Lisa Flowers

Hicks

“In small towns, there are few forms of amusement. Two prominent
ones are easy sex and arson. When the simpler exercises lose their bang,
new combinations develop”
                                        -Big Black “Atomizer”

Your obese Mother
in muumuu
pushing a cart through the empty market
in the dead of noon, filling her cart with junkfood and generic
cigarettes
for her schitzoprenic son.
Your hometown  an  eternal 1979
all Kiss and Cheap Trick cover bands
and feathered hair and crippled coke junkies in wheelchairs,
condoms and Pilsner littering the river banks.

2

A hot, foul, sleepy smell
two faces sticking together in the dark.

3

Boys in ten gallon hats, in shitkickers,
pinching your ass
cornering you in the schoolyard.

4
the bleached, hopeless
raped crops
that would not grow.

The long, lethal expanse of silent, glittering road

5
Something was wrong. Something had been summoned.
There is a smell, they say
that you pick up
a fraction of a second before death.
A heightening of the senses; but by the time he caught sight of the
truck
slamming hard down on him
from behind
cleaving those ten tons of frigid steel
his five senses had already left him
thrusting him down that blind tunnel to the face of Christ.

6

The flag at the high school flew at half mast the next day. It didn’t
take them long to forget it.
“He was a faggot”, they whispered amongst themselves,
“That motherfucker had it coming”
The night he died they went down to the riverbank and drank themselves
into a stupor, or went off to old man Cuntingham’s pasture to tip cows

 

The Bygone Steak

You stand behind your own head
unknown to yourself
like your own mother
hell bent on nurturing and murder
exact as tucking in a child
or a body, safe and underground,
beckoning me into dry clothes
and a decent supper
that will blot out my destiny
like seven years with the hill folk.

I am a vegetable passing through your system,
a great gourmet curry dinner
long since shat out in the toilet,
demanding my place on your tongue yet.

When you write
of
other loves you’ve known, other rags
you’ve kept by the bed
of the old country
of
my ancestors, not yours

it is not my America
nor yours, you seek to emulate:
those women who lie,
vulva to vulva,
with their own absurd sense of patriotism.

 

On the Road Teletype Manuscript, 2001

We have come full circle,
like the dead,
and embrace God,
finally,
with a faith that requires
no more physical evidence;
& no more symbols of physical evidence.
Anything left of our flesh,
our
third grade penmanship,
our grocery lists

fly into dust with Tut
and are outlived by him.

As the reporter pointed out:
the white out, the coffee stain
the mark where someone’s dog
took a bite out of
an age, like a rare drug,
and stored it in his stomach
wrapped in plastic

has hardened to a diamond,
bereft and worth nothing
in the 21st century,
useless to the white and black markets
and the miracle of twenty perfect fingers and toes.

Our lives are atoms we arrange;
cremate, and send into cyberspace.
There are no more hard copies of our lives.

 

The Dead at the Crossroads of a Happy Life

I was wrong, dear, about the parallells between childhood love and conjugal bliss--
they both have consequences.
In the latter your inevitable leavetaking
stands behind us like an impatient mother
sighing and glancing at her watch as we wile away our playtime--
In either, God rises up between our bodies like a triangle
But the former leaves me alone in noonday peace
with the white shelf in the corner,
Queen Gardenia, the Elephant, holding court
over the hugging  monkeys,
and the dear crib and smell of diaper rash cream

How to have come down from either
of my former states to lay in this one--
I can’t fathom:
I keep going to the hem of God’s gown and hiding behind it
then peeking at myself, shrieking in joy.
The skeleton I dressed up as for
Halloween 1975 folds itself into its box
and is stowed away until Our next Christmas--
it’s smell of pine more stringent than the heavens that waft its source