Dugout Replica
By Ryan Clark
Nov 15, 2025
Nov 15, 2025
A built rung in the dun of a dust hole
leads to a small loft hiding daughters.
The home is a built thing,
a dug grass sound, tin laid roof,
and the run of wind singing the sod out.
To go to Quanah is to buy lumber—
there are no trees to feed to our houses
stuck out of the hills or random on the prairie.
The ground demands a share of home,
and so we make a home in the dirt.
The flow of nutrients snakes off
through the roof, stems a vein, leaves
dust haze a shuddering line,
a fake horizon in the fire of lamp.
To break the home is to cease the work of care
that holds us steady to the ground.
Keeping a dugout clean is a length of wire tied
tight with debris, a blown room of cracks and shale,
sand wandering ahead of the broom,
where a finger wipes the waste settled
by the sprinkle of day, covering food with a sheet.
A bride shrugs as a centipede chain-legged
charges under the stove for a minute outside
the heaving ocean of the plains.
leads to a small loft hiding daughters.
The home is a built thing,
a dug grass sound, tin laid roof,
and the run of wind singing the sod out.
To go to Quanah is to buy lumber—
there are no trees to feed to our houses
stuck out of the hills or random on the prairie.
The ground demands a share of home,
and so we make a home in the dirt.
The flow of nutrients snakes off
through the roof, stems a vein, leaves
dust haze a shuddering line,
a fake horizon in the fire of lamp.
To break the home is to cease the work of care
that holds us steady to the ground.
Keeping a dugout clean is a length of wire tied
tight with debris, a blown room of cracks and shale,
sand wandering ahead of the broom,
where a finger wipes the waste settled
by the sprinkle of day, covering food with a sheet.
A bride shrugs as a centipede chain-legged
charges under the stove for a minute outside
the heaving ocean of the plains.
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Ryan Clark is an Old Greer County native who writes his poems using a unique method of homophonic translation. He is the author of Arizona SB 1070: An Act (Downstate Legacies) and How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press), as well as the chapbook Suppose / a Presence (Action, Spectacle). His poetry has appeared in such journals as DIAGRAM, Cherry Tree, The Offing, and Copper Nickel. He currently lives in North Carolina, where he teaches at UNC School of the Arts.
Website: ryanclarkthepoet.com |
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Author’s Note:
These poems come from a longer project which traces the history of a section of southwest Oklahoma that (until 1896) was part of Texas and which today includes many rural towns that have disappeared or are on the verge of doing so, as a result of drought and the systematic destruction of small-scale agriculture. In writing these poems, I used a unique method of homophonic translation which relies on the re-sounding of a source text, letter by letter, according to the various possible sounds each letter is able to produce (ex: “cat” may become “ash” by silencing the ‘c’ as in “indict,” and by sounding the ’t’ as an ‘sh-‘ sound, as in “ratio”). The source texts for these poems are archival materials from the Old Greer County Museum in Mangum, Oklahoma (in the case of “Dugout Replica”) and the Harmon County Historical Museum in Hollis, Oklahoma (in the case of “Gould Community”).