Helen of Troy Battles Southern Hospitality
helen of troy makes peace with the kudzu
my father foxholed me in the lee of the porch, gloved and hungry, ready for battle, straining at the leash until he launched me into the yearly war. i sprang at them, the tendrils threatening the house, the little questing outriders opening their mouths to eat. i yanked them. i hurt them. i beat them back, arms streaked with dirt, following their line to the great press of the mother-vine, the carpet of vegetation toppling our fences, creeping along in inches, in yards. the blanket of it. the smother. i tell you i was raised among all breeds of weapon— hand trowels and knife-blade shovels, weedeaters, hedge trimmers, chemicals in ranks of deadliness, their attendant nozzles and hoses, and so when i tell you i became myself a single sharp edge, perhaps you’ll hold in your mind the crèche that honed me. an animal hunger. a green grasp with shadow beneath, a moving thing fed on new gulps of land. i walked out into the mass of it, boots to my knees against the coiled mines of copperheads, my mother behind me, watching the sky for a white spread of wings. i grew my whole life in a house death longed to touch with one soft finger, and when i looked out at the building wave, i thought, do it. the world around me hunkered under the wrong spread of life, and yet i saw that it was living, edges softened, blanks filled in—a sphere that begged my absence, that collected my childhood in its outstretched hands and pushed it under the skin of itself, hidden and repurposed, folded away, breathing gently under combs of wind.
helen of troy feuds with the neighborhood
if you never owned a bone-sharp biography, i don’t want to hear it. if you didn’t slide from the house at night to roll 4-wheelers out the shed, if you didn’t catch branches on your cheeks and flip the beast in a mud rut, go down yelling, come up laughing, if you didn’t roar the woods with star-love brothers, with blood-wait sister, squinting through pine dirt, through cobweb, through creatures with fur that explode into wings, through devils with fins that grow legs and run. through boys who become brutes and become boys again. through girls who die and stay that way. if you didn’t see a swan become a wolf. if you didn’t see a wolf clamp teeth around a swan. if you didn’t go away and come back again, helen judas, helen stranger, trojan helen, helen of the outside. if you didn’t limp your way home, dark house, door sealed tight, all the street with eyes sewn shut, i don’t want to hear it. i want you silent. i want you listening to me.
