Anti-Heroin Chic
  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • Music
  • Art
  • Comedy
  • About Our Contributors
  • Masthead
  • Issues
  • About our contributors - 2019
  • About Our Contributors - 2020
  • About Our Contributors - 2021
  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • Music
  • Art
  • Comedy
  • About Our Contributors
  • Masthead
  • Issues
  • About our contributors - 2019
  • About Our Contributors - 2020
  • About Our Contributors - 2021
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART

​

12/2/2022 1 Comment

Poetry By Rachel Custer

Picture
       Lee Coursey CC



​
Park

Almost pretty - the sun glinting off broken 
glass. Almost a place where a child should
play. It’s almost August. What is August?
A trash bag filled with clinking bottles.
What is this place if it isn’t drunk by noon? 
Children will gather anywhere. Around
anybody with a story to tell of another
place, of how to go. Almost pretty 
enough, this place. Almost cool enough 
to breathe. The women pushing strollers 
Are almost to term again. The sweat stains 
through their shirt backs. One has a toddler 
who lives in the corner of her vision, who 
she only moves toward as if he is a threat. 
Gathering tiny bits of glass in his fat fists. 
It’s almost pretty. The deft dance of her hands. 
Stay with me, the mother says, and he knows 
he will, in the same way he knows her name 
is Mama. Her name might as well be Mama. 
What is August but some heavy thing 
to be carried in the heat? This place 
but the poor fit of a wrong name? 
A mother. A long pull on a cold beer.
If this place was ever part of a picture,
it must have been almost beautiful. It must
have been the frame that broke. Little hands
burying in glass in glass all the secret things 
they know they know.





House Down in the Holler

Where a thin woman wields a straw broom 
against a siege of river mud. Shade 

of her mother prowling her blood: just because 
you’re poor doesn’t mean you can’t be clean. 

The latest baby hollering in the back bedroom.  

If a man comes home 
like a storm making landfall against a shore,

his children thin trees bent before his wind,
a mother must be the sun. 

In a room with three walls 
and a visquined hole, a mother is home 

for a child’s fear. Mama, broom in hand, 
humping away through black mud, chasing

the fattest river rat you ever saw. 
Chewing a bite of that latest baby’s sole.





​The Promise of War

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
if you will only bow down and worship me.
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. Leans in to the needs a boy
could never speak. That lifelong smoker’s voice. 
Says: listen, boy, I can take you somewhere real,
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 hears what
war say through his smile, never hear a word
                                                                       after war say but.



​

Rachel Custer is a 2019 NEA fellow and the author of God’s Country (Terrapin Books, forthcoming). The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, The American Journal of Poetry, The Antigonish Review, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (OJAL), among others. She currently resides online at rachelcuster.wordpress.com.

1 Comment
Gary Grossman link
12/9/2022 03:03:35 am

Wow Rachel, knock my socks off poems. So many great lines "One has a toddler who lives in the corner of her vision..." "If a man comes home
like a storm making landfall against a shore, his children thin trees bent before his wind," and the ending of that second poem...

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.

    Archives

    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    March 2023
    December 2022
    October 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    August 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.