Navigating Elkton

The mayor didn’t recognize me without my black eye. His gold chains were as dead a giveaway as his American flag necktie
or his fingers plump as bratwurst reddening on a Fourth of July propane grill.

He’s still pretty mad at the ski resort up on the mountain because they want to dump sewage on the fields of our fecund valley. The decaying feces of urban skiers fouling the air on still Saturday nights in the summer when secret garages are alive with cock fights and alcohol.

"Don’t let them think we’re just dumb rednecks here," I told him, casting my irony around like a drunk Masonic Lodge clown on a parade float throwing candy to retarded children. "Don’t talk that way. Then they’ll respect us, right?" He nodded under the weight of realization and patted my back with his kielbasas as I went up the town hall steps. Wood risers, peeling gray paint. Daffodils nodding "yes, yes" and "no, no."

Town business is conducted in a house where Rebel soldiers once lay on a dining room table having infected legs sawn off
by the veterinarian who would never quite get over screams for Mamma. The pale cow-eyed suspicious woman behind the counter near where the doctor would weep took my money again.

The boys hanging around the carwash like ticks on a beagle have their underpants pulled up under their armpits. Hip-hop grandsons of moonshiners, sawmillers and pedophiles, gape-mounthed watch the daily Nothing Parade.

They yell something behind me as I pass on my bicycle.

I felt a need to post this.

Rename the Constellations

It takes the vast Western sky to trigger inspiration sometimes, or rye whiskey. The campfire chewed away at her meal of gambel oak and, since the prairie falcons were asleep, did so with no regard to the noise she was making.

I rolled an ice cube around my teeth and a wave of mountain air spoke to the buckgrass. I heard it, as we all did. The Milky Way was a cloud bank. The coyotes chattered and yawed.

The constellations have names and patterns arcane. Four or five stars became a warrior pushing a broken cart over a snowy hill while being pursued by a unicorn. We called it Tony.

The monsoon built fortresses of steam every afternoon and shot sparks through our sockets. One day, the mountains spilled a heavy cloud down the valley in front of the Dirt See'r, covered our alluvial plain with ice, and shot the well tanks out of the ground.

My friend stumbled among the sage, drunk on abomination, radiant in the oranges and reds of evening.