redux, "things that stanley plumly said"

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,

usually just cancer or tractor accidents.)

people from ohio

all grew up in one-room schoolhouses

and poked crawdads with sticks and ate pokeberries

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
(memories only ohioans can see: ghosts of human victims,
ghosts of genetically manipulated fish),

people from ohio are born

already situated in the middle ground,

the demographic demarcations of society

having no effect in a place like east cleveland

or the foothills of appalachia—

people from ohio have a higher amount of nitrogen

and arsenic and fluoride in their bodies

simply for having been grown in ohio.

i know these things because i am from ohio,

because arsenic and corn and concrete have lived in my heart

since i was old enough to recognize

what having mud and dirt and chemicals in the bloodstream can feel like:

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 ceiling fan,

and when we found him

he was still dancing, jumping a little, maybe it was just

the polluted blood still pumping.

i am from ohio in the same way

calves are from cows.

and i have seen a lot of cows.