JUST SOMETHING JUST THERE
Adrian Blevins

I was wallowing along inadequately inside myself
just using caution on the highway like the good sign said  
 
when a breakdown in the ambiance hurled it out there  
that my pussy was the knob on a suitcase in an atrium  
 
or a sack of potatoes or a teeny pile, perchance, of snow.   
A set of cardboard boxes.  A pip upon the ground.   
 
A bonnet, a barrette, a little oval-shaped piece of soap  
in a terracotta pot. Like something a rustler might
 
just take and lift I guess and filch and not lightening either
but just a rake or a spade and not even mine either  
 
but just something just there like a bough or a branch  
or a box of milk or a scarf on the back of a chair.  
 
Not the heat and not the fervor.  Not the ardor, People.  
Not the zeal and the vehemence.  Not even the aching  
 
and not the salt. Not the swelling and not the blood,  
but just a torpid flatness sitting on a table to be made off with  
 
by whatever whomever had it the ample glow  
like bars and bars of gold I guess in a noxious ditch? 

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Adrian Blevins is the author of Live from the Homesick Jamboree, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, two chapbooks, and a collection of essays she edited with Karen McElmurray—Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including a Kate Tufts Discovery Award for The Brass Girl Brouhaha, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, a Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award, and, more recently, a Pushcart prize, a Cohen Award from Ploughshares, and a Zone 3 Poetry Award. New poems have been recently published in American Poetry Review, North American Review, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, and other magazines. Blevins's work is also being included in Best Creative Nonfiction of the South, just out from Texas Review Press.