My mom used to tell us how she yearned
to go to Mockingbird Hill. It was somewhere
in the countryside near Snake Creek,
so enticing-sounding, so Eden-like:
One could glimpse paradise
in a place called Mockingbird Hill.
One day her parents finally took her,
and she discovered that this place of dreams
was a general store with stinkbait
on the counter and a toothless man
breathing death into her father’s ear.
The dream is so loud, the land
empty beneath the rhythm of alarms.
–Shaun Perkins
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 