“Canary Dirge (From Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy)
-Dale Marie Prenatt
American Elegy is coming
Just you wait -
A bestseller will kill you off too
I'm a hillbilly, they plum kill't me
Bulldozed my bones into valley fill
with the other dead canaries
When exxon oil busts up your aquifers
a red state lawyer
will write a bestseller

about your loose bootstraps too
and shove them down your throat
You'll be paying nestle for your muddy tap
before your bookclub figures out
that our selenium sludge runs
downstream
and we are your headwaters”