Sarah Mackey Kirby

The Song of a Kentucky Front Porch

 

It doesn’t blow New Orleans jazz,

clarinet sass with old trombone

bleeding into evening.

And it cannot bang its metal head

or play pop country, or sing an aria

in a trill of springtime hope.

All a Kentucky front porch

ever learned

is how to play the blues.

 

It lost its banjo long ago,

so you pick at the stillness

like a scab on your knee.

The wood swing can bellow,

and twigs know to snap.

Alone gets played in saxophone.

Harmonica plays trapped.

 

The shut-down factories

and callused hands,

the cigarette voices

and weathered stars,

the mason jar sun tea

and frayed bless-your-hearts.

Those old stories by the lake

and working past dark.

The pierce of the train whistle

and the folks who know hard.

Inside the door and on the porch,

that crying rasp is blues.

 

I canoed down the river

many years ago, before time 

grabbed ahold of too much

of me. I took off my shoes

and tossed rocks so they’d ripple.

Walked home knowing

full-well the music I’d hear.

Guitar strums near some fallen sign

of dreams gone to rust and payments

of dues. The blessed magnolia

and chill of canned beer.

Cicada accompaniment

with some worn down piano

playing its prayers with the blues.

The Days of Dumpster Smoking

 

You spend most of your life

trying to recapture the throat burning.

the singe of a Friday afternoon

keeping him company behind the

drugstore dumpster as he blew

smoke circles from the good cigarettes

you got him free

from your dad’s factory job.

Before driving past Old Lynn Farm,

dirt road curves dusting up

the Carolina blue of summer sky

while Chris Cornell and Billy Corgan

serenaded the two of you,

windows rolled down

through fields of artist sun.

How bad you wanted to be held,

to be loved so much

that love had a texture,

a current, a potency,

a taste.

Where all that lonely

snapping your bones

like twigs on a dogwood

disappeared for a while.

Flew off with the Cooper’s hawks

into the arms of coming dusk.

And you were left inside shadows

sipping cheap bourbon

he knew would impress you

because it felt like danger.

How those hours were danger,

the good kind.

The young kind

that lingered for decades.

Sweetening up the stumbles.

Reminding you that you’re not

really living ’til you open, wide-eyed,

below a storm so fierce

it killed off all the rainbows.

This Wednesday, On the Factory Floor

for my Dad

It’s late August. Another nineteen years ’til you’ll start

coughing. When heavy trays of cigarettes will settle in

your back and phlegm the shade of dusty sunrise will gather

into morning. A Faustian bargain of good wages and

family health insurance for panic moving down your

 

throat. It’s Wednesday. Composed of production line jazz.

A phalanx of factory workers perfumed in tobacco,

clad in steel-toed shoes, and sweat, and uniform tan.

Moving metal. Lifting. Lifting. Waiting ’til 3:00

to punch out from 18th Street and Broadway. Louisville,

 

Kentucky. Tired as hell. Today tired. Middle-of-the-week tired.

Not yet the decades-away, two-inhaler-puffs tired. But that

will come. You don’t know yet, but it will come. You recite poems

through the din to forget your shoulders. The forced overtime

calluses. The on-your-feet. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, William

 

Shakespeare, Poe. Audre Lorde and Ferlinghetti. You whistle

Johnny Cash country and hum Woody Guthrie folk to pass time,

like you’re somewhere else, a long-gone working man

now riding the rails of freedom, who won’t look back.

Only you’re not done. It’s not yet thirty-years-o’clock

 

and many more past young. You listen on that floor

for a cover of America the Beautiful that fits.

Ray Charles, serenading the shift. You, strong

and fierce and proud. Wrecking bones and memories.

Singing harmony into a cigarette-cherry red sunset.

Sarah Mackey Kirby grew up among lightening bugs, weeping cherries, and endless y'alls in Louisville, Kentucky. Her poems appear in Chiron Review, Hobo Camp Review, ONE ART, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is finishing up her second poetry collection. Her first is The Taste of Your Music (Impspired, 2021). Sarah has been a history teacher by trade and by joy and a writer by magnetic pull. She roots for Louisville basketball, digs in garden dirt, and loses at chess. https://smkirby.com/