Mary Ann Honaker
Hometown
If you drive far enough, the four lane
ends abruptly in a bulldozed heap
of fresh turned sod and broken limbs.
Turn right and you can descend
into a coal camp where tight packed
company shacks are mostly
still inhabited, curtains in the window,
plastic chairs on porches, laundry
swaying in the cluttered backyard.
Further still and the blasted peaks
of a strip-mined giant glisten nudely
in the fog-damped air, ghosts
rising in wispy clumps up slopes.
Crammed in a narrow valley
is a town from the fifties:
houses of brick and cut stone so close
you could reach out your window
to knock on your neighbor’s wall.
A red-bricked downtown, some stores
still open, others boarded over,
a single restaurant, a single gas station.
The streets are empty. Someone scoops
the town up in a sheet, lifts the corners,
ready to close it. That’s how tall, how close,
how sharp the mountains are.
Fountain after fountain ripples, gleams
down the walls of the canyon
cut to make a road.
I return home, my face splashed
and awakened by awe, washed clean.
*
My neighbors sit on the shaded porch
again, while a red sunset quietly burns.
The talk today is of a man near my age,
whose son has taken his prized
convertible Mustang. No one knows
if he’ll ever see it again. They’ll take
checks from your mailbox, tools
from your shed. Do you have an alarm?
You should have cameras. How much
are cameras? Last week the kid took
the groceries back to Walmart for cash,
was gone for days. He’s into it bad.
Once Howard was offered a blow job
in the automotive department. Betty’s kid
is on drugs too, and Howard’s stepson.
*
When I was a kid I’d take off
on my bike and ride for miles.
Stop by a roadside store
and buy Pixie Stix and Baby Ruth
bars, Dippin’ Stix and Fireballs.
On weekends we’d picnic in the park,
our only worry a profusion
of fat black ants. Yesterday a woman
was raped by two men on a bike path.
*
I like to walk along the rooftop
of the Gorge, peer down into that cut,
watch the hawks circle the sun.
But they tell me not to go alone.
I’m more afraid here than just outside
of Boston; I double-lock the doors,
don’t sit on the porch after dark.
Every day the landscape dips me
in beauty. What has happened here.
*
Help Wanted signs in every window.
No one can find a worker who’s clean.
At night the crickets tune their guitars,
by day the dial-up buzz of cicadas.
Sometimes I swerve when driving,
stunned silly by the roadside wildflowers.
A matted dog is chained in a driveway.
He barks and barks. No one speaks to him
but to scold him. I want to steal him,
give him a bath, let him lounge
in my bed. A short walk from here,
you can step from the road
onto a beaten path through trees.
There’s fire pits and boxes with blankets
in them, discarded dirty clothes.
Bottles everywhere: cheap wine,
rotgut liquor, diluted and bitter
brands of beer. I try to make a line
in my mind, pile the mountains
and flowers and hawks on one side,
the misery and filth on the other.
Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015) and Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in 2 Bridges, Drunk Monkeys, Euphony, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Off the Coast, Van Gogh’s Ear, and elsewhere. Honaker holds an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She lives in Beckley, West Virginia.
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