By C. S. Crowe
Paradise
I found Paradise at the bottom of a bottle—
An angel drinking Coors Light in a trailer park.
He pawned his flaming sword to pay the mortgage
On his double-wide. When I pass through to Eden,
He warns me, No Trespassing on Private Property, God sold Eden to the logging company years ago.
Please, keep the screen door closed, he tells me,
Or I’ll let the mosquitoes in. Isn’t it a nice night?
The Pines
What will should we call these woods?
Planted in rows, never to take root,
Money does grow from trees,
If we are willing to sell their flesh.
They lean into hurricanes.
For want of touch, accepting abuse,
Resting their eyes, never sleeping.
The wet-footed mother opossum
Carries her young on her back
Past the no trespassing signs,
Never to find rest, no blanket,
Only a bed of pine needles.
With each pass, the machines
Grind down even the stumps.
Desperate for roots, we find only
Red clay, white sand, spilt diesel.
The reek of the papermill in summer.
Even when the town is shrinking,
Still, it grows, one tree at a time.
Ode to Firewood
The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.
Lacerations. Scars. My father’s cursing.
He would spend hours out behind the shed.
A real man knows how to chop firewood.
But when I tried, the axe shattered in my hands;
I can still feel the vibrations in my bones.
Pain warns us something is wrong, but what
About the expectation of pain? This is why
I could never pull the trigger. I have longed
For death, but I don’t want to do the dying.
This is the same part of me that was told,
So many times, Don’t cry. Men don’t get scared.
Thanks to my indecision, I will get neither.
I will evaporate in the sun, a golden mist,
I always said I would let Aphrodite peg me,
But I was lying, I’m too scared it will hurt.
Some days, I wonder how much of my heart
Is scar tissue on a wooden chopping block.
A chunk of broken steel sticking out of the skin.
There’s something visceral about seeing
Your own bones—pale white stained pink.
Knowing this is all that’s holding me together,
And when I do finally die, this will be all
That remains of me—the outline of a poem.
I remember this when I am hungry, when I
Need a little extra cash to pay the rent.
I put down my phone at three am, text unsent,
This generation, strong enough.
Lightning in a Bottle
He sits like a pile of kindling on the electrical box.
Paint peeling. No sign. No warning. What goes on
Inside these mysterious monoliths of modern society?
Without them, darkness, yet they blur past us,
Hidden in the azaleas on the street corner;
Hidden in magnolias on the roadside, never
To be thanked, unless they break, even for a moment,
We will rage in the darkness at their singular failure,
Just as we rage at the sweaty man sitting
Sitting on the corner with his cardboard sign. Get a job!
We do not realize this is Zeus in the form of a swan,
His lightning bolt sits inside the sunfaded electrical box.
It misses the hammer of the cripple, lame in both legs.
It misses the calloused hands of the father, cloud-gatherer.
A storm is coming, and it will not be there to see it.
We are all of us, empty of what little rage we have left.
A Town of Many Roads – King Street
But there were no kings there.
Yet from the magnolia’s plastic crowns,
They did not hesitate to survey all their land:
To the north, the interstate with its gas stations
And its three name-brand, one-star hotels.
To the south, the red dirt roads lined with tractors,
The farms that dared to call themselves ranches.
And to the east and west, the asphalt shores
Surrender to the ever-growing sea of kudzu.
Canopied roads of live oaks. No pollen in spring,
But autumn acorns stained the sidewalk ochre
Whilst ivy blossoms stain halcyon and alabaster
The walls of their three-story plantation houses.
I never saw anyone walk in the shade of the oaks
Save a dog on a leash, a kind of natural order.
It is hard for me to imagine the manicured lawns
Without a silver Lexus on a concrete driveway.
Before the man in dirty jeans trimmed the azaleas,
The flowers wept under the weight of their sins.
A kind of crown, not of gold leaf but fuchsia petals
And leadened paint over plaster and stucco pillars.
The pale bark of pecans, skeletal in branch,
Yet never for want of nuts to rot in their circles.
Why are rich people so obsessed with their trees
When they only seem to care when they fall?
They do not go out with baskets to gather pecans
To make sweet and smoky pies with caramel,
They do not rake fallen leaves into crunchy piles
In which their children and their dogs leap and play.
They do not picnic on manicured grass in the sun.
They take everything and add nothing.
On the other side of town, water oaks, ferns
Palmettos, and passion flowers line faded streets,
Unafraid of the kudzu coming to subsume them—
They have spent their life being crushed underfoot.
Plantation houses, one by one, consumed by ivy
Live oaks, one by one, consumed by poison oak.
The city repaves the asphalt without fail each year.
Gnarled roots crack the sidewalk, but nobody
Wants to give up their beautiful live oak trees,
Even as their town crumbles beneath them.
Photo by Valentin Petkov on Unsplash