March 28, 1941
What they remember is your drowning not your Olympic swimming not those dives those ecstatic surfacings not how you caught what flashed beneath the billows not how you wrote on the waves.
Poetry
Spring
In memory of Martha One winter in the late afternoon my aunt and I took a drive out into the countryside and watched as the sun began to set over icy fallow farm fields its shallow oblique light the very thing she wanted me to see because it was beautiful.…
Gospel River
Despite my animosity toward Sunday school and church: the huge helmets of grey hair capped by tight buns, flung back in hallelujahs; the spirit-filled oxblood wingtips loping to and from hard seats, and all the cloth— giant flowery dresses billowing up aisles, flapping dark suits and long ties lolling like…
The Memorial
The road devours the trees and the mountain, like fruit, excretes the miracle of convenience. At the end of the trail a memorial looks over the valley, where mountains crash into a shoreline of silvery pastures shot through with pink evening light, where factories ride the fog like freighters on…
The Great Flood
Hazard, Kentucky is no different than a hundred rural towns started as a trading post, funded by coal that turned lungs and hands dark at the start of the twentieth century. And while I love the story of Hazard folk making the Stone Gap journey, having to go over Big…
Gifts of the South
An Eclipse The moon, red like fat dripping from the porterhouse side of the T-Bone, an American God in its own rites. Beef moon, nurturing our ebb and flow with hands that knead us to tenderness and umami. Then, a cleanse, clean as gin straight up tasting like clear night…
Audre Lorde was a Secret Hillbilly: A liturgy for the 21st Century
February 23, 2016 Lorde, who would have turned 82 last Thursday. If she had not died in that year of the rising Clintons, 1992. If she had not battled for 14 years before that breast cancer liver cancer For 58 years before that the cancer of a disappearing mother the…
Laundry Woman
My great-grandmother agitated Mrs. Worldly’s wash every week over the hot flash and glow of the fire in the misery shed. Hand on rough stick, grandmother pulled around the glob of tangled shirts and sheets; she stirred as if hauling the weighted laundry about an axis, sloshy seas yielding a…
What I Learned in My Mother’s Kitchen
While my father traveled for his job during the week, my mother lived the life of a woman emancipated by TV dinners and pizza delivery. On Sundays, though, after church, my father dragged her back to the kitchen, where she worked the opener against the lip of a can of…
Nativity Scene on the Courthouse Lawn
So long since I have heard said the word oxen; what mechanics the word insists upon stable faces—