Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie. Episode 14 features James Davis and Jessica Hammack. James reads “Focus on the Family, 1996” which was originally published in The Sewanee Review. Jessica reads “Free Country” which was originally published in The Baltimore Review. Focus on the Family, 1996 By James Davis i. The family was a scatterplot through which I drew a trending line that pointed toward an origin that I called God. But it was not an unambiguous data set. What the hell was a “third cousin”? I’d met one at that year’s reunion. We watched the Olympics and got wet scoring each other’s cannonballs into the Hilton’s peopled pool. I plotted his coordinates beneath a friend from middle school who met me in the bathroom stalls, where we ignored each other’s zits. ii. The family watched a VHS in which James Dobson rapped with teens. He cracked some jokes. He wore blue jeans and doffed his hat to horniness. His wife and he had intercourse three times a week. [Off-screen groans.] Condoms were ineffective screens. against both AIDS and syphilis. We watched him in the family room, my brother, father, stepmom, me. Beneath us, in the sofa bed, the mattress squashed a fieldmouse, dead among his droppings. The TV shed its blue light on the tomb. iii. The family joined in silent prayer for the hostages to be released, for the bomb strapped to the gunman’s chest to be a dud, for hands in the air. He’d been a construction worker there and compound-fractured his left wrist. He was seeing a psychiatrist. He didn’t feel provided for. The family said, tough luck, big guy. You poke the bear, you get the claws. The family wasn’t without cause to want revenge. Neither was I. I’d gotten a B on my algebra test. Of all of us, I hated best. iv. The family voted for Bob Dole. We saw in him a gravitas; in the incumbent, a literal ass. We tsktsked every exit poll. I swallowed Gardetto’s pieces whole to punish my esophagus. It wouldn’t be my only loss that year, but it would be the rule: Democracy won’t do God’s plan. Alone, I graphed parabolas and found their curvature consoling. They spent half of forever falling into the lowest point there was until forever started up again. Free Country By Jessica Hammack My childhood wasn’t so bad. I had a stack of Noxzema pads, a trundle bed. I had ketchup sandwiches, and a yard, a ditch where onions grew, fat and purple. Back then my teachers said war was good for the economy, and instead of I don’t care my friends and I would say Free country, as if that gave us permission to do anything we wanted, like hock loogies out the bus window, or say that we, too, could become President someday, despite all evidence to the contrary. To me, the sweater of America had only just begun unraveling: imagine, I had never seen a murder on a telephone. I hadn’t even heard of student loans, or proxy wars, or mortgages gone underwater. I used to draw the ocean full of smiling fish. I had a crush on Officer Kip, the DARE cop, who, the first week of class, set out a box that said, in navy Sharpie, Tell Me Everything. From my assigned seat, I wrote what I was told. I used to think that growing up meant being free. That I could choose my life. I really thought that they would ask, and I could just say no.
JAMES DAVIS is the author of the poetry collection Club Q, which won the Anthony Hecht Prize. His poetry has been featured on NBC News and CBC Radio and anthologized in two installments of Best New Poets (2011 and 2019). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Bennington Review, Five Points, Literary Matters, Salamander, The Sewanee Review, and other notable venues. Originally from Colorado Springs, he lives in Denton, Texas, where he teaches English at the University of North Texas.
JESSICA HAMMACK is from Morgantown, West Virginia. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, The Baltimore Review, Poet Lore, and other journals. She holds a BA in English literature from Hiram College, an MFA from the University of Florida, and an MLIS from the University of Maryland. She works as the head of research and instruction at the Beneficial-Hodson Library in Frederick, Maryland.