Summer/Fall 2015

By Jason Jones

We was born out yonder,
pickin’ banjos in the moonlight,
summer sausage held over raw flame, all us boys growing
bearded & weird
in the dark with them county-fair girls
ain’t allowed on fairgrounds
no more

Least that’s what Cooter said,
floatin’ slow on Shootin’ Creek,
slur-drunk with a jawful o’ chaw,
smokin’ homegrown standing tall
in a cloud in the canoe

Widow Douglass gave him
for re-roofing her cousin’s cabin
while she was off
in Greensboro with the sugar
in her feet

But Miss Tanner can’t flatfoot
no more no way & don’t want to live,
new roof or not

So said Pastor Smith to Jig Caldwell
when they was visiting
shut-ins

But all that’s off the grapevine
ever since Crazy Bigsby bolted
from his big brother’s barn
in their old man’s coupe & took out Doak Fister’s pig fence

Well, you know what happened & by the time
Mayor Wallace got the militia on the line
Sheriff Davis & the Henshaw boys had dynamited
half a hundred hogs hoofing it down Cherry Hill.

Long story short, the whole mess of pork
ended up at Flynt’s orchard & it was the missus
who came to the idea of putting on
the Pork Festival, so she hired Butcher Bill
with his coterie of cousins & cleavers
to head under torchlight
the slaughter-line that selfsame night.

They say things
got bloody

But I was there

Swinging the family axe, splitting fire-
wood in a spray of splintered pulp,
right next to Daddy, clench-chinned & determined, heaving
a hick’ry handled hatchet, hacking
ham from hock,
a human

Guillotine, a half-crescent moon
windmilling sharpened steel
in a semi-circle of sanguine
silver, slicing clean

Through shank
like a blue yodel through a dark hollow
deep

In the mountain
deep

In the soul. They say things
got bloody

But I was there.