Nathan Fako

Four Truths about Greenwood, Mississippi


our mouths are a room
waylaid at the edge of trees
that darken like sparrow’s feathers, and we kiss
just like them–

I bring you four truths.
First: that evening will come strong, all night,
to unmake us.
Second & Third:
            my brother and my mother have come
from years away to croon carrot-legged, beak
of lust, Diazepam,
            outside our window, but outside
because my brother has yet to enter, 
            to stand
silent over our preening bed
with the part of me he carries, still
meek, bloodied, cold.
So, Fourth: by this wood
I want to want you.
I can still open, I promise,
the way southern roads roll endlessly
under headlights, open
to where I can still love 
only you.
Each night I walk there.
Each morning 
the sun undoes
the dream.




Little Zion Churchyard
for Robert Johnson

A cactus grows in the graveyard of the blues 
where I kick an anthill off a headstone
then pick the ants out of my shoe. 
Most are unreadable now, kudzu-choked,
one there burned, many crumbled, some 
upturned as if time or vandal came to cry your name
is lost, my love belied. Perhaps it was the devil though, 
come to get his due, haunting through the rows of stones
looking for a boxed up blues boy who died, they say, 
just around the crossroads. And as the devil came
do I, to search for souls and skeletons
amidst the growth and dirt, or plead
for answers, find nothing,
and know the good Lord’s work.