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  • Poem with a Refrain from Charley Patton
  • Travis Smith (bio)

You hear him sing it when you come to strike the match and you catch a noseful of sulfur and the kindling starts to burn—

when you come to learn you can’t say some consonants without vowels and hear the fire speaking them for you,

the flame-tongues in the hearth’s black mouth crackling like static in the old shellac of the Charley Patton 78, you hear him sing it—

You gonna need somebody when you come to die

and when you hear him sing it the second time through the final note jumps the octave to a register too high for his voice to reach— You gonna need somebody when you come to

and now the guitar’s high note sings what he can’t sing—

You gonna needYou gonna need somebodyYou gonna need somebody when you come to— now

now the hiss of smoke now the static now the unsingable octaves and the trackless air. [End Page 112]

Travis Smith

Travis Smith graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is now a John Grisham Fellow in the MFA program at Ole Miss. His poems appear in Wag’s Revue, storySouth, and elsewhere, and are forthcoming in Another and Another: An Anthology from the Poem-a-Day Grind from Bull City Press.

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