Two Sonnets from Pierce Junction
Nicholas Pierce
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Kennedy Heights
No one knew what to make of the pear tree,
why only one side sprouted fruit, as if
the branches were opposed to symmetry
or cursed. Strange, yes, but easy to write off—
till a few dogs died digging at the roots.
Around then water mains began to break,
children complained of headaches and sore throats,
rashes bloomed after showers. Poor and Black,
the residents had a time getting anyone
outside the neighborhood to listen, answer
the phone, explain why nothing had been done
about the pipes, the purple soil, the cancer
cases increasing by the month. “Don’t worry,”
they were told, meaning, “Not our problem, sorry.”
Exodus
Soon after Albert Lusk fell ill, his wife
began recording in her Bible: Days
since we’ve had running water. A relief
and burden. With it will return my stress.
She knew the water was behind his cough
and fever, but convincing others—that
was hard. Doctors won’t listen, claim his life
is not in danger, that he simply caught
a cold. Bedrest and patience, they prescribe,
when sleep is all he has the strength to do.
Not a month later, he was gone. I grab
at nothing in the night, surprised anew
each time. The bed remembers him, the sheets
his smell. At the front door, the dog still waits.
AUDIO
Listen to Nicholas Pierce read two sonnets from Pierce Junction: “Kennedy Heights” and “Exodus”
About these poems: “Pierce Junction” takes its title from a Houston oil field that later become the site of a tragic injustice, when the land was redeveloped as the low-income Black neighborhood of Kennedy Heights. I became drawn to this history for a few reasons: superficially, because I happen to share a name with the oil field, and more significantly, because I grew up in a Houston suburb about thirty minutes down the road from Kennedy Heights and yet, until a few years ago, had never heard of the terrible things that had happened there. While writing the sequence, I drew on court transcripts and contemporaneous interviews, and from my research I learned that one of the Kennedy Heights residents had kept a journal in the margins of her Bible, noting each time there was a problem with the water in her home. I learned, also, that a tree in the neighborhood would sprout leaves on only one side. These two details helped me conceive of the sequence as a kind of postlapsarian story.
Nicholas Pierce is the author of In Transit (Criterion Books, 2021), winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared on Best American Poetry’s website and in such journals as 32 Poems, AGNI, The Hopkins Review, Image, Literary Matters, Revel, and Subtropics. He is completing a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where his honors include the University Teaching Assistantship, the Sherman B. Neff Fellowship, and the Jeff Metcalf Fellowship in the Humanities.
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