Georgia Landscape from Highway 75
Kudzu cover overcame the grotto
pissquick, choking out the mosaic
pines and oaks like they were bathed
into lye and red clay. For nature,
witless nature, dumb to its own
screaming, eats itself to seek freedom
to gorge even more. The marsh would
muck-up the ground like a limping
bondsman, falling into itself over
and over again as the catch got away.
Who needs brush fire when one
has a Japanese beetle to eat
away the Spring with all the
attendant dirty work.
Beyond the switchgrass,
there are bill boards: “Live Nude
Girls”—as opposed to dead
ones, one thinks—and the sky
unfolds like a taffy wrapper,
hoisted up on the lightning scarred
pines, the shadows disappear
into a day dreams erratically,
air like a lover’s breathe after
a five mile jog, humid, exhaust,
any lust lingering the sweet notes
behind the sweat beading on brows.
Triggering
I sit on the balcony
Of my Cairo apartment,
White tile covered in black
And brown dirt, looking
Down I notice blood in
My sweating glass of whisky:
Gums bleeding this time
From age and not a fist,
And I can’t shake the student
Who stared at me dead eyed
As she was caught for copying
Her essay on literature of
The Irish Troubles from
Internet notes. She blanks,
Hollows out, like watching
Someone being beat, and
As I spit more blood down
Into the street mumbling
To myself about a dentist
I feel like I recognize that
Whiteness. In Georgia, an
Adopted brother recently
Home from the Iraqi desert
Talked to me about Kurdistan:
He won’t turn his back to a window
And can’t drive during fireworks:
He hand always steady but
For a moment it trembles as if
A silent gun un-muffles. The
Next day, a teacher tells me
My student was in Nablus
Two years before visiting
Her Palestinian cousin, then
Watches an IMI Gabil spread
Her aunt and uncle unto concrete.
No context beyond that. I want
Tell her that I don’t know that hate,
Although it is similar the hate
Spit into every suburb after any
War. I have never been a soldier
But I have washed blood off a road
And not the particular rot of burning
Hair and gun powder. I want to whisper
To her the only sweetness I know in
Arabic: habibi. I won’t touch you
To comfort you. Habibi, turn
Frustrated emptiness into sadness.
Habibi, when we have trouble
Telling bottle rockets from guns,
We can still spit at the life we
Didn’t will ourselves. We can
Count our scars as much as
We do our sins. Habibi,
there is a fat pigeon on
The window. It will fly
Away as like my hair
This will pass. The
Sand dunes are mistaken:
We can be blown
In ways beyond passivity,
We can answer this spectre
We like to pretend is justice
Without being abraded away.
Invasion of the Garbage Snatchers
The incinerator fueled by the heat
of our rage, on the grim peripheral
of our raving, the stranger eyes
of skunks and raccoons gather
at the fray to sup at the remains
of the gathered debris of days.
The grocery waste dumbed
in the fire’s haul: the skittering
of teeth drag each morsel
away. The fevered parataxis:
the giving of what we waste
away, the waste of what we
can’t give. Our minds aren’t
right: creating eyesores on
the forest edge, Mount Meru
of trash. I watch the raccoons
scope away of what remains
to burn, the Spring yet to set
the sky on fire with reflected
blooms, and winter’s fading,
so the heat isn’t necessary.
C Derick Varn is a poet, teacher, and theorist. He
currently edits for Former People and is a reviewer for the Hong Kong
Review of Books. Originally from Georgia, he currently abides in Utah,
but his nomadic tendencies have found him living in Cairo, Egypt,
various places in South Korea and Northern Mexico. He lives with his
wife, and a bunch of books, and writes at night. He has published in
Danse Macabre, Writing Disorder, JMWW, Clutching at Straws, Xenith,
Piriene’s Fountain, Nebo, Yes, Poetry!, and many other venues.
