Poem of the Week

Literal Country Music

Samuel Cheney

Afterwards we got snow cones

and sat on the curb. The clouds looked

like clouds but bigger. Obviously

Utah existed. The bottom fell out

of an entire bag of breakfast burritos

if not for which we would’ve lived

outside history.

Literal country music

warbled from truck speakers.

Images of the prophets hung inside. The mountains

looked like Olympus, the Jazz logo,

the Paramount bumper juddering

eternally. People were floating

into fabric shops, feedstores, 3-D

Video, Deseret Industries Thrift.

It all added up to that. A denial

of the fact of ash. Practice. Literal hymns

neighbors were singing, falling forward

in sleep, waking up again.

The Yale Review · “Literal Country Music” by Samuel Cheney

what surprised you about the composition of this poem?

The more I write of my home, the more I feel I have yet to say about the spiritual and physical landscape of the place. I’ve been recreating the northern Utah of my childhood in poetry for half a decade now, yet whenever I revisit my manuscript, there seems to be an omission of something elemental to that world: a snow cone in a hot parking lot, a Mormon relic shop. Every new poem seems to be a chance to rectify forgetting. I think poems should move a half step quicker than themselves.

Samuel Cheney is an ex-Mormon poet from Centerville, Utah, who now lives in Baltimore. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, and his debut manuscript, BELIEVERS, was a finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series.