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There are 36 carved boulders in Dogtown,
Massachusetts, an abandoned settlement
of platitudes and hounds. Not here. Only deer
carcasses, slabs of highway graffiti.
A hiving in the engine. Let me begin again.
This body is a ghost-making factory
and they scatter here like anywhere.
Like hungry ants on tile. The Midwest
spanning America like a kidney
plopped on a tray table. A thankful thing,
grotesque. And graying
before your eyes. Oh I have been
in emptier places than this and I know
by now the familiar prescriptions.
If sunflower seeds: pickle-salted.
If desperation: the river.
Cloud-bound birdshadow a splatter
of language translated from the tongue
and what it cannot ever know:
obsidian, heartwrench, the waxy line
of a face in sleep.
White-glazed flatlands suggesting any place
that could hold you could keep you.
If winter: an envelope for stillness.
If light: a refusal.
Will I one day swoon for the strange maw
of the grain silo and the milk-
starved sky? Could it be, as C says, I am sifting
the cedars for permission
to be happy? Let me begin: In the heart
of my desk is a letter I’ll never send
or regret, but I am interested now only in devotion
to a sadness that is not noble or monstrous
but speaks in wings, all they cannot accomplish
by beauty alone.
Erin Slaughter’s We Bury Our Tongues and Our Tentpoles appears in Flock 21.
There are 36 carved boulders in Dogtown,
Massachusetts, an abandoned settlement
of platitudes and hounds. Not here. Only deer
carcasses, slabs of highway graffiti.
A hiving in the engine. Let me begin again.
This body is a ghost-making factory
and they scatter here like anywhere.
Like hungry ants on tile. The Midwest
spanning America like a kidney
plopped on a tray table. A thankful thing,
grotesque. And graying
before your eyes. Oh I have been
in emptier places than this and I know
by now the familiar prescriptions.
If sunflower seeds: pickle-salted.
If desperation: the river.
Cloud-bound birdshadow a splatter
of language translated from the tongue
and what it cannot ever know:
obsidian, heartwrench, the waxy line
of a face in sleep.
White-glazed flatlands suggesting any place
that could hold you could keep you.
If winter: an envelope for stillness.
If light: a refusal.
Will I one day swoon for the strange maw
of the grain silo and the milk-
starved sky? Could it be, as C says, I am sifting
the cedars for permission
to be happy? Let me begin: In the heart
of my desk is a letter I’ll never send
or regret, but I am interested now only in devotion
to a sadness that is not noble or monstrous
but speaks in wings, all they cannot accomplish
by beauty alone.
Erin Slaughter’s We Bury Our Tongues and Our Tentpoles appears in Flock 21.
Erin Slaughter is editor and co-founder of literary journal The Hunger, and the author of two poetry chapbooks: GIRLFIRE (dancing girl press, 2018) and Elegy for the Body (Slash Pine Press, 2017). You can find her writing in Prairie Schooner, Passages North, F(r)iction, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. Originally from north Texas, she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Her first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from New Rivers Press in 2019.