~ DELTA POETRY REVIEW ~

Soak or Not

It's Monday and there's a Magnalite pot
with a red bean mission on my stove top.
In Louisiana you choose a side,
a fervent pitch, much more heated
than red, blue or other,
to soak or not to soak the Camellias.
There's no going back
without being branded
a bloodline traitor.
Let the andouille discs boil over
the edge of the pot like crawfish
trying to escape a tailgate,
but don't you dare stab your poor Ma Mere
in her aproned back like that.
Politics can change,
but soak policy is forever.

Craters

Mom did her best
to make sense of the world
after the meteor struck,
and all that was left of my Dad
was a crater in his pillow.
Perhaps in a need for control
of something, anything;
she removed disparate things.
The country music albums she would play
while being a wife and mom;
she boxed and dropped at a junk shop
about a mile from the cemetery,
to silence the songs in her head.
Now that she has left her own crater,
I go mining through the lode of albums
searching for gold in that junk shop
between Louisiana towns.
My own search for control over something, anything;
to look for her name on an album cover,
always in the same corner in cursive
that curled like her drawl
when she would call me her baby boy.

David Atwood is a native New Orleanian, voice actor, musician and poet living in Alexandria, LA with his wife, writer Christee Gabour Atwood. He earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from LSU and has been a radio personality in Atlanta and various Louisiana markets. His first chapbook of poetry "Find Your Way Home" was released in 2010, and his second, "Catfish Bones and Cajun Ghosts" in 2015.