After too much whiskey, I'm having sex
on the hood of my car again, the idling
engine buzzing hot beneath my ass.
I watch the scrub pine weave in and out
of the quiet sky as my ex pumps away
on the dead-end street I grew up on.
Just three houses down, the trailer
where my stepfather beat my mother.
Next to that where the man who raped
my sister lives, or lived. I don't know,
it's been years since I've been in Lexington,
a city now more strip mall than ever,
where women grow up to marry the boys
they loved first, where the parks are filled
with Saturday night blowjobs
and where I almost lost my virginity
on brown pine needles and the wind in the spring
is exactly honeysuckle. I don't know why
I'm here except that I needed him
to see this place, where the chain-link has gone
red with years, where I used to hunt
muscadines and blackberries in the undeveloped
wood across the street. To see if they ever
paved the dirt or if my mother's peach trees lived.
To know if the world I remembered
was as small as I thought it could be.
Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications and The Wardrobe. Her third full-length poetry collection, Down, will be published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Guernica, Ecotone, Mid-American, Tupelo Quarterly Crab Orchard Review, and Willow Springs, among others. She is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee, and in 2017 she was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame.