Dodo Eraser

Venturing Out, Raleigh, Tennessee, 1965

When I ventured out with the other
boys, past the burgeoning
suburbs, to the cold and skeletal
woods, I was always afraid
I would not find my way home. I
was more afraid that it would
not matter, that home never really
needed me, and that I never really
needed home. What if I disappeared?
What if I didn’t exist out in the
peripheries of civilization? It got
colder and then darker. I walked on. I
kept moving. The other boys were ahead
of me until they weren’t there at all.
I kept walking. What if I kept walking?

Crab Apples

When I was a lad in Raleigh,
Tennessee, a walk to the
store felt like opening the full
world of possibility. Ahead were
stores replete with the gold
of the ages. On the way we cut
through a yard where crab apple
trees marked our halfway point.
We stole an apple each and
they were as bitter as alum. We
washed the taste from our mouths
at the Kress counter, where we
had griddle hamburgers, fries,
and cokes on ice. Those excursions
seem ineffable now. The next
week we would make the same
trek again and we would eat
from the same trees, fully
expecting that this time the fruit
would be as sweet as the apples of Eden.

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Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Lunch Ticket, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published over 50 books of fiction and poetry. His newest book, A Troubling of Goldfish, is from Big Table Books. With his wife he runs Burke’s Book Store (est. 1875) in Memphis.