On the perfect surface, our houses will fail. This hole
that is the ceiling
where we’ll sit, eating what we have. This edge
where we’ll swing our feet.
The distance to the ground
where we’ll be feasting
or disappearing. Where the bank fails.
We sing. We sing
to the air across the rivers, where we file in rows,
past Kansas City and Des Moines.
The stars will start talking again.
We’ll have carts, and what we can carry.
We’ll have our apologies.
I can count the rivers of America
this way. I can count the rivers
that flow from south to north, and I can count everyone
in this room.
We say we already know, after dinner,
laughing at the roof.
We’ll call someone tomorrow. We go outside.
We draw across the stars
in straight lines.
We’ll carry all that we can carry. We’ll have sex
by the roadside.
I’ll tell you what I want you to say.
I want you to say there’s a mathematics to this.
I want you to say it
as you take off your clothes.
We’re at a great distance.
Little specks of things.
We have this hunger.
So let us contemplate the hand. The distance
of the hand.
The grasping of the distance.
The hollow of the eye.
Let us say we are walking into a building
we’ll not walk out of.
We know we’re all here
somewhere. The table is set.
There are plants along the window.
Out of curiosity. Out of the body
travel.
We consist of smaller things.
The curtains kept swaying.
We’ll tell each other about it.
We’ll accuse each other of not caring enough
about what we care about.
As we’re all folding
from our houses. Folding into the yards.
Our flaming streets. Our streets
in flame.
John Gallaher is author of Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls (Spuyten Duyvil), The Little Book of Guesses, winner of the Levis Poetry Prize from Four Way Books, and Map of the Folded World, forthcoming from The University of Akron Press. He co-edits The Laurel Review and GreenTower Press.
Stacey Lynn Brown was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and studied at Emory University, Oxford University, and The University of Oregon, where she received her MFA. Her poems appear in various literary journals and anthologies, and her first collection, Cradle Song, was published by C&R Press in January 2009.
Kristan clogged to Rocky Top
at her wedding, didn’t want
her baby born a Yankee so took
a slow train south in the dusk
of her ninth month: Virginia
born in the squalling drawl
of Mama.
I left my accent in a gas station
in Kansas on the move out west.
Too much time spent
in front of audiences beaming back
sympathy for the slow wittedness
implicit in my speech:
I didn’t catch what she was saying,
but didn’t her words taste sweet?
Now it only ever comes out
when I’m back home, or drunk,
or just plain mad. Better watch
the combination of all three:
the knock-kneed grit rairin’ up
skunk drunk, palms fisted
for the rain of blows to come.
Growing up, I knew more about football
than ballet or Barbie dolls, pigskin
in the South second only to God,
and only then on the Sabbath day.
I’d edge into pickup games with the boys
and they’d take me in—y’all get the girl—
but made me run wide, sweeping hooks
that kept me clear out of the way
til the day Jackson wrenched his rotator cuff
and they let me try quarterback.
I spread my fingers through the laces
the way my dad had taught me to
and sent it spiraling clean and long
into Kenneth’s outstretched arms.
From then on, I was all-time
boy: fists full of hair, sunken teeth,
fractured bones, their brawling bodies
dogpiling me down
and always a quick, anonymous squeeze
where one day my breasts would be.
