photo courtesy of Dan Keck via flickr
The dead thorns kept warm underneath a highway
paling underneath the tires
of my grandfather’s 1959 Cadillac Fleetwood,
while his wife kissed their eldest son frankly,
crumpled road maps, & ashed cigarettes
on the fleeting tar while moving their lives
across state lines.
Last month’s rain washed away
the last flecks of red paint from the Cadillac’s back fin
that had pooled in his driveway.
To be West Virginian is to have everything taken away
from you, slowly.
To be West Virginian is to love
whatever version of remembrance
your lineage gives you,
but I have always hated my great aunt’s painting
of the house she & my grandfather grew up in.
It is too late to live there,
because the city of Grafton knocked it down
a decade ago.
I’ve always hated it because she forgot to paint in the honeylocust
that lived in the front yard,
the way God’s orange glow
wrapped its entire mouth around it.
My grandfather could’ve been a metaphor,
but he wasn’t.
Asleep in the bedroom of his childhood house,
he coughed up a shotgun
& shot squirrels out of the guts of the honeylocust.
Honeylocusts can live an entire century,
unless it’s in a painting.
The house’s white clapboard siding speaks to me
from the bottom of a central West Virginia landfill.
My grandfather’s handkerchiefs & Coors Banquet ghosts
live
in collapsed lumber.
He moved from Grafton to Northeast Ohio
to become a farmer.
He wanted to be like John Wayne in California.
He ended up driving trucks for thirty years.
Once, while asleep in the cab bunk
on the side of a Detroit highway,
he felt honeyed sap cankering out
of tree wounds
& coughed up a shotgun.
Parts of this poem appear in “The Death of the Greatest Generation,” published in Protean Magazine.
Matt Mitchell is a writer from Ohio. His work appears in, or is forthcoming to, venues like The Shallow Ends, NPR, Homology Lit, BARNHOUSE, Frontier Poetry, Empty Mirror, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others.