The dead thorns kept warm underneath a highway 
            paling underneath the tires 
            of my grandfather’s 1959 Cadillac Fleetwood,

while his wife kissed their eldest son frankly,
            crumpled road maps, & ashed cigarettes 

on the fleeting tar while moving their lives 
across state lines.

Last month’s rain washed away 
the last flecks of red paint from the Cadillac’s back fin
                                    that had pooled in his driveway.

To be West Virginian is to have everything taken away 
from you, slowly. 

To be West Virginian is to love 
whatever version of remembrance 
your lineage gives you,

            but I have always hated my great aunt’s painting 
of the house she & my grandfather grew up in.

                        It is too late to live there, 
            because the city of Grafton knocked it down 
            a decade ago.             

I’ve always hated it because she forgot to paint in the honeylocust 
            that lived in the front yard, 

the way God’s orange glow 
            wrapped its entire mouth around it. 

My grandfather could’ve been a metaphor, 
but he wasn’t.

            Asleep in the bedroom of his childhood house, 
            he coughed up a shotgun 
            & shot squirrels out of the guts of the honeylocust.

Honeylocusts can live an entire century,
unless it’s in a painting.

The house’s white clapboard siding speaks to me
            from the bottom of a central West Virginia landfill.

My grandfather’s handkerchiefs & Coors Banquet ghosts 
live 
in collapsed lumber.

                        He moved from Grafton to Northeast Ohio 
                        to become a farmer.

             He wanted to be like John Wayne in California.

He ended up driving trucks for thirty years. 

                        Once, while asleep in the cab bunk 
                        on the side of a Detroit highway,

            he felt honeyed sap cankering out 
            of tree wounds
            & coughed up a shotgun. 

Parts of this poem appear in “The Death of the Greatest Generation,” published in Protean Magazine. 

Matt Mitchell is a writer from Ohio. His work appears in, or is forthcoming to, venues like The Shallow Ends, NPR, Homology Lit, BARNHOUSE, Frontier Poetry, Empty Mirror, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others.