Dumas, TX
(After the Western Swing classic: “I’m a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas” by Bob Wills)
I was with Ishtar all the way—
Fort Worth to the Rockies and back.
Fire moons and royal suns never get the rest they need.
I was with my brothers and Pop
in a van pulling a home.
We hit near zero viz dust storms in the home of the Ding Dong Daddy.
We saw colossal turbines with blades
on the brink. Propeller head, please,
I had been broken here before and was breaking again,
whipped through the bird-shot
kisses of another piss-swarm.
I was the essence of an unsettled stock. I was the cyclone stirring
the dust, the ash, the blood,
the details safe behind swift glass.
My inner whirring plus the plit-plit-tipa-tap-ta from the other side
of relentless remembering: you
oughta see me do my stuff.
On the Nock
Do not dwell
Too well in purgatory
Pulling threads.
Tie them end to end
Making a line until
You are naked on an aim
You knitted—all tepid;
Arrested.
The honest math
Of aims
And their endless degrees:
Same number of goodly
Proofs why
I never bullseye.
—
T.K. Edmond is a Fort Worth, Texas writer, musician, and graduate student in English at the University of Texas at Arlington. T.K. is interested in dramaturgy, beauty and cruelty colliding in Texas, and general conceptualism. Work published in 2022 can be found in Strukturriss, Broad River Review, The Minison Project, Abridged, and forthcoming in Provenance Journal.
Photography by: Nicholas Doherty
