Highway or Belief Page 2
buy primer or not? he responds
abstractly. There is a moment
when, frozen, they remember
Baghdad: paint chips
covering them like confetti did
decades ago in Times Square,
only with no nurse back
from the Middle East—
no pretty girl to pick up
shoulder-high and French kiss.
What is the legacy of war, after it,
except this?—two men standing in line
minutes later to pay for whatever
they’ve bought with no need
for talking—one of them touching
the other briefly, walking out
with the paint in his fist—
denting slightly the can
for a reason his fingers
will never tell him.
Elegy for Soldier Who Returned Without a Voice from the War in Iraq
As I walk through the Wal-Mart now in Marble Falls, I think about the question,
ask myself, What could you do after the fact of what was done to you but die?
In my head, you’re alive in the beer aisle still with that fake ID stuck in the back
of your pants when the Wal-Mart man grabs a hold of you to ask, How many kegs?
You’re the underage kid who used to cut every person you could in the high school
lunch line, back when nothing was done to you no matter what you did. You took
apart the team golf cart, then put the pieces back together on the roof of the school.
No one cared. You smoked a joint in the bathroom each day, and no one punished you.
You had so many fans as the varsity back. The whole town worshiped you. I remember
your chinstrap buckled tight and your helmet’s t-bar crossing over your face—the thick
shadow of it. I remember the eye black and sweat stuck to it, the way you went to school
all week for the scared looks you got on the field Friday nights from behind your face-
mask. I remember the pads and spandex stretched over new teenage skin. I remember
the day we had to bury you in them (how the whole town showed up) like the night
you slid off the slick bridge on a dare to the river of catfish and black gar below.
Seeing your broken body bleeding out and bent in the shape of an L, I was reminded
of the football field just then, of the capital L in the center of it that made you
what you could not be years later, two tours in you. You came back from Iraq
with a new brokenness and stood out on the grass of that field once again, where
you knelt down and cried, finally, like you wanted to so many times but could not
in Tikrit, Basra, Mosul, Baghdad. When the checkout man asks me for ID, at first
I don’t hear him. There’s a second or two before I realize I’m standing in line
with a beer in each fist—with my hands in my pockets as deep as they’ll go.
Getting lost in my head tonight, I think of you being spoken to—
whatever war must have said in those daily huddles before each precise move
of your tan, M-1 tank. I ignore everything around me except you—mustached
version you left stuck to that fake ID—how we laughed about it every time
we bought booze. I like to think, Before you fell, leaving the pavement
of the bridge, you heard the crowd cheer and were swept up by applause.
Bull in the Ring
Playing football at fourteen meant getting called a pussy, girl, or faggot
for not hitting teammates
hard enough, being yelled at constantly—
the legal, car-crash huge bruises covering our arms
after stunts
& blitzes, the time our free safety bear crawled for staying home
with diarrhea instead of practicing
with his own shit staining his legs
—but also the brotherhood of coming together & hating our coach
after he gave Jake a concussion
during bull-in-the-ring, & the many times
Ben’s singing voice eased our heaving stomachs
before Monday practice—
not to mention the day we learned Carlos had sex before any of us,
in the eighth grade, boasting
there was no way he got the girl pregnant,
because he knew what a condom was—after which our coach gave us
a detailed speech
about cutting Viagra in half so our dicks didn’t stay hard
too long when we married like him.
Giving the cruelty we faced then
more thought, I think we accepted his daily abuse on account of respecting
each other’s silence.
It was easier taking what we took huddling together.
Though it also had something to do with pleasure we weren’t willing
to claim, at least not readily.
Power-less, we felt ugly, fearful, proud—
masculine—dangerous every game day that year. Our girlfriends kissed us,
called us gods,
waved back eagerly at us from up in the stands before coach
gave his get-your-head-ready pep talk. Hit your man in the mouth. Damnit.
Knock out his teeth.
No one ever asks, Who first taught you to do this? Instead
they accuse us, saying, Men hurt women. You are ruthless, brutal, acting
from your natures.
To which we answer—fists in blue-jean pockets deep as each
seam reaches—Yes. Yes, we are. Now that you mention it, we’re violent.
Sighting Ourselves at the City Dump Site
after Yusef Komunyakaa
Attention clicks, blinks,
focusing—chambers clean
on each gun as it’s fully
loaded: marks at 50,
100 yards, 200 yards.
Spent shells scatter
horse flies from our wrists
routinely. We are
shooting my dad’s 4-10,
30-ought-6—my best friend’s
.308 pistol he bought
six months after
losing his last gun:
an antique Luger
with a swastika
scratched out on its pearl-
smooth grip. (The sheriff
took it in a drug bust, then
—rumor has it.) He likes
this new piece, he tells me,
even more than the first.
It’s much lighter—
but uses the same
hollow points—takes
mere seconds to load,
even with a big clip—
is concealed easily,
and can be drawn
quickly if a situation
seems to require it.
“Pure speed,” he says,
“means everything. And
don’t you forget that.”
We are practicing shots
we know we’ll never take,
since we rarely lock
any doors here—just
gun cabinets, tool sheds,
sometimes cars that seem
worth protecting. But
who’d boost one of ours?
Mine’s a blue Chevy, busted up
something awful. And
my friend’s has a warrant
or two out on it—I think
maybe for speeding
or some other shit—so
no one will steal that.
The Gospel According to Addicts in Llano, Texas
We have chosen to scar our skins here
in tin shacks where we conjure up
more than Christ could on hot plates—
full of chemical psalms now
and prayer-less waking. We’re the dead
you forgot. We’re the saved
where repentance is free but can never save us.
We buy bottles of Drano we slowly empty
in the same way we do Duracell batteries
leaking golden acid: an erasure of everything
witnessed and felt as the sky opens here,
sometimes, during a storm—promising
after rain the good cleansing of church
or a stiff drink to stave off the feeling of emptiness
gathering up. We cough ribbons of blood
with each drug-addled breath. You cannot heal us,
Lord. You cannot raise us up like you did Lazarus.
As he approached you from the grave with insects
clinging to his hands, you could not believe it.
The first time words became flesh surprised you.
You understood symbolically you were the Son of God
until you raised a man. Then you physically did.
Similarly, the first meth we made surprised us.
Our homes each exploded. We stood outside them
in the dark—choirs of sirens closing in, bright red
and blue light bathing us—and could not believe it.
Highway or Belief
He inhabits the windshield & sky
& the truck’s grill he merges into.
& though this yearling fawn
dead on cement, bright in the eye-
like headlights of traffic, finds it
impossible to say what he cannot say
—each path taken a sadness—
help him enter & exit the truck’s
momentum as it meets his spirit
collapsed back to fence posts,
fresh hoof prints in caliche,
his breath lessening.
Let his ending be quick
as the mockingbird’s speech
in the oak over him. Watch
his body rot green, insect-rich
now anonymously but still full
of purpose: beetles feasting
on blue entrails with their pincers,
pill bugs curling in spaces
they carve out of skin, nourished
cockroaches, even, nesting
near crickets—here where only
the meek assemble to claim him—
gleaming with communion.
Have You Been Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?
for Daniel Valentine
Spirit was not wind but the burning sun left
on asphalt between us. My body was not real—
neither was your body. We biked to Winn’s,
the dollar store, to change our bulk of old coinage
into soon-to-break toys that were made in China.
Holy was each plastic man with his blue parachute
dropped so recklessly then from your plywood tree house.
We bought Super Soakers that were clearly knock-
offs and said Mega Water! on their porous barrels,
though we favored dirt clods as our dueling weapons.
You weren’t a preacher yet out of an obligation felt
to be the God-fearing leader your parents expected—
& now you’re not washed in the blood of the Holy
Spirit you told me was bullshit several years after
college let out & you wanted to play piano,
get a record deal, move to Nashville. Did you
ever arrive, taking 35, 40. . . until you got there?
I remember your Pentecostal church & the Kingdom
Hall built thirty-three feet from it, both the last places
even devout folks set foot given Sunday options.
You made each dime collected your advance
on the eschaton sure to reward the faithful,
& I helped you find them, which was my believing.
Did we have enough luck to snag three more quarters?
With some sun, usually: sighting them near the culvert
we used to play in, catacombs it led to beneath our town’s
wide streets where the older kids called back & forth
profane expletives too strong for us—me the Lazarus,
mostly; you leading, Jesus; sewage coating our steps’
slow reincarnation as we stumbled concrete-struck
from each terminus, checking every echo for a sign
or wonder in that stunning maze navigated finally
where we learned faith meant falling without certainty
—darkness & walls the only guides we had skinning
the green flesh from our knees—before understanding.
Backyard Reckoning
I see him as more of a shadow
& less as a feathered creature—
this gray, gristled blue jay. The well-
house’s door creaks, crushing black
widows’ egg sacks & garter snakes’
skins the brown of fading hair
like my own—thin, unbleached—
aged now as completely as the oak
furniture in the house next to mine
abandoned with green trim the texture
of flesh sweating out too long today
in the late July heat. I heard him snap
open a pecan just before the singing.
Bedeviled self severed from me, as near
at hand as the yellow SLOW sign,
I’ve lost your melody in the weeds
behind Waylon’s house, Daniel’s clothes-
line, Sarah Beth’s AC unit that leaked
antifreeze mistaken for candy, the dog
path linking all our houses together
no matter how we each changed
& forgot in our changing the spell
cast by all that nothing. What felt
divisible, matter-of-fact, seems
so solidly necessary to me now.
Where can I rest the brief weight
of my life except deep in this green,
gridded mesh of clover & choke-weed
we all loved to roll in? Returning
may be elegy: a litany place assembles
in us. Whether or not that much is true,
I feel a warm necessity rise in me
similar to each rotting peach pit
in this ripe grove my father, aging,
abandoned when I repossess it—
my own first listening to a call
comprehensible in youth only.
Yours, yours, blue jay: the one
I believed in the way I believe in—
despite protestations, occasional lapses,
the weight of your body pressed
into my palm now—nothing.
A Conflagration
My father’s heart
Burns a pillar of fire
The size of an oak tree
Engulfed by lightning.
I am helpless against
The procession of it
Through his chest
Into mine—
Which is blind,
Symptom-less
The way all disease is
Before first igniting.
Love, though, isn’t helpless.
The flames’ height ensures
He will be consecrated.
Each time he tries to say
My name—riddled
By tubes that root
Through him—
It comes out as, Fire.
Acknowledgments
“Letter to the Critic Who Questions, Among Other Things, My Poor Use of Grammar” first appeared in Devil’s Lake.
“The Last Time I Saw Aron Anderson” first appeared in Five [Quarterly].
“English 301” first appeared in Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts.
“A Body Loves Dismantling” first appeared in Drunken Boat.
“River Metaphysics” first appeared in Solstice Literary Magazine.
“Against Allowing Too Much Distance in
Place Poetry” first appeared in The Pinch.
“Riverbank Elegy” first appeared in CONSEQUENCE.
“County Lines” first appeared in Mobius: The Journal of Social Change.
“Homecoming” first appeared in Atwood.
“Elegy for Soldier Who Returned Without a Voice from the War in Iraq” was a finalist for the 2011 Winning Writers War Poetry Contest.
“Bull in the Ring” first appeared in Pieces of Cake.
“Sighting Ourselves at the City Dump Site” first appeared in Pacifica Literary Review.
“The Gospel According to Meth” first appeared in Birdfeast.
“Highway or Belief” was a finalist for the 2013 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and first appeared in Ruminate.
“Backyard Reckoning” first appeared in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.
“A Conflagration” first appeared in The Boiler.
Thank you Michael Adams, Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, Dorianne Laux, and Joseph Millar (for believing from the start). Thank you Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, and Eduardo Corral (for your mentorship and examples). Thank you fellow Localists Matthew Wimberley, Javier Zamora, J.T. Dawson, Emily Yoon, Vanessa Gabb, and Sierra Golden (for your friendship and words). Thank you John and Linda Brownlee (for always supporting me).Thank you Patrick Courtney (for your solidarity). Thank you Ramya Varma (for all of the things—but mostly your love). Thank you Button Poetry editorial team (for the hard work each of you put in to make this happen). Thank you Michael Mlekoday (whose editing made all the difference). Thank you Rachel McKibbens (for giving these poems flesh by selecting them).Thank you Llano, Texas.
Completing this chapbook would not have been possible without fellowships from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science and New York University’s Creative Writing Program. Thank you to both institutions for their support.
About the Author
J. Scott Brownlee was born and raised in Llano, Texas. His poetry appears in The Kenyon Review, Narrative, Beloit Poetry Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, RATTLE, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He is a founding member of The Localists, a literary collective that emphasizes place-based writing of personal witness, cultural memory, and the aesthetically marginalized working-class, both in the United States and abroad. A former Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at NYU, he currently lives in Brooklyn.