This week’s poem gives us a speaker both separated from and connected to the people around her. The past tense and “letter jackets / & bygone fields” suggest high school. The poem makes its music in the friction between the language and images of Appalachia and a speaker finding herself in literature.
Adrian Blevins teaches at Colby. Author of three full-length collections, her most recent book is “Appalachians Run Amok,” which won the Wilder Prize and was published in 2018 by Two Sylvias Press.
American Gothic
By Adrian Blevins
Them high on the Dallas Cowboys
& me on Faulkner but them saying
Lynyrd Skynyrd. Their letter jackets
& bygone fields of wheat & rye.
Their love for Jesus & their doilies
on tables & their starburst quilts
& the bourbon in the cabs
of their trucks. The parkway
they liked to speed on & me high
some days on Emerson. Me high
on Woolf. Their Mamas & Daddies
& sisters & brothers. Their cousins,
their cousins. Their downy rabbits
wheezing out back. Their frothing dogs
on chains. Their vinyl recliners
& Velveeta & Farrah Fawcett posters
& pink bathrooms & venison casseroles
& fruit cakes. Me not-quite-but-almost
real high on Baudelaire. Me high
on de Sade even almost. Me high
on Rimbaud with them spitting
Skoal juice on the soggy ground
& them driving over dogs & not even
stopping to kick the corpses off the road.
Christ, it was dark. Christ, the dogs
& their pups. Christ, the foxes maybe even
& the does & fawns & possums & cats
& coons. Christ, the little lambs.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2016 Adrian Blevins. It appears in “Appalachians Run Amok” (Two Sylvias Press, 2018) and appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.
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