Self Analysis: Freud in Western Kentucky

When the coroner cuts our mothers
open he will find coffee
grounds and sugar, diamond-like residue
of 6AM congregations
with other brown females, their tongues
bright blue flares as if their men
were permanently lost. We often wished
we had you, Herr Doktor, in the vicinity.
There were things to talk over:
Why the slippage of the Now? How is birth
a trauma when we took to life like lovers?

Near the Appalachian foothills
liquids are not lucid. Our mutant fathers,
parched beyond recognition, came home
at night blackened, angry
at the dead earth’s failure to yield.
There were no tasty sisters waiting,
no patients nicknamed Lil Queenie,
as if they were royalty. In Kentucky
sofas were slept upon, two by two.

And so the days come, then go, then leave.

Our relatives are perfectly unable to remain
satisfied. We stay locked in trances.
One neighbor Gladdie Dingaling has thighs
like a man, made bold from the terrible terrain,
each customer less jagged, unlike our children.
She will hear our confessions
only when the line outside dwindles. She smothers us
with flat-chested violence. The line
grows longer with each failed theory.

Piss on your Viennese practice: the rich
sport with illness, like college boys
playing blues guitar. In our pockets
we carry shreds of rope from an aborted
lynching: it brings us this spatchcocked luck.
Your science claims dividends
of clarity but in our mother’s mother’s gauzy
bed we dream of white trapdoors--
even Baptists need angels. But you wrote,
in German, for God’s sakes,
that they meant menthol cigarettes, over-desperate
condensations of self love and fear over cock
cuttings. Women may read that! Why not

walk across the Atlantic and come here
and write about

the evil
that breaks down
our front porches, the lawns full
of nephews
stillborn and blue and buried
nameless, our fathers like bad-luck cemeteries
sinking hunchbacked into bourbon bottles
as fierce rains from Missouri force
their coal cars to grind
the caves’ rocky mud,
tiny metal wheels spinning and locking,
lurching and crablike, then churning
upward, at last, trespassing
the scorched oval entrance, half
of the latent cargo spilling
out, black shards of ascendant gems.