Descendant’s Invocation

Dadgum if grieving’s not a full-time endeavor. Are you still with me, Steve? I think I feel you in what snags my senses—a porch light’s chuckle on the darkling hillside, or is it Venus, hovering low? An owl’s offended growl coasting on cicadas’ backs. This body’s tendency toward addiction. They say you get one great dog of your life. Wendy died old, wide-eyed with pain, just as Georgia was conceived. O, gather here to me, spirits, ye saints of my songbook! I call you, Steve. I call you, Wendy. Bow-shot toms, extinct moths, unknown builders of the persistent stone fences of Gorby and Hogeye, I summon you now. Take up your washboards and scrub my mind. Burn what I know and what I want on the altar of what I love. Earth and air, grief and gratitude are two flanks of a cavity easily ingressed, a bold summer doe passing dappled through oakshade. This body only feels like a cage. This body is a rawhide knapsack carrying me through paradise, and all of y’all with me.

Megan Blankenship is a writer living in the Ozark Mountains. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Phoebe, Greensboro Review, and Southern Indiana Review. In 2018, she spent six months living alone in an off-grid cabin in the Pacific Northwest as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Find her at meganblankenship.com.