Kenneth Street Redux
Corey Mesler
for my brother Mark and my sister Sue
We lived in a three-bedroom house,
my quiet father, my bipolar
mother, my older brother, my
younger sister and me. The road was
gravel. Round about us woods
as deep as fairy tale.
Kenneth Street, Raleigh Tennessee,
early 1960s. And, as other
families arrived, each shackled by
the same suburban dream,
a childhood developed that was as
healthy or as painful as memory allows.
Once the boys and I found a dead
wild pig, half in a rivulet, in the
woods at the end of Bluefield Street.
The stench was Stygian. We
poked it with sticks and then went
home to eat Spaghettios, Banquet
dinners, pot roast, Chef Boyardee pizzas,
pudding cups, ice cream,
chicken and dumplings. We didn’t
need anyone to tell us that
death, even for a wild pig, is a gruesome
business, and coming for us all.
We knew from our TV, too, all the
shooting and mayhem, all the glitter.
Everyone moved away from Kenneth Street
eventually, and, probably, we all return
like this, with pens and photos and
a nostalgia that, at times, seems like quick-
sand. Kenneth Street, esto perpetua, my
restive home. Inside the music of
screen door percussion and tunes from
my AM radio, I still hear your song, low
and plaintive and calling sweetly, like a siren.
about the writer
Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published over 20 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, Camel’s Bastard Son, is from Cabal Books. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On, which won The Memphis Film Prize in 2017. With his wife he runs Burke’s Book Store (est. 1875) in Memphis.