~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Crystal Bridges

My cousin restocks Walmart
shelves, replacing empties with stuff made over

the waters, as folks once called
those places.

Discounts, my cousin says, help with the kids.

She’s in it for life, my cousin
a people-person Sam Walton would be proud of,
as my family is, her hands in higher

gears once things leak or go bad, a ring
where the bottom stuck, a smear
where the bag gave.

My cousin will wipe away
the mess, so visitors have no idea where
the stickiness ran, or why

I’m hoping someday she might drive
the kids up to the hollow
where the Waltons charge nothing to view

their fine, all-American art.
The museum arches over a creek where I stand
this afternoon musing and amused

at the name—Crystal Bridges—such rich
people gave this place, such vanity

over the waters.
But then it’s my cousin doing her best
to clean up my ennui.

She smiles, shimmering
among the watery questions.

Another Walmart miracle, I suppose—
crystal fake but pooling on a surface too busy
for bemoaning, a process

my cousin’s not about to wipe up
from an art folks might never
understand if it wasn’t made over the waters.

Yes. Walmart
places are a hard take, she tells me.

Worth it though, once your water breaks
and the pains come regular, hands
on steel in a bed

where you have to
push because you simply have to

once that gorgeous head’s crowning.

Just a Man

Dogwoods droop over the roads
where Tammy Wynette was raised,
a place not so far down the road
from Tupelo. She made it out, big

to boot, so men built a museum, walls
metal to concrete, tornado-ready.
Just in case. They say she’d like it.
This story from our tour guide—

a proud man who stands beside
a churn of clipped dogwood, silk
flourishing. Jesus-blood the legend
around here, pink on the tips.

If blood could sing, he says, every
voice would bleed out. But Tammy’s
heart, you see, kept pumping. A flow
beyond us folks she came from.

The museum suggests painted lips
and promising taffeta, a diploma
from Tupelo Beauty College.

Dream big, but remember men sign
the certificate. Plow parts and leather
bridles are tacked to the walls.
Headlines and headshots.
Of course, disembodied gowns

and hand-sewn sequins. Just listen.
Stand by Your Man rings blood-pink
in the hall, dogwoods smiling.
At the exit door, the man just stands,

the man just a man along all
the roads that take you up to Tupelo.

The Bull

Between horizontal slats of unpainted fence—
2 x 6’s rip-sawed to reveal tree rings, years stretched

lengthwise, dark on light, a universe
and more mapped out in in natural stains—

there’s a living bull looking back, disturbed
at being watched, still but angry, head cocked

and ears distended, nostrils bulging
like the double darkness must in male species

when suddenly examined. I can’t say I was
alone or lonely or before the old cow pen

by choice, or the bull perplexed by sawed-up years
framing me as a man trapped within

long slats of my own unearthing.
But when the nares flared, I felt Jupiter arise

from his throne, his kingdom so vast and me
so certain I called him father.