Current
Issue
Volume 12.2
Morgan L. Jenkins
—
Dear California,
I will miss Missouri. Bold summers thrown into seizure—sweat shuddering to snow. Spring preens, dries, becomes square bale. Autumn never arrives. December never dies. Thunder and lightning. The holy mud puddle. Divine Folgers’ tin can full of oats and alfalfa pellets. Jesus of the Plains: he is all bleeding knuckle and whistle on fat, green blade. Coarse hands. Hard heart. The creek rings around each shaved stone skipped then swallowed. Blue bottles skinny dip, are taken like wafers on turtle tongues. Horseflies drum. Mosquitos drill. Seed ticks fall from catalpas, latch like needle-thin newborns. White-tailed deer with pupils in headlights: suicides along the highway. Racoons growl and claw and feast on sweet corn. Mulberries shatter on the gravel. Gooseberries so tart I could cry. I break the tangerine clay: show me nightcrawlers the length of God’s arm. Show me the moon, terracotta jawbreaker. Show me where I come from. In Missouri I am a grasshopper hooked through the heart, kicking, breathless, and tossed to the catfish. I am a swallowtail kept forever: cotton balls soaked in rubbing alcohol, the seeping heap in a glass jar and the fumes suffocate me, molecule by molecule. I am the possum’s bleached jawbone pinned to velvet. I am burying my great-grandfather’s crowder peas for the last time. California, I am leaving Missouri for you.
I will never forgive myself.
Bio Copy here
