Author: Jeremy Ray Jewell

Why’d I Quit Trucking to Become a Writer

Trucking days… I’d get there when I’d get there, and they’d better be appreciative that I even came. At least that’s how it looks through the fog of time. Sleeping under the stars, in the desert, not giving a rat’s ass if anyone ever read my poems. I figured they’d find them blowing across the prairies after I got blown off an overpass by a tornado or something. Ah, nostalgic now for the deaths I didn’t die. God damn it, what a stupid dream to pursue, to be a writer. They say you never know until you try, but here I am — I know my homeland like the back of my hand just trying to stay between the mayo and the mustard, for what it’s worth. Not worth a damn thing to write about, so it seems. It’d’a been worth dying in a Freightliner, though. You gotta die somehow. Better not die trying, better to die living, no? Anyhow… here I am. Alive and trying… something… between the mayo and the mustard.

Oh, The Supreme Condescension

There is no transcendentalism in Lima. However, there are plenty of murals with humans who change into trees, or trees that change into humans, or trees shaking hands, or people mingling roots. They’re the kinds of murals that Thoreau left Concord to avoid. It’s all supremely condescending. Nothing adequately depicts the natural horror which is true religion. Ecological etiquette aside, the public beach ended or began where the Indigenous migrants were washing their artisanal dresses in the plastic-filled stream of water running off from the city. The police searched my bag thoroughly for packaged items. They paced the shoreline watching for littering at any point between plastic run-off wash site and plastic run-off wash site. I walked along the authenticated meters of designated beach along the 71% Earth surface of plastinated ocean until I saw something sticking up from the sand. I dug it up with my foot. It was a red and black doll, made with synthetic dyes, wrapped up in synthetic ribbon. “Brujeria,” said the cop strolling by, “you better leave it there”. Like I said, true religion is very hard to find. It’s all so supremely condescending.

Tactile Afterlife

Originally published in Heron Clan VI

I was at the age to guard the way the creek flowed like
it was some penmanship of larger men into the brown Carolina
and since waited on the country road and backwoods bridge

to become the compassionate elder viewing young catastrophes
and stepping panic stricken out into the power line clearing
as into the incisions of the black bear through hickory bark.

Then the dogwood blossoms fell before you knew it,
and with a vomit of flora the pessimism echo was muffled
as only I now recall how one or the other will first die.

Though in that green fury I am elated that it may be me.
The revolutionist’s preference is to explode like spring spores.
To collapse like the winter buck is the blackest rot.

Such interest in the produce of minds, you know, but
Carolina grows and grows again out of the cavities of
unevacuated chests – it may only be so.

Good News Crackles

Originally published in Heron Clan VI

Driving through the Carolina forests late
at night and the radio moves from music with
advice to music with recipes. Then come the
Jesus stations – all 20 or so. One, then
another. Eventually one reaches out to you,
between the trees and through your headlights,
out of the products and pop songs, splitting
apart the comfortable and the beautiful and
the meaningful people like storm clouds overhead,
and it grabs you by the lapels. It’s been

looking for You, has a message for You. It
has a job. For You. An audio exit opens in
the highway and you’re on it. Exit 81.7 FM,
downtown Jerusalem, Edge of Empire, USA. When
it’s all over you keep it like a psalm in the
glove box, unfolding it for a second in the
parking lot before work, or you read it out
loud in the break room. Because Carolina has
some comfortable, beautiful, meaningful, dark
clouds hovering over it. Good news crackles

on the airwaves, and somewhere sometime it’s
got to rip. Prosperity will rain down on the
forests and the forest people will become
woodland titans. Pulled teeth will resprout.
Lost jobs will be found. We might even buy
back the farm. So think the dry bones
on the Carolina highways at night.

Hillbilly of Monterey Bay

Originally published in Heron Clan VI

Hillbilly Larry and I looked back on all
those America places that weren’t beaches
and we probably thunk a spell on all
those beach places that weren’t America.
We poked a dead bloated seal with a stick and
pointed to a flat otter on the road and he said
“you know I don’t read,” and I said, “neither
do most, honky,” an’ that’d be why the

Steinbeck Center was back in town and
Hillbilly Larry and I are walking among the
lettuce in flip-flops an’ West Virginia Reeboks
talkin’ the cardinal directions what organize us.
Lar never saw the ocean before and I
hadn’t seen a tent city for a few days but
I looked at Larry and I pointed out to sea
“I ain’t ‘splainin nothin’ to you, Larry. Go

get knocked around by a coupla waves,
then we’ll get drunk and I’ll talk about all the
beach towns I know back East.” Lar knew
better ‘an that… “‘slong as I don’t wind up
suppin’ on a young girl’s breast or lookin’
out there thinkin’ a rabbits,” “I’m tired of
your hillbilly crap, Larry,” I said, “go swim!
I want you to text me from China by noon.”