For the 24th annual music issue, we return to the roots of country music and celebrate the essence of “countrified” sound.

Image by Spencer Davis via Unsplash

A half-drunk bottle of Coca-Cola rests on Johnny McGlynn’s tombstone. A couple of helium balloons are tied to it too. Sarah wonders what the story is. Neither of us knew Johnny McGlynn, brand-loyal McGlynn, lover of soda pop McGlynn. He’s neighbors  with my father now. My father’s his new neighbor. Sarah left wire flowers in the brass stand next to my father’s name on the black columbarium wall across the little road from McGlynn’s tombstone.  My mother, Peggy O’Neill, picked this spot, called “companionship grove,” for its proximity to the river. Johnny McGlynn’s Coca-Cola bottle puts me in mind of that famous jar in Tennessee, the way it bends the Huron River and Huron River  Drive to the cemetery’s will.  Hot Coca-Cola is disgusting to consider on this muggy day. It’s supposed to storm later. My mother worries about the flowers  in the rain and wind. I recite  “The Beautiful American Word,  Sure” by Delmore Schwartz to the black marble box, but the town of Flat Rock is stone-deaf to poetry. You can’t get the words to make music. I’m not finishing poems much these days. I keep name-checking my father’s favorite poets, though, instead  of saying what I don’t know how to say about finitude and grief. Death is heavy  like the tombstone of Johnny McGlynn.  It bends the space around it to accelerate the light, but grief is more like the helium balloons that pretend to lift his grave; they work at it all day,  this futile lifting. Sarah notes how strange it is to see my mother’s name beneath my father’s even though her death date’s unfulfilled— open paren, closed paren, open paren, parents, parent. There’s so much I don’t want to tell you. There’s even more I don’t want to hear myself say, like I’m equal to the task of leaving crass symbols with the dead.  The story of Coca-Cola is well-known  and engaging for cocaine’s  appearance as a character, but it’s nothing when contrasted with the story of helium, that yellow spectral line observed during a solar eclipse in 1868, first among the earthly noble gases, second among elements in ubiquity. Carbon, which mycelium borrows  from tree roots to break down matter, is fourth in abundance; the carbon cycle’s  why there’s little left of your neighbor, Johnny McGlynn, Father.  But they treated you to fire  and put you in a box which I placed inside the columbarium wall. I think you’d like hearing they treated you to fire from inside your marble; it reminds me of Milton’s burning marl. I look at the carbonated beverage flat in Flat Rock and remember how I placed a box in a vault and it made phosphorous run to the river, and algae stopped the running river, Father. You watch now like a heron from your gabbled roost. Johnny McGlynn  sucks ice in 4/4 time. My mother  thinks you deserve a swifter river. This one’s gold-green like a pile of newly minted bills or St. Patrick’s Day swag scattered in a parking lot. Pretend luck starved of oxygen,  this way we speak of graves and what you would’ve liked.

Cal Freeman is the author of the books Fight Songs and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn. His writing has appeared in journals including River Styx, Southword, Passages North, Hippocampus, and the Poetry Review. He currently serves as writer-in-residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit and teaches at Oakland University.

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