Overdose Glade

By Wesley Houp

What to name a glade
besides Flat Rock?
Sunnybell? Fameflower?
Ground Plum?
Milk Vetch?
Obviously, Gattinger
or Quarterman.
Even Rafinesque,
for fossil fauna
and native botanicals.
Hell, why not Ortmann?
An early twentieth century
malacologist?
Glades weren’t his thing
but so many of them
inventory the deep and
violent evolution
of mollusca.

And then there’s this glade,
a winding complex
now padlocked against
intrusion by strange Richard,
the new, young forester.
Last spring it blossomed
a dead junkie.
A mile back,
a methhead jungle—
half collapsed tents,
candy wrappers,
smoked-black wads
of tinfoil, plastic bottles,
lunch meat containers,
toilet paper mounds
covering the runs.

And where the forest resumes
at the long foot
of Edwards Hill,
young master Overdose,
the brutal nettle,
slumped beside a beat-up Ford.
His head reclined
in a dry dissolution channel,
face swollen
with gathering blood,
bulging eyes
the color of breadroot
that once made
a young mother cry.