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.