ISSUE 5 · FALL 2010
Copyright © 2010 Travis Blankenship
| Molesting the Legend TRAVIS BLANKENSHIP Criss-crossed over a calendar of Sundays, unsuspecting, lazy days of partly cloudy and windy, sunny hours, a team of adolescent seers scours the muddy pavement of thatched river roads, where the people who watch animals’ curing pelts morph into paychecks on telephone poles take no heart in magical occurrences beyond the still-existent fur trade. There the young seers gather squirrel bones in a chitterlings bucket they carry between them. With femurs and vertebrae, the children erect skeleton towers until the collected remains are used, and a city of roadkill or natural causes sprawls down the dirty street. Whole fields of ants begin to populate the wobbling structures as they strip the structures to the beams of bone, cleave the carrion fragments. But the ants pour. They pile and confine their metasoma in a poisonous mess, yet the Tiresias clan jeer and dance along their new city’s limits even when the basement of legs and mandibles gives out and crushed ant carapaces ooze from the squirming statue like wet concrete. Mothers soon come with brooms and dustpans to clear the prediction— the way gypsies cover their trochomancy— and free themselves of both trespass and certainty. |
Travis Blankenship has been the recipient of a Tin House Writers Workshop scholarship, the Jim Wayne Miller Poetry Prize, a Geoffrey McClevly Memorial Award, and a Bondurant Prize in poetry. His work appears in Artifice and Smash Cake magazines, among others. He founded the Goldenrod Poetry Festival, now in its 6th year, at Western Kentucky University. Currently, he is senior editor of The Yalobusha Review and an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi.