Joe Wilkins: Radio All Night Special AM
She wakes in the night, tunes in Chicago.
There is a song by George Jones
that too soon fades to whirrups, static. That old devil, her father liked to say,
must be sharpening his teeth. The DJ says
there is a pretty pill now to buy
to make you prettier; says there is next Friday a benefit in Sioux City for a boy
who was tackled by another boy, whose back (my goodness, they could hear it
in the stands) seized
and like wet wood snapped. Says there is of course
this war, and now a girl in the war and (does this sound right?) a man collared,
naked, on his scraggy knees. The static’s back.
Be good, her father’d grin,
old devil’s hungry again. Then over her in the night bend for a kiss. She spins the knob.
Albuquerque. Here, at least, is always
the good news: By the blood,
the faceless preacher breathes, by the blood I bind you,
that you may not ever be unbound.
JOE WILKINS lives with his wife and son on the north Iowa prairie, where he teaches writing at Waldorf College. His book Killing the Murnion Dogs: Poems is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, and his work appears in Georgia Review, Southern Review, Harvard Review, The Sun, Orion, and Slate, among other magazines and literary journals.
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