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Rain and Pine
Drinking at a bar in Chattanooga.
Home from college it’s good to be home.
My friends are here it’s late or early.
I am watching the rain fall—
Hard kernel-rain
needle nose
from the sky
rain.
It’s early or late my friends aren’t here.
I have no clue who you are or where I am.
I lean into myself tightly like an ear of grain.
I watch the hard rain—
Motor-driven
variable-speed
grinder
rain.
Lightning hits a pine.
Throws its limb across the pavement.
I wet through my jeans smell like ammonia and corn chips
In the rain-fed morning I watch the pine tree—
A broken thing,
one wing slung and
strut-fallen.
You pass me a pipe and I suck it in the kerosene heat
blows.
You get on me while I watch the rain.
I say you’re so good remember I have a tampon in.
You get off the sky is saddle shaped the pine tree—
Limb moaning.
Joint-pin wanting,
side-wise we.
Nancy K. Pearson
Nancy K. Pearson is orginally from Chattanooga, TN. She received her MFA from George Mason University in May 2005. Her poems have appeared in Phoebe, Kalliope, Folio, Brick and Mortar Review, The Adirondack Review, and in the forthcoming Margie.
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.”
- Charles Baudelaire
