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.