Airport Beers with Justin Carter and his forthcoming book ‘Brazos’ from Belle Point Press
Airport Beers is an interview series. The following is an interview between Bryan Harvey and writer Justin Carter. Justin’s poetry collection Bravos is forthcoming from Belle Point Press and is currently available for preorder.
Bryan Harvey: Care to give us a rundown on your relationship with ants.
Justin Carter: Fire ants were a big part of my childhood, which might be a weird thing to say but they were everywhere down on the Texas Gulf Coast.
There are a couple times in the manuscript where ants show up, but let me highlight and expand on the reference in “Some Things I Miss.” See, this one morning I was in my bedroom, probably playing the Super Nintendo, and I looked down and there was an ant on my leg, which was weird but not that weird, you know? Bugs have a way of getting into places and my childhood home must have had a lot of ways for them to get in, because you’d see ants, roaches, pill bugs, stink bugs…all the bugs.
But then I noticed a second one on me, then a third, and then I looked down and the floor was full of ants. It turned out that they’d found a way through the wall and there was a whole ant hill behind my computer desk — it was one of those giant, L-shaped desks that people used to have, and it took up so much of the wall that we just had no idea that the ants had colonized my bedroom. The hill was probably a foot and a half high.
I will say that sometimes, poems lie. The speaker and the author aren’t always the same. In this poem, the speaker gets bit by these ants and has to pour meat tenderizer on his legs. That didn’t happen. I managed to get out of the room with maybe one or two bites, nothing more. But there was this other time, when me and my parents were out fishing by the river, that I wasn’t looking where I was going and I stepped into an ant hill. That time, I got probably ten bites — maybe more — all over my foot, and I did wind up putting my foot in a bucket of meat tenderizer when we got home. So, the poem conflates those two moments into one. If I didn’t combine things, I might have written a whole book about fire ants.
It’s also been weird, now that I live in Iowa, to see normal, non-fire ants. My sister-in-law has four kids and the food debris from that attracts ants, so when we’re over there, we’re also liable to see some. But those just…don’t bite you? They don’t leave these giant white welts on your body? It’s nice, I suppose, to no longer be in a place where I have to be so aware of the danger of ants.
Bryan: As a kid in Georgia, I once foolishly waged war against a fire ant colony. Emphasis on foolishly.
Certain poems in your collection are coming of age episodes that read like sandpaper reflections on being young and aimless. The speakers in these poems are often in places where they don’t have ownership. They’re trespassing to some extent, but they also just seem to be looking for something to occupy the time. What was it like growing up where you did and when you did? How often do you go back?
Justin: You know, I actually love my hometown, even though the poems might sometimes suggest the opposite. It’s just a complicated place.
I have two different answers to “what was it like growing up where you did.” I’d say until I was fifteen or sixteen, I didn’t really think much about the world beyond the small town. I went to Houston a couple of times a year for things like an Astros game or the rodeo, but mostly I just hung out with my parents and went fishing and watched sports and ate BBQ. I was content with that world since it was all I really knew.
And then I got a car. I’m from a town of about 3,000 people, but when you live there and have a car, you can drive out to the nearby town of 20,000 people, where you get exposed to a lot of different people, and I think that was where this kind of aimlessness comes from — once I realized I could leave this town where nothing happens and nothing changes, all I wanted to do was leave. I’d drive two hours away to other small towns on weekends because some local metal bands were playing at the VFW Hall there. I’d grab a couple friends and drive to Houston because there was a free show at the record store there.
It’s all about perspective, right? Once you have some distance from a place, even if that distance is just fifteen miles of distance while you go walk around a mall somewhere else, you can kind of realize things about that place.
I usually go back once a year, though my wife and I had a child in December so I haven’t been home in 15, 16 months now. My father moved out of town, so the last time we went to Texas we went to his new place instead of down to my hometown, where my mother still lives, and that was weird — to be a couple hours from home and not actually go home.
Bryan: That hometown love definitely resonates throughout the poems, from “My Grandfather’s Football Game” where Dallas is setting up a field goal to that “drunk and stumbling” soon-to-be cancer patient in “Some Things I Miss.” And all the wayward adventures here burst with fun. I think what’s impressive about your poems is the care they give to rough edges while resisting the urge to smooth them over entirely. In the poem “I Go Back,” you touch on the sentimentality in how John Mellencamp and Kenny Chesney sometimes deal with small town life, but the poem takes the truth of Chesney’s cliche and ends with violent reminiscences that veer towards the grotesque. Or take the poem “What We Can’t Leave Behind” where you have the harmless “Bullet holes pinged in a Coke can” at the start and the more ominous “crack of rifles in the distance” at the poem’s end. I guess the question here is about how much conscious effort is in consistently striking that nerve between love and perspective — are you mining the place for what you need the poem to be or is the tone surfacing on its own?
Justin: Funny story — I hate the Cowboys. Maybe not as much as I used to, but since 2002 I’ve been a diehard Texans fan. But my mom’s side of the family was always big Cowboys fans, while my dad’s side was Oilers fans who were left adrift in the late 90s. There was a time there when my dad always wore a sleeveless Packers t-shirt, because we had this lost period between the end of the Oilers and the birth of the Texans.
I’m not sure why I decided to talk about football fandom there.
Anyway, I think I’ve reached a point where that’s not a conscious effort. Earlier on in my writing life, I worried about how to thread that needle, where the line was between writing a love story to a place and finding the distance to be critical of a space, but at some point I just started trusting myself. Trusting my images to do the work I needed them to on their own, and also trusting myself to not interfere in that work. There are things I love and things I hate and things I can’t understand about the world — in the poems, I want to allow all those things a place to breathe.
Bryan: The first poem in Brazos ends with an observation about the rain being a ghost. And then you have variations of ghosts throughout the book. Soup cans. Fish. Kids hiding. Old trees. But what was the first ghost in your life that propelled you down this path of observing all this paranormal activity in everyday life?
Justin: When I was in first grade, a writer named Zinita Fowler came to our school to read from a series of three books she’d put out called Ghost Stories of Old Texas. One of the stories in the first book was about a ghost right outside of our town, the ghost of Britt Bailey, who appears in the poem “The Legend of Britt Bailey.” I thought that was so cool — a book that had our local ghost in it — so I convinced my parents to buy me all three of Fowler’s books. All these years later, they’re still sitting on top of my desk.
I come from a county with a lot of these ghost stories. There’s that one, and then there’s the story of this abandoned haunted church one town over, which I wrote a fictionalized version of, and then there’s the Wild Woman of Hasima and the ghosts of the Karankawas out at Camp Karankawa and I’m sure there’s more. I’m not sure what it is about the place I’m from that makes ghost stories so prevalent. Maybe it’s about finding some bit of excitement. Maybe it’s because all the trees look frightening in the dark, the way they hang over the backroads.
Bryan: That’s cool. It’s funny what we do and don’t hold onto from childhood. You mention Buc-ee’s in “Some Things I Miss.” Now that you live in Iowa do you miss the proximity of the world’s cleanest bathrooms?
Justin: So, here’s the thing about Buc-ee’s — the Buc-ee’s I mention in that poem is actually nothing like what people imagine when they think of Buc-ee’s. For people who aren’t from the Texas Gulf Coast, Buc-ee’s conjures up these giant travel stops, the cleanest bathrooms in the world, all of that, but I’m from the county where the company started and in the beginning, they were just small gas stations. We had two in my town — one about the size of your average 7-Eleven and the other maybe the size of 1.5 normal gas stations. The smaller one — which the company finally shut down a few years ago — actually had a door you had to open to go into the bathroom, which is very different from the giant mega Buc-ee’s, and it’s that smaller one that exists in the poem.
Here’s a picture of it from Google, because I think a small, shuttered Buc-ee’s is just such a strange image.
Bryan: From what I can tell online, a Buc-ee’s might be coming to Wisconsin, but it would probably be of the world domination travel stop variety. Where I live in Virginia, a Buc-ee’s travel stop might replace a cleared pad site that is currently covered in scrub pines and that I run by on my Saturday morning route. I’m reading all the worst Buc-ee’s stuff in case it doesn’t come, and I’m reading all the best Buc-ee’s stuff in case it does.
Besides poetry, you also write about sports. What are some WNBA storylines you’re excited about going into this summer whether they be travel center size or the stature of a local gas station? I apologize for that segue.
Justin: If you need some bad Buc-ee’s stuff, I know a number of ex-employees who can give you endless examples.
The “Buc-ee’s travel center” of WNBA stories is Caitlin Clark, right? Her WNBA debut was the most-watched WNBA game for ESPN in years and she’s bringing new eyes to the sport, but just like a Buc-ee’s travel center, everyone knows about her and is talking about her, so trying to add to that just makes a crowded place even more crowded.
The Brazoria County Buc-ee’s kind of stories are what I’m really interested in — how Tina Charles looks for the Dream after taking last season off, how the Wings weather the absence of star forward Satou Sabally, how the non-Clark rookies do, especially Cameron Brink, who I think has the potential to be a better pro player than Clark is.
I think that’s something I want to do a better job at when I write about the W this season — highlighting the smaller stories. I’m going to be doing a deep dive piece every other week for Her Hoop Stats that takes a specific player in the league and does a deep dive on her game, and I want to make sure that I’m covering the unsung heroes, the people you run into at small Buc-ee’s.
When I was 13, my parents took me to my first NASCAR race and beforehand, we stopped at this Waffle House, and the guy working was a magician. I mean, he was making five-plus meals at once, just expertly serving up breakfast food. I’d never seen anything like it. And, like…the WNBA has a lot of players who are like that Waffle House man. Layshia Clarendon, for instance, had a triple-double in the Sparks’ first game, just doing a bit of everything for the team. I hope people talk more about these kinds of players this season.
Bryan: Thanks for making that Buc-ee’s line to the WNBA less tangential.
Justin Carter is a writer originally from the Texas Gulf Coast and now living in Iowa. His book Brazos can be preordered here. He’s earned degrees from the University of Houston, Bowling Green State University, and the University of North Texas, where he graduated with a PhD in English. He is an editor at Fubo, writes freelance pieces about women’s basketball, and has contributed to a number of literary journals and websites. Here’s a link to his website. You can also find him on Twitter (@juscarts). Airport Beers is an interview series. Past sessions include:
- Mike Nagel (April 2023)
- Craig Graziano (May 2023)
- Kamilah Lawson (June 2023)
- Sandra Marchetti (September 2023)
- Justin Bryant (February 2024)
