POINT BLANK

by Ida Stewart

 

          “You can have my right arm, but you’ll never get my mountain.”
                    —Larry Gibson, on his stand against mountaintop removal coal mining

                       

 

                       

 

This is a point: a green island in a sea
of scar, a rise not unlike his potbelly

under the neon green t-shirt—
and what with the hilltop cemetery like a belly

full of bodies resting sweetly, we could fairly
call his attachment umbilical.

And after all—his overall
pockets and pores emptied of the earth—all that’s left
squirreled away

is his blood.
But back to the point

and how they’re making it for him,
finer and higher and deader-

on than he ever could, waiting
here with the squat rocks waiting

to be eroded
into the holler—

the sound of their machines, he thinks,
brainless as barking:

that ceaseless ghost dog of his
filling in the blank of night.

           

           

 

           

Return to table of contents here.