Rick Mulkey

Poetry

Rick Mulkey is the author of five books and chapbooks, including Ravenous: New & Selected Poems, Toward Any Darkness, Bluefield Breakdown, and Before the Age of Reason. Previous and current work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Southeast Review, South Carolina Review, and Crab Orchard Review. He currently directs and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Converse College in South Carolina.

 

Mingo County Men

When I knew them as boys
shooting spit wads at Principal Martin
and sneaking peeks at the fishnet hose
of our young 4th grade teacher Ms. McCall,
they already sneered like grown men
with jobs as haul truck drivers
or longwall miners for Independence Coal.

They already had wives whose girlhood
dreams had fallen flat as cakes
dislodged from Easy Bake Ovens,
whose cheerleader smiles were swapped
for a Bud and a bottle of Oxy.

Even then, slipping on sneakers
instead of steel-toed boots, their houses had an air
of lumberyard sawdust and coal-tar pitch.
Their lunches carried the stench of onions
and potted meat. Their hands, stained yellow
by Camels they’d snatch from their father’s packs,
were already calloused and gashed.

And how they dropped then crushed
the finished butts beneath their feet
said failure; though, they still stood,
that harness of smoke encircling them, watching
and waiting for their futures to begin.

In the rural Appalachian community where I grew up, I knew a number of boys who started work at very young ages, many of them barely teens. They always stood off from the rest of us, said very little, and were seasoned and aged in ways the rest of us never fully understood. Occasionally, they would show up to take part in an afternoon touch football game or basketball game, but usually you’d find them after school waiting near the school bus garage smoking cigarettes. I often wondered what had happened to them. This poem started as a response to an old elementary school photograph I came across. At about that same time I was also reading articles on how several West Virginia counties had been decimated by the prescription drug epidemic. All of these elements played some role in the writing of ‘Mingo County Men.’

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