Rustin Larson
The Carter Family Gets Famous
I’m an acrobat swimmer.
Lean on.
They had a white mountain
and I want that mountain.
Rabbit they all called it.
To eat an apple,
the mountain has tears.
Their snakes resemble
those that slide like snow.
Pet until the branches
slide down a pane of glass.
They all got apple trees;
her archtop guitar,
hungry for an offer,
had a neck like a 2x4.
Barbecued little.
Then she tuned it
to rabbit flesh
so their convolutions
with a hammer
they toasted a package of nails,
the little critter,
and French fries,
their first recording.
Had him for breakfast.
I gave it my all;
it happened in November,
Thanksgiving,
but it wasn’t my best,
and she left
because they couldn’t
or her ankles itched for his cousin.
Afford no Turkey;
curiously, the traffic,
Maybelle or Sara,
wild or Madison Avenue,
The Carter Family otherwise
gave way to sad,
to reunite in reunion,
to the orangeade,
these Virginia gals,
they were stands
in nowheresville,
got to be looked at talking.
That is my out-for-about
alcoholic kind of imagination,
salvaged like a sack
that fits on this Sunday
of broken blue glass
in a laziness of spice,
the throat sickness,
tub, pink eyed
and notorious
and the sleep
that overtakes you.
Rustin Larson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry East, Saranac Review, Poets &Artists and other magazines. He is the author of The Wine-Dark House (Blue Light Press, 2009) and Crazy Star (selected for the Loess Hills Book’s Poetry Series in 2005). Larson won 1st Editor’s Prize from Rhino magazine in 2000 and has won prizes for his poetry from The National Poet Hunt and The Chester H. Jones Foundation among others. A seven-time Pushcart nominee, and graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing, Larson was an Iowa Poet at The Des Moines National Poetry Festival in 2002 & 2004, a featured writer in the DMACC Celebration of the Literary Arts in 2007 & 2008, and he was a featured poet at the Poetry at Round Top [Texas] Festival in May 2012. His latest collection, Bum Cantos, Winter Jazz, & The Collected Discography of Morning, won the 2013 Blue Light Book Award (Blue Light Press, San Francisco).
Return to May 2014 Edition
I’m an acrobat swimmer.
Lean on.
They had a white mountain
and I want that mountain.
Rabbit they all called it.
To eat an apple,
the mountain has tears.
Their snakes resemble
those that slide like snow.
Pet until the branches
slide down a pane of glass.
They all got apple trees;
her archtop guitar,
hungry for an offer,
had a neck like a 2x4.
Barbecued little.
Then she tuned it
to rabbit flesh
so their convolutions
with a hammer
they toasted a package of nails,
the little critter,
and French fries,
their first recording.
Had him for breakfast.
I gave it my all;
it happened in November,
Thanksgiving,
but it wasn’t my best,
and she left
because they couldn’t
or her ankles itched for his cousin.
Afford no Turkey;
curiously, the traffic,
Maybelle or Sara,
wild or Madison Avenue,
The Carter Family otherwise
gave way to sad,
to reunite in reunion,
to the orangeade,
these Virginia gals,
they were stands
in nowheresville,
got to be looked at talking.
That is my out-for-about
alcoholic kind of imagination,
salvaged like a sack
that fits on this Sunday
of broken blue glass
in a laziness of spice,
the throat sickness,
tub, pink eyed
and notorious
and the sleep
that overtakes you.
Rustin Larson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry East, Saranac Review, Poets &Artists and other magazines. He is the author of The Wine-Dark House (Blue Light Press, 2009) and Crazy Star (selected for the Loess Hills Book’s Poetry Series in 2005). Larson won 1st Editor’s Prize from Rhino magazine in 2000 and has won prizes for his poetry from The National Poet Hunt and The Chester H. Jones Foundation among others. A seven-time Pushcart nominee, and graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing, Larson was an Iowa Poet at The Des Moines National Poetry Festival in 2002 & 2004, a featured writer in the DMACC Celebration of the Literary Arts in 2007 & 2008, and he was a featured poet at the Poetry at Round Top [Texas] Festival in May 2012. His latest collection, Bum Cantos, Winter Jazz, & The Collected Discography of Morning, won the 2013 Blue Light Book Award (Blue Light Press, San Francisco).
Return to May 2014 Edition