Things Go South

Amy Woolard

Always trust a red door
On a black Camaro, thighs

Sticking to the vinyl in the June
Sun, pinking up the place.

Here, the apple don’t fall
From the tree. Here, whatever you

Find lying on the ground is yours.
A scratch-off waiting to strike. The shade

From a sidelong glance. You’re looking at
What happens when a body fights back

Three years after the fact. Three years
After the fact: the sweet morning

Stench of you sweating out last night’s liquor
Just by pushing my tongue against the porcelain

Crown glued in my mouth, like hitting a switch.
Every town I leave, I leave on scholarship.

Nothing looks better to me than seeing
Nothing for miles. I can fit everything

I love into this trunk, into my own two arms,
Into my backhanded smile. And this gas station

Bathroom is more than just an American
Notion of the dirtiest place on Earth. It’s where

I’ll put on my face. I know how to wipe
A scene clean. And then I’m gone, love, like

I was never there. And even if it could hear
You at these speeds, the backseat don’t

Care a lick what you have to say. Sweetheart,
I sympathize with the assassin in every story.

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April 10, 2020

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“Things Go South” (poem) from Neck of the Woods by Amy Woolard
Alice James Books, 2020.

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Amy Woolard is a legal aid attorney working on civil rights policy and legislation in Virginia. Her first collection, Neck of the Woods, received the 2018 Alice James Award from Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Boston Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere, while her essays and reporting have been featured in publications such as Slate, The Guardian, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Neck of the Woods

Alice James Books

Farmington, Maine

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“This debut offers a troubled journey delivered by a voice the reader will want to keep listening to.”
—Publishers Weekly

“[Woolard’s] poems are smart, sexy, dark, witty, and surprising. I think that if I had bought just one book at AWP, it would have been her collection, Neck of the Woods.”
—Nin Andrews for Best American Poetry

”Amy Woolard’s Neck of the Woods is a book that abides between dark humor—'Tornados need to slow their roll & keep their cones tight’—and the kind of disasters rendered so casually that they seem all the more terrifying—‘tremored like seeing a landscape while your elbows/Are hooked onto somebody from the back.’ In all, this is a book about survival, but this speaker is honest enough to say she’s hasn’t been made whole: ‘A demolition after my own heart.’ What a lovely debut!”
—Jericho Brown

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