dodging the burly

the salt lick, & blue bottle flies, the little stores selling sleeves

of steel wool, ah hockensmith! where gin musty trees & a grey

clutter meet, & there on cemetery street by the old train tracks

the oysters still share the sidewalk with the shredders.  is there

anywhere else you could buy a pack of 1950 football cards in

1974 & gag on a twenty plus year old husk of pink gum?  king

hill!  his gulag of a haircut & broken coal cave eyes, as if he’d

been searching for some plausible, honorable way out only to

realize there’d be no dodging the burly.  if this was royalty it

was a royalty we could understand, awash in happy’s nethers,

conscious of the bank & the blacktop & flip-flops in magnetic

north.  afternoons it was jack tar & the innards of the origami

mill for cantor, we shucked plywood & kept to puffed-lazy in

the oranging - we held to our innings, all.  excepting the carny

folk cooking french fries inside of a grease-caked van in early 

august & it’s true, we were of our own, like we’d been locked

in a lunch bag, a hermetic ziploc, a window only to an outside

aware of but surely unshared, a muddy shot snapped to whirly.

of what the choo-choo penny corn sometimes speaks, after it’s

tossed in the duster, of a place we’d rather never always been.

                                                                                                        Jeffrey Little

Previously published in the book FIVE & DIME, Rank Stranger Press, Mount Olive, NC

Front Cover Assemblage by Ben Ricci and Jeffrey Little..