Tribular

Let's workshop this poem

Tribular

You are still young and still rocket-thrusting/
from that city of downhill-BOCES students/
and middle-school dropouts. The poor there,/ 
your poor—well, focusing only on those few/
not detracting from downtown hipster renewals/
twenty-four-seven with rusty shopping carts—/
draw well-water, crimson, from sulfur springs/
and can set it afire from the tap (with a laugh).//

Their kerosene-vapor heaters ever sibilant,/
their roof water tock-tocking their buckets,/ 
their utility-grade value bacon in white cartons/
leaving no window into that all-fat product/
tinted green—they brag, not just about how/
the water is flammable or about how much/
they stole or about how many guys they beat up,/
but also about how they pay child support.//

Those that can read even brag that they can/
and thereby that even you—university you—/
are not as above them as they sense you think/
you are. It never gets old, their faked struggles/
with the words. “Hi—hick—corey—sm—/
smock—èd; hick-corey smockèd! That right?”/
They have an affinity for rice and potatoes/
and insist the fat is the best part of the steak.//

Rickets-stricken as kids, no strangers to lead,/
they dress in wash-worn clothing, as faded/
as their line-dried towels. Their skin appears/
all the more worn, their growths and blotches,/
their obesities and warts, all the more intolerable./
Retardation and flu abounds among them,/
and so the teen diarrheas from diaper to hair/
throughout the single-wide sinking in the earth.// 

They will bring in friends and family members,/
though—no matter what. And they let them/
shit and piss and die under your old comforter./
During rare visits—jaw clenched in repulsion/
from such post-industrial tribalism, and its smell/
of shit muddied by value bleach—your mom,/
although a light in the madness, will give you/
that same blanket without thinking a thing.

* “Tribular” originally appeared in Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures 6.1 (2018)