found
wanting
every single day
on the flat-nosed school bus
she brings along some treats
barbeque potato chips red
licorice whips orange
cheese/peanut butter
crackers or some other
neat little prize from
her Grampaw’s store
never hidden away in a
paper sack but displayed
full out for tormenting our
dark hungry eyes
our bellies cramp a little
she knows
just by glancing over our faces turning
in unison like so many flat sunflowers
towards the sun, which of us did not get
breakfast Ruth, for one, because her
mamma is drowning in one of her
three-week sleeping jags not because
of the bottle, like they say, but because
of the darkness that falls on her sometimes
heavy like a quilt of bricks
copyright Debra Shirley 2006
found wanting first appeared
in Margie Review |
 |
Grand Daddy
Don’t you set none a that watered-up
blue-john milk
you done bought at the Foodland afront a me, hear?
None a that margie-butter neither. They ain’t got
no taste to ‘em, no taste a
tall. All you kin git me
to drank is Mae Shirley’s fresh sweetmilk. And
her buttermilk.. Aaaw, I like her buttermilk, now.
They always atryin to scare us off a raw milk,
sayin it’ll make ye sick. I’ve
drunk raw milk all
my life and it ain’t never made me sick. They just
atryin to git ye to spend yer dollar at the Foodland.
They’ve all but rurned every little man in the county.
Reeves Lumber run out Dwight Holcomb’s saw
mill. County shut down
Effie’s Café – said ye
can’t run a resternt outa your own house even though
she’s been arunnin hern fer damn near thirty year.
And you kin forgit findin a jar a homemade
sorghum syrup within a
hunnerd mile a here.
Look here. See that pinecone design pressed
into the
top a that butter? That’s
Mae’s butter mold. Better
try some on one a Mamma’s biscuits. We’ll git ye
offa that margie-butter yet. Fore it makes ye sick.
copyright Debra Shirley 2006
Grand Daddy first appeared in The Cortland Review |
Listen to Debra read
her poem
Grand Daddy
here
|
