Slow Southern State

Dancing on the hardwood feeling good,

I snap my fingers. Listen.

At a horse track in Hot Springs my father bet all his life savings on a palomino Quarter Horse named Diamonds Sparkle.

When my grandfather peppered

his seed across the alluvial floodplain,

cotton cropped up like a southern snow

in September. My grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts lopped like gongs on the washing line. Blighted youth, blackspot

on roses, butterfly milkweed, I murmur

as I tumble ass-backwards—headlong,

my blithe youth behind me. I’ve come this far, barefoot and mean, out of the backwoods of the Mississippi Delta. Dipped in Southern drawl and mud-stained fervor—

a water splintered levee—it doesn’t ask why first. It has a rhythm to it,

a gentle pulsing—

like my grandmother’s spider-veined hands

in the biscuit dough. Her food, thickened

all her toothpick-limbed children,

and my grandfather, mellow like smooth corn whiskey. Under a setting sun,

his bourbon-boozed breath

came in small spurts.

Most folks talk too much,

he’d say, aiming chewing tobacco

into an old coke can.

He never murmured.

Sometimes he’d look

out across at the tar-tinged night

and talk nonsense with the invisible choir

of cicadas.

My innocence clucks

like a chicken hauled off to the chopping block. Goodbye fruit flies cruising

the heirlooms. Goodbye pecan pie

and homemade vanilla bean.

Goodbye my cover of coots that grandmother fattened every morning with slivers of leftovers.

Where the word holler was both

a verb and a place—where ramshackle

little mud huts were made.

Some words are rickety doors creaking

open, and I walk on— through another lost summer,

a red-stained road

never coming

to an end. The cicadas still sing.

One of these days,

I’ll be gone.