Things are different here, where consonants
are vowels dressed in overalls. The heat
doesn’t know another way to be but oppressive, flattening

your hair and will in equal measure. Here kudzu and ghosts
grow wild, blooming in the rising damp when no one is watching,
and hand-sewn quilts flair over every counterpane like exotic patchwork birds.

They all have a story, a brush with death or misery shaped and formed
at the bassinet. Mothers come with nicotine-stained comfort,
necks smelling of clean white soap, hard-worked hands

never stilled by age or idleness. Here is
the culmination of ceaseless energy, sunburned arms
and humid sweat the chapters of their own books.

You’ll see the elderly on porches, watching with avid interest
in their watery eyes as life teems around them. Their strength is born from loss, blue hands gripping at the arms of a youth

just to feel closer to the years they’ve shed.
Nostalgia becomes fear becomes mania.
They peer constantly from windows framed in yellowing curtains,

trying to ascertain what they’re missing
and for how long. Some of them keep
shrines to the dead in basements and attics.

Some of them hang photos beside rocking chairs,
curved cane and smell of moths. And some keep hair and bone, teeth and nail, reminders of what they will become.