Nathan Erwin

THE FOX SISTERS COMMUNE WITH THE GHOST OF ACCIDENTAL OVERDOSE II

All white powders look, more or less, the same, all lambs gathering at the cliff face for shelter.
You said, get a life when I slapped out the twenty grams of speed
on the mahogany table. What?
Like there was more than this?
The ten of us all circled up around J-Rod’s Meadow Brook apartment, & I broke fat lines
on each person’s phone. The sun pocketed into black ice on the sidewalk.

Snorting those line split us each in two directions, scentless sand,
& when Nadia went down, her head a heavy knock on the floor,
your freckles really shined saffron against your face. A fork & knife went sailing
across the room you lifted your phone from your nose
to your ear to call 911.

We all went down, blooming trees in an abandoned lot. Fuck Fentanyl & my ragged death rattle,
its erratic coyote whimper, leg twitch in coil spring trap.
A chair fell, another body dropped.
At first, I thought I saw a river of fire. Between our cluttered inhales,
someone said, look at all the diamonds.

But then, I saw you, dousing kerosene on our 6th grade
binders, hunched over, snow dust shoulders slightly
bent above the sleepless shape of each flame.
Road rash on your cheek, an elbow longer than your forearm.
Back then, you said, the entire blanket of snow
was the oldest, perhaps, the first ghost,
returning from the sky.

There was the sound of girls sobbing. The ambulance blew its little fucking trumpet.
I opened my eyes in time to see the cops handcuffing your arms that kept flopping down,
over the shackle, knocking the floor.
Your eyes wide, not seeing anything,
but an endless parade of lambs.

Nine of us
were narcaned back to life. You didn’t come back at all.

In some otherworld, no one in our crew
could pick up that night, & instead, played Euchre
& shotgunned beer,

a world where you’d eventually become
the doctor you said you’d be,
prescribing Dexadrine
to teens flunking out of East High,
our tiny town hidden under your fingernail.

The snows have left the hill towns. No revenants.
Falling white fangs. Now,
it’s too warm & all I can do is pray

everything goes back
to the way it was before.

When I picture your face, it’s still
laughing at snow on fire.

Nathan Erwin is a poet and land-based organizer raised on the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. Erwin currently operates with the Pocasset Wampanoag Tribe as they fight for land, food, and seed sovereignty. His writing has recently appeared in North American Review, Boulevard, Sho Poetry, Puerto del Sol, The Journal, Terrain, Poetry Wales, Gulf Coast, and Ninth Letter. He was the winner of the 2024 Environs Prize at The Maine Review judged by Dr. Craig Santos Perez. His organizing and his poetry are conversant, and so he writes about foodways, myths, medicine, and wanting.