On the themes of Your Very Flesh and Rivers
[I’m twenty-four years old & driving my father’s 1984 Ford F-150 down a highway that is whispering us to sleep.]
I’m twenty-four years old & driving my father’s 1984 Ford F-150 down a highway that is whispering us to sleep. The windows are down & the radio is cranked & we’re shouting at each other from a bench seat. We are trying to slice our very flesh into words, paste New Orleans to the Illinois loneliness with a trumpet & confetti. Embrace it. Sweat. He says, We could go all the way to South America, you know. This shouting, this foaming at the mouth, keeps me awake for days.
[I’m twenty-one years old & sitting in a canoe somewhere between Baton Rouge & New Orleans, Louisiana.]
I’m twenty-one years old & sitting in a canoe somewhere between Baton Rouge & New Orleans, Louisiana. Our backs are burnt & our hair is bleached & our teeth are all we’ve got. If we paddle 60 miles a day, he says, we’ll get to New Orleans on my birthday.
Day 1: 57 miles: we’re looking for a place to sleep while the crimson embers of last light descend on the bayou. A large boat pulls up to a landing: the perfect place for our bodies tonight. When we sea-leg onto the mowed grass, a man’s voice echoes through a loudspeaker: You can’t camp here & This is Angola State Penitentiary.
It’s dark & we don’t know what else to do. We float down about 100 feet & find a shrimp-shaped shit 4 feet above the rising water. I set up the tent & keep out of the boatlight shining like an actual eyeball for miles along the weeds. In 15 minute intervals we hit the deck, dodge the searchlight & rise again to the soupy wake crashing against our little island.
We eat in the tent with the noises in the water all around. I think of those alligator teeth coming through the thin fabric walls & sleep with a revolver under my head. One .22 caliber bird-shot cartridge that might just piss-off the larger varieties of night. In the calm darkness, we’re not dead. Instead, we wave the boat good-bye.
Day 2: 10 a.m.: we are stopped by a boatload of sheriffs wielding various weapons. They throw a rope to get a good look at our burnt backs & bleached hair & teeth. We tell them we’re from Wisconsin. We thought you were escapees, they say. Do you need anything, they say. & I thought it’s not often a man with a gun asks me that.
Day 4: 7 p.m.: 10 miles to New Orleans. We’re camped under a mile marker that gets trimmed once-a-year. There’s an anthill. We point at it & say don’t step on that, for heavensake! & then step on it anyway. We wake that birthday morning at 4 a.m. shouting about the ants that joined us. Could have been the duct-tape holding our lives together, that’s true. Could’ve been a lot of things. I shook like a bathtub when we got there & that’s how I remember it, Amen.
*”The phrase “shrimp-shaped shit” is a reference to Matthew Guenette’s collection AMERICAN BUSBOY.”
[I’m twenty-one years old & visiting a historic house in Lake Providence, Louisiana.]
I’m twenty-one years old & visiting a historic house in Lake Providence, Louisiana. We walk in & there’s a true Southern Bell apprehensive & elderly. We ask about bars in town & she says There aren’t any & looks at us a bit scared & I feel bad because we’re scary, I think. I’ve never been scary, I think. She points us to a gas station down the street & takes refuge in her office tending to the telephone. I find a piano & begin to play. Slow at first, there’s a tempest building in the trunks of Live Oak. It crescendos & a river flows from my fingertips. Water fills the house while the Southern Bell invites her friends for pictures with the talented young men & together they wash away that fool scary for good.