Those summers, the field blurred thick
through the heat-haze. Our double-wide
like a castle on high hill—not quite
drywall thin enough to hear screaming
lawnmower outside. The same thick me
reading Bullfinch’s in a dusty jacket.
Gods bloomed in the trailer’s close air.
 
Not like the Jesus on memaw’s wall, gaunt
and holy, but figures full
with fault and fire. I traced their wars
on my hand-me-down waterbed, 
the sticky vinyl envelope cool with water
against my own big body.
 
Cassandra came last. Priestess
choked on truth no one wanted.
Her voice lived in my room,
the wheeze of the weedwhacker
the Kentucky sun a furnace. I read
about a prophetess
in a prophecy-proof world.
 
Now, years later, the field’s sold off.
The news scrolls like a never-ending
Styx. We have felt the world go frantic
for years–an ozone tang 
before the storm, the flicker of recognition
of every porch myth, deep as limestone. 
The gods are gone, or never came. 
Just us. Outside, 
the moon is said to be red
and I do not watch it or the fireflies
from the dark—Inside, 
I am the closed room, the screen door
covered over by PVC siding and walled
in. I trace the old lines of these myths, 
mouth their tales of wanting. Do you feel
it too? The phantom ache
where wings might have been?