There’s never just one. The captive turns surgeon, hangs skin on the barbs of the understory, sepias into dogwood leaves. Runaways rub garlic on their feet. Hounds bay outside the restaurant. But there’s no waiting either. A soldier clothes a corpse. Grass drowns the battlefield. Silhouettes confederate night. Beneath the bed, boots slough their crusts of mud to fill the chinks between the hardwood planks, so we can never sleep in just one place again. And this is how it begins, as a postman’s fingernails on the screen door’s screen, itchy for a signature, an indication, the story on the outside to match the one within. The message says my throat is one hot Atlanta, bring back the party line. Then I can whisper through the caterwauls what I’ve been meaning to say all along. Says I am a mockingbird, a catbird, a hungry pigeon. I am the wingless crow who laughs at himself when the pines lean over the shack in your dreams.

I made a map of the county and shoebox houses on every road, oilcan museum and smaller box houses on the smaller map within. Cicada for the trolley kudzu’d in some hair. A Hotwheels on a cracker at the sardine-tin garage. I made a coffin for a sock I folded like a dunce. Dug a quarry and a blue-hole in the ridge, stolen backhoe in the deeps. Fake tree from a forest, guitar from a gourd, and from the constitution umpteen more. Tiny music in a hole-punch chad. I made my collapse, my fold, my own little elsewhere. Boat from bottlecap, flotilla from remote controls. A bandage from my pocket lint, cottonfields from quilts. And a zoo and an ark from a wayward bird. I wrote the county’s history on the heads of matches and at last I made a suitcase out of clay and packed my clay and took the census as I made my way out of town.

for W.C.