It's Hot in Hell

Impounded cars tell no tales.
Compound fractures tell the folks in CSI plenty.
Impacted wisdom teeth have to be broken before they’re taken out.
Much like your mother did.
Enacted laws are fears made flesh.
Exacto™ knives cannot be taken on planes for fear of what they will do.
I am a six-foot-tall Exacto™ knife.
Pomegranate seeds are the real food, not the flesh of the fruit.
I took your mother for granted, the things I made her wear.
Once planted in the South, kudzu vines go everywhere.
Women are not kudzu vines.
But you knew that about your mama.
Alabama is the kind of south they mean when they say “The South.”
Hot nasty green stuff in every pouch of land.
Your mother didn’t care about Alabama’s Chekov scholars at three in the morning.
Demanding air conditioning and to get the car back.
Just standing there, wanting an explanation.
Like creeping vine in full station over the doorway.
Grapes make wine, grapes grow on the vine.
Whine whine whine whine whine whine whine.
What a time for her roots to shoot deep.
Drunk, half-dead, keys still on my ring.
Including the one for the shed.
Chekov said if there’s a gun in Act One, it has to go off by Act Three.
Same thing with garden tools, machetes for instance.
And to think, your mom used to call me a hack!
Now I look back, she didn’t know the half of it.




Sean Hoade is finishing the MFA program at The University of Alabama. His work has appeared in The Pub, Chic, Dissociated Writers Project Journal, and elsewhere. Currently he is working on both a novel and collection of short stories, both investigating Buddhist themes.


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