Forty short years ago, an explosion devastated SW Washington. Mount St. Helens blew her top off and the ash could be seen for hundreds of miles. Scott Poole, co-author of The Last Tiger Is Somewhere, remembers it well in his poem "70s Summer". 70s Summer It was summer in the 1970s and mullet dudes wore tight shorts over sweats like half-ass super heroes imitating Rocky. Everything smelled like hot bark dust and you could never get those little brown slivers out of your hands. There was always somebody’s cousin swinging nunchucks in the driveway and when we weren’t having pinecone fights we ripped the skin from our bodies by crashing our bikes into each other. Every day was a baseball in the nuts and we drank warm strawberry Shasta pop all summer, staining our white shirts with red continents we dreamed into beautiful wounds. Duck shit covered the cement walks and dead cow bones littered the woods. Once, I saw a couple of teenagers screwing while I hid in the top of an enormous oak. I swam in the postage-stamp-size development pool until my eyes closed shut, on fire with chlorine and I ran my banana-seat bicycle into a bridge and fell in the pond. The taste of algae still sits on my lips. Mill Plain Avenue was nothing but two lousy lanes melting into a ribbon of goo every summer. I can still see my Steve Austin doll’s robot eye staring at me from a Doberman’s mouth like a message from the future. I used to beat dogs back with my bike pump, choking with the newsprint stench from my canvas newspaper bag, all knees and balance heading to the pee-smelling house to collect three stupid dollars. Then Mt. St. Helens blew up all over the damn place and I crawled up on my roof and gaped in wonder at the lightning-bespeckled gray column of death, then walked back in the house, woke up my parents and returned to watching Kids Are People Too on TV. I caught a steelhead in the Columbia bigger than me and you could still swim in Battle Ground Lake and past 124th Avenue was nothing but grass fields and broken-down barns dying under blackberries. Nobody wore seatbelts or helmets or sunscreen. We were all burnt to nothing but a bunch of red peeling writhing mosquito-bitten knee-scraped tube-sock-wearing cul-de-sac kickballers with giant Goody combs in our back pockets. We’d go fishing at night when Dad came home and we brought three five-gallon buckets of Bluegill back from Lacamas Lake and dumped them in the development’s pond. They rippled just under the water like a midnight-blue blanket of sweat. I had forgotten these details until the other day when we drove down 9th past Fircrest Elementary and I saw a kid struggling to walk because his pants were cinched around his quads. I just thought, “Look at those stupid kids. Who the hell would be dumb enough to do that?” Then I remembered standing in the same spot when I was ten years old with Brad and Brian Sellers and we all had pulled our shorts down around our legs and tucked in our t-shirts to cover our asses, laughing at each other, saying, “You look so stupid. That’s the dumbest thing ever.” Then Brad said, “Bet you won’t lift your shirt at the next car. It could be the world’s first reverse BA. Just think.” (Brad had a bit of the showman in him.) “Maybe I will,” I said. “Do it,” he said. “Maybe I will.” “Do it.” “Fine.” “Fine.” I guess I figured this was my golden opportunity to enter the rarefied airof the kiddom coolness pavilion. So I lifted my shirt and flashed my small stupid butt at the next car coming down the rise. Now, I don’t know why I didn’t notice the make and model of the car but when the car screeched to a halt beside us I recognized it then. And there was no mistaking the person who sprang out. My Mom. She pointed her finger at me. At first, I thought it was a gun. Anger shook her body as if she were a tree and somebody was trying to knock peaches off her. I don’t think she completed a sentence the rest of the day. “YOU . . . NOW . . . GET . . . THERE . . . BACK . . . TROUBLE . . . KILL . . . CAR . . . FATHER . . . CAR . . . KILL!” I wonder how long it took her to recognize my puny rear end. Was it instantaneous? Did all those diaper changings, all those baths, give her a sixth hiney-sense where she could pick my butt out of a crowd from a hundred yards away? Was it like radar? Assdar? Or was there a brief moment when she thought, “Look at those stupid kids. Who the hell would be dumb enough to do that?” In The Last Tiger Is Somewhere, two poets from the West bring their work together and take apart the news. Recent history gets jigsawed. Current events get skewered. The result is thirty praise songs, fairy tales, guilty verdicts, and mathematical equations. There are prayers here, and new commandments. There are portraits and photographic negatives. And an introduction by Carney and an afterword by Poole form a frame around it all.
Available in July 2020. Preorder now! Comments are closed.
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