie thought she was backwoods royalty. Like she belonged in Southern Living. Her best friend was a flyswatter on that front porch lording over us all.
*
You, too, drove through not checking for a name. You, too, jumped on the bypass.
* No one spots a lone shooting star over a skyscraper.
* You know we elected the first woman mayor here, the men all ineligible from tax evasion.
* We couldn’t afford a streetlight but once every decade or so.
* Don’t act like we didn’t have a taxi cab once. Don’t act like the United Nations didn’t headquarter here almost.
* Every town is a novel, a sentence or three.
* A hand-sewn quilt tossed across the foot of the bed.
* The moonlight seeping across the patchwork when our worries won’t allow us to sleep.
BRAINSCAPES IN LEXINGTON, VA
After visiting the Cy Twombly Museum in Houston
Scrapes Scraps
The moon’s out, midday
in this town of dead horses and the men who rode in on them.
Town of Stonewall’s stuffed horse.
I mean I measure a man by the width of his corduroy snap of suspender nosehairs in all directions.
I linedraw in the dark that awe-shucks attitude. Fishes
Fishes with shadows
Flamingos in the foreground (“sinking as if standing”) Formal burial of forearm.
You could often find Cy at Walmart, that black hole blank corners pulling your eye down.
You could find my father people-watching in his white Ford in the parking lot
very depressed not even going in (“sinking as if standing”).
I want to erase and make what’s missing the painting the poem.
Can you even see a word and not read it anymore?
Pubic tuft Cloudcock Vomit shit
Can you not silence the shapes?
Fishlashes So much blood in the soil we’re sipping it spitting it slipping in it.
What if words balled into a cyclone of color?
What if for now a libidinal outpouring?
Something like:
On the stroll after visiting The Menil Collection, A Church of Christ; An altered epigraph:
May the blessings of the lord be yours in abundance in the new smear.
Triptych Jalisco
I:
Make sure your love fades when the strays fall for you because the dogs’ surely will except in the city where there are leashes they prowl rooftops snarl through fences like right-wing politicians the man on Playa Morita selling carved coconuts of jaguars smirking señoritas with watermelon headwear little diablos fondling themselves informs me people in the country are más tranquila, smarter, funnier, sexier, in better shape Orozco and the bodies emptied of organs Orozco and bodies not walking through fire because they are the source cheese-smothered gringas carne en su jugo there’s a telenovela inside any one of us 30 telenovelas on this bus staring out across landscapes only rattlesnakes could thrive in telenovelas asleep on the sidewalk telenovelas losing their life to the undertow paper trails, embarrassments, vergüenzas, half-assedness, halfheartedness eventually a colibrí visits and the artists sipping beer on the gallery patio stop talking to you there are birds unable to amble even on earth try to dry try to drag your eyes from ocean so easy to take your eye off anything in the city until a kid lifts a skateboard
to strike another kid riding a skateboard don’t make a telenovela out of it make a telenovela out of Veronica’s eyes eyes the color of Guadalajara if they let the dust settle like it would like to until there is no city no gringo just a lonely footpath into the black hole of her pupil red lipstick smeared across your cheek across continents
II:
Sí the dogs on the roofs and all the car alarms find each other in the night gringos and grackles, grackles and gringos sunburnt and metallic blue green sheen meat in its juices goat and its derivatives Spanx up to your phalanx the ______ of unknown origin entering your chest like the moon you lose forms more easily in the dark identities dull and disparate just imagine all the people you see exactly once in your life Veronica imagine those you never those dark shapes dunking and diving like ink blots too quick to be a painting all color now slipping into silhouette look, the birds don’t even believe the day is done or maybe it’s their shadows that refuse to give up all the administrative maneuvers the whole metabolic mess candlelit tables spilling out under festival decorations on a Tuesday
one, only one gringo couple dining retirees and their cracked lobster shells their pizza crust don’t give me that gringo price even if I’m hurtling toward the old man chapter of my life I’m not rich like the pensioned take a peek at my bank statement the debt I avoid paying I find a cure for male-pattern baldness it’s called not giving a shit resistance is erectile dysfunction pinche capitalism, Veronica once whispered in some gringo’s ear according to un muchacho in a school uniform in the town of Tequila after the Cuervo explosion tequila flowed through the streets and I was nowhere to be found
III:
Everyone in San Pancho claps when the sun disappears below the horizon like a cheesecake, un pay de queso we share don’t be so anti-religious it’s religious admit it, the sun is our one true god it and the colobrí okay, I’ll translate for you: hummingbird if you can’t be an atheist of the hummingbird you can’t be an atheist of the sun a child makes a break for the crashing surf, gets swept away by her mother some guy is juggling machetes on fire but aren’t we all? he balances one on his chin
I like the mean gleam of sun off catholic rotundas too big for the tiny towns they bully I like cascading flowers that remind me of labia I stick my nose in you wouldn’t know your ass from a cactus says Emily and she’s not wrong I fancy myself an autodidact I invoke Borges and Bacon the not-so-secret eldritch order of Colunga, not a comfy chair among them Colunga with a tentacle for a face, metally bronze buttocks map of where we all originated cast across your back I stagger towards the Airbnb I vacated, someone else staying there I fall in love with the tour guide, follow her around like a stray puppy oh, Mexico I’ll miss your sewage smell your overflowing toilet paper baskets stepping in your dog shit daily the tuft of egret white as the tidepool is black maybe I’ll lose my passport on purpose I never loved the country I came from anyway everyone staring at the crowd gathering around a young man who washed up getting his chest pumped the defibrillator arrives 30 minutes late and it’s out of batteries no one claps we just sip our margaritas until we’re gone
