Three-Man-Operation, poem by Mathews Wade

Papaw’s ranch ain’t so much a ranch

but a two man operation with his neighbor

Terry, whose wife is also named Terry,

just two men rubbin pennies, joined

by fences mended with zip-ties, where

strung-out race horse rescues populate

junked-fields & hunting dogs are kept

hungry for the let-out in cages intentionally

hidden behind the barn for fear of PETA or

a stand-in mailman who might be canine

sympathetic, where frog ponds ain’t real

ponds but broken field tiles filled-in

with coffee-colored water as to not be a hazard,

though the two’s perception of what a hazard

is, or isn’t, is one of the many things you’ll

soon learn not to trust, like when Terry

tells you to point your tally-whacker at

that third-wire, you don’t listen & if you do

you won’t again, or if Papaw tells you

to drink the Kool-Aid from his spittoon,

you don’t listen, & if you do you’ll spend

the rest of your life trying to forget the taste

of another man’s stains.

//

Before he hands over the cattle-prod, he zaps it twice to remind

you of the power you’re about to hold, mulberry pie lingers

in his dentures from your annual bloodmouth breakfast, a fun

tradition as you recall—press it to hide, he says, get it to move.

//

After Papaw’s second heart attack, after

Terry took up drinking when female-Terry

left him for a man they both called a word

Meemaw wouldn’t allow spoken inside

the house, you spend your summers

mowing, shoveling, listening to the radio

spill racism & spitty fear, cloppin about

in mid-high muck boots past your knees, proud

of the tractor keys in your pocket, the camel

on the keychain is smoking a cigarette,

but you consider him a friend, looks friendly

enough, you learn a lot in these summers,

the taste of Old Milwaukie, about shanks

& jiggers, why shotgun shells are red,

that drinking cold chicken broth from a thermos

will keep you hydrated while you search

for castellated nuts with a metal-finder, the ranch

becomes a three-man-operation, as they start

to call it, even let you sit on the porch as the two

of them croak at the moon like frogs

in a whiskey-lingo you pretend to understand.

//

You awake to a flashlight in your face, predawn shadows moving,

by this time you know the drill, the pie for breakfast, the zap, zap,

get the beasts to move while they’re still sleepy—wait for the Semi.

//

It’s Labor Day weekend, your last week

on the ranch before starting sixth grade,

you’ve been practicing your locker combination,

the satisfying click-pop like driving

a nail into new-cut wood, Terry wants to ship

the cattle early this year, says he needs the money,

& by this time you’ve made enough mistrust-

mistakes that you’ve started asking questions,

you want to know where the cattle go after

the round-up but Papaw refuses to say, so you ask

Terry, & Terry says to hop in the pick-up

when he goes to get the money, so you ride along,

following the 16-wheeler carrying all forty

of the furry Herefords you’ve named,

you can see their eyes through the perforated

metal, same eyes watched you work all summer,

dumb as inbred retrievers, but always smiling,

& when you arrive, you realize real quick

some things are better left unknown.

//

You’ve seen enough sunrises to know a good one & you pray

that that morning it would be good, but it came blunt as hammer

to skull, just a sneeze of light, not a smear of color—see that boy

leaning against the fence asking for forgiveness? that’s you.

Mathews Wade was raised in Hilliard, Ohio, and is currently working towards his MFA at Columbia Univeristy. He is the winner of the Academy of American Poets Bennett Prize, 2016.