Alabama Summer
by Natalie Reese McCoy
Red clay and rusty tire swings
make beautiful the dead things
out rims of fraying trampolines
sagging with the memory
of unremembered weight
and wet feet
from the creek
where crawdads
are dumped into buckets
or emptied into pockets
and brought back between the toes
as Mawmaw blanches,
white as church paint,
“Aw, Holy Ghost!”
of Alabama summer,
I feel you in the air-conditioning
and, closer still, the final mercy
of the flight
we all take
for a moment
when we fall from weightlessness
in the middle of woods
and watch it bleed
the cheapest gasoline
in all the nation’s states,
right where we land.