Kevin Heaton lives and writes in South Carolina. His work has appeared in a number of publications including Guernica, The Freeman, Raleigh Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Adroit Journal, and The Monarch Review. He is a Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee.  Visit his website.

Political Correctness

I found myself left behind in a redwood
cathedral, super glued at the hip to a silenced

pleader clenching an empty gel pen between
two toes; signing to a songless nuthatch

like a near-quit fetus, hoping for hearsay
about supposed things. Alongside a burl altar:

Sadducees, Pharisees, and tax collecting
Publicans were soothsinging psalms,

and casting the bejesus out of daylily shadows.
Seems the pendulum always swings too far

the other way from splintered klaverns.
All I’d really hoped for was to remain—
sincerely me.

Combovers

Am I being candled for a more elevated
pigeon hole? One where all the double yolks
have been sifted?

That bushel of premium persimmons
I canned last October puckered, turned
festy, and burped their lids.

Or, perhaps I belong down here in this din,
among the wig hats drying out around
this old country store potbellied stove.

With the vichyssoise leeks and alimony
dads moving towards less eccentric
complexities; no longer in denial

about penetrating sources of light. Among
counselors readying their toupees
with that spotless, store bought pomade.

The Senate Has No Clothes

From across the Rappahannock, on the fulcrum
of lint-filled fault lines, the last massas rime into
the chalcedony recesses of their waxing dementia.
Perhaps you’ve seen them there: naked, unpolled,

grazing in full ungabled sun, mazing postbellum cane
fields for locoweed and orphaned sugar tit, crazing
hardscrabble, clogging to the cracked-cowbell jingle
of a sharecropper’s pocket change. Or at night,

nosing through deer droppings for musk covered
persimmon pits, rooting through lichen-labeled rows
of weeviled cotton stubble for plowed under overseer
dollars—swapping them to carpetbaggers for peonage

and jiggers of snake oil in those folded Nebuchadnezzar
poker faces like fourth kings in the second dynasty
of Isin—their puckered pie-gaffers papping out old banjo
tunes in the garbled pig latin of piney truffle tubers.