Ian Hall

Love in the Time of Company Towns

Nothing worth nothing ever happens
after midnight. Coroners & dairy

farmers alike have told me this, & you should believe
every atom of it. But, then again, a godgiven rule

is humbled by its exception. Tonight, for instance, I am
inevitable. You & me, your curls tasseling out

like a 4-H project, are hoofing pell-mell
down the mountainside to the birthing hips

of the Big Sandy, hallooing there is no such joy
in the pharmacy as on the road thereto. Boneheads

to the letter of the law. Eyes amok with dilation, I want the deed
to the way this swimming hole looks just now—all bluing

& moonburnt. Vague twang of chum. The cattail
astir like tooth-torn garters. Usually, I’m too gummed up

in everydayness to appreciate this
claptrap idyll. But right this second I need no convincing

that both my feet are planted angelic in the heartland
of the real. With ring fingers you fishhook

my nose. Get a royal whiff of that, you say, & I mainline
the menstrual zest of a river in July. Lo-Fi

sublime. Water busks over the bosom of stones. Lusty
crickets won’t take maybe for an answer. Tomorrow surely

there’ll be another frog-strangling rain. Too spongey to ply
a trade, earn a troglodyte living, roofers & loggers might

mass here to fish, drink, lie, swap
lore. Might connive against their foremen, some

litigious homeowner. & I too will be out
another day’s greenback roughage. But this doesn’t peeve—

I can always binge
you through the billable hours. Butterfingered, I just went to palm

one of your glands petite, but the drowsy piles of rock
we were idling against made a tattletale sound & with malice

came apart. We are side-by-side on the grass now, sides
splitting. Chalk a line around us as we lay, & this’d be right

tragic. More star-crossed than Heloise & Abelard. Still airy
& elfin from the vertigo, you ask if those are the names

of the teacher & student who got caught holding pagan
angles in the supply closet at the vocational school? More

or less, I say, & course my hand up your spine
like a Geiger counter—pausing above the pastoral

inflections, the haute scoliosis, to bleep animatronic. Grinning,
our fingers duet. We are close enough to know each other

biblically. So close I can hear the gristle
creak in your back when you move

your mouth to mine. Now we are not talking
swine futures or the Technicolor horrors that haunt

the CSPAN ticker. There is noise, but not a trifle of that. What homesteads
between us: sighs, yips, small gallantries, air

sacs daubed in ancestral gunk. Right now, there’s strictly this
Strep throat patter—hot, thoughtless. Like a gamboling lamb, you go

to & fro. The flats of my feet sizzle
with hookworm.

Ian Hall was born & reared in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky. His work is featured in Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, Southeast Review, & elsewhere.