Dean Marshall Tuck

poetry

Dean Marshall Tuck is a writer living in eastern North Carolina with his wife and daughters. His novel Twinless Twin (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2025) was chosen by Jason Mott as the winner of AWP’s 2024 James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel. His fiction was selected for this year’s volume of New Stories from the South anthology. Poetry can be found in Rattle, Witness Magazine, New Ohio Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Cincinnati Review (forthcoming). For more, please visit deanmarshalltuck.com, IG: dmtuck_writer.

 

Renegades

Usually, it was around 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.  when the ATVs would rev and zoom  past our bedroom window, tearing down  the paths that would take them across my uncle’s farm, through the woods,  into the neighbor's property: the sand pits,  a secluded drainage ditch farmers  would irrigate from, where they piss out  campfires and empty their beer cans,  spotlighting deer and sometimes  our bedroom window, blue shadows  on our ceiling, voices of glad boys  with cigarettes, guns, beer, and little else.  Such sounds infect one's dreams  for years to come. As the farms  in my hometown grow smaller and fewer,  new neighbors, their barking dogs,  the theft, the all-night gunfire,  their fluorescent lights, loud music,  and monster trucks—it all crowds  my sleeping mind. Forgive us our trespasses,  a strange word mumbled with every  Lord’s prayer. My prayer: lead us not  into the hands of trespassers who roam free,  who, in owning nothing, own everything—  the entire county—who take what they will,  all they see, who never sleep, whose lives  stand like loaded guns, pointed nowhere  and everywhere.

“ My recurring dreams of rogue neighbors predated the buying, subdividing, and selling of my rural hometown by more than ten years. Hundreds of new houses and new neighbors later, were those dreams premonitory? Time will tell. Check out the urban blight aesthetic of the music video for Toto's ‘Rosanna’ if you'd like to join me in my nightmares.”