Tag: Rachel Custer

War

By Rachel Custer

 

In the same way that an old man without a home
is more likely to be bearded, war shuffles
first into small towns. Picks up cans ‘longside
the rurr-route. War knocks first on the faded
doors of the poor. He’s a carnival barker, this
one, his eyes full of young men with bodies
that want to eat the world. War leads a boy
to the highest point, says all this can be yours.
War stands in a lineup with the regular suspects
and do his eyes shine. Do his face look pretty
next to them old boys. War sits in the gas station,
drinks bad coffee with old friends. War sees
the harvester chewing down the field like a man
kiss his way up a girl’ leg. Pastor invites him
to church to say a piece. You wouldn’t believe
how funny war can be, and how he knows
the best stories. War leans in to the needs a boy
could never speak. That lifelong smoker’s voice.
Says: Listen, boy, I can take you somewhere real,
can make you somebody new. Same old women
ain’t for you. You ain’t for here and nothing else.
War look all day long like a poor farm boy, with
eyes like he went somewhere. But see his hair?
That cut a city style, a rich man cut. War tell you:
Boy, the places you’ll see. Boy never hear what
war say through his smile, never hear a word
war say after war say but.

 

Rachel Custer’s first full-length collection, The Temple She Became, is available from Five Oaks Press. Other work has previously been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, The American Journal of Poetry, B O D Y, [PANK], and DIALOGIST, among others. Visit her website at www.rachelcuster.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: Image of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica by tiganatoo via a Creative Commons license.

 

History

By Rachel Custer


There is only one story a woman says and maybe
she is saying something about the truth, or maybe
not. The history of a place like this is the history
of those who leave it. It’s a great place to be from
they might say, and smile. Pretty men and pretty
women and their easy belief that they are moving
forward through the world. Their necks graceful
in their city clothes. There is only one story and
it is not this story, sweat and grease and the grace
of ritualized days. The pinch of repetition in the
joints. The world would be forgiven for believing
the best of this land is the dust that a hand knocks
from old boots. Maybe there is something of the
truth to what she says, like there is only one way
to live in a place one cannot leave, and that’s to
love it. Take the raw animal of its days by the
throat and throttle the one story from its jaws. Or
maybe not. There is only one way to live in a place
where everybody believes nobody lives. Like
there is only one way to be a fire and that is to burn.

 

Rachel Custer’s first full-length collection, The Temple She Became, is available from Five Oaks Press. Other work has previously been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, The American Journal of Poetry, B O D Y, [PANK], and DIALOGIST, among others. She is currently completing the Tupelo Press 30/30 Poetry Marathon fundraiser. “History” was previously published by Tupelo Press.

Visit Rachel’s website at www.rachelcuster.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: © 2014 K-B Gressitt.

How I Am Not Like Hillary Clinton

By Rachel Custer

 

The woods call to me, too, from across this road,
from away from here, from the opposite
of houses filled with tired people,

from the constant grasping of small hands
that might as well own me. Who wouldn’t be calmed
by a path through the grabbing branches? Still

I don’t go to the woods, trusting more
in the noisy hate of the known world than in
the cold, true silence of a mirror. Here, in the dark

undergrowth of the mob, I am still afraid, but I am
not alone. Here I can weigh a stone in my throwing hand.
Here I can know the stone won’t be thrown

at me. Fear keeps me from the woods into which
you wade, eyes forward, again and again,
because the woods is silent

as it circles me. Here, with the tired people, I can
say to myself I am only tired, that the stone
in my hand can’t be wrong

if we’re all holding stones.

 

Rachel Custer’s first full-length collection, The Temple She Became, is available from Five Oaks Press. Other work has previously been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, The American Journal of Poetry, B O D Y, [PANK], and DIALOGIST, among others. She is currently completing the Tupelo Press 30/30 Poetry Marathon fundraiser. Visit her website at www.rachelcuster.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: .waldec via a Creative Commons license.