The neighbor is eating locusts again,
as if a plague were just another
point of view, sitting out back of his caved
two-story, squinting skyward, a cast
iron in hand, a mouthful of
wings ground to dust. My sister’s
busy too, straddling the fence, getting out
our mom’s gold pumps, spritzing her hair
into a hive of black. She’s making the universal
honk-your-horn sign at truckers who pass
with their loads of skinny firs bound
to cross the Pacific. If they’re lucky they get
a kiss blown over the yellow line, because
they’re only ever traveling
in one direction & that’s away from King’s
Valley, a place known for its dead
settlers & Xmas trees. There’s a whole
cemetery for land-claimers here, where
locals leave antlers & Hot Wheels & red
polyester carnations on the graves
they like best. People with names like Nayhem
& Sarepta, who saw their kids give up
the ghost to ailments nobody can pronounce
anymore, might be happy
to know they’re still missed. The point
of the steeple on the only church for miles
around blew down & no one’s the means or the mind
to fix it. My mother is trying to
be the good hostess
she hopes I’ll one day grow
into, schooling a girl named Mynda
toward the GED we all say
stands for Goodness Ends
in Degrees; showing her the difference
between the progressive & perfect
tenses; how to interpret
the verse “touch me
not, for I have not yet ascended;” the necessity
of opening the day with a sorry for trespasses
unwittingly made. I have a habit of trespassing
to see our neighbor’s sow, the one who gave
birth to thirteen piglets, only
to crush them in her sleep. She’s had so many litters
over the years & they’re all defecating
into the creek now, making us worry our wells
will fail us. I also
have a habit of visiting his cat
Confederate Gray, who licks the air
if you stroke her ribs. My sister asks me to cut
her hair again, & again we drop the locks
in the creek & hope it never stops
moving away from us. It seems we’ll get by
with our lie a little longer, if only
because the nematodes are failing
to save the Yukon Golds & the thistle is
going to seed & Mark, a family
friend who happens to be hard
up, is sleeping on the couch, asking us
to call him Lucky like it’s Desert
Storm all over again. He takes it
upon himself to learn me
vigilance, which is to say, self
defense. He tells me to give
him everything I’ve got,
but I’ve never done that
for anyone, & I don’t think I’m ready
to begin. His forearm finds its way
to my throat & his knee goes right
between my legs. He holds me
to the wall till I admit
I’m licked, which happens quick, but anyway
humiliation’s hardly real
when only John Wayne is watching
from his lacquered saw blade on the wall
& anyway does anybody survive war
without being won
over by the dream of decline? You can find us
on ghosttowns.com, or you can find us
on A&E, re-running our stories
about how haunted this place really is—
women waking up to translucent children
braiding their hair, all those farmhands
who saw Old Man Cosgrove only visible
from the waist up, who tells them
this valley is paradise & no one’s
told him otherwise. There’s a store here
called The Store & it just quit
selling gas because its holding
tanks are pure rust & won’t hold another
drop. Still, you can purchase Dreamsicles
& Bud & homecured
jerky, & Charlotte who runs
the show will skin & quarter your kill for free
if you bale her hay. She says
the locusts are in cahoots with their stinging cousins
who inhabit the dirt & just recently flew
up my shorts & stung me till I stripped
stark, till I climbed a livewired
fence & ran two meadows only
to find out I was amusing
the neighbor’s pigs, who cooled in the mud,
blinking away flies. My father got so pissed
he set the whole nest aflame, only
the fire didn’t stay
where he put it & so a season’s worth
of growth went up in smoke
& the locusts mourned & the scent
of singed Rieslings lingered in my hair
for a whole week. He said it was lightning
had struck, & Mynda wrote a song
in honor of the crop. I remember
only the phrase “portentous
clouds vandalizing blue.” The insects remained
unscathed. I admit I’m proud
of my sister for mastering false
lashes & liquid liner, for painting cat eyes
that’d make Audrey jealous
if she were alive & smoking
as if it weren’t deadly & dancing
with Fred Astaire. There isn’t much to check out
at The Store, but Funny Face is one
option & my sister & I know every
line by heart, every step
& throb of Technicolor. So we watch it again
while Dad feeds the burn barrel yesterday’s
news & the high-gloss catalogues
he doesn’t want us
to be tempted by & the boxes of cereal
that always say, “Better Luck
Next Time” & sometimes it seems
the future has a habit of repeating itself.
—
Devon Walker-Figueroa, a recent graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, currently lives in New York, where she serves as co-founding editor of Horsethief Books. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The New England Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Narrative Magazine, Tin House (The Open Bar), and Copper Nickel.