Thinking about It

for the nine

I’ve taught myself to dance while watching
my bare feet, because that’s the only 
way I can do it. But I’ll admit
it sounds pretty silly to those in-

spired cloggers among us, who du-
tifully close eyes and mind as
they pirouette in the undrunken
coffee of pre-dawn—those free spirits
WCW has called

“the happy genius of my household.”
You see, the bunion on my left foot
is so large, my big toe gets trumped by
its left-handed brother. Whenever

I step, I never have more than nine
toes scribbling choreography. Still,
that’s one for every muse—with one
left over, never touching the ground—
twirled into my own twisted style of

transcendence.

Crape Myrtles

Even dead people can grow them.
— Felder Rushing, The Gestalt Gardener

They call it crape murder
that chainsaw pruning straight out of a slasher movie
leaving perfectly good trees
limbless—whose only crime was growing
too big for the hell strip between sidewalk and street.

Bonsai with nothing but squat stubs
of silvery bones—Mongols
slaughtered by Mongols in caps
that defame every college blessed
by a football team.

Yet nobody dies. Months later, they’re bright
as Popsicles—grape, strawberry, lemonade—
refusing to melt in the August heat. Even
the ones in the highway median 

rammed by Rams
flattened by F-150s
trashed by Tacomas
severed by Silverados

come back, come back,
battered spirits
dependable as Hamlet’s ghost
cheerful as Caspar.

The forked one in my front yard got guillotined
by a Ponderosa pine during an ice storm
perhaps fifteen years ago—then spurted
flowers like blood for a decade.

Now it’s almost nothing
but bare bark, loose lichen, a few
fizzled fireworks in July, petering out above
my father’s ashes. 

This winter I’ll cut it down to twin trunks,
maybe spray it with Triox, even mulch it
with rocks. And when I’m finished                           
let’s show Jesus how it’s done.

Gilbert Allen's most recent books are Believing in Two Bodies (a collection of poems) and The Beasts of Belladonna (a collection of linked stories). A longtime resident of Travelers Rest, he was elected to The South Carolina Academy of Authors, the state's literary hall of fame, in 2014.