things that stanley plumly said on april 28th, 2009, between the hours of 8 and 9 in the evening.

he said, tell a story.
give the context, and make the poem
breathe a little heavier for it.
he said, i am from pickwa ohio
and people there die,
and i said, i know they do.
(people from ohio
die young and old but always tragically,
though never from a drive-by
or an airplane crash.
people from ohio
all grew up in one-room schoolhouses
and took mandatory naps
and dreamt of being one of the ones
who does not survive their 45th year
of being a farmer
to an ungrateful leached dry corn field.)
stanley plumly said, this
is the way to get out of anything:
dance.
and i'm dancing my way to my car that night
and i'm thinking:
people from ohio are all the same,
all grew up in the shadow of insane asylums
and rivers that lit on fire in the 1960s,
people from ohio are born
with death in the vein of their left ankle
and by the time they hit puberty
death has perused all the other parts of the body
and chosen the heart as a home--
people from ohio
all recognize the value of a dollar,
waste not want not, are full of other
colloquialisms about money that have no worth.
i know these things because i am from ohio,
because death has lived in my heart
since i was 13 and i had lesbians as next door neighbors
and the kid who sat across from me in social studies
found a rope of the right length
and hung himself from an incredibly stable cieling fan,
i am from ohio in the same way
calves are from cows.
and i have seen a lot of cows.