Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In this nonce sonnet, C. T. Salazar pays tribute to the complicated state of Mississippi. As he told me recently, “I started writing these sonnets at the beginning of the pandemic, out of feeling stuck in Mississippi. A lot of their work in the sequence is about reimagining Mississippi as a place where Mississippians aren’t lonely, and what that would take.” The imagery—milkweed, dog tags, swans, dirt—is prototypically American, as is the motif of burying things (including our flaws as a country) and, thus, trying to forget them.
Four Snakes Makes Our Flag
after Tom Snarsky
and the stars wept milkweed
and in the headlights your daddy’s dog tags
and it’s okay to kiss him goodbye
and all the brass in your pockets
and Corinthians can be a flower so long as
the garden beetles turn all gospels back to carbon
and a swan landing so quietly the water doesn’t seem to move
and I’m terrified of digging up confederates so the dog
is shallowly buried
and July was the first time he told me he’s losing his memory
and from the meadow he lifted a whale’s vertebra three years ago
and I don’t know if you’ve ever held something that old
and beneath all this wind I have been putting my ear
to the dirt and listening to us forget ourselves
C. T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. He’s the author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, forthcoming from Acre Books in 2022. He’s the author of three chapbooks, and the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, West Branch, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Denver Quarterly, RHINO, and elsewhere.
For more miCRo pieces, CLICK HERE
