Old Tires Cover Rattlesnake Holes
The barefoot children stand on cracked clay they call the back yard. Hard dirt and weeds, some old car tires cover rattlesnake holes. All three are almost in kindergarten, standing in grass up their collarbones. They stand behind the chain-length fence, holding their microwaved dinners as they exchange breath with the next-door neighbor’s attack dogs. The dogs hang out their tongues, drip-drip, snap and growl. The kids would rather risk having their little throats torn out by Dobermans than to take a meal inside their house.
Inside the house mattresses sprawl, covered with old brown blood stains because one of mama and daddy’s good old eight-ball buddies was so frantic he couldn’t hit the right vein. The ceiling is sprinkled with vermillion constellations and spreading brown water stains like anemic pancake blobs with burnt edges. The bathtub has been impossible to drain since last Thanksgiving. It has ten different calcified grit rings, the black ones oily, the orange one smells of sour sulfur. The green filmy one feels like shedded chemo skin.
It is better if you wash off outside with the cold water hose. They have a bar of soap under a small rusty skillet that got pitched out the back door. It is even more divine if you strip down in a sudden downpour and run around dancing and shouting outside in your underwear, leaping straight up when it thunders. Lightning is striking somewhere, out there in the atmosphere. Your mama and daddy are out there, maybe, somewhere under the atmosphere.
You are still alive in the home of the bad dollar where your parents might easily forget your name. And that would actually be better for you if they did, because the day is soon coming when they’ll try and sell you for a twenty.
Your mama and daddy are dirty. You are only trying to get clean.
Holly Hunt is from the Ouachita Mountains of central Arkansas. Her poetry has been in Ploughshares, Poetry, The Southern Review, and other journals. She lives with her cat and her husband who was raised by wolves and The Grateful Dead in California. Her fiction has been in shoegaze and The Louisville Review.
