Jumping creeklocks or digging for black-hid greens,
my name is Butch, rhapsody beau. I’ve hangsnipped
a mighty breath in snarlgotten Graham County.
Crags swaddle a valley like possumrazors:
younger blowdays I walked barefoot upside a trace
noting the kinkspray of coves claimed
by Qualla, an inability to saygap what blanks
have formed between ridgebooms, what federal
wooly worms duped womenclues and children.
Bindles carried by harrowed patchmaids, a necklace
of ginseng root turned pallidbody, on a tally scroll
many men died for namesacks, but Sequoyah’s
swirls could not foretell bullyshackles,
creeks framed by condos to inherit goldcap
shiny smiles for fools, for the showland.
For a carousel of shady gaperooms, dropsy dolls
along tourists’ Cherokee mantleskins in mud huts,
I scratch the jelly of nettles. I’m a quackbolt who
knows Soco Gap, my strikedance burns hills to a crisp.
I seek lightholes to flabbergast Snowbird Indians
from Stecoah’s lonely valleybabe. Set between
a whiteboy’s kayak and perverted roadside stands,
lustcores have burned my people white. On my knees
digging beanspice, raccoons line up behind, lost.
Who is the darkarcher in this brave’s dream?
Even now I fish for oddtrout near Big Witch cove,
throwing back speckslab browns for the tribe.
I can’t construct a smokeseam. It’s like what happened
to furry tobacco leaves: a ragbunch of brothers
sat starvedown in a cave needing all the dark woods.
In the bellsnatch where citizens live, Qualla’s boundary
never matched a steeple’s heightfist. They were and are to give.
