The Rural Carrier Stops to Kill a Nine-Foot Cottonmouth by T.R. Hummer

There is a connection between the snake in this sonnet and the carrier.  First off, a rural carrier is a mailman in the country.  A cottonmouth is a common type of snake in North America and it is a venomous snake.  They are typical in southern United States and are not a concern when it comes to the endangered animals list that the United States government has.  However, the average cottonmouth snake will grow up to two feet in length, occasionally growing up to five feet. The largest one to ever be documented was six feet long, so it seems like the nine-foot cottonmouth that is described in the sonnet is unrealistic.  There is a connection between the snake and the carrier in the sonnet, even though there is a mutual hatred between the two of them.  The carrier hates the snake so much that he shoots it twice, when it appears that one shot would have been enough.  The word 'squirm' is the word that connects the man and the snake, when "I saw the son-of-a-bitch uncoil/In the road ahead of me, uncoil and squirm/For the ditch, squirm a hell of a long time".  He talks about how sometimes, a man just hates something so much that they want to kill it, but in the end, he seems to feel the connection to the snake because "I felt my spine/Squirm suddenly".  There is the feeling of similarity between them because of the link between the living things that live on Earth.  

Drag by Lusia Strus

The word 'exhale' is quite a powerful word throughout the monologue.  It seems to do a lot for the setting of the play, since during the monologue, the other actors are throughout the audience exhaling when Lusia exhales.  It seems that it is a transition to each topic that she discusses, and it also gives her power, which she gains from smoking.  There are even some points where Lusia does not take a drag before exhaling, which means that it is not just from smoking.  It seems that she could be letting out different aspects of her life through her breathing as she thinks about what she has done with her life.  It is being released the same way her breath is leaving her body.  Another thing that Lusia does is that she uses the smoking to be more confident to the audience.  When the lights begin to go dark, she begins to lose her confidence and she is a child, like she describes herself through the monologue.  She seems to be battling within herself if she is a child or if she is an adult, like the way she bought her first cigarettes when she was 12, but she asks "Do you think the IRS will try me as an adult?" It looks like Lusia grew up when she bought her first pack of cigarettes, along with making her way “through college doing phone sex” and by talking about cancer, but she seems like a child when she talks about the IRS and when the lights begin to go out, she seems like she is childish and scared.  

Discipline by Donald Ray Pollock

In Discipline, by Donald Ray Pollock, there is a constant comparison between father and son.  Luther, the father, and Sammy seem to have a relationship that is not father and son.  In the story, Sammy only seems to be someone that Luther can live through vicariously.  Luther talks about his failure against Bobby Lowe’s father in several heavyweight competitions, and seems to be forcing the same rivalry between Bobby and Sammy.  He rarely even acknowledges Sammy as his son and does not seem to be happy with who Sammy is.  When Luther sees Bobby, he can only think of how much better Bobby is than Sammy, which causes him to push Sammy even harder than he was before.  He calls him his son at the beginning of the story, but it is merely to introduce Sammy as a character, instead of having the emotional connection between Luther and his son.  It seems that Luther only uses Sammy to accomplish what he could not do when he was Sammy’s age.  Sammy does not seem to be his own person, only a boy controlled by his father.  A reason that he does not say anything about this is because he is, in some way, receiving affection from his father, which is better than no affection at all.  Once Sammy dies, Luther finally has the realization of how much Sammy meant to him, not as someone to train, but as his son.  Luther refers to Sammy as “his boy” after Sammy dies, and then begins to push himself into training harder than he had trained when Sammy was alive.  This may be because he feels bad about being the cause of Sammy’s death, and feels that he needs to take responsibility for how much he pushed Sammy.  At the end of the story, Luther goes to train at the spot that Sammy died, which seems to show that he is finally accepting responsibility for his actions, which led to Sammy’s death.  

Heat Lightning in a Time of Drought by Andrew Hudgins

In Heat Lightning in a Time of Drought, by Andrew Hudgins, repetition is used with the phrase ‘want some’.  It is not specified what ‘some’ means, but it has significant meaning to the drunken neighbor and the writer of the poem.  Repetition is also used throughout the poem, such as “The crickets will not, will not stop.”  There are also repeated words, such as ‘drunk’.  The author references more than one drunken person: the neighbor and the woman with whom he fell in love.   The repetitive words make those sentences in which they are more powerful and draw the eye to them.  They are clearly important due to the repetitive words, or at least the author is trying to bring attention to them.  Another part of the form of the poem is the lack of sentence structure.  The sentences run on and do not end at the lines, instead continuing on to the next line. 

            There are a lot of comparisons throughout the poem.  The chandelier falling and exploding is compared to the rose dipped in liquid nitrogen and being smashed against the desk.  The words that are used to describe the events are very harsh and descriptive, such as the words ‘exploded’, ‘razors’ and ‘snapped’.  It reflects the damage done on both the rose and the woman, which are both beautiful objects in the poem.  The comparison of things snapping and breaking relates to the broken relationship that he had with this girl.  It seems that the girl has left behind pieces in the bed after the salesman shows him the vacuum and uses it on the bed.  There are different cases of drinking throughout the story, both happy and sad.  When he meets the girl, she was “a little drunk, the love-light/unshielded in her eyes”.  However, after his relationship ends with her, he has a “friend who helped me through [his] grief by drinking/all my liquor”.