D. A. Powell

the bare-backed barback in the bear bar’s back bar barebacked with a bare bear who was also a barback back there

We hadn’t got color up till then. And if I had a nickel, why, that was for milk. Milk money: the money a body gained. Was just me on that hillside and the kite, red & white waked up into the wind. Hardly anybody knew me then. Oh, Lord how quickly the things of this world came and went. Practically the first thing I notice when I get back. Wind, and I am lifted. Wind and I am hauled ahead by string and air. The bows sinuate the air, I hear them tatter. A certain kindness to that hill, its slope gone gaily green against the eve and oh, the tail dipped; the string slipped. Uppity huff and drag of hawk air plundering eggs in the sparrow’s nest. You left this fragment, this bit of shell behind.

kiss upon kiss they grow into this they wish your shad roes hand sock hard rock cold toes will blow warm will blow cold they just raid your hash then like meat bees with your cash they give they take form like your fist over love

let’s say you want flowers you should have flowers let’s say you want forever you should have flowers let’s say he should have you in and out by tuesday and if you want flowers you should have flowers and the flowers will stay fresh until tuesday you say yes that’s the way it’s done should you want flowers

don’t talk to stranglers when yr wasted do talk to swingers don’t talk to swindlers if you can tell them apart from the strangers who are just strangers no stranger than you alone and afraid to be alone cuz they might want to touch your throat

spread millet in this neighborhood all you get is bluejays bluejay may be cooked three ways

soon, industry and agriculture converged and the combustion engine sowed the dirtclod truck farms green with onion tops and chicory mowed the hay, fed the swine and mutton through belts and chutes cleared the blue oak and the chaparral chipping the wood for mulch back-filled the marshes replacing buckbean with dent corn removed the unsavory foliage of quag made the land into a production made it produce, pistoned and oiled and forged against its own nature and—with enterprise—built silos stockyards, warehouses, processing plants abattoirs, walk-in refrigerators, canneries, mills & centers of distribution it meant something—in spite of machinery— to say the country, to say apple season though what it meant was a kind of nose-thumbing and a kind of sweetness as when one says how quaint knowing that a refined listener understands the doubleness and the leveling of the land, enduing it in sameness, cured malaria as the standing water in low glades disappeared, as the muskegs drained typhoid and yellow fever decreased even milksickness abated thanks to the rise of the feeding pen cattle no longer grazing on white snakeroot vanquished:    the germs that bedeviled the rural areas the rural areas also vanquished:    made monochromatic and mechanized, made suburban now, the illnesses we contract are chronic illnesses:    dyspepsia, arthritis heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, asthma chronic pain, allergies, anxiety, emphysema diabetes, cirrhosis, lyme disease, aids chronic fatigue syndrome, malnutrition, morbid obesity hypertension, cancers of the various kinds:    bladder bone eye lymph mouth ovary thyroid liver colon bileduct lung breast throat & sundry areas of the brain we are no better in accounting for death, and no worse:       we still die we carry our uninhabited mortal frames back to the land cover them in sod, we take the land to the brink of our dying:    it stands watch, dutifully, artfully enriched with sewer sludge and urea to green against eternity of green hocus-pocus:    here is a pig in a farrowing crate eating its own feces human in its ability to litter inside a cage to nest, to grow gravid and to throw its young I know I should be mindful of dangerous analogy: the pig is only the pig and we aren't merely the wide-open field flattened to a space resembling nothing you want me to tell you the marvels of invention?    that we persevere that the time of flourishing is at hand?    I should like to think it meanwhile, where have I put the notebook on which I was scribbling it began like: "the smell of droppings and that narrow country road . . ."

How is it that you hold such influence over me: your practiced slouch, your porkpie hat at rakish angle, commending the dumpling-shaped lump atop your pelvis— as if we’ve one more thing to consider amidst the striptease of all your stanzas and all your lines— draws me down into the center of you: the prize peony, so that I’m nothing more than an ant whose singular labor is to gather the beading liquid inside you; bring it to light. I have never written a true poem, it seems. Snatches of my salacious dreams, sandwiched together all afternoon at my desk, awaiting the dark visitation of The Word. When you arrive, unfasten your notebook, and recite, I am only a schoolboy with a schoolboy’s hard mind. You are the headmaster. Now you must master me.

I play the egg and I play the triangle I play the reed and I play each angle I play the lyre and I play the lute I play the snare and I play the flute I play the licorice stick and I play the juke I play the kettle and I play the uke who ever thought of the triangle who ever thought of the clarinet the castanets the cornet the discotheque the harmonium the euphonium marimbas and maracas harmonicas tom-toms and tatas I play the fiddle and I play the jug I play the washboard and the washtub I play kalimba and I play the koto I play the organ and I play the banjo I play the fool I play it cool I play hot and I play pranks I played your mixtape forgot to say thanks

Who needs a scary movie when there’s scary life. Icy days pile up like empty pill bottles. One craves hot soup and bear sex. I can’t hibernate above the Kum & Go when there’s Smokey lights all night. It isn’t easy making change for a twenty on a Tuesday night, when they’re filling the tanks beneath the pumps and the manager’s on break. All underage kids must come here. And go here? The world rhymes with itself. Earth is earth and row is row, whether to pull a set of oars and scull or a line of cornstalks completing the farmer’s math. Up above the Kum & Go I’m reading Maya Angelou And there’s a head shop open 24 hrs they do not sell head but you might think it the way the patrons come and go all night all fall all night all fall. I lived behind a sex club called The Power Exchange. All words have been charged with electric bodies ever since I wandered into my first poem. It was surely the Road Not Taken. Or maybe The Body Electric ... I’m easily mistaken. An alder is reptilian in its body, lithe leaves at night and such vocal things. It is a sexy tongue the world speaks. So many licks to get to the polished moon. Tell me a story then. How did you come to be trampled or new or high where the warblers land and recklessly shit where they eat. The universe I fear to be crashing. No painkillers for Doug. Ugh. It’s just autumn come. Electrical storms. The brave fire of the leaves and everything. The pawpaw, along with the huckleberry, the chokecherry, cranberry, Concord grape, and persimmon is one of the indigenous fruits. I usually only get it here, and only this time of year. Fear is real. Especially that most unholy fear that we will be forgotten. Fruit, when it’s rotten, opens a door to memory from other lives. Is it wrong to wish for another life? My hand can barely write the thought. My eye can barely see, my soul, translate the fire into autumn’s sweet flush, persimmons taste like semen, pawpaw tastes like flesh, large hard seeds like date pits I spit off the balcony in summer into the parking lot below where none are sure to be hit nor anything grow. A spider would not lower himself to touch such concrete ground. I would not live to see a tree grow to fruition, and yet each year I’d like to try. Well, Midwest, here I am. It’s pumpkin time. The cicadas have stopped singing. It’s just the crickets now along the river. But above the Kum & Go, it’s wind and machinery. Why do they all take the same path, and why do these undergrads shout against the fall wind. The rebel angels’ cries are but the check-in cries of birds, “hey Mike, hey Mike.” It must be hard to be Mike, your name reduced in the ears of others to a syllable of grief. And then it seems that Mike is gone. Relief.