I gaze at the myriad knickknacks mirroring
lands I’ve nuzzled my splintering stakes in,
lands renowned once only for indigo grass
blades pinning a grin in the face of
depression that Johnson would idly war with,
coal cramped into abandoned hills that
all but begged for a glazed hysterectomy,
warts you’d salve with tobacco, suboxone, and
swill that we all now know to call cancer, and
hill folk, hearty and hardy as hiccuping fairykin
whispering Appalachian murder ballads in
ears of a rasping ass; and, of course, that
Bluegrass strumming from guts of a
hare-lipped milk jug strung with rusalki hair
so dulcetly sullen and soulful a suite of sound
it could rattle the chalice of Christ from a
clown ruff ruddled with indigo blood; and the
blue-bloods, both cuts, cloyed and cultured or
nettled, neglected, afeared, and forgotten—though

now, these knickknacks, pillows confessing
Kentucky in phlox-blue comic sans, America
wattle-and-daubed from disfigured license plates, the
pre-shrunk t-shirts scumbled with emblems of
dainty dilettantes dredging mint juleps from
verdigrised horseshit strewn over shuddering tracks,
and, alas, these little gilt tea towels screaming,
Wildcats! and If it ain’t Kentucky, it just ain’t bourbon,
which urges my corn-cowled breastbone mutter,

If it ain’t bourbon then,
is it just not Kentucky—these knickknacks,
goldfish buoying up under garbled glass like
bird shit piled up over a rusted alarm box, shyly
abounding in Crohn’s-prone basements and
gleefully teetering tors of immortal trash that
rival those wiling sandstone scarps that
Muir preserved from becoming a water park.