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Emily Kingery: Dirtbag Wilderness

March 4, 2022 by PBQ Leave a Comment

Our dirtbags, our dirtbags 
were medicine men. 
 
They spoke as oracles, 
capped bottles, skated 
 
razorblades across 
the glass of pictures. 
 
It’s just like shoveling snow, 
laughed our dirtbags 
 
as they unburied 
their parents’ faces. 
 
Like raking leaves, 
want to try?
 
We watched their hands 
swap bills, our eyes 
 
the wrong kind of wild. 
Our dirtbags laughed:
 
You can sit with us
while we finish. 
 
This was intimacy: 
our sitting, their finishing. 
 
We laughed; we returned
frames to their shelves.
 
We bought shadows dark 
and lip stains darker. Darker, 
 
said our dirtbags, damp 
on basement couches. 
 
We envied in secret
the laughs of bright girls, 
 
high as their hair 
pinned in hard, slick curls. 
 
They spun like acrobats
in the high school gym,
 
strobing in glitz 
we were disallowed.
 
Bitches, spat our dirtbags, 
skanks, whichever 
 
words coaxed our laughter. 
We swallowed them 
 
like expectorant
and laughed in wet coughs
 
under canopies
of parking lot trees,
 
our arms crossed as though 
coffined already.
 
We rolled in our dirtbags’ scent 
like hunting dogs, 
 
napped in stuffy rooms 
as their hands, their hands 
 
blessed guns, made backpacks 
heavy with Ziploc holy. 
 
It’s all good, laughed our dirtbags. 
Our hips, our ponytails 
 
swayed easy as leaves. 
By summer, our dirtbags 
 
wore sly, deep pockets, 
weighed powders, 
 
held capsules to the light
under a jeweler’s loupe. 
 
The car windows glided, 
phones lit up like lightning 
 
bugs on the shoulders
of gravel roads. Such soft light, 
 
light of vigils, light the yellow
of a forgiven bruise.
 
We rode to neighboring towns
of missing teeth and needles.
 
We cried in bathrooms 
far from home. We were home
 
when we laughed, when we laughed
we laughed Everclear vomit. 
 
But our dirtbags, our dirtbags
let us sit while they finished,
 
and their hands were warm 
as stones pressing us to sleep. 

Filed Under: Issue 101, Poetry 101 Tagged With: Emily Kingery

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