Nicholas Molbert
On Showing You My Hometown for the First Time
Let’s follow the funk
of diesel and washed-up
redfish carrion to the coastline
of this town.
The number of people
here who know
the definition of petrichor
is exactly you. Petrochor,
am I right? The cattails submit
to the emission-whiff of the wind.
They bow to the refinery
as if to they pay their respects,
pay for their slow death.
Men get cut a good check
to work at the shop there
but come out years later
with crude slang and chronic ailments.
The gasoline coming
from the refinery powers
planes that allow
my parents to smoke
their den with vetivergrass vapor.
As you can tell, this town is obsessed
with elsewhere. There is
a boutique named Else
Wear just over the horizon.
And in the same direction
is my elementary school
where I hacky sacked through
recess and swung from an old
wooden derrick-turned-playground.
In the spirit of elsewhereism,
the town calls that derrick
The Steiffel Tower.
They just hopped over
the Atlantic to France, forgot
the fact that the Tower
was based on a copy of the first inland
rig only a handful
of miles away in Jennings.
An old farmer stuck it right
in the middle
of his crawfish ponds.
Those little lobsters didn’t give
a shit either.
They kept on keeping on
just as everybody else does
on this coast. Tomorrow,
we can oops over the fence
into the playground
and goof off
on the makeshift bars.
We can kick a homemade
hacky sack made from short
grain rice and a crew sock.
Let’s come back at sundown
when the horizon glows red.
Let’s play hopscotch
in the grid made
from the day’s leftover sun
as it shines through
the trifle of this derrick.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Originally from the Louisiana Gulf Coast, Nicholas Molbert now lives and writes in Cincinnati. His chapbook, Goodness Gracious, won Foundlings Press's 2019 Wallace Award. His poetry and prose has been published in or is forthcoming from Birmingham Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, Mississippi Review, Missouri Review Online, Ninth Letter and Pleiades among others.