Slow Southern State
Dancing on the hardwood feeling good,
I snap my fingers. Listen.
At a horse track in Hot Springs my father bet all his life savings on a palomino Quarter Horse named Diamonds Sparkle.
When my grandfather peppered
his seed across the alluvial floodplain,
cotton cropped up like a southern snow
in September. My grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts lopped like gongs on the washing line. Blighted youth, blackspot
on roses, butterfly milkweed, I murmur
as I tumble ass-backwards—headlong,
my blithe youth behind me. I’ve come this far, barefoot and mean, out of the backwoods of the Mississippi Delta. Dipped in Southern drawl and mud-stained fervor—
a water splintered levee—it doesn’t ask why first. It has a rhythm to it,
a gentle pulsing—
like my grandmother’s spider-veined hands
in the biscuit dough. Her food, thickened
all her toothpick-limbed children,
and my grandfather, mellow like smooth corn whiskey. Under a setting sun,
his bourbon-boozed breath
came in small spurts.
Most folks talk too much,
he’d say, aiming chewing tobacco
into an old coke can.
He never murmured.
Sometimes he’d look
out across at the tar-tinged night
and talk nonsense with the invisible choir
of cicadas.
My innocence clucks
like a chicken hauled off to the chopping block. Goodbye fruit flies cruising
the heirlooms. Goodbye pecan pie
and homemade vanilla bean.
Goodbye my cover of coots that grandmother fattened every morning with slivers of leftovers.
Where the word holler was both
a verb and a place—where ramshackle
little mud huts were made.
Some words are rickety doors creaking
open, and I walk on— through another lost summer,
a red-stained road
never coming
to an end. The cicadas still sing.
One of these days,
I’ll be gone.