RACHEL MORGAN
No Longer Two, But One Flesh
Winding north from Knoxville is the message I love you Kim,
on exit signs, mile markers, interstate overpasses: I ♥ Kim.
This is love, when it’s new, coruscating, contained in the body.
I-75 plaits the mountains, sleeps in dangerous, low-lying fog, moseys
by neat, rectangular trailers, with stairs that spill into impeccably green yards.
The cement swans patiently circle the grass. The plastic toads dress in yellow
vests and spats for lunch in the churchyard, and poor black Sambo
hauls the water. Methodical gliders click back and forth, porchsitters
wave to drivers. Wheel of Fortune flashes through the screen doors
until time to open the pill box, until bedtime, until early. The yard swans
nest under bushes, the TV’s off, plastic deer look tentatively toward the road
wondering if it’s safe to guide their young to the water, the Morning Glories
are no longer the purple horn of a Victrola. This is love when someone
forgot to check on it like rising bread, but has figured out what it isn’t.
Still Life with Rusted Out Washing Machine
Scapula like a cased wing. A woodpecker makes
her nest in the hull of a washing machine
perched in a dry spring running with tires, bedsprings,
and an engine block. When she sings she echoes,
therefore sings more. When she drums a babel of hammers
fashions a spear. A Madame Curie curling fetal metal.
She is shaped like a scarecrow scaring the crows. She’s
communed with the discarded, done with domestic,
angry monarch of the valley whose song translates as
appetite or lust. Yearning is identical in absence.
Posted
No hunting.
No trespassing.
Gospel singing
every Saturday
night. We’re back
to washing cars.
Don’t
save us.
Don’t
sing to us.
Out of
the mountain’s
rib we
coax a life.
A lungless
salamander
who must exist
in the sorrow
of a creek.
Rachel Morgan is the Poetry Editor for the North American Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Northern Iowa. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She co-edited Fire Under the Moon: An Anthology of Contemporary Slovene Poetry (Black Dirt Press). Recently her work appears or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, B O D Y, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.