William Brewer
OXYANA, WEST VIRGINIA
- None of it was ever ours: the Alleghenies,
- the fog-strangled mornings of March,
- cicadas fucking to death on the sidewalks,
- the pink heads of rhododendrons
- lopped off by the wind.
- We wrestled earth with alchemy,
- turned creek beds into wineglasses
- the Roosevelts set at state dinners,
- fueled fires as hot as the sun’s dreams.
- And there was light: a mile deep
- in the underworld mines,
- beaming from our foreheads
- like wings through dust.
- Not even the days we called beautiful.
- Autumn weekends when D.C. drove in
- to take pictures. Women in silk dresses
- picking our apples, posing,
- holding our bushel baskets
- with a tenderness we’ve never known.
- Snow days, belly-crawling
- onto the frozen lake
- to hear the ice recite the Iliad.
- Not Hog Hill where Massey Energy
- dumped cinder, the gray waste
- between breaths, poisoned trees
- black like charred bones,
- where we burned cars while girls
- wrote our death dates on our palms
- with their tongues. Even now,
- rain choking the throats of smokestacks,
- the river a vein of rust and trash.
- Have you ever seen so many cold faces
- slapped in the afternoon?
- So many voices screaming—Wake up.
- This is beyond desire.
- This is looking through a hole
- in the wall around heaven.
- How do you forget that—
- a world without ruin,
- a world that can’t be taken?
- Where once there was faith,
- there are sirens: red lights spinning
- door to door, a record twenty-four
- in one day, all the bodies
- at the morgue filled with light.
- Who can stand another night
- stealing fistfuls of pills
- from our cancer-sick neighbors?
- Of the railcars crying,
- the timber trucks hauling away
- the history of a million birds?
- Pitiful? Maybe. But oblivion is all we have.
- And if we want to chop it down
- or dig it up or send it screaming
- into our hearts—it’s only now
- that our survival is an issue.
- Pin oaks arm-wrestle over the house
- as barrel fires spark like stars in the valley
- and the day closes its jaws.
- I can hear my brother explaining
- how when Jonah woke inside the whale,
- he didn’t know where he was.
- I’m not saying this ends with a leviathan,
- but I’m not saying it doesn’t.
- Here it comes, rising through the floor,
- the voice that tells me I’m tired
- of the world, that pulls me down
- to its pale kingdom. Should
- someone find me, they’ll scream
- stay with me as they fish
- my tongue from my throat.
- Should I wake, they’ll ask me
- if I can tell them where I am.
WILLIAM BREWER is the author of the forthcoming collection I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions), winner of the National Poetry Series; and the chapbook Oxyana, selected for a 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
