Return to Wraith's Profanity

As morning bled a slit of curtain,
breath slid slowly from the prone body.
Shivered liver. Dogs yapped farewell.
You felt no wagons on the horizon.
Wraith, you are full of sad verses.
Forty years to approach near silence.
If I cut the grass around a trailer
do I admit I live there alone?
If grass around a trailer is already dead
did you leave a message in diesel?
Dear longed-for communicant,
this tract of dirt stashes a curse.
As morning beckoned your eyelids
to lift, a quiet song hushed, died.
Empty pill bottles transfixed us.
I shiver in a window. At nothing.

Clay Cantrell is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Memphis. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Toad, New Delta Review, Midwest Quarterly, and others. He is currently ridding a farmhouse of a rat snake infestation, in Decatur County, Tennessee.