I drag Georgia behind me like a bridal train
in some muddied trawl across the verse’d mountains.
This red mud ain’t like blood at all: this
kudzu can’t choke me up. This flood
out back behind the closed down Badcock’s,
where the cattails sprout from a drainage pond,
where the shopping cart rusts and peeks out,
cannot wash away the stones I carry with me.
What hope can I have to run from a south
that sprawls forever and outgrows me?
There is a patch of moss I lost in the foreclosure
and it hides the fool’s gold I peeled it back to hide.
When I dream about apples, they are crab apples:
all rose bushes grow alone on a small hill:
there are two fig trees facing each other in the empty
yards in my mouth, and they let any ant crawl up
inside the fruit that falls from my tongue.
James Rosser is a Nonbinary writer from Cedartown, Georgia. They also like to write about weird video games and listen to angry bluegrass. Their favorite tree is the Flowering Dogwood.
Twitter: @JLR_III