I've never been to Memphis.
But I met a dark-eyed girl in a bar
outside of Asheville with hyacinth
in her hair and sloe gin lips
that fizzed on about Lawrence
and Nietzsche and her own indiscriminate
past, who said she saw Elvis, once,
and learned about Dionysius from a book
she'd stolen from a vein-starved junkie
on a bus trip from L.A.

Her conversation stammered in the rain,
through the street to her room -
she wouldn't call it home.
Said she came from nowhere
in particular and that my eyes stared
like the black ink fixed below
a question mark. She agreed with Nietzsche.
And Lawrence: her clothes discarded
like religion on the floor.

Later, when her words had mumbled
off to sleep, the supple linen
on her breast rose and fell
like the blue hills reaching out for Tennessee.
As I crossed the street, the rain
beat time to the melancholy
moan of the midnight freight, rolling
in from Saluda. A sound that draped
and filled the valley like a tired
sax man, bending dark notes
in an empty Beale Street bar.

©J. Kevin Winchester