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Wade Redfearn Sep 2018
The first settlers to the area called the Lumber River Drowning Creek. The river got its name for its dark, swift-moving waters. In 1809, the North Carolina state legislature changed the name of Drowning Creek to the Lumber River. The headwaters are still referred to as Drowning Creek.

Three p.m. on a Sunday.
Anxiously hungry, I stay dry, out of the pool’s cold water,
taking the light, dripping into my pages.
A city with a white face blank as a bust
peers over my shoulder.
Wildflowers on the roads. Planes circle from west,
come down steeply and out of sight.
A pinkness rises in my breast and arms:
wet as the drowned, my eyes sting with sweat.
Over the useless chimneys a bank of cloud piles up.
There is something terrible in the sky, but it keeps breaking.
Another is dead. Fentanyl. Sister of a friend, rarely seen.
A hand reaches everywhere to pass over eyes and mouths.
A glowing wound opens in heaven.
A mirror out of doors draws a gyre of oak seeds no one watches,
in the clear pool now sunless and black.

Bitter water freezes the muscles and I am far from shore.
I paddle in the shallows, near the wooden jail.
The water reflects a taut rope,
feet hanging in the breeze singing mercy
at the site of the last public hanging in the state.
A part-white fugitive with an extorted confession,
loved by the poor, dumb enough to get himself captured,
lonely on this side of authority: a world he has never lived in
foisting itself on the world he has -
only now, to steal his drunken life, then gone again.

1871 - Henderson Oxendine, one of the notorious gang of outlaws who for some time have infested Robeson County, N. C., committing ****** and robbery, and otherwise setting defiance to the laws, was hung at Lumberton, on Friday last in the presence of a large assemblage. His execution took place a very few days after his conviction, and his death occurred almost without a struggle.

Today, the town square collapses as if scorched
by the whiskey he drank that morning to still himself,
folds itself up like Amazing Grace is finished.
A plinth is laid
in the shadow of his feet, sticky with pine,
here where the water sickens with roots.
Where the canoe overturned. Where the broken oar floated and fell.
Where the snake lives, and teethes on bark,
waiting for another uncle.

Where the tobacco waves near drying barns rusted like horseshoes
and cotton studs the ground like the cropped hair of the buried.
Where schoolchildren take the afternoon
to trim the kudzu growing between the bodies of slaves.
Where appetite is met with flood and fat
and a clinic for the heart.
Where barges took chips of tar to port,
for money that no one ever saw.

Tar sticks the heel but isn’t courage.
Tar seals the hulls -
binds the planks -
builds the road.
Tar, fiery on the tongue, heavy as bad blood in the family -
dead to glue the dead together to secure the living.
Tar on the roofs, pouring heat.
Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon,
obtained from a wide variety of organic materials
through destructive distillation.
Tar in the lungs will one day go as hard as a five-cent candy.

Liberty Food Mart
Cheapest Prices on Cigarettes
Parliament $22.50/carton
Marlboro $27.50/carton

The white-bibbed slaughterhouse Hmong hunch down the steps
of an old school bus with no air conditioner,
rush into the cool of the supermarket.
They pick clean the vegetables, flee with woven bags bulging.
What were they promised?
Air conditioning.
And what did they receive?
Chickenshit on the wind; a dead river they can't understand
with a name it gained from killing.

Truth:
A man was flung onto a fencepost and died in a front yard down the street.
A girl with a grudge in her eyes slipped a razorblade from her teeth and ended recess.
I once saw an Indian murdered for stealing a twelve-foot ladder.
The red line indicating heart disease grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating cardiovascular mortality grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating motor vehicle deaths grows higher and higher.
I burn with the desire to leave.

The stories make us full baskets of dark. No death troubles me.
Not the girl's blood, inert, tickled by opiates,
not the masked arson of the law;
not the smell of drywall as it rots,
or the door of the safe falling from its hinges,
or the chassis of cars, airborne over the rise by the planetarium,
three classmates plunging wide-eyed in the river’s icy arc –
absent from prom, still struggling to free themselves from their seatbelts -
the gunsmoke at the home invasion,
the tenement bisected by flood,
the cattle lowing, gelded
by agriculture students on a field trip.

The air contains skin and mud.
The galvanized barns, long empty, cough up
their dust of rotten feed, dry tobacco.
Men kneel in the tilled rows,
to pick up nails off the ground
still splashed with the blood of their makers.

You Never Sausage a Place
(You’re Always a ****** at Pedro’s!)
South of the Border – Fireworks, Motel & Rides
Exit 9: 10mi.

Drunkards in Dickies will tell you the roads are straight enough
that the drive home will not bend away from them.
Look in the woods to see by lamplight
two girls filling each other's mouths with smoke.
Hear a friendly command:
boys loosening a tire, stuck in the gut of a dog.
Turn on the radio between towns of two thousand
and hear the tiny voice of an AM preacher,
sharing the airwaves of country dark
with some chords plucked from a guitar.
Taste this water thick with tannin
and tell me that trees do not feel pain.
I would be a mausoleum for these thousands
if I only had the room.

I sealed myself against the flood.
Bodies knock against my eaves:
a clutch of cats drowned in a crawlspace,
an old woman bereft with a vase of pennies,
her dead son in her living room costumed as the black Jesus,
the ***** oil of a Chinese restaurant
dancing on top of black water.
A flow gauge spins its tin wheel
endlessly above the bloated dead,
and I will pretend not to be sick at dinner.

Misery now, a struggle ahead for Robeson County after flooding from Hurricane Matthew
LUMBERTON
After years of things leaving Robeson County – manufacturing plants, jobs, payrolls, people – something finally came in, and what was it but more misery?

I said a prayer to the city:
make me a figure in a figure,
solvent, owed and owing.
Take my jute sacks of wristbones,
my sheaves and sheaves of fealty,
the smell of the forest from my feet.
Weigh me only by my purse.
A slim woman with a college degree,
a rented room without the black wings
of palmetto roaches fleeing the damp:
I saw the calm white towers and subscribed.
No ingrate, I saved a space for the lost.
They filled it once, twice, and kept on,
eating greasy flesh straight from the bone,
craning their heads to ask a prayer for them instead.

Downtown later in the easy dark,
three college boys in foam cowboy hats shout in poor Spanish.
They press into the night and the night presses into them.
They will go home when they have to.
Under the bridge lit in violet,
a folding chair is draped in a ***** blanket.
A grubby pair of tennis shoes lay beneath, no feet inside.
Iced tea seeps from a chewed cup.
I pass a bar lit like Christmas.
A mute and pretty face full of indoor light
makes a promise I see through a window.
I pay obscene rents to find out if it is true,
in this nation tied together with gallows-rope,
thumbing its codex of virtues.
Considering this just recently got rejected and I'm free to publish it, and also considering that the town this poem describes is subject once again to a deluge whose damage promises to be worse than before, it seemed like a suitable time to post it. If you've enjoyed it, please think about making a small donation to the North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund at the URL below:
https://governor.nc.gov/donate-florence-recovery
ERR Nov 2010
Well I’m living in a crawlspace listening to conversations
When I can’t take reality I change the station
The music heals me

I’m living in fear with a ringing in my ear
The train is on the tracks and it’s getting kind of near
I’m thinking sideways I’ll do it my way
I should care more but why start today

I don’t keep up with the same old sound
I’m busy in my head and it’s written down
I want you to see what happens to me
When I lose existence to think is to be

Under the ceiling above the floor
Between the walls and behind the door
I’m living in a crawlspace listening to conversations
When I can’t take reality I change the station
The music heals me
Sleepy Sigh  Apr 2012
Crawlspace
Sleepy Sigh Apr 2012
Your mind is a heart-trembling sight,
And often as you flaunt it I know
I should never tell you it destrings me,
(Sets me wrong and then puts me in tune.)
I mustn't ever never
Say I wish to do the same to you.

(I would caress the insides of your bones,
Kiss your esophagus, clean your arteries;
I would eagerly sew myself inside you.)
I mustn't ever never
Anglerfish my way into saying
"I would be a limb on your body."
And yet "I love you" cannot possibly -

I would live in your synapses quietly
Never intruding, you wouldn't notice me,
Perhaps even forget me by and by;
But I would electric-think my way through
Your toomuchmind sofastly:

I would repair the gaps with
Scraps of myself torn off, I would
Maintain you invisibly with
My unvisible tools unsensed
And silentdense as an atom's center
Whose disvisible weight is universelifting.

I would lift worlds onto you
As though nothing ever sang sadness
And every(right)thing strongly whispering
Through your veins would know
"I want to pulse your blood and beat your heart."

So much more "love" cannot possibly
Desire, I desire (to make you) the
Overloved lover my domain over:
The king and the grass and the sky.
Timothy Essex May 2010
I like slandering your makeshift forceps.
I hammer you down with watery *** and then spill

the remainder on the couch. Yarg! A diamond’s
worth at least a small intestine, and you

are worth whatever’s left over after night
has upended itself, poured sideways out of its

shellacked crawlspace, and turned the basement sour.
There are remnants of you in the park,

some red stain by the baseball field where,
if you’ll remember, you watched little leaguers

build teamwork, and faint splotches on tree bark
from your lactations which, if you’ll remember, happened

every morning. I whisper your godforsaken name
and am slapped in the head. The children cry

when I smile. I cry when the children smile. Good
heavens. I forbid you from not entering my corridor,

even as I set up a barricade. I like my water scalding,
my passion chilled, and I like you in easy-to-

swallow doses. I like you in my eggs.
Ditto the faucet, keyboard, the occasional lily,

but do not mess with my pearls. I mumble of apodictic
meadows while I sleep. What can I say?

I do not mumble of unclogging your bathtub,
which has a certain foul repute, and has grown

heavy and ugly with your hair, which is everywhere,
just as you are everywhere, and wherever, and so

******* hidden it’s not funny anymore, we stopped
looking some millennia ago, after scouring the drainpipes,

kicking down your doors, dissecting your mattress,
speculating about your burial site, etcetera, and even so

we have not been really looking all this time, have we,
just blaring your name through the speakers,

putting wrong numbers on our calling cards, leaving
uncooked meat out on the back porch as if you were

a raccoon, oh, or a lion, which you are not, or not
quite, though, as the books say, you have honey

in your stomach, and if you could but be
ripped open we would taste and see.
m  Dec 2018
Anna Pt.2
m Dec 2018
My mind could not conjure up the notion that the word, the name, meant something. A-n-n-a. I looked. I looked: she stared back the same. Unknowing, unfamiliar. I wanted to remember, I wanted to.



7 a.m, in the crawlspace underneath the house, flashlight grasped in my hand, sweat from my forehead plastering my hair against it. It smelled like dust. I inched forward on my stomach, writhing as a worm. My body seizing against dirt and webs. I yelled out her name. Just to see. Just to test if my mouth still knew how to speak.



Anna.



Anna.



There. In the corner. I flicked my light against a box with tape on the side and her name written on over it in marker. I whispered it to make sure. Anna. One more time. Anna. I sunk my face into the ground. My breath, soft from my lips but coarse in form, disrupt the filth, made me cough. I crawled over to her with ease, as if the bones in my body were pushing me, the muscles guiding me; these pulsing veins, telling me.



When I opened the box, the first thing I saw was her, smiling back at me in the form of a memory. July 1996, our wedding framed around sanded wood, with splinters etching at the sides, aching for a hold on them. And I cradled her, despite this. Despite my skin giving in.



Anna.



I almost forgot.



My head was hurting again. I blamed it on the suffocating of the casket underground enveloping me, not the staples buried into the skin of my skull, not the remembrance that underneath piles of dirt, her body was just a stack of old bones with only a stone to tag her as proof she was once living.



Anna. My Anna. I cradled the picture against my chest. I clung to her.



My light began to flicker, a spider crawled across my finger. Anna was diminishing, like a ghost, like a gentle sweep of navigating headlights turning a corner, creeping away, and suddenly gone.



Anna. A-n-n-a. I shut my eyes. I could finally remember.
moments descend on me.
The Darkness Aug 2012
The pine floorboards, cover my work.

The pine floorboards, creak at the spot I ripped them up.

I didn't want to **** her,
But she made me insane,
In a fit of rage,
I put a hatchet Right through her ******* brain.

The pine floorboards, cover my work.

The pine floorboards, stained red at the spot I took her life.

Underneath the earth,
In a dark crawlspace,
That's where you'll find my love,
Sleeping oh so peacefully,
Underneath the pine floorboards.
Zero Nine Jul 2017
Every word you've
ever heard
is a lie,
***
to
find
out

Didn't you know
there is no
eye to eye?
with
you,
your
self

Some dark part of you confidently starts those fires.

Desire and I go way back, close, I've groped their inky caves.
Resist desire's lurid scope, so sure, precisely how you're made.

Some dark part of you longs to *****, to crawl your ******* veins.
WA West  Aug 2018
Do you?
WA West Aug 2018
Tantamount to the crawlspace where your emotions
are dissembled,
is the animalistic focus in your pointed gaze,
Sketchy eyed with jerky limbed motions,
As elusive as you are always around,
Or so it would seem,
Their eyes fall upon you,
no doubt,
You are a vision,
That I do not and have never questioned,
There is a fundamental lack of
hesitancy in your days,
lately you have looked let down,
Thinking of you,
occurs outside the restraints of time,
I would like to be everything with you.
Raymond Crump  Jun 2011
Toad
Raymond Crump Jun 2011
Under the spread hazel's winter
umbrella hung with pale catkins
pulling at a black bin liner rubble
spilled, a little toad tumbles free
from under in turmoil of warty limbs.

A toad in this garden where is no pond
found a moist pocket of plastic pleats
and a larder of wood lice in the rotted
pile sits on my palm calm as a buddha
thoughtless, yellow-eyed, unidentified.

Later, returning for forgotten secateurs
he drifts down in the water *** I let in
to the ground, trailing a bubble stream,
an olive green indifferent nature god.
The lordly stars sustain his crawlspace.

— The End —