by Milo Wolverton
Pennsylvania sky
like smoky brown beans.
A withered green house,
I’m smug and sixteen.
Plastic diamond
of a dim chandelier
and tabletops flanked
by walled veneer.
My toes tap
on the cat-tongue bristle carpet
with orange flowers
scribbled across it.
The wicker chairs wobble
like squeaky teeter totters,
and a woman named Joyce
is calling me granddaughter.
Me,
I’m her “deformity,”
my masculinity
and gender nonconformity.
Her foaming lips
muzzle me
until I retch
from her breath
baptized
in Pall Mall cigarettes.
While upstairs there’s
rabbit-sized rats
stacked
dead in Joyce’s bath.
Bloated piles of bile
stain the tiles that
replaced the bricks
that Grandpa made
before the rot
of steel mill graves.
Before the devil’s breath
licked Grandpa’s teeth
with cancer
and Grandpa,
a proud union man,
was dead at 43.
Rats moseyed
all over town
after they tore
the steel mills down.
Those rats razed the rattle
of blue-collar dreams,
fleet-footed and fading
into unmanned machines.
That was Pennsylvania’s
last gasp,
her lungs blue and black.
Her mill workers morphed
into feral insomniacs
or pig skin grins
devouring Prozac.
So I fled
at 16,
to streets
that screamed
“God hates fags,”
and so hated me
like Amber,
my ex-lady
who pummeled me
constantly.
It took 8 years
to break free
of a love that always
threatened
to kill or consume me,
but after
some time passed,
I started to believe
that the tide
was finally
changing for me
when suddenly,
Pennsylvania
always ruthless
and mocking me,
my baby brother
became another tragedy.
He was doe-eyed and desperate
so he doused his pain
with all of the blood
from inside his brain.
43.
Bruised lungs.
23.
Sudden guns.
The morticians
sweep my family
into
a jar.
Now I go back
to the rats
stacked
dead
in Joyce’s bath
when all I wanted
was downstream
from my bootstrap blue
Pennsylvania dreams.
Milo Wolverton is a post-traditional student studying English at Winthrop University. They grew up in a blue-collar town in Western Pennsylvania, but they now live in South Carolina with their wife, cat, and three dogs. Milo identifies as queer and trans and is interested in exploring issues of class, queerness, and trauma in their writing.