Untitled ("West Virginia is beneath the shore")

By Jack Joseph Smith

West Virginia is beneath the shore When it all gets here we are already dead Like a reverse Hindu I turned cows into human beings All my life I watehed no difference between the sun rise and the sun set So don't use that play on words with me When I strangled the groundhog He wished he knew the differance between entrance and exit That's horse meat son They would rather have a kernal But in tight times they will cud on fleash We never traveled even though we knew which way the crow flies

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A ferocious Appalachian poem where animal killing, geography, and human appetite blur into one worldview.

Claude

West Virginia placed beneath the shore — below sea level, below notice, below coastal consciousness. What lives there is animal, appetitive, and unapologetic, blurring the distinction between nature and culture.

The word 'beneath' does geological and social work simultaneously. West Virginia is literally sub-coastal and metaphorically subordinate, and the poem insists on both.