Adrian Blevins

You get over these constant storms and learn to be married all over again, every day. —Barry Hannah The foyer is hers because the kettle is hers as it was made for water and the water is hers because the sac that grew the baby was hers though the semen that made the sac was his like his boots are his and the tea that’s of the kettle after it enters his mouth is his unless it’s hers since it’s inside the kitchen that’s hers and therefore not his unless he’s simmering the Asian sauces that are his because they’re dense and knotty rather than milkish and paltry like everything else from the nation state of the motherland of the no-mercy child who won’t stop sucking and wanting and whining in the ear that is his although the child herself belongs somehow to the woman and thus its hunger is hers as is the bed and dresser and mirror and latch though the hammer naturally is his and the saw and lumber and back and muscle he suffered to build because he guessed he thought it would be good for something besides this house like a pestilence of people who weren’t his because nothing was his except the whirl he carried in his belly of the mix-up of loving her in the first place like being sucked into a burrow of lava embers and putting your tongue to it until it caught fire and all he could say was that the burn was his—this hole in the mouth— this fiasco of the woman bent now in the garden to smell the cilantro as though she didn’t know his head was split with hating her and loving her and hating her and loving her because she was an ache and a kink and somehow the furrow—the groove and the rut— and age and death and kiss and fuck and not-fuck and song and not-song and no it was not sweet though he’d go on and carry it since also—since mostly—it was.

With her one horrid eye persistently unfastened, a vigilant bird watched my grandfather during the Great Depression use each evening of one whole year to wander his corn fields knowing this world is just one pig after another in one pen after another. Therefore, the bird heard him suppose, shouldn’t he with his best gun, machete, Buick, or rope terminate his acquaintance with the tiresome setup of breakfast-lunch-dinner-dawn-dusk-fall-winter-spring-summer- blah-blah-blah? But his girls were good-looking and made such fine pies, so the bird watched him live wretchedly until he died more naturally of cancer too soon to see his people become the dopefiends, doctor-haters, masturbators, insomniacs, sleep fanatics, shut-ins, and teetotalers the bird knew they would become, for the purpose of girls is to just ruin everything with wanton reproduction so that now now now it’s really relentless—how heavy his people got in their limbs and how torrential, thus, the frenzied wind, though beyond the eye of the bird is the small, ashen brain of the bird, and below that, a heart, I swear, through which come the iffy notes of this cruel song.

If your mother’s like mine wanting you honeyed and blithe you’ll get cooked by getting evicted since the mothers can teach with a dustpan the tons of modes of tossing. And the fathers will lift your eyes too-early-too-open: the fathers can creep up on anything when it’s still too wet to cloister with their weeping and strand you like a seed or cook at the carnivals with the can-do caroling and storefronts and foodstuffs and annulments and Scotch and off-handed fucking and walking out and moving on until they’re cooking the drift of you wanting a whole bayou up in you and cooking and cooking the gist of you needing your crannies hot with a good man’s body-silt until your head is stuffed with a pining for diapers and the most minuscule spoons made mostly of silver and Ajax too and Minwax Oh in this the dumbstruck story of the American female as a cut of terracotta and some kindling in a dress while howling at the marrow of the marrow of the bone.