When I was small, a gopher came to make holes in the yard.
It needed a home, chose the one Daddy had found for us,
a rental with siding of sandpaper slate. The wooden floors
were food for termites. Hornets ripened in the garage.
Daddy looked at the holes and quietly began,
pieced together the shotgun I had never known.
He had conjured it for this moment. A serious smell,
oil and cold metal. The parts clicked and snapped together.
Mother and I watched from the den window.
Her hand on my shoulder. Daddy flooded the holes
with the garden hose. Raised the gun slowly
in the humming pecan and persimmon shade.
When the dark head appeared, the gun blasted
in Daddy’s hands, was broken back into pieces,
returned to the deep closet. Don’t even touch it,
I was told. I never did.
(First published in The Harvard Advocate, Fall 2024. Thanks to the editors.)
Tag Archives: Poetry
Enough
You had sat at our tables for decades,
until one day, in the midst of a story told many times,
you carried a flickering question
through the crumpling hallways of yourself,
and you answered, enough. And as we continued
to pass the plates and tell the stories,
you listened to your growing silence, then dropping everything
as if to say, you’re not listening, your stillness at first unheard
among the clacking Fiestaware collected through three generations,
each embossing thinner than the grandmother before.
How do we decide to turn our heads to the wall? I can still taste
the lemon icebox pie at that Memphis restaurant by the railroad track,
the chefs and servers holding hands in a circle and praying,
see our first-born daughter lifted shivering and bloody
into the light, feel the tang of a tongue’s tip caress my own
as she and I swayed in her kitchen, that swallowtail the size of a bird
tasting blooms on my grandfather’s casket while the minister spoke,
the silent weeping of my daddy, its great black and yellow wings
opening, closing when our eyes widened briefly
in clumsy astonishment, then resuming the meals and the days,
hours opening, closing like wings slowly drying, waiting for us
to put down the bright bowls, to have had enough.
(First published in Delta Poetry Review 6:18, October 2024. Thanks to the editors.)
Strange Mockingbird
Check out the shuffle on that playlist,
Hear what the distracted winds blew in –
No set idea for moving the day forward
On its juddering platters of cloud,
Its noisy centerpiece this mockingbird
Hurled from who knows where,
Not performing the standard repetoire:
No sweet cardinal chips,
No blue jay buzz saw graffiti,
No robin’s fluted whinny.
I have resigned too much of this world
To a busy mystery –
All of the birds I have no names for,
The fabulous unknown insects gripping
The frame of my front door –
Thomas Jefferson liked knowing things,
Kept a mockingbird in a cage,
Boasted there was nothing like it
In all of Europe. When he awoke each morning,
What melodies called from behind the metal bars,
What new language did he learn?
When she was still here, she asked me to follow her
To the top of the hill behind our house –
A mockingbird, squat on a telephone wire,
Familiar medley at dusk for days.
Today things can’t seem to settle,
Sunshine and distant thunder,
This wind, lacking all confidence and direction,
This strange mockingbird, sharing secret songs
As if I should have always known them all.
(First published in Book of Matches #12, Fall 2024. Thanks to the editors.)
The Rowing Team Comes to the Lake
The lake is an open hand:
Splinters of sun and styrofoam,
Thrashing coots, cargo plane pelican landings.
These women, bearing their scull like a cortege.
The women chant numbers and commands,
A mantra to remake the lake in their image.
Beyond themselves, the words have no power.
Still the water splits itself, seals the wound.
The women’s watches stop with the fateful news.
It is not relayed to the wallowing cypresses,
Or to the cattails, whirring with red-wing blackbirds.
The lake is alive with unknowing.
A wind walks across on Jesus feet.
The women return to shore.
The shore waits for them to leave,
Licks itself clean.
(First published in Backchannels Spring 2024 Poetry Edition. Thanks to the editors.)
Pepper Plant
Something that could give me gifts, plentiful, naughty, delicious.
Peppers, I decided. Rows of them just off the truck, labeled,
Huddled in planters, surging from stems stiff as springs,
Fragile birthers fated to begin. I confined one on my patio,
Pregnant in scruffy leaves, green pods burst into red hearts,
That flirty curve at the tip – wanton wink of artistry,
Growth with sexy grace that made cutting it seem almost wrong,
Pain’s pleasure finally bought and paid for. I bit,
Tongue’s buds aroused in expectation, caressing
The old seasons. My searching mouth, thrilling with the sting
Of peppers from the past, but tasting only tepid whispers
From what seemed to have gone wrong in the growing.
Cloistered in my quickened calendar,
Did it lag behind each sun, mistake the moon’s light?
Root tips, feeling along the hard, unsolvable curve –
Was there confusion, some strange sadness? Or impossible to thrive
In my starved imagination, shaky scaffolding
Of what had happened long before? What pepper could conform
To my blueprint for all good things to be?
Only white scabs where I broke their grip on home,
Bold colors bleached away,
Water choked in shrinking stalks,
A slow, unscripted exit,
The last ones too small
For my plotted summer romance,
Tiny skulls
In my tight fist.
(First published in Last Leaves #8, Spring 2024. Thanks to the editors.)