During their panel discussion titled “Voice Lessons” at the 2015…
Hateful
my Granny said, her pleated
velvet cheeks aquiver
as we watched the battered
Fords and coal trucks
splatter gravel from the road
above the porch.
That’s one thing
I can’t abide.
I don’t remember
who it was or what he did
that made my Granny spit
his name like chaw
into her jar, but I remember still
the boy who shot into my mind—
my mother called him hateful, too,
the way he’d hold himself
up high and hard there
in his daddy’s store—
and how I wanted
what he had,
bone-weary as I was
of my own softness.