True story.
Leon Evans is a logger,
a man who’s good to look at, lean
with eyes like sapphires
shining through the grime on his face
after a day’s hard work
when he’s too tired to care about anything
but getting some dinner and sleep.
His marriage to Zina didn’t last.
They say he was mean in his youth,
caught a hippie once,
cut off his hair with a chain saw.
So I asked him, “Leon, is it true?”
“Naw,” he told me,
“It was just a pocket knife.”

-Susan Rae Sampson