The Meadow Literary and Art Journal 2011

The Dead of Shawnee by David Shattuck I In my room, beneath its unchanging dark I wear out your name by calling it. But when the line is severed, your soft voice is hushed over by the rain outside. What was it about this place I loved? More highways than people. More empty fields than black cows to swallow them each season. II The dead of Shawnee, Oklahoma stay quiet tonight. The full moon slips over the airport with its single runway and no planes for miles. Tomorrow they’ll begin again to drudge the Deep Fork for a girl who believed she could, and almost did, walk across the water. Here faith and its absence are two lines from the same song. III In Autumn the pecans crowd the gutters. Everyone has a neighbor who shells them for free, so everyone has bags of halved pecans to give or to sell. Outside the Indian casino the sheriff’s boys laugh nervously around a parked squad car and wait for someone to stagger out. Wait, and thumb erotic the tips of their batons. The dead wait out the rapture on Parker’s Hill. Their grandchildren have forgotten them, the brave ones have left already theMeadow 107

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