It was all there:
I explored and climbed
through gravel and roots in embedded cars, earth cars,
stratified nowhere buildings
which hum inside of
nowhere bricks, red out there in
piles of autumn sticks
that house potato bug
tape worm ancestry shoe rocks metal
rain.

Everything his, into the smoke of my father’s machine shop.
I shuffled past with fistfuls of hot venison,
with fur clumps by the wood stove.

Inside, this: rubber mallets hooked into walls, grease hands
with black faces like coal movies. There was more meat in tin foil,
more meat than tin foil. It came from the woods on a day
like today when black face and rubber mallet went to hunt, in boots
up to my eyeballs––

and a calendar of naked girls, the first ones I’d seen,
hiding like me in the back of the building. I who like
the day was short, flipped through the months, for months.

The thighs of June, the confederate blossom of May,
And April — affective breasts, who sees me from behind the
wheel of a Camaro. Both of us grinning,
both of us hiding from our fathers.

– Alex Johnston