Lines

Brian stays in hazard because the work is good and he doesn’t have enough saved up to move, but most people that stay end up pill-popping and/or pregnant, wondering what-if as they watch themselves get fatter.

I will be living the what-if. 

I know it sounds vindictive and I suppose it is impure, but I can’t help how I feel and I will not be ashamed anymore. 

God has left the back screened door open for me, the moss eating over the cinderblock footpad and playing Strawberry Jam on vinyl, dancing around Gurpal’s living room, Sweeney had just started out-growing his beard, raver man with bowling balls for knees and toothpicks for shins, tripping over his own clown feet.

Out here we take it deep and nothing below the surface. 

The curvature and currents of Earth’s directional intake, passenger sideways chance at daring mobility and backseat driving on Carrs Mill Road, everyday, straight through the intersection with Grafton Shop it turns into Vale Road, and then you make a left on Red Pump. 

They put in a traffic circle out front of the new elementary school, keep going straight through there then at the bottom of the hill make a left onto Cedarwood, second left onto Pearwood and it’s the third house on the right, white house with blue shutters, after the assholes with the Confederate flag hanging outside. 

Gee thanks, I feel so welcome in your neighborhood.

I know, tell me about it, and this is when I get jumped on for calling people rednecks and white-trash, they get so offended you’d think I’d spit on the Bible.  

First of all, Rachel said, rednecks are the first people who will give you the shirt off there back, more then any other stereotyped group of people, and second of all, white trash is white people trying to be some race they are not—

and it went on but I will spare you her grammatical failings and lecture on the greater morality of a bunch of ignorant racists; this is classic.

Each season I change with the procession of weather and birds and colors and failings.

I stand on the bottom rung of Nona’s iron balcony in Ocean City and turn my head to the left to the East, the Atlantic Ocean churning rock and oyster martinis. 

With the wind at the back of my head, my hair gets pushed out at all angles around me, wild mane swirling blonde night energy raiding the plaster highway for boogie men and bar fights, bastard flings and cheap dates to Party Block, the hipster broad rimmed glasses make me think of Harry Potter more than anything but it’s all so funny—

sad, really, if you want to be real about it, but funny too, I can’t help it.