barns burn
my brain blisters
the prairies melt
texas welts
the sky sprouts wide
refineries spewing my favorite my
ths
the ozone is our last door
out
pump
pump
that’s all we hear
in hell
we call our best steers brah
man
i swear it is no insult to you
r god
or the big boy himself
it is just
a name
glug
we fracked beau
mont
gita
the land
we fed be
ef scrap
diesel
palladium corn
i’m surely made of the same stuff
i will linger in you
r live
r
Marshall Woodward is a writer from the Gulf Coast. Gutslut Press will be publishing his first chapbook, CLOWN STAR, this spring.
Writer’s Statement
A vulture lets us know when death is near. We call attention to threats by making noise, by hovering. I am circling the rot of earth celebrating a sublime landscape filled with fading treasures—our shared toxic cadaver. This work is made of exuberant decay, bodily distortions, heavenly cries, and comical eulogies. This is a scarecrow telling the vultures, ‘hold off, not yet.’ These poems take shape and structures praising rites of spring, yet as they linger they are picked apart by the birds, disintegrating through earthy forces. Language is deconstructed, destroyed, fashioned into revolutionary dynamite.