On the white wet branches of the wawa tree, still clutching the last brittle leaves of harmattan, two doves land. They say, “Go,” and still, I want to make them into something they are not. Ananse’s messengers, whispers of ancestors, a sign from the other side of the veil. What news do they bring from the world beyond? It cannot be good. More hunger, more hands reaching for a future stolen before birth, more blades dulling against old scars, more salt in the wounds of those who kneel beneath the great trees, waiting for snow. And snow does come—a hesitant dusting, falling from whatever we believe lies beyond the sky. The doves seem enormous, as big as condors, but only because I watch them too closely, ask them to mean too much. They do not care for omens or prayers. A shake of a wing, and both are gone. No message given, no message asked of me, only their absence and my own silence, settling like the dry-season wind on the white wet branches of the wawa tree.

What do we do with the boy, do we burn him, do we nest him in dirt or stone, do we wrap him in cedar and myrrh, in muslin, in all our questions, then lower him into a country of worms? What becomes of a son’s body, if none of us names it now, if we leave it for time to dissolve— will it soften like wax or shrivel like salted meat in the sun? We have the denim torn at the knee, his cracked phone, the shoelace knotted like an unfinished prayer— are these relics or trash? Is grief what gives them weight? If the sheet stained with his sleep still holds the shape of him, would it be a kind of betrayal to wash it clean? Or worse, to wear it in secret, like armor? On the floor, beneath his dresser: a drawing he made, him as a hawk. Was this a wish, or a warning? Did he know how close the wind had come to taking him? Do we call the priest, or the flame? My brother says bury. My mother weeps for fire—“ashes can be held,” she says. My father hasn’t spoken since the accident, just holds the box of his childhood teeth like a god measuring what Job once lost. And I—I look at my own hands, half-expecting chains, Prometheus-style, welded by silence, left to the vultures. No one grieves the god who brought us the spark; we only light it. My brother says, “He was a boy, not a myth.” But I saw it— he tried to bring light to us. And what now? Shall we build a pyre in the backyard and call it a cathedral? Shall we drag him to earth and let it take its toll? Shall we exile him to memory? Was he a country we lost without maps? Is grief its own topography—floodplain, drought, scorched field? Was this what Hercules felt, if he ever lost a son? (But did Hercules ever have a son who died?) Does that mean he was spared this? Does it mean he was no man at all? And what then am I, still living? Where is the hole they talk about, the one you can crawl into and forget? Is forgetting, too, a kind of godsend? How long does it take— how many mornings, how many crows? I look at my hands, again. Once they held him. Now they only ask questions. What do we do with the body? What do I do with these fists?

They found him face-up, a hush in the reeds / Birds combing the spindle trees, eyes like pond-glass, buzzing out glitch-songs above the body / not again, not again / moss swaddled his jaw like a jaw still thinking / his eyes full of dusted glass / not shut, not open / He was once fire / once feet / once cornmeal and deer sinew / now just wet cloth and the smell of rusted pennies / Swamp moss draped over the arcades / the frogs croak / tabulate / bear witness without comment / we watched them—two of them― half-boys, half-breath / The first son did not speak / The second son dropped to his knees in the bog-water / cupped air before he dared touch / He reached for the man’s cheek the way one might reach for fire they used to know / a cheek like dried leather / a ghost’s shoulder / he wanted to know him / to call him back / to say: you were not alone / we saw you / we came / But the first son gripped his wrist—tight― No / said with a glance / No / said with the bones he came from / the rule was unspoken / The frogs croaked louder / like rattles / or teeth in an old mouth / The boy fought for the right to know / to press palm to cheek / to feel the weight of the silence passed down / to name what had no name but memory / or warning / or mirror / The swamp took in his struggle / did not speak / only shivered its mosquitoes / flexed its breath / A drop of body oil the size of a water balloon slid from the man’s collar / split on a fern / atomized into salt and silence / Roiling in the stillness was something holy / or wrong / or both / A footstep is a swamp in which gators rise / a carnival of teeth beneath us / He was once breath / once drum / now just a story the earth almost forgot / And still—the boy wanted to touch him / as the frogs croaked / as the sky held its breath as moss curled around the names we never say aloud.

If I’m honest, the story reached me like heat rolling in off desert stone this man, not yet thirty, pulling water from the bones of jars and making it wine. They say he opened a blind man’s eyes with spit and dust, called a dead man out of his tomb like it was nothing more than sleep. But what if, by some ruin in the stars, some curse woven through our lineage like cracked olive branches, the grief still comes no matter how we bow, or lift our hands toward something greater? The way they found Ezra’s boy folded in the straw behind the stable, face calm as if dreaming, the mother shaking him softly, then not at all what god would allow that? Am I wrong to say I stopped praying after that? I even said as much on the walk back through the alleys of the old quarter, where bread cost more than a man’s word, and word of miracles passed quicker than famine. Even now, when someone says they’ve seen him—the Nazarene standing in the market with eyes like fire held at bay, I feel my chest lock up. At any moment, something terrible could crack open again. A child gone, a wife taken by fever. The ache hasn’t left me. It sits behind the ribs, quiet as a lion waiting. They say he walks among us now. That he weeps. That he laughs. That his touch is like morning. But I have been wrong before. I have waited, and nothing came. Still….still.. I want it to be true. I want the blind to see. The dead to rise. The stone rolled back. One day, I will believe again, I feel it coming― like thunder under sand. I will walk the path barefoot, head bowed, asking only for a sign that the world might heal. That someone still walks among us who remembers how.

The truth is, I’ve never cared for country music. If I’m honest, it always felt like a party I wasn’t invited to—like someone else’s Sunday dinner, all laughter and long vowels, but not a seat for me. The steel guitar wails too high, the stories too clean or too whitewashed pickup trucks and blue jeans, small-town heartbreak, but never the sorrow I knew, never the kind you couldn’t sing with your boots still on. Once, I tried to like it. Drove down a two-lane road in Georgia with the windows cracked, a man on the radio singing about freedom and his daddy’s rifle. I didn’t turn it off, but it didn’t reach me either. It felt like a quilt stitched without my fabric. Felt like something kept sacred, guarded. Still, don’t get me wrong I respect country folk. The way they fix things without calling someone. The way they remember who raised them. Their quiet codes. Their loyalty. They don’t trust easy, but when they do, they mean it. I've seen a man cry over a horse and never speak of it again. And maybe that’s why the music stays the way it is. Because the people have stayed—close to their land, close to their grief. They hold their music like they hold their dead: with both arms, tight. They don't need it to change. And maybe it shouldn't. But still, there’s a third verse, even in this music. A place you don't always hear beneath the fiddles, beneath the twang something bruised, something borrowed. We come in through the back door, but we come singing too. DeFord Bailey, Charley Pride, Mickey Guyton—they all brought something holy into the room. And maybe that's enough for now. To know we’re echoes in the holler. To know the land still hums with us.

thank you for visiting. this town— a mouth of saxophones. you’ll love it. or hate it. but either way, the sound stays. how long’s it been? since we slipped through the back alley of a burning country, stage smoke on our collars, gravel in our teeth. twenty years since I last sang beneath a chandelier shaped like a crown. forty since they lined up in velvet coats to watch me rise from silence & fall back into it. memory presses harder than this bone-thick air. they say: music lives forever. but I live inside a broken octave. my brother— if I can call him that— stitched me into this gold-lined grotesque. come closer. feel the fire's hush. it sounds like applause from behind a curtain. watch the logs— each one a former tree flattening into the color of forgetting. he said I could be preserved. said the voice was worth whatever came after. & what came after was a clamp. a white coat. an open lie about a fall that never happened. opium. a shallow bowl. a sound that split the room from my future. the body, made holy by removal. they said I sang like god. like gold being melted & poured into a throat. the cities bowed. the marquees blinked my name into every dusk. but no one asked where the rest of me had gone. I did not take a wife. the dark between the notes was enough. still, I wonder: could the voice have deepened & remained divine? what if I was meant to be thunder, not lightning? I’ll never know. what was taken wasn’t just what made me a man. it was the hour I was never allowed to grow into. the father I could’ve become. the song I might’ve written in another key. I sleep now in houses built by my own ruin. I’ve made peace with the velvet, the smoke, the fame. but there are nights when my breath catches on a note that’s not there. a silence only I can hear. a death I must sing alone. I don’t love the songs, not always.

We all saw it, though not the same. A wheel of light hung low above the orchard at the edge of town, just past the irrigation ditch where cattails lean like monks in bent prayer. Someone said it spun— a disc of hammered gold, glowing in silence. Another, that it hovered, a stillness so complete it made the crickets stop. The boy from the trailer park swore it made a sound—low and long, like a cello dragged through mist. I saw a ring of fire, not consuming, not falling, just there, turning slowly in place. It seemed alive, or held by some invisible hand, as if the air itself had opened and something older than stars was staring through. Estelle saw angels, or something like them— forms inside the ring, moving, eyes where wheels should be, wheels inside of wheels, the old stories catching fire again in the present tense. We spoke of it in half-words and metaphor, under gas station light, beside the vending machine. No one knew what to call it. A miracle, a test, a sign, a veil thinning between this world and the next. The man in uniform took notes, asked about drinking, about history, about sleep. He didn’t write down the moment the dog stopped barking, or how the wind shifted east. He did not see how it left behind a circle of scorched grass, or the way we didn’t want to leave that place even when it was gone. Later, they came for our accounts. They wanted shape and sequence. Some gave testimony. Some kept silent. But none of us forgot. I remember its light more clearly than the moon’s. It was a kind of presence— not human, not cruel, just other. And perhaps that was enough. Not what it was but what it made us feel: lifted, small, and suddenly known. In church, they read of Ezekiel— a prophet before rockets and satellites— who saw a wheel in the sky and called it God’s. Why not? Why shouldn’t the divine arrive without warning, in ways we don’t expect, and ask nothing but wonder? Estelle wept for a week. She said the ring had followed her home. I said nothing, but I kept my windows open at night, and sometimes, when the world goes quiet, I swear I hear something turning.

But I love the fields they came from. The dirt roads that stay dirt. The old men who wave even if they don’t know you. The porchlight left on. The silence after supper. That’s a kind of music, too. And if one day someone sings a song that sounds like both of us like a rusted screen door and a stomp clap and a grandma’s whistle I’ll turn the volume up. I’ll let it play all the way through.

That we might walk quiet through the woods together, afterwards bare-chested in the sunlit clearing, our feet mud-slick from the soft earth’s pull, burrs clinging like old stories to our ankles— that was all I wanted. No phone. No noise. Just the moss, the hush, the sound of your breath beside mine. Sometimes sweet tea in a flask. Sometimes silence. But lately, I’ve stopped praising this world out loud. How the forest opens not suddenly, but with ceremony the crooked path bending toward my childhood, the smell of bark and sweat and my mother’s hair oil simmering in memory. The trees breathe heavier here. They lean in, say things in bark and birdsong, ask questions I don’t know how to answer. And I, barefoot and dizzy from the mushroom’s sacrament, am just now learning how to listen. Isn’t that how it is? You wake one morning lit from within, your blood humming gospel, then hear a child’s body washed up in a river, somewhere far but familiar. And no amount of crying can undo the weight of what we’ve done to each other. What kind of man am I? What kind of son? I think of my uncle, who put the liquor down one day and never said why. Just sat quiet in a busted lawn chair under the pecan tree, a book in his lap he rarely turned. The light would fall on him like grace. Sometimes he’d nod like he knew a secret he couldn’t share. When he took me to school, we said it’d be a good day if we saw the vulture circling the big pine at the edge of the freeway. If we didn’t, I’d feel a little less protected. Then he started to lie— say he saw it when he hadn’t, or that it flew off just before we passed. And I’d lie back. Say I’d seen the wide wingspan too. That it was there, always there, even when the sky was empty and the pine had been cut down. That’s the real truth the things we say to carry the day. The vulture was there because it had to be. Just now, I felt I should be alone awhile, in the clearing with my grief and the trembling ground. But then I looked up and the trees were reaching for each other, and it felt like they were praying, or maybe I was. And I saw you the way your shoulders bent forward in thought, like you were building something delicate from the bones of your past. And even if I fail at everything, even if the world keeps spinning mad, I want to point to the vulture, like I was taught, want to say: there—look the black wing blessing the sky, the thing we see when we stare long enough