Suss: another literary journal

How the Seminary Student Convinced Himself to Leave Eastern Kentucky

by Christopher Prewitt

The tree is the spine of the moon, and the black tire
is a vision of God to the four-legged and name­less
wan­der­ing the high­ways. We want to belong
to that world, to find our souls a kick­ing root
fetus of gin­seng, but under­neath the log,
we know, are cop­per­heads, among them
the one that spooked the horse you swore
would bind you in the cru­ci­fix­ion
of the sad­dle. We want to believe
the moon bucked from the sad­dle
could main­tain our secrets, but the purged pale gold
sput­ter­ing above the spine evoked the face
of the red-haired girl and the sand cas­tle
slowly eroded by the tide of that detached
voyeurism, its sad expres­sion the paw print
of the ani­mated soul­less chal­leng­ing its cause.

• « previous poem

• next poem »