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Oxyana

Tucked in the Appalachian mountains of Southern West Virginia, Oceana, is a small, once thriving coal-mining town that has fallen victim to the fast spreading scourge of prescription painkiller Oxycontin.

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Poet of the Month: William Brewer

THERE IS A GOLD LIGHT

Kind of absurd that I still wake up thinking you’re alive. It lasts maybe two seconds. A lot’s changed since you’ve gone— I’ve been so shocked by beauty my toenails went black. As a way of bringing people together, I’ve started stealing

stop signs. Each morning, I put on my best suit, stuff it full of dried grass, and go walking through the fields. The crows totally lose their shit and I feel dead and alive in that blurry way it got for you near the end—

high, not high, nodding off, so bent over it seemed your spine was made of feathers. People say I’m performing grief. I say I’m keeping things alive: tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, melons. The more still

I stand, the more flies do their fly thing, sewing up the spaces between seconds. I want to kill them. I want to pick off their wings and paste them on my eyelids. When I bat my lashes, I’ll levitate a little. I’ll buzz.

For lunch I chewed up bread for Grandpa and fed it to him. It was like putting coins in a busted jukebox. Strange thing: I watched his eyes, blind as bowls of milk, trail the curlicue flight path of a cardinal. On the walk

from his house, the barn, rising from the green wheat, looks like a rogue wave with a hankering to drown. Tidal force of dove-gray wood, hay-scratch, ribbons of snake-skin hanging in the rafters. I’ve come up

to the hayloft to gather tomorrow’s courage and wonder out loud if maybe you were the cardinal, but there are bigger miracles at hand. It’s the evening hour when the sun, through the cracks in the wall, slides

over the floor like golden doors to something as desperate and false as prayer. As if my grief were a hall. As if it were of any use to the dead. How can this not be for you? I would have done anything.

William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions), a winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series, and Oxyana, which was selected for a 2016 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.

Our Poet of the Month series is curated by our friends at Poetry Society of America. The nation’s oldest poetry organization, founded in 1910, PSA’s mission is to build a larger and more diverse audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the vitality and breadth of poetry in the cultural conversation, to support poets through an array of programs and awards, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life.