Charlotte

When I was a child the walls were filled with bees. Burr and sugar.

Seams beaded with heat. Corner of a numbed mouth.

At night doves threw themselves at the windows.

Hunters storming through the gum trees like house cats

cut from their bells, beer-drunk Gods making a scene through the ceiling.

I had a big bunny on a red leash, I think. There was a white horse

standing in the road. Asparagus ferns, yellow jackets turning up a hem.

The wormy cats dumped behind the machine shed. The red

Corolla parked on the edge of the bank-owned bundle, swallowing

exhaust until it blew. The neighbor who

shot his wife, got off. His story—a copperhead, two fingers

on the trigger, morning glories ratcheting

up chicken wire. The honey’s slow clock. I’ve kept it

to myself. Don’t want to mourn this forest brute with history.

The shade trees root-rotted with the long blue acid of bodies.

The weight of them. Oh god, cut them down. My brother says he was hit by a car

in the intersection where they paved over those fallow 15 acres.

Built a Chick-fil-A, an Applebee’s. A Bank of America

and another. He says the car kissed him gently on the hip. He says we ate

roadkill. Remembers dinners of maggoty black-eyed peas. I was there.

It was C. who was hit when we were crossing from marsh

to marsh. We always talked big about sugaring

the tanks of bulldozers in the raw new lots, but chickened. Always fought

over who found that antlered skull in the lost forest. I say I lay down

in front of the mower to stop my father from cutting the grass.

I say that the start-cord snapped into its steaming sheath.

That the muscadines broke open in the mouth like the peal of a bell.

The linoleum yellow with pollen on the sleeping porch.

C. died, long after. Drowned even though he swam so well.

We were long gone, and the marshes. They ploughed down

the half-slumped sharecropper’s cabin in the auction-bound lot

where we would linger on the sill—ghost places set for dinner still,

forks, knives, dislocated dresser drawers, the snicker of a possum

under the range. Birth bills pushpinned to the wasp-papered wall.

They put in a Food Lion, a Steps N Motion, a Wolfman Pizza

with 15 screens on repeat. Wolfman always tearing into a blonde.

Why did I decide to write this poem today? C.’s been dead

ten years at least, and the subdivision’s cum-scent rows

of Bradford pears are tall as hell. I’m ashamed to love any shape

this land has bent to. The creek oxbowing beneath the interstate loop.

The above-ground pool we filled with tadpoles, walls sloughing algae,

paw-paws and fire ants whose red mounds we drowned with boiling water.

The confederate flag the muddy hens the trash fire smell of fall. Fuck it all.

They’ve renamed all the places I once knew. Now Raintree, now Innisfree,

Fairway Downs, Cobblestone, Polo View, Piper Glen, Firethorne.

Engraved on sandstone gates, the toothache green of sod, 10,000 white

houses with grand two-story porticos. I’m ashamed to mourn

the land once wielded like a knife. But I want to remember

the car: gentler than it’s possible to say. Gentler than a nipple, or a bee.

That’s imprecise.                           And was it the horse, not C. who was hit?

I remember her in the road, everyone out of their cars. Arms up.

A hand on her muzzle. She was afraid and then she wasn’t.

Or was the horse killed elsewhere? Ohio, Michigan, Virginia? I think so, yes.

Hit at the base of a long sloped drive, the palomino.

Buckets of pony, what a mess. This horse is alive on the gravel road

at the end of the story. And C. was alive too, yes. Standing on the bloody

road staring into the stinking, trembling marsh.