Originally published in The Quarterly Journal of Ideology, Louisiana State University, 2003

Blue Ribbon Woman

Her focus on the dough lying boneless on the counter is disturbing. Her hands maniacal and powdered from wheat’s blood, the scent of yeast on her knuckles. She arches her back; she surgically removes bread from common ingredients in the cabinet. Her answer is no.

I’m not a child, anymore; I’m an orphan of the kitchen. She closes a lid on an ageless Tupperware bowl and places it on the counter, and waits for natural magic. She continues making dinner for the family. I stand, waiting, watching her back do the simplest tasks with the arthritis of pioneers. Her answer is still no.

She is proud of her rural language. She is upset that strength has left her homemade hands, and though she’s pacified us for years with food and good intention, she has never seen us eye-to-eye, she has never even heard the question.

But she’s won eight ribbons for her zipper pea casserole.

And two for her corn bread dressing.

Pentetruth

Over the doorframe, they put a slash of red.

This house is marked by genius or at least the color of it,

that flush of victory that accompanies genius, though for some, it’s led

by the noose, and for others, the trail of rope is made of shit.

We were told to take the symbols of faith, and build.

They were to be tied to our hands, like cuffs, perhaps, or

maybe they meant a softer image, like a pair of gloves to shield

the fingers of this generation from too much violence—gore,

and filth, and truth. What battlefield isn’t strewn

with truth? Blood is truth, and symbols are blood, and in

all the world, is there more perfect a shape than a circle; more if sewn

into itself, and into its corners again, and again, and again?

But this “slash of red” is a battle cry; they are the last words we hear

and then the march begins, and doorframes fade to more

available images: older men to the front, young men at the rear

and in between, sad middle men we hadn’t noticed before.

And when we did, we knew that death would come after all men,

that we have shoulders because we have shame;

first there’s life, second there’s living, and then you realize that in

one terrible moment the world has become the length of a single name.

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[...] this is a work-in-progress, from a collection I’m working on entitled Blue Ribbon Woman, after the above poem. I woke up this morning still a bit, for some reason even after all this time, still hurting in my heart for “you.”  That’s a simple commentary I know, a tad cliche.  But I’ll come around, in time. It’s never a good idea to walk away from a writer…

GROTTO
Thank God, thank God,
thank God, thank God,
thank God.

Thank God.

I let Go.

I dropped the “d.”
Finally.

What it took to stretch my iron-fingers from their stranglehold
on that last broad-leafed tendril of your name, as it left my lips,
eschewing my thinning teeth,
oh –
and that intake of breath once I’d spoken forgiveness
was so full I knew what God must have felt the day
he gave a sparrow wings,
then pushed it from the nest,
or left green on the leaves of lilies,
but then withheld the rain.

Everything must pay the price to be blessed.
I wasn’t lived enough to see they both came
from the same hand.

You never knew:
you were only the third time I’d emptied myself
completely of tears.
You were, however, my first grotto.
After you, I stood on ground sere
and threadbare; it took great pains
to keep my Old Sallow’s roots, firm, lively.
Each and every hour I had to lie to them
to keep them unaware
that all the water in the world had been turned sour, and

so, I never got the chance to tell you
how I’d been hoping you’d leave the water alone
and sketch me, with my own charcoal.

I bought you the large paper, but you never used it,
gave it no reason,
no good-bye letter;
those weren’t your kinds of movies, I knew.
It was treason, after all, that kept your smile so wide.

For months and months, instead of sleeping,
I tried
to figure out exactly how such depth
could be kept,
inside so small, so compact a letter
of the alphabet

If I’d only recalled its place in English: how final it often is,
how done; a graphic period, it was inescapable of its function
as a marker for the past tense, when
it’s noticed.
I’d forgotten
the most obvious purpose of the letter “d,”
to change the clime

and how it is so often the finish, the end
like in God’s name.
A name I say nearly every night,
mostly out of anger, and softly.

Rarely, do I pray for good things
because of you.

Even if what I do pray is barely audible, though,
I know that

even prayers barely said, are still prayers,
and are still said.

And each year more that God lets me live,
I intend to take away
another letter, strip its of shame,
until you can’t tell us apart.
And before I know it, one day,

I won’t even be able to spell your name
or His,
or mine.