fat little hillbilly word nerd.
There were back issues of National Geographic stacked up in the corner of the living room. A basket of trashy romance novels with seething, sultry, shirtless men overflowed next to Great Mamaw’s recliner. There was a Kennedy biography and a beat-up, flea market copy of Profiles in Courage displayed on the side table right next to her commemorative presidential plate. The family Bible squatted solemn and thick and reverent on her nightstand with its gossamer-thin pages at rest and not to be disturbed by the grubby, clumsy hands of young’uns. Out in the rusty little camper where she stored all the scrap material from her quilts, she also stashed the racy True Detective magazines I was never supposed to find.
My favorite book was her favorite book. The one she made good use of and referred to most often. The book that Great Mamaw kept tucked in her apron pocket or laid out within reach, easy to get to on the crooked little coffee table—The Old Farmer’s Almanac. My Great Mamaw lived her life by the signs. She knew when the moon waxed and waned above her little holler and she knew what its moods meant for the soil her roots were planted in.
This collection is inspired by and written for my Great Mamaw, Lovel Blankenbeckler. It was my honest-to-goodness honor to care for her at the end of her life, and many of the following poems were written during that time. My Great Mamaw taught me her ways, those ways forgotten and buried in the pages of the almanac. She taught me to look up at the sky, to feel the stars move through my body and right on into the ground. She taught me to know when to plant and harvest, and she taught me to know when to bloom.
When the Signs Are in the Head
Wet Dew
My place is five fifteen
in the morning
in a plastic lawn chair.
The kind you buy
four for twenty
at the Dollar General.
Flecks of red spray paint
cling to my skin.
The tortoiseshell cat is satisfied
to sleep in the cradle of my legs,
crossed ankle to knee
like a man.
She’s making biscuits.
Needlepoint pricks
of practiced country cat claws
kneading my pale, doughy flesh.
The stray shepherd,
one eye sky blue and
the other mud brown,
is never satisfied.
But he missed me
when I ventured off the Ridge
and into town.
So he sits
as patient as he can manage
and I scratch his muzzle
and listen to the knock
of his tail on loose, front-porch
floorboards.
We sit in silence.
Except for the thump and the purr.
Except for the cardinal
screaming
“Wet dew! Wet dew!”
one last time
before the light breaks
the whole holler.
The Home Cemetery
We keep our dead
at the dead end
of a rutted gravel road.
Generations filed away
forever
in staggered rows.
They belong to me.
A birthright of last breath
And rotting body,
buried safely beneath
six feet of soil.
The dark soil
I came from.
Full grown and dirt poor.
This is my acreage.
Rich bottomland fertilized
by bone.
The cemetery floats,
a rounded island tethered
to the mountains
by creek-bed tombstones.
Dusted with broom sage.
Populated solely by lingering souls
and a stray, persistent
peacock
trespassing on my land,
picking his hungry way
over my graves.
Churched
All the old men
from the Beartown
Church of God
call me Sissy.
There’s Ligey
and Whirley
and Johnny
and my Mamaw’s cousin
who found Jesus
after he beat cancer
a couple years back.
They’re working men
of God.
They
