the blueshift journal

After Hernan Bas’ On the Jagged Shores

​

The coast of a puddle copies the way the Carolinas push

on the North Atlantic verbatim. Appalachia still means everything

 

to me, but I assume I could find it somewhere else if I looked.

There are a finite number of patterns in nature. Everything

 

has its doppelganger and nowadays I plagiarize men’s

bodies indiscriminately. I have a right to take what’s not mine;

 

this is what both men and the earth have taught me. In rural America

everyone is having an orgy in the bushes and calling it three hail Marys.

 

Poached white-tailed deer film the debauchery for leverage

in the next century and I still want to mouth cruise my way through

 

all the boys that threatened to rape me in high school. These roads

are hot with H veins and ATVs winding through private

 

property. In rural America the switchbacks are built to disorient

and it is nearly impossible to be trans and alive, but here I am:

 

dizzy and gay and wanting to fix something I didn’t break. Nowadays

I want to return home just so I might remember something good

 

or recognize nothing through the pine-dark. Where I grew up

I knew only one kind boy. He could build every inch

 

of the world with an Etch A Sketch. And I like to think, he

is the only reason the ground is holding us up at all.