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Jeffrey Little |
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bowling for salt lick it was hills behind the water-house again w/the melons rolling like lopped heads at an all day hatcheting, time to pin your ears back & get real gone in a bag of white bones as you trot a crazy-legged beeline for the booth raffling off pappy nervie's legendary salt lick carvings of turkey buzzards along w/a selection of his editorials for the hockensmith star, a corncobucopia of absinthe fueled impropriety that propelled him to the forefront of county cranks. in our weaker moments we call this home, one way in, one way out, pappy nervie became a tree, we all do, outside of town. a forest of old folks standing outside of town. this is hockensmith. during the carnival it steps aside. the VFW's earth pig dance takes center stage in front of a paddock of ruffled emus that the greek bought but no one will eat, twenty or so jumpity birds w/out a hunch as to how they ever found themselves here, in hockensmith, huddled before a mob of men dressed like aardvarks in the service of only god knows what, if there's an answer it's hiding in the hills, like a yeti, in a lean-to, staring lost into an electric bulb. saturday afternoon flash fry for emmett louis little the old timers trust in emmett to trance the trains. some call him the witchin' trowel, or scat shaolin, others think he's the son of that mystic crayola who passed through town back in flood times so they all keep a jug or three of the diner's finest grease in their pantry for when he's old enough to flash fry his first balm. in the meanwhile frothed by gitt's creek it's a chance of taking, of fishing for the resuscitative on their own, no luck in makeshift tin pot talcums, the answer is off in emmett alone, slow charleston, off in emmett made-self-made. sitting, then, is central, in cane, or thatch rotwood, w/one eye locked on the blackbirds treed, & the other on emmett's assure. before hockensmith these were hills the hills droning away on a hill's drone hoedown - the hills wait for the butter & bark. what we can see of its buzzing sounds like the delta tree dog's trance, like the voice of peetie wheatstraw, the devil's son-in-law the high sheriff from hell, it's a sound that the folks here in hockensmith call "your ass flown nigh halfways home." a wind gusting from the north means it's a bitter song sung sharp, like a field holler in a drain pipe, & even the trees have begun bunching by the base of the hills as if to say "it's our last rainmaker drifting away in a red sky wrong!" this is the end of town. in better days it nearly fell from the bone, clean, w/just a touch of the hot carbons & clench oil that spooked the creek into dropping dry, before all of these houses rolled to a quit, & braced a risen swoon. …sumo, sump, sump pump, sumpter… the physics of it all is in there, from the subtleties of set theory to the cyan hills of hockensmith, it's only one page but it goes without saying that if you can't find a translator on the outside the initiates here could dig you up a dozen on the fly, each one a master in the brush country kabbala & devoted to the notion that the range of a single page is easily a hundred worlds wide. [Index] |
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Thunder Sandwich #26 - Summer/Fall 2005 |
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