I’VE HEARD STORIES
Like that landscape painter who pushed his goat hair
Brush across canvas for hours until two Coors
Cases were empty beside him and he passed out,
Waking to see some lonesome countryside more
Beautiful than he’d ever witnessed himself, as if
In delirium angels took pity, touched his art
With their golden fingers.
How one morning he felt something give
And pulled three teeth from his skull.
He keeps them in a cigar box,
The landscape hangs over a stranger’s fireplace.
Like my neighbor who only drank wine—
“Like Christ Hisself”—gallons at a time.
How he could turn gnarled stumps
Into foxes, honeybees, angels; how when he was carving
A crucifix for his parish he lopped off his left thumb
With the adze but never panicked.
Now that left thumb is in a jar on his windowsill
Catching light all day beside rosemary
He keeps trying to root in creek water.
The crucifix is still in the church, blessed now,
Where people come and kneel before it.
Like me—the nightmare I keep having.
Strapping my boys in the car, my breath
Toxic enough to blow a fuse.
Colors blended and beautiful but twisted
As a cottonmouth about to strike.
How I get in the car, despite the wind, the light,
My own flesh and blood tugging me back.
Then I turn the key.
I’m not blessed to make anything beautiful,
Not a landscape or stump,
Dust, and awaiting return—
For now, blessed only to wake.
*
IN A SILENT WAY
My wife digs her hands into black soil,
Flesh scraping against meat of the earth—
Brown loam speckling her pale, slender fingers,
Veins blue as heavy water, she takes hold of a root and tugs
Heavenward, commanding the earth by some grace
Bestowed by the very dirt she digs and tends.
The soil—like me, it writhes for her.
She runs a finger across a ring snake’s scales
As our son lets it slither between his fingers.
She dusts dirt from skin, gathers beans, tomatoes,
And sun-bruised flowers in her hands.
She touches my hand and says nothing.
Watches the garden, our boys—
She thinks of something I’ll never know.
She draws me from clay.
Her breath expands my lungs,
And how I wish I could grow roots,
Tree myself into this very ground
Where she will be tomorrow,
And the tomorrow after.
*
THE HILLS ARE QUIET BUT IS IT REST
It’s not the hills to blame for shrugging into hibernation.
Regress is grace, knowing when to be quiet,
When to raise your voice, given intention mirrors the divine.
But who’s to say buck-a-roo—
Now’s the time to make peace with worms, my grandfather said.
I wasn’t born bleak as him.
Grace is only slippery in greasy hands.
Drive enough nails and you’ll hit a thumb, God knows.
It’s in the picking up the hammer with broken hands though.
It’s in closing eyes and gasping a thousand feet deep.
Just know nothing is ever as imagined, not the weight of snow
On the cypress boughs, not the finger held over candle flame.
The worms know though—when to feast and fast.
The privilege is knowing the line that holds us,
Knowing when to still soul and close eyes,
When to unfold knife and get to work.
*
RUMORS OF WAR
I can’t stop thinking of the time coming when men will go mad,
Kill whoever isn’t insane like them.
My father used to tell me nothing good happens
After 10 p.m., he used to say drive like everybody else is drunk and on drugs.
He used to get up every morning at dawn, hair muskrat-wild,
Praying far deeper than the roots of any Judas Tree
For mercy, redemption, and mercy again.
I think about the mad people saying, “You are mad—You’re not like us.”
How they’ll bash skulls against curbs like drums
Keeping time to a rhythm droning in their ears.
All the way down, turtles and madness—
Except my old man, quietly escaping three wars:
Hearing, speaking, seeing.
How the one he keeps fighting—the one never
Televised, the one no one will ever tune out—
Rages in the heart.
The trick, he says, is to sit alone in a quiet room,
The room will teach you everything.
I’m a good citizen of this land. I do my part.
See—I pick up this inchworm, move it from here to there on the dogwood leaf.
*
Spencer K.M. Brown is a poet and novelist from the foothills of North Carolina where he lives with his wife and three sons. He is a finalist for the 2023/2024 CMA National Book Awards, and winner of the Penelope Niven Award and Flying South Prize. His work has appeared in Eunoia Review, Salvation South, Scalawag, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast, and the poetry chapbook Cicada Rex. His novel Recommendations for a Departing Soul is forthcoming from Regal House, (Fall ’27).