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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).




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