Flyover Country
- Flyover Country
We would fly over it if we could, sure enough:thick nights perched up high on the barn's tin roof,smoking, we want to be the swallows sailing overthe wheat, refuse, the cul-de-sacs and deer carcasses.
Instead we pass secrets, then shame within uslike shared liquor from corn, from moon, and thenwe sneak back home, slide pond-wet into the coop-rubbingthe screen door hinges with spit
to make them silent. We know our home is full of mencoming out of bushes with mean things ablaze. We watch iton TV documentaries. Spooky place, home; bestial, rank.Hours in the backyard, nights playing light as a feather,
stiff as a board, Ouija, and sometimes we do see its pastand it's frightening. When we start on talk of leaving,the whole town says our choices are six in one hand,half a dozen in the other. So we just sing I will rock the cradle
when you gone, and together we make the soundof standing ovations and we do that until dawn. [End Page 283]
Alison Powell's poetry has previously appeared in AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Puerto del Sol, Denver Quarterly, Caketrain, and Quarterly West, and other journals and in the anthology Best New Poets 2006; she has work forthcoming in the Antioch Review and Boston Review. She is currently pursuing a PhD in English literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center, focusing on the Romantic poets. She teaches children's literature and Romantic poetry at Hunter College.
