Kings Valley
The neighbor is eating locusts again,
as if a plague were just another
point of view, sitting out back of his caved
two-story, squinting skyward, a cast
iron in hand, a mouthful of
wings ground to dust. My sister’s
busy too, straddling the fence, getting out
our mom’s gold pumps, spritzing her hair
into a hive of black. She’s making the universal
honk-your-horn sign at truckers who pass
with their loads of skinny firs bound
to cross the Pacific. If they’re lucky they get
a kiss blown over the yellow line, because
they’re only ever traveling
in one direction & that’s away from Kings
Valley, a place known for its dead
settlers & Xmas trees. There’s a whole
cemetery for land-claimers here, where
locals leave antlers & Hot Wheels & red
polyester carnations on the graves
they like best. People with names like Nahum
& Sarepta, who saw their kids give up
the ghost to ailments nobody can pronounce
anymore, might be happy
to know they’re still missed. The point
of the steeple on the only church for miles
around blew down & no one’s the means or the mind
to fix it. My mother is trying to
be the good hostess
she hopes I’ll one day grow
into, schooling a girl named Mynda
toward the GED we all say
stands for Goodness Ends
in Degrees; showing her the difference
between the progressive & perfect
tenses; how to interpret
the verse “touch me
not, for I have not yet ascended”; the necessity
of opening the day with a sorry for trespasses
unwittingly made. I have a habit of trespassing
to see our neighbor’s sow, the one who gave
birth to thirteen piglets only
to crush them in her sleep. She’s had so many litters
over the years & they’re all defecating
into the creek now, making us worry our wells
will fail us. I also
have a habit of visiting his cat, the one he calls
Confederate Gray, who licks the air
if you stroke her ribs. My sister asks me to cut
her hair again, & again we drop the locks
in the creek & hope it never stops
moving away from us. It seems we’ll get by
with our lie a little longer, if only
because the nematodes are failing
to save the Yukon Golds & the thistle is
going to seed & Mark, a family
friend who happens to be hard
up, is sleeping on the couch, asking us
to call him Lucky like it’s Desert
Storm all over again. He takes it
upon himself to learn me
vigilance, which is to say, self
defense. He tells me to give
him everything I’ve got,
but I’ve never done that
for anyone, & I don’t think I’m ready
to begin. His forearm finds its way
to my throat & his knee goes right
between my legs. He holds me
to the wall till I admit
I’m licked, which happens quick, but anyway
humiliation’s hardly real
when only John Wayne is watching
from his lacquered saw blade on the wall
& anyway does anybody survive war
without being won
over by the dream of decline? You can find us
on ghosttowns.com, or you can find us
on A&E, re-running our stories
about how haunted this place really is—
women waking up to translucent children
braiding their hair, all those farmhands
who saw Old Man Cosgrove only visible
from the waist up, who tells them
this valley is paradise & no one’s
told him otherwise. There’s a store here
called The Store & it just quit
selling gas because its holding
tanks are pure rust & won’t hold another
drop. Still, you can purchase Dream-
sicles & Bud & home-
cured jerky, & Charlotte who runs
the show will skin & quarter your kill for free
if you bale her hay. She says
the locusts are in cahoots with their stinging cousins
who inhabit the dirt & just recently flew
up my shorts & stung me till I stripped
stark, till I climbed a live-
wired fence & ran two meadows only
to find out I was amusing
the neighbor’s pigs, who cooled in the mud,
blinking away flies. My father got so pissed
he set the whole nest aflame, only
the fire didn’t stay
where he put it & so a season’s worth
of growth went up in smoke
& the locusts mourned & the scent
of singed Rieslings lingered in my hair
for a whole week. He said it was lightning
had struck, & Mynda wrote a song
in honor of the crop. I remember
only the phrase “portentous
clouds vandalizing blue.” (The insects remained
unscathed.) I admit I’m proud
of my sister for mastering false
lashes & liquid liner, for painting cat eyes
that’d make Audrey jealous
if she were alive & smoking
as if it weren’t deadly & dancing
with Fred Astaire. There isn’t much to check out
at The Store, but Funny Face is one
option & my sister & I know every
line by heart, every step
& throb of Technicolor. So we watch it again
while Dad feeds the burn barrel yesterday’s
news & the high-gloss catalogues
he doesn’t want us
to be tempted by & the boxes of cereal
that always say, “Better Luck
Next Time” & sometimes it seems
the future has a habit of repeating itself.
***
After Birth
Reed, who’s got one strike left before he gets
life, tells me afterbirth is what the cougars are after.
“Lambing season,” he says, “plus, placenta’s a delicacy
to a cat.” I try to explain how intent they were,
how their intentions appeared
to involve me, but Reed won’t hear
a word. My mother takes me at my word & won’t
let me leave the house. So I learn
to regret my story, sit indoors
for weeks, watching for hunters, only to find
what’s hunted: the gray diggers interring green
walnuts at the feet of the tree they fall from. Now
all I can think of is blood, how we first feed
on it without knowing we feed on it
or that it possesses a plan all its own. Every girl
I know has started, nicknamed it
Florence or Flo or The Red Badge
of Courage. It’ll be years for me. When a doctor
finally says, “You’ve fallen so far
off the growth chart, I’m worried
you won’t find your way back,”
I’m fourteen & can still go out
shirtless without causing a stir. “Eat more
butter,” he says, but I don’t
yet believe what I eat will help me hate
my body any less. Reed doesn’t hate
his kids. He loves them
too much is the story. People tell me
to avoid him, but I don’t. His flocks graze the fields I drag
my shadow over & I have nothing better
to do than gaze at interminable
feeding, mumbling Exodus
under my breath, some passage
about bearing false witness. & I think I know
by now that knowing involves the senses turning a touch
licentious. My parents haven’t known each other
in years & no one wants to know me either. A tree falls
in the woods. Con- sensus leaves us cold, etc. Green
Eggs and Ham, I really dislike that kid’s book, with all
its I-would-nots & could-nots on boats & in woods,
all its reds & its greens inter- mingled, muck of inks
you should never swallow. A doctor hands me
a copy, says, “go, enjoy” & pulls a plastic curtain
between us. I’m three & can’t yet read any word on my own
but “God.” He reaches his hand, gloved
green, inside my mother & says,
“What about this weather we are
having?” Just between
us, I warn the story’s star not to touch
its plate, but in the end it’ll do what the good Dr. has
scripted. I throw the book. My mother stops
singing beneath a stream of steaming
water, a red-black mass dehiscing
at her feet. “Find
your father,” she commands, so I run
through yellow meadows, yelling his name, his name,
which the hills give back to me, though he can’t
hear them from the other side of this state. On the other
side of this state, my mother finds her first horse.
It is 1980, decade of the single-wide & no-
children-in-the- picture. Just a mare called Chianti
who dies one year before I’m born. Her heart,
size of a child’s globe, fails while foaling,
something involving a decayed length of intestine & great
pain. My parents take great pains to save
her, but the foal will lose
his mother the instant the air enters his chest.
In Egyptian hieroglyphs, “I” can be rendered
as a single reed & “meadow” as a row of three
reeds bound by a flatline of horizon. I know little,
even now, though enough to say my name & know it’s not
mine, but just some inadvertent testament
to my mother’s love of horses & good
breeding. In an ancient Seventeen
Magazine, an English girl of means
straddles a dappled pure- bred bearing my name.
Seventeen, the age I am when my interior starts giving up
the way it’s meant to, with blood, & thanks
only to pregnant mares held captive, their urine stolen
for the green tablets I’m made
to swallow. & though I feel
like a martyr outgrowing martyrdom when it happens,
a sacrifice of sorts still takes place inside me. I
am the first to admit I’m kind of a poser sometimes, like when
I convince my friend Ann I’ve started,
when in fact, I’ve only lifted
my mother’s lipstick to tint my underpants the right
shade of red. Sure, I’ve begun to forget my mother’s
writing as it appears in Arabian Horse World, some piece
on giving birth & up & tricking a strange
mare into caring for a foal
not hers by painting it up, by daubing
it down, in the afterbirth of her still-
born. What more could one ask for?
My mother once rubbed moonshine on my gums to numb the pain
appearing inside me. Moonshine, the name given the foal
dressed in after- birth & therefore breathing.
***
Curse of Bodie
“Please find enclosed one weatherbeaten old shoe.
The shoe was removed from Bodie during the month of August 1978 . . .
My trail of misfortune is so long and depressing it can’t be listed here.”
—anonymous “curse letter” sent to the Bodie State Historic Park
Bodie is the first ghost town I’ve met that makes people want
to visit it. They’ll pay to cross an ocean just to press
their faces to its fissured windows & take in
century-soiled sheets no body will rise from
again. The beds in Bodie continue to be made
priceless by disuse as I wander its streets with a childhood
friend. She poses now before brothels & chapels
evacuated of howls & hymns & sins of every sort while I snap
up the faces she makes (as if for me). The wind is
up. The sun too. I wind the film for another exposure as I rise
on tiptoe to glimpse a bottle kept from emptiness
by a sip’s worth of whiskey. She whispers, “I bet you
anything some employee steals inside the house at night
to fill it up” & I nod, feeling she’s right, whether “it” is
the bottle or the house. Sure, time is telling
its finest lies in Bodie, where saloon girls still croon
from the other side & the shiver of dry grass
makes you think of a record dark & grooved
slipping from its sleeve. So our steps drive rusty nails
a touch deeper into the dirt as we pass
a leaning shed. So the mortuary still stands up & for a form
of closure the rest of Bodie won’t obey. The scent
those bodies must’ve made in the summer,
in the summer . . . We look through another
window to find yet another window carved in the lid
of some little kid’s coffin & start to doubt
if dying can even cure one of her fears. In the museum
shop, we bend over letters that bemoan failed kidneys & jobs
& vows, each scrawled trial accompanied by a fragment of Bodie
bent on getting back at its holder just to get back
to Bodie, where death’s the only duty you’re expected
to perform. “Arrested decay” is the state Bodie claims
to live in, if any place can be said to live, to claim. I eye
the oxidizing can lids littering the ground, begging to be
held, but trust the curse letters to be true because I get
no coin is worth a fishhook embedded in the eye,
nor an unearthed nail the only life I’ll ever get.
But how’s it possible to be in Bodie & not
spirit away some bit of it as you go? Or maybe being
here is how the curse begins. I lower myself
to the ground to examine a mouse recently cured
of Bodie, drying in the sun, its hide an outgrown coat
its bones just won’t quit wearing. “If we’re still virgins
in two years,” my friend once mused, as we sprawled
on her double bed, lamenting the vastness of our innocence,
“we could lose it to each other.” Like a child,
I prod what rots & can’t help it. Ants crawl
from the mouse & I start to linger over the particles of Bodie
clinging to the soles & tongues of our boots, thinking this thin film
might delete us from the world of sunlight & luck. “I don’t like
that my name is a place I haven’t been to,” I state
to my friend, after reading about William S. Bodey,
who never even lived in this lawless town named
after him, some story of perishing in the snow & I know
somehow it’s always been Bodie in our cards—not fields
of Devon violets, but hills filled with gold
destined to be traded for bones dressed
in yesterday’s best. In Bodie, population zero, you close
your eyes to revive the flames that drove miners
& dancers & ministers from their muslin curtains & firewater,
their harmonicas & pocket watches, that forced them to set
these scenes we dismantle with our aimless
coming & going. To be here is to rehearse
disappearance—or to be here is to disappear. We enter
a saloon on whose dusty window’s drawn, “Goodbye
God, I’m going to Bodie” & for one second I feel
the suffering of the dead is more real
than the suffering of the living. My friend begins to braid
her long red hair & a mark looks back at me,
her ear- lobe pierced some years ago
with gold, its aperture now traded for a comma-sized shadow.
It feels a little wrong we’ve only crossed
one state line to get here & the weather was prime, the road clear
of snow; likewise wrong that we claim, as we brush Bodie
from our boots, not to fathom what possessed so many guests
to hold onto their cursed stones, nails, globes, jewelflowers,
shards of glass, mattress springs, a piano once . . . for years
on end, as if the punishment were what they were
after & not the memory of the world
without them in it. I hold my breath as I walk
Bodie’s streets—unaware of a frail wire in my childhood
home even now being taken into the mouth
of some small animal; un- aware the only parts
to survive the heat will be the hearth & the bathtub, that place
where my body was first held too close, this head & heart
held underwater like sinners or sieves, left to warp
but stay recognizable in that other
ghost town I know no one pays
to enter or explore—until it burns so badly I remember
the emptiness I hold will never belong to me.
***
Gallowed Be
The nearest land- fill’s nowhere
near & no one is
to blame. We burn the year’s
news—in the meadow, in the mind,
till the crosswords & the funnies wilt
to winterkill. I trace
the day an epitaph
in ash: “Hallowed Be
Thy Games.” Every story is
ashamed to be true. My father’s now
a widower, & no one
is to blame. My sister
doesn’t laugh, plots to live
on land turned tame—where the soil’s kissed
with concrete, yields no wine.
It’s all the same to me, if we winnow,
if we win. I tell
myself the story that I’ll visit
distant cisterns, let their sallow
walls win me over, lift my low
life & lowly frame of mind. My father
gets fined for burning out
of season, says he doesn’t
get why. So the days go slow & I
climb a pulsing fence that stops
no bucks nor does, observe
the neighbor’s piglets wallow
in their loam. (Still,
the world is wide, if the hymnal’s hold
true, & every beast has a mind to get loose
from a valley fallowing
toward foul.) My sister braids my waist-
length mane, says, “this
place is lame.” I try to tell her
no one is to blame, but the sky is
so hollow
