William Brewer D.

I Know Your Kind


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My Somniloquist

      20  Overdose Psalm

      21  Resolution

      22  Detox Psalm

      23  What We Can Replace

      24  Withdrawal Dream with Feather and Knife

      25  In the New World

      26  West Virginia

      27  Halfway House Diary

      28  To His Enabler

      29  Withdrawal Dream on the Cape

      30  Against Enabling

      31  Playing Along

      32  Ode to Suboxone

      33  The Good News

      34  Letter in Response to a Letter from My Son

      35  Relapse Psalm

      36  In the Room of the Overdosed, an Ember

      37  The Messenger of Oxyana

      38  Explanation of Matter in Oxyana

      39  Today I Took You to Our Oxyana High School Reunion

      40  Ascent

      41  Oxyana, WV: Exit Song

      42  There Is a Gold Light

        Notes

        Acknowledgments

        About the Author

      I know your kind, he said. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.

      — CORMAC MCCARTHY

      Oxyana (n): A nickname given to the town of Oceana, West Virginia, after becoming a capital of OxyContin abuse. Following a successful crackdown on prescription painkillers, heroin has now flooded the state. West Virginia has the highest fatal overdose rate in America, nearly three times the national average.

       OXYANA, WEST VIRGINIA

      None of it was ever ours: the Alleghenies,

      the fog-strangled mornings of March,

      cicadas fucking to death on the sidewalks,

      the pink heads of rhododendrons

      lopped off by the wind.

      We wrestled earth with alchemy,

      turned creek beds into wineglasses

      the Roosevelts used at state dinners,

      fueled fires hot as the sun’s dreams.

      And there was light: a mile deep

      in the underworld mines,

      beaming from our foreheads

      like wings through dust.

      Not even the days we called beautiful.

      Autumn weekends when DC drove in

      to take pictures. Women in silk dresses

      picking our apples, posing,

      holding our bushel baskets

      with a tenderness we’ve never known.

      Snow days, belly-crawling

      onto the frozen lake

      to hear the ice recite the Iliad.

      Not Hog Hill where Massey Energy

      dumped cinder, the gray waste

      between breaths, poisoned trees

      black like charred bones,

      where we burned cars while girls

      wrote our death dates on our palms

      with their tongues—even now,

      rain choking the throats of smokestacks,

      the river a vein of rust and trash.

      Have you ever seen so many cold faces

      slapped in the afternoon?

      So many voices screaming— Wake up.

      This is beyond desire.

      This is looking through a hole

      in the wall around heaven.

      How do you forget that—

      a world without ruin,

      a world that can’t be taken?

      Where once was faith,

      there are sirens: red lights spinning

      door to door, a record twenty-four

      in one day, all the bodies

      at the morgue filled with light.

      Who can stand another night

      stealing fistfuls of pills

      from our cancer-sick neighbors?

      Of the railcars crying,

      the timber trucks hauling away

      the history of a million birds?

      Pitiful? Maybe. But oblivion is all we have.

      And if we want to chop it down

      or dig it up or send it screaming