Tyler Allen Penny
Image by Anna Essentiels on Unsplash
Tyler Allen Penny is a queer poet, performer, and educator from a one stoplight town in the pine belt of Mississippi. His poems can be found in Crazyhorse, Best New Poets 2018, Columbia Journal, The Southampton Review, Deep South Magazine, OF ZOOS, Fearsome Critters: A Millennial Arts Journal, and elsewhere. His work has also been included in Entropy Magazine’s Best of 2020-2021: Favorite Poems Published Online. He is the recipient of the Joseph Kelly Prize and scholarships to attend Tin House's Winter Workshop, Taleamor Park and the Vermont Studio Center. In 2017, He received his M.F.A. from Stony Brook Southampton. He lives and teaches in Brooklyn, NY.
Small Town Mythology
Rust red burst forth through white paint
fissures like gashes
across your mother’s iron-boned
garden bench. We lounged around
kissing each other on the mouth in search of things less practical
but beautiful like burning pine needle voodoo dolls
with stolen Bic lighters
and pricking fingers on spiny
sweet-gum wrecking balls.
We kings of pearled magnolia bade with bamboo flutes
each morning’s dew to bloom our kudzu kingdom.
Between the slick
of hurricanes, evening honey suckle lightly
soured the dreamy haze of sweat-stained streets. We danced
the muddy swamp blues till our eyes
glared like gator jewels, then raced
barefoot back down the black tar highway
that coiled slowly around
the scorned backside of our town.
The grim moon grinning through boughs of dead pecan,
urging us back home with go on,
go on.
go on.__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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