Switchgrass This is the year of this is never over. It''s raining and it will not stop raining. Outside Springfield, roads move like spilled water. Silos of dirt and rust surround the bones of barn lofts with shingles shucked like broken stalks. Crabapple trees lose their fruit and fall from rot into wild clover. In the straight lines of cut lawns--the hay-thick scent of Illinois. Plowed hillsides pierced by stenciled signs beg me to pray to God. The switchgrass bends to the shoulder of the road, pushing the wind through the gravel.

The switchgrass sways and sways. It will not stop swaying. I''m floating away from home. I''m becoming a prayer I never said for myself. There is smolder and silence when my pickup truck goes quiet and smoke rises from the engine. Parked slanted on the road''s shoulder, it takes a few tries with wet fingers to prop the hood. A mangled cat mats the crankshaft and fan belt, fur-shredded and soaked. He must have wanted warmth from the storm when my truck was a box of rust resting crooked on my lawn, miles ago.

His black eyes are rolled back. His tongue is out and his throat is ripped open, exposing muscle. I never even heard his scream, piston-stretched and hot. I want to shake him back to life, but I feel so far away. It''s raining and it will not stop raining. Switchgrass quivers in every direction. It''s raining, and I don''t have anywhere to leave. *** Hymn The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother''s call.

--Brigit Pegeen Kelly I was a lost boy with a quiet ache, so quiet it was like listening to a spider weave a web around a cotton ball in early autumn. The temperature dropped. The trees breathed please with their long breaths. My throat grew raw and thick in the scratched open light of morning when I woke nervous and cold. I found my naked feet bare and the bed covers fallen from the bed with the fan left on. My mother was still gone like good sleep. I''ve never had a conversation with my mother about our lost days or anything other than how I''m cold. She can''t have a conversation because her geography is mapped with a landscape of broken light bulbs and brown leaves and dirty snow that is so dirty it looks like the variegated feathers of a lost boy with lost wings.

And that boy remembers his mother singing hallelujah in church, and I remember being at church the whole time wanting to be in the trees, hiding and feeling the trees breathing please against my cold skin- please . All the while, my father sits in a checkered lawn chair, even when it''s cold outside, with a small radio listening to baseball scores recount the losses of men who have lost their whole lives swinging at a ball. That ball is sometimes a bird that a boy reaches for as the bird edges the sky. My father rubs his hands on his knees and yells, and I''m yelling in the trees about missing everything that I have lost-a song I once heard at church that goes Lady, help the absent loved ones. How we miss their presence here. May the hand of thy protection, guide and guard them far and near. I don''t know how it goes anymore. The air is plain like the color of my forearm, and I''m sitting in a children''s swimming pool that has deflated to a swarming puddle of mosquitoes.

It is scum-thick, and I''m trying to sing help the absent , but I''m a lost boy who can''t remember that lost song, that can''t remember how to sing his hallelujah , so I sit scratching the red bites on my legs until they bleed. *** Until I Learn That Please Is the Color of a Bruise Made from his hands, Chris aims a gun at me. You''re dead , he says. But I don''t like being the dead one, so I take off running. The chasing lasts a long time. We snag our sleeves on the tops of chain-link cyclone fences until the chasing becomes a way to see how far we can explore. Climb and run, climb and run, the unbraiding of back alleys and empty lots until we end up on an acreage of private property with our own privacy and no one else around. Chris corners me under an old lean-to where a sun-damaged cigarette boat is living out the rest of its existence on top of an old hitch-trailer.

Here, Chris forces me to play punch-for-punch until I beg Please stop . Until I learn that please is the color of a bruise, skin swollen and purple on the side of my throbbing arm. Everything is swollen when it starts raining. We roll our pant legs up and walk home through the wet grass. My soaked shoes, as I walk, are like a feeling knotting up inside my stomach that I can''t explain. This is how you stay friends when you''re poor , Chris says. Our whole summer was like this-- when we couldn''t see that far into the future, every day was the same. It was nice, the way we could handle a little bit of pain and return to it again, day after day.

*** Flyover Country III. [Long Day of the Factory Belt] And what of my father who lost his father at nine? Everyday after he threw a baseball at a church wall across the street from the only apartment he ever knew, playing basketball on the sloped hill of a parking lot with other lost kids on the north end, until he moved in with my mother in the only place she ever knew, and together, the two of them compared the only geographies they believed in. When he thinks of this, his face reminds me of a barn''s haymow rotting away, insulated with owl nests and mice skulls. This was his descent into the incinerating pleasure of normalcy- work and bars, work and bars-long days of the factory belt hangover. How many days has he risen and questioned the different versions of himself pinned to clotheslines where the wind flattened, smoothed, and beat out the wrinkles? I believe it was hard for him to reach into a closet too small to contain the dreams that went missing and pull out a routinely painful, uniformed version of himself, like removing an arm from a bush, finding it scratched by thistle and covered in cockleburs he pretends don''t hurt. When I look into the landscape behind his eyes, I believe it was too much for him to sludge everyday through the sedgegrass shadowed with sycamores and elms, where littered white plastic bags floated through like ghosts, snagging on felled branches-yes, his eyes grew to look like this. It took me a long time to accept this, but his wife is asleep in a bed that is falling into the ground, and I will never understand his fear. Compassion is awareness of the ineffability of another''s fear--its different shades, and there is honor in the weathered crumpling of his face.

*** Scared Violent Like Horses I was too young to call him a friend, but I had a classmate once who snuck up behind a horse and now his body is made of a long time ago. He is the quiet space in my memory where he never sat next to me again. Back then, everyone I ever called a friend held fire in their fists when they talked to me. Their fists were dingy, grime-covered, and grease-slick as if they were made of horsehair, as if they were untamed and lonely, galloping and wind-swollen. We didn''t know how to talk about loss, so we made each other lose. We went to fields to see who could take the most damage. We went to fields that smelled like the boy who became an empty space on a Tuesday morning a long time ago. Now, because I am scared of time and how it moves, I look down at my fists that didn''t always want to, but have hit so many friends that the broken knuckles look like bruised magnolias.

Listen to me, Please , when I knock or bang on the table or door and beg for attention. Please, I don''t know how to ask for forgiveness. I don''t know how to let anything go. I don''t know how to say anything else about the boy who had a buzz cut and a flat head, the boy who was kicked in the face by a horse and died looking up at the sky. The boy''s father must have found his son with a crushed face, and while running back to the house with his own son in his arms, must have said something raging and spiteful to God. This memory is my starting point when I think backwards and apologize for all of our fists coiled tight as key rings. How could we not break the mirror we look at in the morning? How could we not swing at the different versions of our faces staring back between the fissures? The hurt and mangled parts of us loved the blood dried brown on our skewbald knuckles, and we had nightmares of being reined in. We needed someone to help us change.

We needed someone to force us into confronting the uselessness of our violence. But no one came, and our fists swelled unbridled and restless, wild and afraid.