For Paul and Sammy by Chloe Jackson

My dreams are littered
with the echos,
the flaming shards of iron
that flew
from the feverish hammer and anvil
of your hands

rough and dark
like leathery tobacco;
Your rock salt nails
wedged with soot,
fingertips riddled with splinters
like sassafras kisses.

You smell like the
abandoned farmhouse
in northern Oklahoma
where you spun my soul
from the cotton, grown
and picked for a nickel
by your daughter.

You feel like the
humid, stagnant, cypress air
at the southern gulf
where your wove my veins
from the Spanish moss
your lover tangled in.

I know you only
from hand-me-downs
that are full of holes
and vague hems,
from the red soil and sand
that buried you
and the voices
that carried you
into the forgotten corners
of a distant relatives attic.