vol. 1, 2007
Linda Parsons Marion
In the big rancher, they won’t see me
slip down the bank: Oliver and Betty Sue,
Buford and Evelyn, Richard and my mother—
and I, another man’s child. The men switch
from sweet tea to Falstaff; the women
wear beehives and ankle bracelets, smash
cigarettes in their plates of cold eggs.
Face down in the long summer,
in the mesh hammock near a pond
that sucks the neck of land, I befriend
spongy clover, skim the clouded bottom.
More terrapin than girl, no human teeth
or ears, cool mud my true home,
guarded rushes.
My mother dyes her hair platinum,
then jet, to be Richard’s showy conch,
his blackest obsidian shore. Their bodies
passing in the hallway spark and blind
like noon on water.
Inside my bony shell, dead quiet, only
the current of my hand ruffles grass
for the odd four leaves, night’s scratch
and wail still pent up and burning.
Hereabouts we call it dogwood winter, late visitation
of hoarfrost singeing April’s prime quick as flame
to tinder. Heartsick at the window, under quilts and wool,
I am slow returning to my garden worksong.
Today, your birthday, I put off calling, this wilted expanse
between us: ground sodden and silvered, first blood
of maple and myrtle drained into ruin. Icy misunderstandings
heave through topsoil, old as our earthly time.
By a girl’s quarter moon, I sowed my hopes, my birthright
wormy, tenuous. The walls you stacked year by year
chapped and bruised our hands, drove us to the outer
bounds of what might have been for daughter and mother.
Ham and butterbeans, you tell me, for your birthday lunch
in the high-rise cafeteria, enough for dinner tonight. Candle
in your lemon cupcake, a quavery wish. You did not bingo
today, but last week won $5 with a coverall. Luck is all it is.
Arborists say the trees will tap auxiliary stores wintered
over centuries of begatting, unflag new emeralds
and russets as if never bitten. Looking out, the burnt iris
chills me, the cracked land burdens, separates us still.
My copies of Siddhartha and Steppenwolf dog-eared,
I was far out, liberated and braless, lolling around
in my father’s blue Van Heusens. Best were those
with the sheen of starch and steambaths, cuffs not yet
frayed, at the collar a wink of Old Spice. He never
missed them—on business in Ottawa, hunting pheasant
in Kansas, or well into his cups at the Mitchell Hotel
with Jerry and Earl, freewheeling with the bosses.
No worse than the miniskirts I rolled higher
before civics class, I wore his cottons and poplins
pressed to bare skin, curved hems brushing my thighs
like fingertips, the pause of men’s eyes. I wore them
when he returned to our flowered livingroom
and sank behind the sports page, when he griped
about the dry roast. I wore them until my stepmother
said, for pity’s sakes, put some pants on
when your father’s in the house. Oblivious we lived,
buttoned in stiff bone and pearl, in absence
and hunger, my breast pockets loose with change.
Author’s Bio:
Linda Parsons Marion is the poetry editor of Now & Then magazine and the author of Home Fires. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Cornbread Nation 2, Negative Capability, Nimrod, Potomac Review, CALYX, Helicon Nine, Atlanta Review, Poet Lore, among others. Her work was nominated for a 2006 Pushcart Prize, and she has received two literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, among other awards. Essays and poems have also appeared in The Movable Nest (Helicon Nine Editions, 2007), Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia (University Press of Kentucky, 2003), Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women’s Poetry (University of Tennessee Press, 2002), and Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival (University of Georgia Press, 1999). Marion is an editor at the University of Tennessee and lives in Knoxville with her husband, poet Jeff Daniel Marion.