National Poetry Month: Lucas Howell

"Primitive Road"

(Lucas Howell)

Say you love the albums with the smoky riffs

and downbeat rhythms. Here, they beg, fall in with us.

Forget that book, have a whiskey ... have another.

Say you love the books, the words

and the silences between the words --

failed yellow dashes on a disused highway.

Say you love the highway, the blacktop

and the bullet-riddled sign that reads

Primitive Road where the blacktop ends.

Say you love the fields, the black of midnight,

coyotes' yipped prayers and 

their raw thirst for hens.

Say you love the raw salt of powder

when its ghost rises from the rifle's breech

and settles, sweet with lead, in your lungs.

Then breathe what's left back to the world --

speak the coyote's tongue, sweat the nitro

from your blood, say you love what you've become.

"Primitive Road" by Lucas Howell appeared in the November 2006 issue of Poetry. His 2006 collection is The Lonesome Crowded West.