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Leaving Carolina

At the end of a long trip, you must bind your heels with two-inch
Rope, with the correct
Sailor’s knots around the ankles and knees to
prevent mutiny on the boat home.
The kudzu weed whispers three times and three times
You must not listen. ‘mi amore,’ it will
Say, ‘the love you had here
Swells gallweed green round paper trees only
To melt away, smelt and smouldered into mountain
Ash to stuck the potters’ wheels,’ then ‘Stonewall’s soldiers
Stole my flowers for their sweethearts’ savor,’ then
‘I will go into the house of
The lord,’ but do not listen.

O, how much of you will remain
Here? Pack up while you can. The wind grows weary
With every new season. Postcards from Asheville just
Don’t sell. Who wants to paint an overturned pickup propped
Between two pale oaks? The birds don’t nest in trees any longer;
They want something to fly back to. Where’s your home, little dove?
Three paces down from Ol’ Graham’s rubble-rot, his body still breathes
Though he can’t hear a thing.

On Sundays, you dare not slight the bare
Image: greenblack hillocks like split lips bleeding
Out the strip-malls and old powder shops. The grass grows
Five feet tall but only once. Then it’s sheared for the coyotes’
Convenience. Rabbits hide as long as they can, but I’ll tell you the same thing
I told them:
Don’t linger.

Orson’s Ambulance

Dracula preyed on the giglots swaying
slouching toward Times Square like pallored ghosts that
fade to dust at every perked touch. The saucers
ticker-taped the skies over Newark last night, acousmatic
crooked coughing of old carburetors none of your concern –
All will be heard, if not seen. Caesar’s congress of fallutin phonies won’t
stop the stride of the R.A.F.’s finest S.O.B.’s. The European theater,
like any theater of Caesar’s fancy, shall go up in flames.
Dead Abe Lincoln and Holmes deduces nothing, have you ever seen
a man croak in his mama’s matrimonial sweater? No, but the 5 ‘o clock Andy Hardy
Croons Hitler’s salutary song so what we need with radio? The image!
The sky’s the limit with the image; the sky’s an axial cut from God’s heaven
To His forgotten hovels where boots fall serrated with spiked tongues
Theater? Radio? Film? Hell, Orson,
You ever stop and smell the smoke?

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Fran Kursztejn is a trans writer/filmmaker based in North Carolina. Her fiction and poetry are featured or forthcoming in The Greyhound Journal, Scaffold Literary Magazine, donotsubmit!, and Promethean Magazine.

X: @fkursztejn

Image generated on Magic Studio