Heaven's Burning Porch

The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Arkansas

In Heaven’s Burning Porch, James Dunlap reckons with the legacy left to him: one of pain, gratitude, violence, and salvation. In turns dark, humorous, lyric and narrative, Heaven’s Burning Porch explores what it means to grow up in rural Arkansas under the weight of his rough inheritance.

from “A Good Year for Pecans”

—Central Arkansas, April

The plum trees are wearing their crowns of thorn again
and the clouds that hang like shreds of dried tobacco
are sliding away like clots of oil in an empty lake—
the persimmon tree, dying in a nest of its own fruit,
now ripped in half, now yanked out of socket,
its roots like thorns pulled from a muddy paw, no sound
but the green whisper of pine needles raining down
from the single tree left standing, and I haven’t seen
enough of this night to know what it means