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We drink in the phantom lights from the pitch of
the limestone steps surrounding our cracker-thin
shack, on the edge of what was a Smoky Mountain mining
town, waiting out another night of cold television and warm beer.
Brown water gurgles from the chipped porcelain
faucet in muggy circles. Our broken taps, a blessing,
mama says, grabbing another beer from the torn
carton in the corner. The beer’ll keep us young
and happy and thin. I giggle, ignoring the ache
in my belly from the suds. Late at night we tell
stories, sitting on the back step, watching the blue
foxfire dart up the loamy mountain.
Mama says it’s the ghost of
a Cherokee maiden peering around
the shadows for a lost lover but I think
she’s a warrior, following the trails of blood
from Oklahoma into this marshland to look for
the baby she left behind, her only son lost
on the journey from green lush
to bowls of dirt and soot.
She’s coming over the Yonahlosse trails, sifting
the dirt with bare fingers to find
where her baby’s blood lay final.
Maybe they were gas station lovers, mama says, forced
to meet at the filthy pumping stations, dust on
the floors of cracked plaster lavatories while their
bodies, like trapped canaries in a mineshaft, were suffocated
buckling under the weight of the finest bits of coal,
stolen like diamonds in the earth.
Unnatural gas extracted from the ether
of tunnels warped from overuse, now abandoned
only the shacks of lovers left to remember
how the ground once bowed with sooty riches.
In the glare of foxes, on the edge of a blue mountain,
in a dying town of 300 people,
I can believe almost anything.
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K. L. Pereira has written on asexuality, progressive queer representations in Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, the history of Wonder Woman and zine culture. KL’s poetry and
nonfiction have appeared in Bitch Magazine, Clamor Magazine, Girlistic Magazine, Lotus, Sui
Generis, The Hub Journal: Boston’s Literary Quarterly, and What’s Up Magazine.
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