Three Poems from Connor Whitecotton

County Line

Pulling into the gravel where
your letterman got ripped
before college, where cicadas
weren’t louder than her shrill
drawl. The reunion is smaller
again, still nice, and your
cousin still has the audacity 
to be bored. Dollar Tree root
beer is all you’ll afford.
More weeds in the lawn.

Dead leaves are still caught
by wind, and as such the 
curb is emptier driving back.
Remembering being worried
about losing your accent.
Having the orange vest ready
and feeling like manhood is
burdens carried. Your job’s 
the same and mom remarried.
Everyone else is gone.

On the Bolivar Peninsula

                        and, of course, it has to feel cinematic.
Tennis shoes hold up a man who only
                        cares about reaching the ferry before sunset,
though anxious his friend will fall
                        off the rocks and into a snake’s house.
Mosquitoes live next door on this

                        peninsula, almost urbanly gritty, almost more
like dirt than shore, grass than water,
                        mud than Margaritaville, as if some wartorn
family with an English name may
                        have a beach day tomorrow before being
chased home by cowboy boots.

                        That same childhood feeling, the furthest
thing from nostalgia and the closest
                        to home, nestles itself amid the pelicans and
weeds and the lighthouse off the road.
                        The friend and him can’t reach it. They are happy.
A billboard misbalances the sun.

Goodnight, I Love You, Goodnight

In the growing block theory of time there is no future. If I go back in time I only live from then on. Time marches. That leaves me, leaves you in the ever present. How dumb lucky am I that in all these times you would be there, that all these space-time conundrums have in common the gap in your teeth, that the sterility of time is warmed by your sweater. You make time travel art, something beyond science and through the needs of my soul, because every trip back is another day, another day where I can say a cheap line to thrill you, work a shift to buy you roses, embarrass you in all the ways, all pancaked over in time’s eyes. The simple bedazzled. The departures glacial. May I invent time travel to make you all mine, or don’t and wake up that I may defy the theory, travel to the future, and in an hour pray you’ll smile at me, roses in your eyes.

Connor Whitecotton was born in Natchez, Mississippi, and is currently a sophomore English major at the University of Southern Mississippi. His poetry is published or forthcoming in the Southern Quarterly, 30 North, and Hattiesburg Alternative. He likes a good burger, old music, and watching movies with his cats. He lives in Texas.