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there’s a place where they
watch television on television sets where they trim fell and mill our backyards we don’t recycle they burn paper keep dirty jobs blown knees we burn our trash they work in suspenders and they drink in suspenders Jon at the radio station crackles off the fire watch at Paradise Creek the poor salmon runs coming this summer the November washouts coming - The stick-built homes run this moldy season up into the rafters. The trailers on cinder blocks lose power when it snows or high wind lays down the power lines. Most Novembers the wind takes their blue tarps. The tarps take their brown ropes. The ropes take their glinting metal stakes till there is little but tin-colored potholes full of water on the driveway maybe one kitchenette maybe an empty stroller maybe uncooked meth fresh from the grocery store for the managers to maintain. There’s a feeling among us that some thing is always against this place. - Off on one of the wet gravel roads the highway still spittles with the fully loaded music of logging truck routes, the night-shift millwork electrician is sleeping through gunshot still singing from the 10 point elk horn bent up with a jagged grin made into a chandelier with candles on each tip and hung in the living room. It’s getting dark. Local television makes the light in the room a nervous beautiful blue. His dog adjusts one leg that dangles off the couch, kicking away, dreaming her way out of a bad hunt |
Andrew Rahal teaches for the Quileute Nation and Peninsula College. He received an MA in Creative Writing from Vanderbilt University and co-founded the Nashville Review. He serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at Narrative Magazine and his poetry has appeared in Cobalt Review, Danse Macabre, Hawaii Review, and Silk Road Review, among other venues. He lives in Forks, Washington.
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