This poem originally appeared in Locust Review #13 (Winter 2025/2026)
Name: __________________________
Date: Every time you come back.
Instructions: Circle all that apply.
Use pencil; answers may change when the wind does.
1. The first thing you smell when you hit Main Street is:
A. Burnt oil and fryer smoke.
B. The ghost of the factory, coughing in the dust.
C. Your own nerves.
D. All of the above.
2. At the Day and Paylin’s, the clerk still:
A. Calls you sweetheart even though you’ve corrected him twice.
B. Pretends not to recognize you.
C. Slips you a free lighter, says, Don’t tell corporate.
D. Is you, again, in a dream you can’t clock out of.
3. The house you grew up in now belongs to:
A. Your mother’s ghosts.
B. A family of raccoons thriving in the insulation.
C. No one, officially.
D. The silence that lives between hoarded walls.
4. The local paper still prints:
A. Obituaries before weather reports.
B. The same headline: Factory May Reopen.
C. The prayer list, longer every week.
D. Nothing. The presses rusted through.
5. When someone asks where you’re from, you say:
A. The name of the nearest city.
B. The name of a highway.
C. Somewhere that burned down.
D. You laugh and change the subject.
6. On the jukebox at the dive bar:
A. A country song about a woman leaving.
B. A country song about a man staying.
C. Static.
D. You, humming along to both, pretending not to know all the words.
7. How do you know you still belong here?
A. You remember which toilet at the Flavor Factory always clogs.
B. You still flinch when someone says kin is kin.
C. Your accent returns like a bruise under light: warshin’ dishes in the zinc.
D. You keep the keys on your ring even though the locks are gone.
8. When they ask who you are now, you answer:
A. Someone who left.
B. Someone who learned to love their own strangeness.
C. Someone who still looks back.
D. All of the above, and still failing the test.
Bonus Essay (10 points): Explain, in complete sentences, why you keep dreaming of a place that tried to unmake you.
Tish Turl is an author and artist who writes what they call “class-revenge fanfiction.” They are a member of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective and an editor for Locust Review. Tish also works on the Born Again Labor Museum. Their published work includes the serialized novella Sound, the short stories, “Space Goths,” “Memez,” and “Sewerbot,” the serialized poems of the Toilet Key Anthology and the “Stink Ape Resurrection Primer.” They hace an MFA in creative writing frin Southern Illinois University.