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seems that all the mountaineers, save for grandad’s grandad,
pilgrimaged to the ozarks and turned the corn presbyterian,

leaving truckfulls of coal behind for a sun’s mouth unopened.
my ancestors traded the mountains for a 1/3rd success rate,

taught us to chisel our kids from the cliffs and call them so.
sometime between grandad’s dad’s 12 brothers and sisters

and my only childness secretly cutting up the rug
with a contraband of playboys and hustler mags

beneath a heap of blankets, there came a plague
of infertility in inheritance.

was it in the summer of the town’s bicentennial,
in a bluet of 1 am,

when papaw and i slung ourselves
around the house corner, and he shot the hide off a racoon

thieving by the dumpster, and bullet shrapnel
knocked the wind thru the guts of his mercury light,

and we had to use his dentures as a lantern
just to get back to the house.

a punishment for deadening the habitat just to reclaim territory,
as if everywhere i was looking wasn’t already a lack thereof.

how i lost our children before calling them twinkles in our eyes,
i still don’t understand.

overpopulation feels like a myth when you can’t contribute to it.
i’m sorry it isn’t cheaper to pass down the family name.

if i could live everything over again, i’d wear looser underwear
and search the ends of the earth for my y-chromosome— 
​
just so we can one day tell the neighbors to lose our number,
and we can one day get to a paradise not yet corrupted by almost.

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Matt Mitchell is the author of The Neon Hollywood Cowboy (Big Lucks, 2021), Grown Ocean (word west, 2021), and tweets @matt_mitchell48.

perhappened mag
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header photo: zoe gayah jonker (unsplash)

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