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CD Collins
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Kentucky native CD Collins follows the storytelling traditions of the South, both as a solo artist and when accompanied by musicians. As one of originators of the early ‘90s resurgence of spoken-word with live music, her work has been archived in award-winning compact discs: Kentucky Stories, Subtracting Down and Carousel Lounge. She consulted with Academy award nominee Debra Granik on the screenplay for Winter’s Bone.
Collins’ fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines including StoryQuarterly, Salamander, Phoebe and The Pennsylvania Review. Her collection of poetry, Self-Portrait with Severed Head, was published by Ibbetson Street press. Her collection of short stories, Blue Land, was released by Polyho Press and includes the Pushcart nominee “Sin Vergüenza.” She has recently completed a novel-in-stories titled Afterheat.
She has produced a short lyric documentary which chronicles the catastrophic steps of mountaintop removal to retrieve Appalachian coal. With her band, Rockabetty, she is currently recording a new compact disc entitled, Clean Coal/ Big Lie.
For more information please visit: cdcollins.com.
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CLEAN COAL BIG LIE
Anybody says to you
Clean coal.
Anybody says to you
Cheap coal.
You only have to say....
Big Lie
Now listen here,
I’m going to Washington, D.C. and I’m going to sit down with the first family. Because I want to talk to them about the train.
The train that runs all day long, all through the night,
It loads up over in Cheyenne station, chugs down to Leatherwood, on to Sapphire, to Charlene, to Hazard.
In each station, it’s loaded up with coal.
As the coal rolls out, the mountain comes down.
There is a couple of myths being sold round town.
Clean coal.
Coal is dirty.
Cheap coal.
No, it ain’t cheap.
I want to tell you the understory.
I come from a culture that is being lost, stolen.
I live in a third world land, in this first world country.
When you flip on a light, over half
the electricity comes from coal.
Ripped from the Appalachian mountains,
My home.
To get the coal, they don’t strip mine anymore,
they don’t deep mine
they just go on and tear the mountain down.
A machine called a dragline
20 stories high, its base the size of a gymnasium
crawls to the mountaintop, digs into its face
then dynamite blasts,
flaring plumes of yellow smoke,
fountains of shale,
you shake inside your house,
the hillsides shudder with the shock,
the ground heaves like an earthquake,
then fly-rock rains down on us
our houses crack; our wells dry up,
whole towns disappear.
The man from the coal company says,
'We ain’t seen nothing we can't buy.’
Dragline scoops out the blue, blue coal,
A mountain seam that
took 300 million years to create
takes 300 days to knock down.
Then our ruined mountaintop
called the overburden
is dumped into the valley
burying the streams, flowers, wildlife, and anything that cannot run away fast enough.
And the bluebird flies up, but where does she go?
Or the medicine in those mountains.
The rivers run thick with lead and slurry.
They grade a false prairie where the mountain stood.
But this soil produces no fruit, no seed,
maybe they’ll slap another Wal-mart on it.
Coal, pure carbon,
twice as dirty as oil.
burn up this planet in double-time.
It ain’t clean.
They take your money to prop up coal
If you add up forests, air, the fish you eat, land and the people on it,
if you’re talking about the future.
it’s the most expensive fuel on earth.
Oh the coal these hills shine like blueblack diamonds,
And it burns with a blue, blue flame
If you’re my president, too,
Raise up your voice
And stop this train.
Oh it’s Dirty business. That Dirty coal.
Eclipse
Tonight a shadow covers the moon;
the shadow, just a shadow, the world.
The moon is full and singing its familiar song of O’s.
The voice vibrates in the hard cavities
until the planet seems to live.
There is a woman walking under the moon
in the barren streets of the town
as the shadow bites into the bright edges.
You could say:
this woman traverses the sky
long trails of light years
weaving themselves into her hammock.
You could say
her heart was the moon
cold and bright,
or her eye in one-quarter view.
Yet these are only images.
The light of the moon is a dust of glass
reflecting a distant star;
the moon’s surface slippery, like silica,
faintly reflective, like volcanic sand.
You could say the moon always shows the same face,
as it revolves with the earth
in the light of the home star.
You could say,
yet this is only science.
The shadow muffles the light like a hand of smoke
until the voice is small, a reverberation.
She steps into a doorway out of the wind
listens as the voices rise from the craters—
Sea of Clouds, Sea of Showers, Ocean of Storms.
She hears the song about hushed deaths
and persistent shadows;
the song about the seed that must grow
to the size of a galaxy
in one lifetime.
So that it may contain this:
astonishing, temporary, illumination.
Subtracting Down
I love the way I can
drag a screw
through soap
tap a starter nail in the wall
drive the screw into the stud,
the way the men talk about studs
when they build houses,
pouring the footer
framing up the 2x4s
laying in studs.
He asks his wife,
You getting stud service
from Tommy Banta,
who wears
the red stone,
a bleeding garnet
in his solid gold ring.
Tommy Banta,
who drives her to work
pulls into
the KFC drive-through
whispers into the speaker
I’ll have a breast, he says,
and fries.
I love the way peace floats
settling on the furniture
the velvet armchair
subtracting down.
Don’t dick around with the figures, baby;
you don’t know how it’s going to all add up.
He says, You know, if it weren’t for me,
there’d be no high rise;
all be living under a dome of sky.
I say,
I love when my own fear speaks, says,
hiding will not protect you.
We find our way
through subtraction
stripping down.
I love the fragrance of grease
from exhaust fans
into the winter morning,
walking past on my way to the factory,
how steam billows into clouds
my hands
two blue stars
in my coat pockets.
In my bones I carry
the habits
of my precious desolation.
Time dissolves
undifferentiated
water on water
white on white.
I will drain the disturbances
like polluted oil,
eroding the pistons
the corroded washers
the sick engine.
I will loosen the bolt
drain the accumulation
the bitter screws.
In the blighted bayou
a man floats
in the orange fungus,
rocking face up
in the dinghy’s wake.
Do you love the way
we find our way
through subtraction?
The men full of friction
building the world
the screws
the studs
the 2x4s.
I love the
erosion
the attrition
the rusting
the stripping down,
till there is nothing
left but essence.
Nothing to save,
nothing to hide,
nothing to fear.
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