Sometimes these bruises and cuts I can’t tell you where they come from.
My drug runs. My wobbly walks from bedroom to bathroom.
Unconscious consumerism. I have a tumultuous relationship with
my extraordinary desire to be lazy. I have a tumultuous relationship with work.
What land promised: promised land. Blood as dark as compressed peat after
a few million years. I’m fond of my foibles, my thousands of abandoned plans,
stars across one long, cloudy night. I’m up to my ankles in sedge
as the lawnmower sits in the garage: snapped pull cord. In the morning,
morning glories, purple and pink, will open from atop my tomato plants.
Someplace out there far from where the tax base swells, my great- great-grandfather
emerges from the Earth’s colon where the same black sky over Bedford County was
invisible. Rats, fiddle-quick, were the canaries in the coal mines. I’m sneaking
a cigarette, the wayward cinder scribbling across metallic nothing. I scribble a line:
Nobody, and I mean nobody, beats black lung. And I could be that somebody.