Stigma has its thick-skinned tongue licking out their fastidious shit holes it is a crisis it is a nonchalant devoutness it is inflamed, of consequence, provoked, quivering. Just stick me, God.

I am usually far more interested in their reactions to stigma than I am in stigma itself. Run, as they might, and as they do, stigma will bitechercockoff.

Poolhall baby sweeps the bar out in the whiskey morning.

Here in Appalachia, we count the stigmas in the stigma. All your second selves in the rabbit holes you live in.

We tell ourselves us mountain people are proud of who we are white trash is who we mainly are. Some of us are white trash something considerable. Some of us endure in trepidation.

He will suck your cock for a dollar. If you don’t have a dollar, he’ll take food. He’s alive but he’s comatose.

Accountability is us.

We got corpses like crab grass. Dead people in trailers. Addiction is the superhighway of stigmas in the stigma.

He’s just a kid but he has his share of stigmas they’re remoras glued to a great white shark.

It’s a weight he carries around and he cannot look at you in the eye because his vision is the floor. The train station he lives in is abandoned the kid himself is abandoned all his second selves in the background are abandoned and Appalachia is abandoned most of all. We are on our own. Not unlike this kid. He is despised and you must not touch it.

As he whips himself to bleed with it. From the obeying body deep and strange, you have broken the rules, and now you must pay. A pound of flesh and shaken. Poverty is a goddamn crime. The body is his book and the roadmap of his many scars. He is the stigma of revenge. Stigma is the smell of him. Piss like a hectic fever.

A grieving stands bewildered in its deathlessness. He is betrayed and then his blood will taste of you. He is defiant, too. How many men have stumbled on their own. He could dress himself and some of him was glass. His people were of a noble mind before they were addicted than by the neglect of kingdoms. He sleeps in rags. Stigma and all of it undone.

Tongues and desolate and dragging death along. The fragments of him are unspoken train tracks dull and rusted the colors of old nails. Midnights of the warm dim shore past all his many secrets caught between his self-imposed verdicts and the whispers speaking of his doom. He gathers it like music and all his roads are narrowing. That you had rivers, boy. Now, just tell me who you are.