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Driving down from Georgia and the Doors Are Painted Blue

By Anne Barngrover
Poetry•Vol. XXVI No. 1 (Spring 2013)

The devil does my dirty work: I wish you could know and not know. The devil squats
at Fat Mac’s BBQ. The devil suckles beer–can chicken to beer–can

bone. Shot Well Road. Quail Rise Road. Signs say, chicks here, rabbits here, Jesus
is here, and the churches are white and poor. The funnel cloud is a forest

fire. The forest fire is controlled—a blue house on wooden stilts, a bare-armed woman
throwing branches onto more. Tell me this time I’m at nobody’s

mercy. If I dream a snake, my enemy waits behind any door. Love, I killed the snake.
His jowls, they fattened. His hands flapped to old catfish. His words turned

marbles into dung. If I will it, he cannot hurt me anymore. And you, you are a good
man. An open country. A church’s red door. I wish you to bring all my animals

out of hiding: black cows in their green swamp, white geese pecking at carrion,
goats behind trees and their kids spring born—small devils I find on my way back home.

Anne Barngrover’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Indiana Review, Nimrod, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Smartish Pace, among others. She is a first-year PhD candidate in Poetry at the University of Missouri.

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