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.

you give me waaay too much credit;
u are investment; a great poet,
needing tending and nurture,
watering and encouragement;
since god could not be everywhere,
he made sure many poets exist
to tend
to their fellow's seeds
~~
the problem with seeds
they don't come with a guarantee
from the manufacturee,
or a note from home
for the teacher,
that makes ''my dog et it''
slightly more believable,
each a new babe seedy needy,
crying in the mid of night,
for water and loving attention
as it teethes roots in the soil,
and
the discourteously majority
fail to appear even if you read them
good night moon, nightly

you must plant ten,
hoping one child,
will sprite sprout
and even then,
survive the outrageous misfortunes of  natures
bumps and beaks of the day and night
that lurk about in a
disarmingly charmingly
destructive way

did i say ten?  
idiot.
plant a hundred
just to obtain one germination.

I think the seed guys have
conned us pretty good
the odds
truly ****
as you, the champion children
like to say nowadays,
and **** they are,
too right

sun I cannot control:
water and soil, I can,
for if n'ere to rain,
your seeds will be
well fed,
well read,
and the water,
my eyes will supply
naturally

He shrinks to a hush
below purple sky – this air,
soft and beckoning,

carries a mute voice
that teethes at the brain, killing
the pull of his son’s

image. Now two eyes,
paled and tearing, watch the speck
of light grow greater

than the stars. His arms
raise to the light like a babe
grasping for papa.

I go out to breath, I inhale what cleanliness their is, my chest heaves
At this hour their is no sound but the  leaves
And so I am taken aback when I hear a birdsong,
The timid creature cautiously creeps out from under the eaves,
And I go to fetch a scrap of something for it, I hold out the crumbs to it on the palm of my hand and it teethes, then the bird fly's away and I sneeze, As I go on back to bed I suddenly cannot breath, My body fails me and I convulse and fall off the stair and break my knees, Oh for if only I had wings, I lay their crumpled up and pay my actions fees.

The agony that peoples
such tormented heights
convulses in stone-breath.

The outward semblance
swells in neat conformity,
the lower thump of blood
curdles inside its chilled contraction.

Sensing outcrops, pale, limp wheat-blades
whitening beside the agonising certainty of beasts,
teethes like a fleshless jaw.

I hold my head up  
out of practice.
I perfect the stance.

The agony confronts me.
                       Stone.
                                 Stone-heights
group in their rigid surveys
me.

tonight

is a ligature->the tap water in the glass full of tap water in the glass
in the glass

dawn is somewhere.                
here
our faces are snoring like a chihuahua gnawing at my ankles.     down
to the Achilles, babe-
inside the stringy things that are holding its throat to
mine.
i leaned back.
you crumpled.

i don't

the ground is littered with these little ugly stubs that
go
everywhere
when you rush a notebook. they're not even mine.

she doesn't stand a chance.

they are waiting to devour her.          all of them.
the ones with teethes like middle school dances. the ones with
gums.
the ones that chew trident while talking on their cellphones in line, in front of you.

it's where it's at.
it's where it breaks apart.

it's gunna hurt
us.

He intrigues me
In the way that makes me guilty.
In the way I thought
I knew I'd never feel again.

He is intelligent
In the way that's only meant
To be found in the pages
Of wishful fantasies.

He is an enigma
An ever-changing puzzle
A red herring of a clue
That somehow speaks the truth.

He is a prize
Someone to be dearly coveted
And dearly beloved
And jealously covered up.

He is a Muse. My Muse.
The guilt of finding one anew
Teethes at my heart and soul
And I trash what I write of him.

He is inspiration
He is wishful thinking, hopes, and dreams
He is that spark
That pushes me back to this art.

He is.
And He was.
I beg that He'll forgive me
For finding Him.

A Saturday afternoon in Austin, in mid-March.
A dinner scheduled, a girl with colored hair
says she has enjoyed our conversation, and will see me soon.
A stack of books piled up to my knee,
and three hours to sit in the sun, if it lasts.

There is something terrible in the sky, but it keeps breaking.
Over the chimneys a bank of cloud piles up; one flies overhead and I'm forced to reread a page gone grey.
A pinkness is rising in my arms, breast, ears,
and my sweat drips onto split pages.
I am wet like the drowned and my eyes sting.
A message from my sister informs me of another overdose.
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 black as a cypress swamp.

Bitter water freezes the muscles and I am far from shore.
The water reflects a taut rope.
The water reflects a jail in the shallowest bend
that will one day be remade to stanch the water of poison.
Feet hang in the breeze singing mercy
at the site of the last public hanging in the state.
Today, the very area dilapidates as if scorched
by the whiskey he drank that morning to still himself.
A bandit, maybe, but loved by the poor, and now
lonely, at this end 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.

Years later, a plinth is laid
in the shadow of his piney feet,
here where the water sickens with roots.
Where the canoe overturned. Where the oar was broken.
Where the snake lives, and teethes on bark,
waiting for another uncle. 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,
the best in the region.

Where the tobacco waves near drying barns rusted like horseshoes.
Where the boats took tar down to port, and money back
that no one ever saw.

  Tar binds the heel but isn't courage.
  Tar seals the hull -
  sticks the planks -
  made the roads.
  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
Marlboro $22.50/carton

The white-bibbed slaughterhouse Hmong hunch down the steps
of an old school bus with no air conditioner. 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 woman was set upon by an owl and cracked her head on the driveway.
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 bored blood excited by opiates;
not the nighttime arson of the law;
not the smell of drywall rotting or the door of the robbed safe falling off its hinges;
not the chassis of teenaged cars gone high over the bump,
over the bend, plunging wide-eyed in the river's icy arc.

If you would like to understand,
look in the woods to see by lamplight
two girls filling each other's mouths with smoke.
Hear the shout of 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.
Drink this water, bitter as it is: and if they tell you that trees cannot feel pain, you will have learned not believe them.
I would be a mausoleum for these thousands
if I only had the room.

Here in the city, a mute and pretty face 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, with its codex of virtues.