This Is Not To Say
So many feelings fit between two heartbeats So many objects can be held in our two hands Don’t be surprised we can’t describe the world And just address things tenderly by name. -Zbigniew Herbert This was supposed to be about the dirt that flies up in puffs between bare feet when the bees are buzzing...
The Potato Harvest
This is the morning that summer ends. In one hard frost our garden has become an abandoned battlefield, the last vestiges of the living lay stiff and frozen, black wilted zucchini leaves like limp umbrellas stand as pathetic monuments, tattered flags, over what was, only yesterday, a vegetable garden. Potatoes love one heavy frost. It...
Kathy
When I took Kathy to my meet my parents, Dad got out his boarding-school yearbooks. He’d never done such a thing, shown anyone the elegant 1930s volumes—certainly never to one of my girlfriends. I suppose her work as an educator made his sharing of that lost world relevant, but he also was showing a pretty...
Tenderness
Ronnie Thomley banged on our door early one morning. He runs heavy machinery for Willie Thrift, the pond man. He showed up at our place in the pine woods of panhandle Florida driving a compact air-conditioned tractor equipped with a front-loaded rotary cutter. Ronnie’s boss had sent him over to clear out some of the...
On the Farm
Who Oh my god, who is she? I want her for my own. I want her affinity with all those chickens, her lopsided leaning, her house all atilt. I want that tipping chimney and the angle of her neck as she lets one hen push its way into her heart, another pose as a hat....
Rural Route
Before my uncle raced down the hill from his farm to ours to stop a fire when we weren’t home, before he lifted and threw a barrel of oil out of the burning shed. Yanked the garden hose off the spigot. Before Rural Route 1 became 121st Street, before one farmer warned us about the...
The Origin of Sausage
i. The origin of sausage is the boar. Spices are added because it’s a bad cut of meat, all tough and bland. I refused to eat it when I learned its source through a 4-H project—one that had me tour a meat packing plant as an adolescent. ii. For as long as I live I’ll...
Full Gospel
1. What I see as a child on my way to church with my grandparents: dead barns, CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO faded into the gray wood. Also: Southern Indiana hills, knobs, knolls, ancient ripples where glaciers halted at the Ohio. What I see at my grandparents’ church: an Appalachian diaspora. Millions fled the mountains mid-century...
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