~ Delta Poetry Review ~

B. Lynne Zika

The Uprising

Damn it all! the South still rises up to pester me,
what with its trim town squares and its unknown statues
and its romance over the ugliness of death.
I knew a woman who clipped her mouth with clothespins
and cooked her husband’s breakfast in such accustomed silence
that he did not notice gentility had turned to wood.
 
In the mawkish splendor of a summer wood
I have suffered pine straw to reveal what is required of me.
I’ve laid my body on heated rock in shame or silence
as if stilling hope might bronze pain to the impotence of a statue.
Along a greying rope in a neighbor’s yard, I’ve worshipped clothespins
holding their disembodied children with the tenderness of death.
 
We wear our Sunday clothes for death.
Strangers’ hands lay us in satin and wood.
Hidden in the fabric of our sleeves, clothespins
hold us, finally, together. As for me,
let me be upright in the red clay, the silence
of my unanswered question raised in the fist of a statue.
 
In a town where my childhood died, a soldier’s statue
lifts its hat to the five-and-dime. A small paper notes the death
of summer. In the evening silence,
on porches of brick and wood,
faces I no longer recognize nod from their chairs to me.
A Sunday shirt hangs in the yard, stiff below its greying clothespins.
 
A string of crows clips the night to the telephone line, the clothespins
of their claws encircling a deadly current, a dozen grinning statues.
A continent away, I shade my eyes toward a palm tree, which regards me
as lost through life, not death.
We are reaching for ourselves across chrome and steel and wood,
our tongues licking the fire of silence.
 
I step into a circle of light. In silence, an unknown man awaiting death,
his jacket fringed in clothespins, sits at a desk of splintered wood.
He forgets to throw the switch, and my hunger, a dark statue, rises to hold me.
_________________

After Ezra Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte”:
Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.

Fried Chicken

Blend cayenne, paprika, chili powder,
salt, sugar, garlic, pepper, thyme, oregano,
ground patella, come-in and oleole in free.
Hands across the wide field entered break chain
for one so small. I ran so hard, hurled myself
against those Red Rover locked arms.
In case I haven’t apologized lately,
I meant to call/write/complete that project/
have a perfect marriage/avoid instilling
fear of poultry in all children born
and unborn, but Monday was training
and Tuesday was the dog’s birthday
and Wednesday I forgot where I live.
But I will make a bed of greens for you,
lay your head on bitter arugula so you
will have sweet sleep, crack the grey
pecans, dredge poulet, blanch tomato
without flinching. I will drizzle the sharp
tang of hunger on your tongues,
on the gaping mouths turned gooseward
sky-drenched, on the cankerous mouths,
on the mouths of the wide field,
on the red, red tongues.
I have no grudge with herbivores. They’ll
never know the way salt pork insinuates
itself into the fringe of white chenille.
You knew when you were waking up
at Mema’s house.
My whole life I wanted callouses on my hands.
When I finally got the two kids and two cats
and the husband who wouldn’t last long
settled into a tinderbox with a tin tub
and no address, she came to see me. Just me.
The trick to frying onions is to keep
the oil at 300° so the moisture cooks out
before the flour over-browns. I believe
in the certainty of men, the way the knife
swings easily from your wrist. I believe
you know there is no hesitation
in the linear romance between the blade
and death. A hammer finds its truest note
under the guidance of a single thumb.
Sitting on the porch one evening,
I asked Mema if she understood
why I lived in so primitive a place.
She said, “Sugar, Pop and I had our happiest
years in a coal-heated room with one pot.”
This is why I learned to cook:
I asked the red-haired girl on my first day
if I could sit with her at lunch. She said
their table was always full, but I saw her
eating fried chicken with her boyfriend
and 18 empty chairs.