BETWEEN LAFAYETTE AND PANOLA I HAVE A FEVER DREAM
Now the car has crapped out on me, too;
the engine all but fainted in the heat, so
here I am, somewhere other than intended.
Perhaps because I’m living drought myself
and prone to seeing mirages, or because of all
the blood softening the soil, the earth reaches
out to me with concern, the swabs to treat my
wounds rowed in fields all along the highway.
While clearly in distress, I’m not to be picked up
by anyone with a dirty Ford pick-up truck and
rebel battle flag belt buckle. I hear every sound
sharply: blades of grass clashing, snarling motors,
every small register of violence still to be found
in the atmosphere, oppressive, after all these years.
I hear voices letting air from their words like tires
punctured by nails left behind from roadwork.
I hear packs of dogs barking excitedly, as if
they’ve stumbled upon a source of meat.
Then I hear absolutely nothing at all. But,
more importantly, nothing at all hears me.
CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Granta, The Nation and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at The Rumpus and on the editorial board at Alice James Books.