You call me Fescue, Bermuda, or even Kentucky Bluegrass like I’ve been over here all along
but like you, I’m just a feudal remnant haphazardly broadcast across dispossessed lands.
The colonizer’s blueprint, a rolled-out carpet of familiar Eurasian green ahead of your arrival.
Savagely replacing all the native big Bluestem stands, and Gamagrasses and Switchgrasses that
multiculturally bunched across the savannah with my sun-burnable blades of homogeneity which
collapse with every frequenting drought with my shallow roots that shed off millennia of spongy topsoil
and retain no moisture with every growingly intense storm. I was that scout who softened this land for
your ancestor’s conquest.
Maybe that’s why now you spend 3 to 6 hours a week worshipping me. Listening to the putter of horse
powered piston-popping zero-turn sermons. Suppressing any attempts of the natural and the diverse
to supplant me with your cultish ceremonies of petro-fertilizing baptisms and routine mass
circumcisions at that front-yard church of the perpetually pruned and pristine holy lawns of your
fathers. Unaware of your deification of me, or otherwise, you would call me something else.
gridlocked steel belted needles crackle over vinyl rutted roads
spun all across this scrubbed terra turntable
who’s phlebotomized fluids propel us
hissing out clouds of atmospheric shrink wrap
as we’re replay through these predefined loops
involuntary amplifiers stuck in 400 yearlong destiny manifest loop
scratching from one blacktop track of interchangeable box stores
and cloned homes to the next
that all hum numbingly edifying edison’s design
lit up by the cooked petrified guts of disemboweled mountains
this wobbly warped disc of existence’s droning cacophony
of “civility” deafens and mute us
until they demolish the whole record and flip it
for a new set of tunes for us to consume
but outside of there
where white tails compose
improvised meandering trails
or in another time
when we could hear
river’s and creek’s bust rhymes
and our naked feet
bong beat the packed dirt
with our heart thumps
as metronomes
and mycelium animating
chestnuts, ash, and white oaks
to use their leaves
to sample wind
pushing through
the hollers and the gorges
forming heavy baselines
booming in our chest
comingling intricately
with the red bellied woodpecker’s belt
with the white throated sparrow’s
melodic song
all churn together
to make a soundtrack of the universe
a constant ambient music
we were once a part of
and still can be
Bernard Clay is a Kentucky native who grew up in Louisville. He has spent years developing a deep appreciation of the state's unique natural and urban areas. Bernard earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kentucky Creative Writing Program and is a member of the Affrilachian Poets collective. His work can be found in various journals and anthologies. He currently lives on Scorpion Hollow Farm in eastern Kentucky with his herbalist partner Lauren, founder of Resilient Roots, where he homesteads and continues writing. English Lit (Swallow Press, 2021) is his first poetry collection.