The River is for Drowning Girls

every song says it’s true.
Hair blooms in the cold current,
little fish rise like angels

to meet them,
they go down
in the dark,
in the good
black mud.

They roll, white-eyed
through brown water
arms out in benediction
fish-pale bellies
and breasts

like a basement
full of mushrooms
roots and blind things.

They say there are catfish
big as Volkswagens
near the dam, the divers

come back up
and never go down again.
They say when the drought drops

the water low enough, the old carved stones
break the surface

and only say
that you’ll be mine
and in no others’ arms entwine
down beside
where the waters flow
down by the banks of the Ohio

here, once, they humped the earth
like new dug graves in the shape
of serpents, eggs, moons,
wheels and bears,
buried bones, copper axes, obsidian hands

but the river is for drowning girls
every song says it’s true.
Train trestles cut
across flat stones and mud,
ring top beer cans, tangles
of fishing line.

The river swells with rain
and swallows fields
making mirrors of the mud
leaving fish to die for the corn
leaving the old stone blades of knives
arrowheads, bone beads and broken pots.

The river is for drowning girls,
hungry for their white flesh
it beats against the city walls,
glutted with chicken coops,
detergent bottles, syringes, empty jugs,
tampon applicators, slick black
logs and fishing floats.

Dark as a rotted oak leaf,
as a cold night, as the smoke
of a fall fire on the bank,
dark as a barge filled

with west Virginia coal
electric light of a lone house
and a song ringing out:

go down go down you Knoxville girl
with the dark and roving eye
go down go down you Knoxville girl
you’ll never be my bride

the river is for drowning girls,
girls drunk and dancing
girls fucking boys fresh
from jail, in cars,

in towns with cold smokestacks

the river is for drowning girls,
they go down to the last line of land
and wait to be taken away.

**

Monee Illinois can go to hell

in the attic of a farmhouse
that sits in the middle
of rotting outbuildings
brown eyed susans
rusting lead-gas cars
with dry-rotting upholstery

there is an upright piano
with an out of tune high c
in the silence of that attic
are songs i carried on my back
there are cats,
that swarm through the rusting tractors,
the crates of junk
the barrels and cages and bones

there is a red linoleum floor
where i am forever dropping
a puzzle piece out an open window,
where i am stacking a chair atop another
atop a table to climb to the ceiling
a stone i am flipping over
where the black ants are running
away with their babies in their teeth

in winter, the ghosts of pigs
stare through the greasy windows
at a black handled phone
still under my name