by G.H. Plaag
for Aiden Hale
Tennessee rain is like the dew
on a plum. whether you are clinging
to the cliffs of Chattanooga or antiquing
in Elizabethton, this holds true.
today’s rain is the freezerburn
on a Hungry-Man, ruinous and specific,
shards in mashed potatoes. the rain
falls and reminds me where i am
and what has happened here this year.
Tennessee rain is the vogue way to say
my aliving is a threat. it is the reason
they call me child-killer. it is the same rain
that fell on the hollers and the plains
and the blue ridge and the delta
and the flora of the twenty-eight years
of one young boy’s young life. we won’t romance
him. we have a bad habit of styling
certain murders as soap operas and others
as pollution. this is neither. this is
Tennessee rain for twenty-eight years without a culvert.
what we call evil is reaction to evil which is
reaction to the rain. we must stress this,
that some of us get caught without windbreakers.
we are pale and naked in the pounding
driving rain. sometimes in this wilderness
we kill. when i say we i do not mean we
trans people, i mean we people. we people
kill. we kill and kill, we bomb, we slaughter
things with sweet soft eyes, we rob
the land of its ichor, we kill, we kill,
and we do it with faces like we’re taking
out the trash, like we’re checking our emails.
Tennessee rain is a trick to mark the killers
among us with one hard name. we have seen
the mitosis of evil so we want to find
that first bad cell. and we know it
has no name, no root. we know this truly
but we need to shift the spotlight from ourselves,
from our own suspicious vices, like we’re playing
a schoolyard game of mafia. this year, the killer
is anyone who dares to summit the penitentiary walls
of their own bodies. we are cells one to one million.
we are close to the root of evil, the one watered by
Tennessee rain. his name will never matter.
the way we see him is he is holding a gun
to the temple of a child. the way they see it is
you are, too.
smell the rain. hear the arbors
open to its falling.
don’t shoot.
G.H. Plaag is a queer poet, writer, and musician hailing from Boston and various corners of the American South. They received their MFA from Hollins University, where they taught, and have published work with Tahoma Literary Review, Winning Writers, The Hyacinth Review, the Winter Anthology, and Poets.org, among others. Currently, they reside in New Orleans, where they are developing a novel in conversation with various structures of power along the Gulf Coast.