He was so damn good— had a look, cocky smile, a lock of hair loose across his forehead, dark eyes that could melt metal. He’d saunter up, smelling of heat and lightning, move in, lips to my ear. One finger, trailing my cheekbone and downward, firing me up. A living room chair, our kitchen table, various lamps and half-filled mason jars, fell prey to our fervor. Until they didn’t. Until his unkempt hair and juvenile gyrating grew tiresome, his pranks predictable. There were mouths to feed, bills to pay, his excuses an endless replay of teenage tantrums and there I was, working my ass off for chump change, a bag full of if onlys.
His fingers, cold as metal, locked across her mouth, clumps of her feathers wrenched from their sockets, she tucks herself, like a folded note into a shadowed roost, between the stairs and her small iron gate, dreams a billow of sky, wings, perpetual winds.
It came on me like the darkening of day. He was handsome, it was late, his lopsided grin, the band, the booze, his Chevy King Cab, airconditioned, backseat leathered and wide, his fingers thick, tongue a freaking bang-fanger. He knew exactly when to shut up. We staggered back inside, the smell of fireworks and detonations all up inside us. She stood there, wraith-like, hang-dogged but tearless. Infant on one hip, toddler fist-clinched to the other, said I bet you think you’re special.
The pond below the house reflects heaven no matter the weather. A pair of Canada geese park themselves along the edge, honk disapprovals as me and Sadie Jae fly by in her Jeep four-by-four, singing Jambalaya, crawfish pie and a filet gumbo. Wind wicks our ponytails, prickles our sun-burned shoulders, pilfers our whiskey breath. We spin ruts into the lower pasture, dart in, out of the pines, come to a slide-into-home-plate stop, inches from the front stoop, our laughter lawless. Times when I go low, I summon that sizzley summer, ear to the wind, listen for Sadie’s spicy Cajun yodels.
As Poet Laureate of Ohio, Kari Gunter-Seymour focuses on lifting up underrepresented voices including incarcerated adults and women in recovery. She is an artist in residence for the Writing the Land project, a Pillars of Prosperity Fellow for the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio, and the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series Women Speak. Her anthology I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices received the 2023 “Book of the Year Award” from the American Book Fest. Her work has been featured in Verse Daily, World Literature Today, The New York Times and Poem-a-Day. Her third full-length collection of poetry, Dirt Songs, is published by EastOver Press.
Stills from the film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a 1931 American pre-Code horror film, starring Frederic March and directed by Rouben Mamoulian. March plays a possessed doctor who tests his new formula that can unleash people’s inner demons. The film is an adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson tale of a man who takes a potion which turns him from a mild-mannered man of science into a homicidal maniac.
