My Uncle has spent the past twenty years rambling about a patch of overgrown East Kentucky farmland two miles back Flatbottom Road where I grew up. The following poems are anagrams produced from lists of the plants and animals he cataloged and categorized on his many long walks over the years.
Reptiles/Amphibians
Reptiles and Amphibians of Flatbottom Include: Eastern Box Turtle, Snapping Turtle, American Toad, Tree Frogs, Moldy Tree Frog, Rat Snake, Hog Nose Snake, Eastern Milk Snake, snake that slithers into your dreams at night to remind you of the inescapable climate crisis and all you aren’t doing, undeniably phallic snake that explains the green new deal to you in incomprehensible jargon, the snake you ask to swallow you whole who won’t, and the snake who agreed to swallow you whole in a city of unending motion, the inside of the snake you see as you slide through her digestive system—isn’t this what you asked for? Time has finally stopped, but it isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Still the hum of the bill that might pass before you say your peace, still the hum of the homework due, still the hum of your sister’s empty bank account, still the hum of your oil leak.
Afternoon at the unmown pagan hillside
burial mound: A moss caked stone
nests. A forlorn, procumbent stem
snakes. A blaring airplane
forges her pixilated
belt in knit fog. The sky’s
habit, the blotchy
torso, the digestive
system. The unending
roar of waking
hours slide beneath
my teeny feet. Time shifts and oughts,
swallow me. RIP
rurality, RIP whooping
crane, hello
hillsnake. Online in Astoria,
my sister says, “seeking to purge
toxic masculine energy.” I tweet,
“Just ask a snake to
swallow you whole.”
Am I unwieldy?
Am I whole? I stay
outdated, diluted,
outta the blue. An unfinished
selfhood. I hold
out the sh
of “hush,”
the l of “doll,”
“echo’s” o to lull
you both. At night,
the airplane’s
soft asyllabic nonspeech enters
my dreamscape
no habitat, no ease, no
hideaway. Only output.
At sunup, green
humbly hoots
the motif
O thank you, oil leak
Thank you, crisis.
Thank you, surefooted,
streaky patterns
who permeate time.
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Grace Rogers is a musician and poet from East Kentucky. She is currently an undergraduate at the University of Louisville. She was a summer resident at the Kentucky Foundation for Women in 2018 and served as poetry and experimental/hybrids editor of Miracle Monocle in 2018-2019. Grace's work was named honorable mention for Sarabande’s Flo Gault Student Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The White Squirrel and The Uncommon Grackle.
Twitter: @grace_aaand
Instagram: @grassandrogers