Three Poems by Kayli Hinkley
The Hanging Tree
“I was just a boy when I watched them
hang a man from that tree,”
Papaw said from the driver’s side of his rusted pickup.
I held my breath and
grasped at my youth,
which always seemed to fade a little
when he showed me his past.
He stared ahead, knuckles white
eyes like pools, swimming
and brimming
with old memories,
and things seen
much too young.
The grass was worn to the soil
all around us–a threadbare spoil of remembrance–
where tires had come, and stopped,
and gone, much too frequent
for mother nature to hide
the marks in the earth that matched the treads
on Papaw’s beat up Ford.
He was a regular at the CO-OP and Hardees on weekdays,
the ballpark in the spring, and the duck blinds in the fall,
but his Sundays weren’t spent in a church pew,
like all the other good country folk.
Papaw spent his Sundays in silence,
searching for his lost innocence
at the base of an old sycamore.
The Mighty Age of Six
I often wish I could go
back
Back to an old home I once inhabited.
It sits in the little town of Cornelia, Georgia–
a two-bedroom home with a sloping
driveway
that always froze over in the winter.
Cornelia, Georgia.
It was the place where I discovered magic
and awe
at the mighty age
of six.
Cornelia, Georgia takes me back
to a time
when I still had religion,
and my grandfather wasn’t blind,
when I trusted myself,
and I swore I’d never let a drop
of alcohol
pass my lips.
Sometimes, the want for that place
for before,
is so great
I sit on Google maps for hours
just to stare at the indention
that little house in Cornelia, Georgia makes
in the earth. Even if I cannot touch it,
it helps me to know
that this piece of myself
still
exists.
I can cling to it—
Its satellite image,
even when everything else
has changed.
But I can never go back there,
because I am two thousand
seven hundred
and forty-one
miles
away,
teetering off the edge
of the Oregon coast.
It’s the coldest day of the year,
with a mist
so dense
I cannot see my own fingers
as they wriggle in front of my face.
Here, I’ve forgotten how to pray,
and I can’t seem to shake the feeling
that there’s nothing waiting for me
on the other side of a beating
heart and a conscious brain—
No “job well done,
my good and faithful
Servant.”
No warm embrace
from that glowing deity
in the sky.
So with nothing
left to do,
with no one to save me,
I wade
into stormy waters,
letting it toss me
from here
to there,
with no life vest,
no safety, no hope of return
to Cornelia, Georgia
or to the mighty age
of six.
The Ache of Humanity
No matter how old,
no matter how far removed we may get
from our primordial forms,
humans will always ache
for magic and Santa Claus,
for shooting star wishes made in the width of a breath,
and for a heaven—one that’s so in reach,
so tangible,
we swear we skim its threshold
every time we call to the sky.
We write books, and sing songs,
build temples, and churches, and altars
to fill the empty space
some creator made
in each of us
And so
the ache of humanity
becomes the string
that ties us all
together.
It’s the thing
that makes us
one.