Issue 11.1 Fall 2015

11.1 cover image

 

 

Tennessee Antebellum

 

Richard King Perkins II

 

 

Sunlight is loud as it hangs suspended,
countering its own scale.

 

You looked into a window of my home
before I lived there and saw my future.

 

I’m going to be in constant pain, stuck in the
basement of a Tennessee antebellum home.

 

You predict that my suffering will be caused
by the germless purity of my own defiance,

 

when the ox and lamb measure time
just before my life walks out on me.

 

Catastrophe lingers in placated air.
I’m revived in an underground meat locker

 

my shoulder blades hooked to chains
of hyper-awareness, the scabs of my inner-being.

 

The moon is hiding behind my occipital lobe.
Light rises from my brain’s birthplace.

 

 

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