Figs, pigs, peaches and a mule

By Lori Lasseter Hamilton

Wet grass kisses the fish

on Grandma’s patchwork quilt

as I plant her red roses in the ground,

Railroad Park, one fourth of July

while I eat a food truck hot dog

and the orchestra plays patriot songs.

 

When I was a kid, I’d eat figs

from Grandaddy’s backyard.

Now, a bulb yellow as a lemon

pumps chemo in me

and Mom takes me to eat fried green tomatoes

from a Green Springs meat-and-three.

Mom and Dad sit down to eat

at table with me

and I share tomatoes with them,

breaded, fried in grease.

Talk turns to how Grandaddy 

would give his garden tomatoes to them

and Mom would make fried green tomatoes then.

 

Dad tells me when he was a boy,

he had to lead a mule down a country road,

get out and walk, hold the rope

‘cause the mule couldn’t keep up

while Dad held the rope in Grandaddy’s car.

“Sorry, son, but you’re gonna have to get out of the car.”

 

Dad showed me where on his hand a scar

used to be, from a pig’s hoof

scratching him as he held the pig down

so Grandaddy could castrate him for better meat.

And the peaches Grandaddy would not spray, Dad said,

but tried selling them on Broad Street anyway

even though from the inside out, a peach worm infested them

 

the way wild kudzu decayed his backyard

with the scent of rotting grapes.

 

I wonder if that same kudzu

followed Dad down to Birmingham, 

a peach worm and castrated pig caravan

with seething snakes hiding in its tangled vines,

when he was able to escape Gadsden, home

to one hospital, where Daddy’s family

went to die.

 

Growing up, every day we drove by 

a kudzu mountain

on Chalkville Mountain Road

so Mom could drop my sister off 

to catch her Shades Valley school bus.

 

I wonder if, back in the eighties, that castrated pig’s ghost

ever swam in my cousins’ blue swimming pool,

other side of Grandaddy’s garden,

sharpening his hooves, pulling kudzu vines

to pump up his biceps.

 

Saturday nights at Grandma and Grandaddy’s,

we’d eat figs sometimes

or my aunt’s Mississippi mud pie

as we watched Hee Haw.

At the end of their night,

Roy, Buck, and cast would sing 

“May your pleasures be many,

may your troubles be few!”

 

Oh, if only they knew

I don’t stand a chance

with the Lasseter curse

and the ghost of a castrated pig

gripping me in a kudzu undertow.

Who We Are With Birds

By Girard Tournesol

Like a skate’s icy spray

a charm of goldfinches bathed 

in powdered snow at the feeder 

feathers a dull winter maze

My mind wanders to an aria of canary

caged in some pet store menagerie, 

plastic castles in wood chips 

their songs of freedom

I see countless people buying them, 

taking one home in a cage 

when the right thing to do is buy them all

and set them free

Cloud formations over Carolina

Cloud formations over Carolina:

scratchy lines which Paul Klee

would have been proud to stroke;

colors which would have shat-

tered his dynamic sensibilities;

forms which might have re-

defined his mad contexts,

brought madness to his sane

world.

-R. Bremner

(published in Turbulence 15, December 2013)

Summer of 22: Gonna Break the Hairy Skin of Summer’s First Peach (Thanks to Phil Terman)

Dust dry here

Most of the summer. 

Lost a peach tree 

To disease, drought…

A double whammy.

Surviving tree’s handful

Of hairy-skinned, nearly 

Ripe peaches escape the coons. 

Black raspberries a bust, 

Blackberries fared slightly better, 

Apples and grapes may do 

Well enough if we get some rain. 

Dahlias are half the height

This time last year,

Blooms late and sparse. 

Tomatoes late, 

Beets will do well 

With late season rain.

Garlic good. 

Rabbits ate the beans.

Interlopers trapped?

Three skunks, one opossum.

Still on the loose?

Four raccoons, one doe

Gonna bite into that first

Ripe peach, let the juice

Drip down my chin

And grin like a fool.

-Wayne H. Swanger

Garden Thought

May I be taken swiftly

Avoiding appurtenances

Of profitable compassion

Perhaps, collapse lifeless among

Tomatoes and dahlias,

Impaled upon the joy of my work

-Wayne H. Swanger

Golden Trees

By Ramey Channell

All through that passionate summer, 

with our intemperate sun

burning and beckoning,

your face remained the face of a child,

still dreaming dreams of childhood

as you played beneath summer trees.

 

Then, like changing leaves and seasons,

so quickly you became

what you had not been.

Climbing skyward into the mass of gold and red,

you left behind familiar earth and dreams,

seeking higher, newer things.

 

I watched the sudden change as you,

bewitched by one cool breeze,

balanced in a world

I had forgotten many autumns before.

Now, with your new cool and careless face before me,

I am haunted by memories of golden trees.

 

 

 

 

Published in Ordinary and Sacred as Blood: Alabama Women Speak, 1999, River’s Edge Publishing

In The Season of Drought

 By Ramey Channell

I grow weary of poetry

when I see the way the end will be:

a slight stuttering of the universe,

a quiet pause, then undefined eternity.

A small light,

then, uncharted night,

and a few angels wafting.

 

I grow inquisitive and loosely buoyant

when I think of angels wafting.

What they do and why they do it

is celestial and mostly mystery.

All I know 

is dig a hole, plant a seed,

and watch for miracles.

Eden Road

 By Ramey Channell

The road from Mama’s house snakes down the mountain,

narrow and black, tar-fragrant under heavy summer sun.

Alabama sun beats down like judgment, but also blesses;

beatitudes resound beside the road where blackberries glow

like fat black juicy bits of down-to-earth Heaven.

 

Voices singing Hallelujah! from the bushes;

loud whirring mechanical heartbeat of insect chorus;

katydids, hot and happy Hallelujah chanting,

till the air runs over with too much sound;

the world runs over with too much joy.

 

Mountain voodoo blackberry joy!

Katydid chanting Hallelujah joy!

 

The narrow black road snakes down the blessed mountain,

cutting right through the middle of hotter-than-hell Paradise, 

like a keen heavy knife, a gleaming two-edged sword,

plunging clean and deep, down to the pulsing center,

of a humid, sugar-sweet blackberry pie. 

 

And I stand beside that road, enchanted, heat-dazed, fingers poised

above the fruit of hot summer katydid Hallelujah Heaven,

motionless, enraptured, listening to another sound.

Deep in sacred shade, under heavy bushes of Paradise lost,

He sings, He rattles: dusty sound like pebbles roiling in a tin can.

 

Voodoo mountain blackberry joy!

Rattle and snap Hallelujah joy!

 

And He sings of blackberries from the beginning of time,

and the many blessings of summer, sun, and shade.

Glassy sharp obsidian blade of rattling sound,

cutting through the sultry heat and heartbeat, down to the quick;

He lays claim to bushes, shade, sunshine, earth and Heaven.

 

Alabama sun beats down like judgment, but also blesses;

hasty beatitudes back up the magic mountain road,

away from the bushes of Paradise and the lust of the berries.

Those who have ears, let them hear: Hallelujah!

And those who have blackberry mountain voodoo joy,

 

Let them rattle, rattle, blackberry joy!

Blackberry voodoo Hallelujah joy!

Knightvision

An out of sorted knight 

some way rides into a 

tumbling zig saw puzzle wall

upending the beginning he craved.

He finds what he didn’t know

he was looking for;

his questions answered

he didn’t think to ask.

In bum fuzzled flux, he 

barely balances on his steed’s two legs,

his own armored feet dangle out of stirrups.

Never the less, the knight hovers almost fearlessly

on the matte plateau, only moving forward laboriously,

searching for righted-ness.

Although angled into it now 

the desperate upside-down knight’s

head swims in thumping blood

coursing through his helmet

until a new kind of experience suggests itself.

Deciding to take the path with heart,

 the knight’s saddle mysteriously straightens, 

his feet discover the dangling stirrups,

and the earth shifts back right side up

And then, opens up to new possibilities.

-Susan H. Evans

https://www.facebook.com/womanacrossthewater/