By Nathan Erwin

After, I kept for­get­ting – the color of my mother’s hair,

the sound of the ocean, falling down the embankment.

I do remem­ber sitting on the damp steps of Paul’s trailer,

waiting for someone to open the door. A morel

growing right out of the wooden foun­da­tion. Silence.

No black­bird Oakalee, just an after­noon set­tling into itself.

As a boy, I found that if you listen, there are times,

usually cued by the sound of steam escap­ing, a volta,

where the whole world pauses, con­sid­ers the exhaust

of your family’s Ford, the way the fumes can only be seen in the cold

as it drives off, a rip­pling applause of carbon and water, water, water.

I think I asked the mush­room, what’s next?

& then, I was soaking, sitting on the top bunk in Paul’s bedroom.

His sister small & topless on all fours, snarling like a bobcat,

scrab­bling an ear with her toe. The bright buds of her eyes fixed

on the grapevine in my hand, blood­less, the navel cord that Paul

threw to me, heaving in a light timpani, pulling me to shore.

His father rum­mag­ing in the lowest drawer. Easing up

my heels on the bunk’s ladder, the sound of the river

filled me again. The river that pulled back my jaw, mud and water

angling against the sun & into my belly. The world took a step back,

hum­bling the hand in the drawer,

the throb­bing of the tril­li­um field,

the flow of the Owego into the Susquehanna.

All of this, walked me down the ladder, out of the room, out of the trailer,

naked  into the purple rolling of dusk, letting the light dry

all the dark, pet­ro­glyph­ic hand­prints on my back. A push,

a longing to never see so much or live so long, the way light bends over

the arc of a wing rising into the sky or out of death.

NATHAN ERWIN is a poet whose writing direct­ly engages with the “more-than-human” world of North­ern Appalachia. His writing has recent­ly appeared in The Journal, Willow Springs, North Amer­i­can Review, Poet Lore, and Ninth Letter.

This poem orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 21. Support local book­sellers and inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers by order­ing a print copy of the mag­a­zine.

Photo by Noah Buscher