A gymnast, a circus performer,
strange dreams of life, so many twists.

The slow ache of age – waking
again and again to the same old world. 

Treading frigid water in a new river
we have been forced to cross.

Burrow your fingernail beneath browned,
crusty skin, unsuture
new tissue that hides old pain. 
Dig, tear, rip, peel.
Reopen
the wound just to see your tender, pink
flesh underneath.  Remember
what you’re capable
of withstanding.

“Orange” doesn’t do
you justice, you sunlit friend,
you fiery savior

It’s just an echo
There’s no turn-down button
But the volume does go up on its own
There’s blood on those hands
And I’ve never heard of that drink
It’s heavy and lethargic
The weight of that 18 years is medically diagnosed-
As never going away
“In fact it will affect you more as you age”
I was trying to wear these boots but they’re too big and
I’m not
Your framed little picture on the top of the fireplace
I drive down those long back roads
Down by the river and
I Shake
I cringe
So empty back here
There’s no way to clean your hands
You already got them dirty
I won’t pretty it up and I won’t nod my head
I used to play Barbies,
Make mudpies and heat them up on the rusted tracks
It’s all so blurry
And I’m in no rush to figure it out
Since it only gets worse as you age

You and I share the memory of entering Appalachia
like a wet curtain that soaks up sound.
When you’re on the other side you’re only there–
and nowhere else. It isn’t Kentucky, it’s the county
you call to.

In poetry,
we share the carrying of counties like pennies,
each attempting to name a familiar self.
In poetry, we bond over how suffocating,
how beautiful its been.
We bond over the rejection, the cordial porcelain
the way that both vases and toilets hold all of it the
same. 

We share the giving up of Food City,
Piggly Wiggly, and Dawahares for
anonymity in cities. The tired pursuit of identity:
some single self. To be strange, or named stranger,
where no one stops you in isles, where no one ever knew
your grandmother’s maiden name.
Together, we suffer such mid-life freedom.

Try to define this paranoid blood,
where rooted madness drives us. 
Some of us hide inside our syllables
stretched over words like blankets because it feels better.
Kentucky lucky is being stuck in the same poem,
all crying and laughing at one line. Asking and begging:
what do you do with a thing when it won’t rewind?
Hillbilly descendants reread
Wendell and hooks
to enter the curtain
again, against our eyes.
We drink around it, the flat top mountains, our coasters,
We hold the taste in our mouths as long as we can.

It’s all you can do to scratch at a thing like this.

The picture is framed
atop my mother’s dresser
smiling one day old
like a blank slate so dirtied
its time now as old as me.

the other boy in the holler was free

he ate raw hotdogs from the refrigerator

screamed NO at the top of his softened goose down lungs

Sliced a stripe down the drive way with his bicycle

while up top my bones rattled with trepidation

I cried like the ice cream pouring down my small hands

so afraid be sticky, fearful to shout NO

his world was the wind and mine was the root cellar

I was prepared for long winters, wrapping my feet

he was hungry for adventure, cutting his teeth

he used up all his life in thirty sun circles

and I read the millionth vague obituary

I attended the pain, avoided the funerals

hollers are eat up with invisible missiles

about a water-
fall is that it is blessed.

Eyes fluttering
As I drift away,
Familiar visions
Of years past
Float in my head,
A freckled face,
A strong nose,
Sun-bleached
Blonde hair,
Soft to the touch,
Featherlike fluff,
His blue eyes –
Or were they green?
Yes definitely green –
Wait, no, brown,
Maybe blue?
Can’t remember –
The familiar face
Looms over me
Like a phantom,
A fictionalized photo,
A roughly distorted memory,
Days of old, spent dreaming,
Haunted by what I’ve lost,
Haunted by what I don’t have.