Photos by Siobhan Bledsoe.
I leave him swinging on his porch
hammock & walk outside to imagine
the insides of houses home to
unsexy duties, sometimes
shared and often
misallocated.
A hard sighing mother
chain smokes, slyly
regarding her TV
on and framed
in the background.
A perverted and proud
modern landscape painting, or:
a study in grotesque modernity?
I wish to run down the rest
of the humble
hill, outrun the cluttered
interior
design of my
mind, and onward
beyond
the valley, to where mountains sit
on a stamped postcard, hesitant to self-send
until the first Tuesday of September rustles.
Ready, aroused, and awake.
It is 4:30 in the afternoon.
Yawning trees once stung erect now
wilt, sunburned into submission
by the ninety degree sun.
The mountains settle into sleep under
a shared purple blanket, knitted by
the hands of a season changing.
Back home, on the first floor
of the largest Victorian
on the sleepiest
block, my host is drenched
in a puddle of shame.
I imagine the fetal grown man sucking
his thumb, covers pulled tightly over his tiny
body, hiding from the violent memory
of the night before;
gas station beer after gas station beer, Hank Williams cover after Hank Williams cover, sore fingers, an empty stomach and then black.
I want to tell him, as I carry his smokes and a six pack back from Main St., and hurry up the same hill, that it will be okay, that Fall announced herself,
but I can’t.
This town boasts honesty,
boasts steeple integrity
that pierces hourly chimes into the bluest sky built for a summer day holding on so
I can’t tell him that it will be anything but these familiar undulations;
the descension, the plateau, the ascension, and the sloppy, slovenly sounds of the troughs feeding the forever hungry.
Siobhan Bledsoe is a MFA candidate at the New School in Poetry. Her recent publications include The Quietus, Human Parts (Medium), and other lovely Internet homes for experimental poetry. Including The Inquisitive Eater! When she’s not writing, she’s cooking, taking long walks (or riding the ferry), playing music (poorly), drawing, contemplating finally betting a dog, dancing, and consuming way too much television (it’s the golden age, after all.) Someday she hopes to be brave enough to do stand up. A dog lover, a sister, and a long time NYC resident, she’s read all over the city and is a part of They Said, a poetry collective. A resident at Vermont Studio Center and The Burren College of Art in Ireland, she’s looking forward to Paris this summer where a new writing adventure awaits.
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