Pecan Grandiflora, Peppervine Dowitcher

Ian U. Lockaby

Ian U. Lockaby’s poems have appeared, or will soon appear, in APARTMENT, Bomb Cyclone, and CutBank. He’s the Assistant Editor and Translations Editor at New Delta Review and co-director of the Underpass Reading Series in Baton Rouge, LA.

Pecan Grandiflora

The texture of the text is
a bark of the word is

can’t make
identification take
to the tree

Palmetto berries
bottled at the source

A child
by the roadside
mid-morning fall

on a Tuesday—
What’s in school

fleshly-wrapped
every letter
a graded meat

All the woods
wrapped in
leather butcher paper—

an embalming
a plant pulp
an animalia.

Peppervine Dowitcher

If these bitter skeins
could unravel

into sweetness,
they would—but
they’re made

of sound—
if sound
could see shapes

in the clouds and
if they fell on me

One would be
the shape of the sound
of the word for you

and if you tried it
in your mouth, it would
feel like

What the word means
having just met
the sound

a song before sentencing—
a soft spot of bark

that is your only
footing—a forecast
of the whether.

Issue 10.1