I am still restrained by weather.
Rain today so I’ll not go to the woods.
I had said “yes” to the RSVP I had
received but now the answer is
“not likely.” I see the sky darkening,
I’ll watch the rain fall, pray the first
prayer I learned, “Maybe tomorrow.”
-Byron Hoot
Like some monk, I pull the hood over
my head, the top of it above my eyes
obscuring and focusing my vision.
I say no prayers except the ones
of my presence, hearing and seeing
answer enough for me.
I pass unnoticed, unseen appearing
occasionally at the right place at
the right time, hear, “Thank you”
and disappear the way a wild
animal does – that step not quite
believable like a magician’s trick.
I like it best this way. The way
of the crossroad, the intersection
of time and place and need,
the call of “Wait, please” an echo.
No-one able to see where
I’m going not even me.
-Byron Hoot
By Karen Weyant
You are too young to remember VHS tapes
and their Be Kind and Rewind warnings,
but at one time, employees here spent hours
doublechecking cases and tapes, making sure
every movie started at the beginning.
You know that in these times of Netflix, Hulu,
and Amazon Prime, your days here are numbered,
just like your fathers at the local factories where
hours and pay were cut slowly and painfully until
the doors finally closed. Still, you show up
every morning, clean out the overnight drop box,
and make coffee in the dusty backroom.
Still, you wander through long afternoons,
re-arranging B horror movies and women-in-peril flicks.
Still, you stay, looking forward to the regulars:
kids reeking with weed who buy handfuls
of candy bars, tired mothers who look for
a family favorite their children have not yet seen,
and the old man who always leaves the local bar
well before last call, beer on his breath
as he quotes John Wayne when he once again
rents the remake of True Grit. Creepy, some
say, but you know why he lingers here, his sourness
staining the air: this is what he knows,
and no one is waiting for him at home.
By Karen Weyant
With pockets full of penny candy, I took
the shortcut home from Joe’s Superette,
sauntering along the railroad tracks behind
the bars on South Main. As the sun set, I slid
a single candy cigarette to my lips, mimicking
the smokers I knew, my pointer and middle
fingers holding the stick between puffs,
while the sugar grew slick with my spit.
Ahead of me, Susan Carlson threw open
the back door of Jake’s Bar, her own cigarette
dangling in her pouty smile, smoke hovering
like a halo around her. Everyone knew Susan,
the girl could break up barfights with only
her long fingernails and a barbed tongue.
When she saw me, she smiled and waved,
then removed her cigarette that had burned
its way down to the butt and squashed it in Straub
beer can. Smoke trailed from the opening,
and I felt the sugar in my mouth turn sour,
imagined I could taste ashes. I was not yet ten,
my T-shirt worn flat across my chest.
With every step, the strings from my frayed
jean short brushed against my skinny thighs.
It was cold for early October, so every breath
I took was a thin puff of smoke.
I almost said, “My body has betrayed
me.” This disease I never thought
of possessing me. I hesitate such
an accusation, such a causality
between the unknown and the known.
How rarely what I know has fit
the facts and, further off the mark,
the truth which may lie concealed
for a long time. I’ll not waste myself
concocting reasons by some pretzel
logic. I still say with God, “I will be
as I will be” satisfied with that integrity
of ambiguity and responsiveness
to what is and what is not.
It’s hard to say this is a gift
but I am at the brink of those
words. And curses, also, which
I hurl like angry prayers in defiance
of any answer. So I have been
given something not to be overcome,
impossible to ignore and to which
I refuse to give any pity to – I am no
victim of anything. Of course, I think
of Jesus – betrayal, arrest, sentence,
passion, crucifixion, resurrection.
There is a correlation – this is what life
gives. Of the six acts which claim
the last of his life, I can claim five
with certainty. Damn near a twin,
I remind myself.
-Byron Hoot
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.
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:
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)
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
