Rhonda Recalls the Way the Ground Moves

By Luci Brown / Issue 12

The ground has been changing for a while. I was younger and the ground felt solid. Unmoved. Felt like holding me to this Earth in a way I said I was okay with. I said okay, and I meant hell yes please give me grounding in this shithole town with shithole parents and shithole existence.

It opened up one day and showed me every bone like a fossil like a smirk from the Earth like a fortune of my future like the perfect Tarot reading. Have you ever felt a hug from someone you loved and it stuck to you for a bit even after you hugged? And when they died you thought about that hug? I was ready for death to hug me in that long way. When I die, I will remember death fondly. I will say don’t get me wrong, he was sweet.

And when my mom kept reminding me I’d be nowhere without a dick in me and the know-how to cook a right good meal for a man, I felt the ground start to move. I didn’t feel stable anymore because I suddenly couldn’t make love to a grave. I had to fuck a guy with flesh and I had to tear open and feel it. I like to lay under a bed after sex. The closet can work okay, too.

II.

My favorite part of summer is drinking a margarita while watching the excavator dig graves. The tequila makes my cheeks flush and the broken dirt reminds me of my skin and the way the grass crackles as it bends. Sounds of every time a man has ever touched me. But burial makes my heart flutter. So I keep going back. I bought up all the salt at Qwik Stop and the cashier wanted to know what dead animal smell I was trying to get rid of.

Axe body spray has no idea how to make a man smell like Earth. The Earth is better than that. It smells like rich blood coagulating in a single vein. It smells the way your mouth feels when you wake up hungover. It smells like seventy different pine trees, but it’s the perfect amount of seventy different pine trees. I tried to love a man who wore the stuff but he made the grass blades break off and I just couldn’t stop wanting to stab the center of his spinal column like stopping a tree at the root.

In the winter, when the ground stays firm, I go to the backyard and run my feet through the perimeter. Gauging every dip slope knob mound and all the flaws of her face. It’s like knowing every freckle. It’s like telling her she looks good this season. It’s how you can tell if something has changed. Like when he broke my arm three times before fall and suddenly the yard had tons of tiny divets like hard rain like hail had hit us.

III.

I think sometimes there’s a magnet underground diverging me in directions I may not go. I haven’t figured out how to break the pull yet.

LUCI BROWN is an Appalachian highlander currently pursuing nonprofit and educational work in the bourbon barrel hills of Louisville, KY. Her first chapbook, Home Brew, was published in 2015, and her work has appeared in Moon City Review, Rogue Agent, Menacing Hedge, and others. She is the managing and poetry editor for Stirring, board member and reader for Sundress Publications, and YPB member of Sarabande Books.