untitled IV
4.8.26
The South runs in my veins even when I’m not in it. Couldn’t dream of stopping these words from careening out of my fingertips. I sometimes struggle to share pieces I think will be in my upcoming poetry book, but maybe I’ll learn something from sharing more abundantly with you.
ONE
Iodine tears and Hoover Dam gates burning
A storage unit at the edge of calamity
Twin lightning strikes to the natural gas substation
Nothing stood a chance in Tarrant County
…
Do other people drive by former units
for no other reason but to see if nature
learned from the disaster of greed?
…
Shadows flat against loss-dusted frame
8 year olds shoot cocaine pellets stacked on railroad tracks
Palettes of makeup with early-oughts pageantry
Conceived in ‘97 raised with the spirit of ‘77
…
A mother can’t grieve the floodwaters fighting highwaters for real estate
Her horse sketches and figurines with ceramic simplicity snapped at the ankles with stained glass spectacle
A son’s PowerPuff Girls backpack bursting with too-many Hot Wheels cars
Floating non-consensually like Thanksgiving down the Cahaba
TWO
There is a version of the twins
Arguing over Twix bars and pool floaties
Anchored in Birmingham to reproduce
…
Nobody watched the shy one under covers
Ostensibly-trusted toddlers wearing curiosity like a peeled and patterned turquoise veil
Easily mistaken for underwater utopia
…
Someone in the other room squirts ketchup on white bread
The type with babies biting opioid laced ambrosia on the front
Butter and bologna meet toothy gums pockmarked by Skor tobacco and spite
…
A crime scene beneath a twin’s pillow
…
The other twin continues to make their bed
Assuming someone will always disrupt it
…
The twins’ father drove his Coca-Cola truck through the front door
Disappearing one to a different dystopia
THREE
between drugs sex and rock and roll
one taints the water of the other
religion must have been invented for this
christianity can’t be held by 2 thousand years
neither the earth by 4 billion
ethics defaced by billionaire effigies
rhyme schemes expose and highlight
rarely do protests activate rings of fire
handshake deals with skies marred by rage
hot coffee stitches cancer into colon linings
beg Ronan Farrow to spell accountability slow
do youth animal species harm each other?
can we be liberated from birthright?
legacy and liberty dare not cross streams
corporations snarl Hell’s noxious breath
it’s not the twin’s fault for her conditioning
who taught her body violence before her first period?
and therefore her twin?
-dHp