heavenly perdition

The heat, like controversy from centuries of hate rising from the ground, coils around all living things, snakelike, ethereal. Mossy trees hang low, moving slow in the oppressive air. Fat like beached whales, spongy and heavy with clammy skin, we stuff ourselves with all things fried, from pickles to defeated hopes. We've lost our way, but no worse than anyone else, no more blind-sided or false-prided than the others. Our children may struggle to speak, clamor to be heard by anyone, anyone who will listen and pick out the words from the slow slur, left behind in a system that promises the opposite, especially those deep in silty soil.

I rise above, I fall below. Born into it, I push against and swallow it whole, loving and hating it all at once, reveling in the history but denying the past. The struggle makes me tired, being tired makes me weak, and weakness makes me fail. I inhale the fumes of pepper and lard and smoke and slow, hard death. Panting, glistening, I wrap the mood around my bare, tan shoulders, draped like a flag, and carry on, raging against the stereotype I embody.

Does anyone hear me? This quiet girl from the South, this lone voice among wolves. I gave up on screaming a long time ago, on sarcasm more recently. People can choose not to hear me, choose to let my drawl slide in one ear and out the other, like music, like innocence, like ignorance. It doesn't bother me anymore; I am overlooked the way the rest of us down here are overlooked and ignored, or worse, mocked and skewered.

Laying on the succulent grass, ladybugs and mosquitoes buzzing around your ears, there's peace like no where else. The bones of the past are underneath, just under the surface, asking to be remembered, honored-- not forgotten, but not relived. Let sleeping ghosts lie. Above, the future spreads. On a clear night, you can see the stars here, count them into the thousands, hundreds of thousands. Here, you would have the time.