Tag Archives: decay

Kelly Scott Franklin, ‘Shell Station, Tennessee’

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It was the ravage of the scene that shocked:
the concrete torn by trees and ragged grass,
red guts of fuel pumps over splintered glass,
the wreckage clawed by climbing vines and mocked
by moth and rust. There in concentric rings
obscene graffiti spelled out every sin.
(The smell of something even worse within.)
It’s like we saw into the death of things.
But what about the ruins I can claim?
What of the loves that I have let decay,
the hand withheld, the times I didn’t say
I’m sorry, didn’t pray for you by name?
We leave shell stations, call them what you will.
Neglect is the unkindest way to kill.

*****

Kelly Scott Franklin writes: “Originally sparked by an ekphrastic prompt over at Rattle Magazine (declined; first published in Ekstasis Magazine), this poem was ALSO inspired by a real abandoned gas station somewhere along the highway through the mountains on the way to Knoxville, TN. But I think it had been cooking in me for a while. I took a trip across the American heartland, from Southern Michigan to Central Kansas, and was absolutely depressed by the neglect and decrepitude. I stopped at a rest stop to use the restroom somewhere along the way. The restroom had a sign that said, “We take pride in the quality of our service. If anything in this restroom is not up to your satisfaction, please contact the management.” I looked around the restroom and there was garbage everywhere. Everywhere. It’s like people have stopped living the basic human things. The poem was also inspired by my troubled relationship with my late mother.”

Kelly Scott Franklin lives in Michigan with his wife and daughters. He teaches American Literature and the Great Books at Hillsdale College. His poems and translations have appeared in AbleMuse Review, Literary Matters, Driftwood Literary Magazine, Iowa City Poetry in Public, National Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Ekstasis, and elsewhere. His essays and reviews can be found in Commonweal, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, Local Culture, and elsewhere. 
https://www.hillsdale.edu/faculty/kelly-scott-franklin/

“Abandoned Gas Station, 2013” by Genial23 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Potcake Poet’s Choice: Brian Gavin, “The Work of Trees”

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Brian Gavin 2020

Brian Gavin

The Work of Trees

Things, like people, in the business of decay
depend on trees. Within this latticed dusk
the wearying pretensions fall away
like flecks of paint from off a shrouded husk
of clapboard, and green stones spilling from a fence.
The house leans forward now, nails soft with rust —
it is the way an aged woman bends
forward in prayer, shapeless in shawl. There must
be trees beneath which things grow ripe and rot,
to be again with other things, in dreams —
old women at mass, men at bars, forgotten
things, distilled of story. Underneath the beams
the brush ebbs; all change is by degrees
of lessening – that is the work of trees.

Brian Gavin writes: “This poem ran a couple of years ago in The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry. I chose it because, for me anyway, the compelling thing about writing poetry is the way that a poem kind of leads the poet where it wants to go. With this poem, for example, I had absolutely no idea what it was going to be about. Then I started playing around with the image of the dilapidated house and the other images and rhymes until it seemed like the poem was satisfied!

I find writing this stuff to be most gratifying when the process plays out this way, and least gratifying when I try to tell the poem what to do.”

Brian Gavin is a retired Distribution Manager who started writing poetry about 5 years ago. His poems have appeared in The Journal of Formal Poetry, Peninsula Poets and Snakeskin Magazine, and in the Potcake Chapbook ‘Careers and Other Catastrophes’. He lives in Lakeport, Michigan, USA, with his wife Karen.