My Hometown

My hometown clings to Elvis Presley’s lapels. It’s fried catfish, collard greens, fast-food mashed potatoes with thick white gravy, and pulled pork BBQ on every fifth corner. It’s ante-bellum homes and racial friction but not enough to cause a spark. It has a viable breath a few times a year, but someone always snuffs it out. It is Harvey’s casual restaurant and Profitt’s porch on a lake in the woods, surrounded by hummingbird feeders and alligators that sun in a pond behind the main smoke shed. My hometown is a dungeon dominatrix, an old house on 6th Street painted in Mardi Gras colors that caused clamor from the socialites who hire Catholics to go to the liquor store for their medicinal needs. It is old and new, which is always suspect. It is black and white, corn dogs, and two brackish rivers that join in a confluence less than a quarter-mile from the adult bookstore which is hidden by overgrown vines and adorned on its roof by a colossal pink pony that is well-hung like the god who left the city in 1972.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

God is a Catfish from the White River in Martin County, Indiana

and we would eat
Him on Summer Sundays
after Mass. Sometimes
we would eat Him
on the lawn of His own house
as the sun shone through
the sycamore leaves,
creating its own stained
glass on the grass
beneath our feet. We named our

biggest county festival after Him,
the CATFISH FESTIVAL.
And we would walk up
and down the main street to
look at the vendors selling knives,
quartz figurines, and paintings
of the American West, even
though we were smack dab
in the middle of it. Up the road

and around the corner
is the bridge where men
fished for Him, the biggest
of the summer meant
bragging rights for the
year. Some would be
mounted, others were soon
fried and fed to those
finishing games of softball
in the park. When night came,

we would sit in a truck
bed or on the hood of a
car, still warm from
the July sun. The grease
from the feast of Him
earlier in the day still
on our fingertips and
lips. Around us,
fireworks of all kinds,
but towards the heavens was
where our eyes would
always end up. We would inch
our hands closer to each
other, in hopes that they would
meet. If even briefly, we would
live off that touch for
weeks. We would make plans

or the next day. We would tell
ourselves that this was
the rest of our lives. In the
morning, we would know what
we were going to eat that day.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.