tennessee's star atlas
Illustration by Paige Wang
A collection of poems by Leo Nims
This is a collection of 3 poems, titled 'tennessee's star atlas'. In their respective order, each represents growing up, love, and loss in the south. They are all loosely biographical pieces that were each written at turning points in my life. This collection was formed through my observations of what I have come to call the Unified Americana Experience. The first piece is on my last year living with my mother, the second is about learning to forgive my father, and the third is a reflection on the murder of my GodFather, written on the drive home from his funeral.
right now we’re standing in an open field three miles apart,
and in ten years you’ll be wishing your kids could meet me,
while im in witchita with the dropouts and the shepherds and whats left of the union.
im sorry i convinced you that we were untouchable.
im sorry i told you that my mother had to put her birthday cake dog down.
do you remember who left you all alone in the rain?
or who left you face down on the tracks?
that was the moment my body hit the water.
back when your dad still called you yellow,
and brian found god in prison,
doing life without parole.
i think this is the summer we stop believing in god.
i think this is the summer we stop looking for the man in the quilt.
do you think the dead get older?
and can they make it to graduation?
im so scared that you won’t believe me when i tell you that our couch won’t fit through the front door,
and that it’s going to snow tomorrow despite what the tv says,
and that i saw a ghost in the hallway last night.
i keep repeating the same sentence over and over as it loses more meaning each time,
and the boy in my closet asks “you’re just like that aren’t you?”
and i say yes,
i suppose i am.
and i suppose this is the year the fridge becomes a shrine to those we’ve lost.
_
my father was a preacher who taught me more about ice fishing in the summer than i ever wanted to know,
and on sunday mornings i would hide so deep under the covers that he wouldn’t be able to find me.
my father built motorcycles on the front lawn,
and let the neighbor kids screw parts into place on their way to school.
my father loved my mother so much that it scared him.
so much that he would swear up and down that the hands that were hitting her didn’t belong to him.
they were the devil’s hands,
born and raised by temptation,
youngest child privilege,
track star blood.
hands that play poker on the front porch with the carnies,
bake state fair winning cookies,
and hide tinted black foil in the ceiling tiles.
starry lamb with eyes gouged out, cut apart at birth.
circus cowboy sitting on the couch, while i make sunday dinner.
there’s rot growing inside me, that started in his kitchen.
together girl on the bathroom floor.
boy sitting in the bathtub.
i was painting the kitchen blue when you hit me, and got down on one knee to apologize.
i brushed the dust off a statue of the virgin mary and washed the butter out of my houston colored dress,
while my mother danced with someone else’s man.
you carried me through the corn field, under every star in fulton.
and in the morning we’ll drive all the way to new orleans, with our envelope money and refrigerator wedding rings.
_
mid june driving down every gravel road with the heaters on full blast while it rains so hard i forget i was crying
everything we’d ever loved washed away, even you.
gods been living in a two star motel, says it’s just like a chapel.
fenced in pool and the ghost we met last summer.
he said he didn’t see any of this coming.
i told him i never looked.
we used to live here.
