Month: December 2010

O Strong Oak,
Mighty Oak,
I invoke to you
a future.

Though slender and spindly,
Your twisted trunk strengthens,
The taut fibrous sinews
Of a god-made steel.

O Strong Oak,
Mighty Oak,
I invoke to you
A home.

by Woody McCree

Run Rabbit Run,
Disappearing off the grid,
No inner compass at hand-
Just endless seas
Of scrub and sand
And windswept pine.

Run Rabbit Run,
Deeper and deeper-
Indecipherable trails-
Never to return.

Regress to the age
of conifers and ferns,
the green desert calling
all civilized to repent,
dissolve, and forever disappear.

by Woody McCree

{Pre-heat}

Let’s start with the rib-stickers of waist-wideners that ward off the cold lean of a belly’s grumble: back-fat and fat back, with ham hocks, and bacon grease and lard-lined pans—“to season” stews and pots full of vegetables: white acre and black-eyed peas, lima and green beans make tongues live easy and jaws clap in ovation of fill theS empty gut.

Let’s continue with leftover Thanksgiving’s turkey carcass boiled-all-day-down till its spare skeletal frame elbows the pot’s brim, and swats at and ducks from the wooden spoon. Just a spoonful of carnage helps the ingredients meld down, in the most traditional way: gumbo, gravy, étouffée, chili, barbeque, roux.

{Preparation of Main Course}

Vegetarians, like vultures, scavenge too for Earth’s tendrils: umbilical fruits, parsnips, organic algae. Southern Vegetarians’ hands handle oyster knives, cut-up okra and tomatoes, yellow squash and Spanish onions with a teat of brown sugar. Pillagers they are. Harvesters in-season.

Vegetarians shuck then fry yellow and white corn kernels, strewn with salt and black-pepper seasonings in a pan to plate right next to Jiffy cornbread baked in 9-inch cast iron skillets, coated in vegetable oil. Season-side-up, double-dipped in buttermilk, deep-fried okra drowns paper towels lined in a tinfoil cake pan.

{Dessert}

Southerners jar jelly, fill lard-laden piecrusts, hand-patted with flour, and then folded with fruit—been-out-all-week fruit ripens on countertops, like bananas, apples, and pineapples. Banana puddings, peach & blueberry cobblers, meld down with sticks of butter. Cake heaven on holidays, passport us to German Chocolate, and Italian Cream; just a slice of cream cheese pound cake, coconut or red velvet, tradition the most Southern way.

by Yolanda J. Franklin

The first girl I ever kissed wore
cherry necklaces and swore by
numbers. Somehow, she explained
as we sat alone in her house, her
parents gone away to a movie,
our names amounted to nothing
more than a sequence of digits,
a summation of our identities, and
who we could become together. So
she added our names together, the two
of us sitting on her bed, alone in her
house with her parents gone away
to a movie. She chewed on her pen,
quietly assessing the number written
on the notepad in front of her, leaving
me to guess the meaning of her silence.

Double zeroes, maybe, or worse, I
feared, perhaps three sixes. Together
We were the Biblical beast, our future
offspring a sign of the End Times?
Instead of showing me the number,
She spoke it. She breathed it.

69

Infused by cherry wisps, it hung
like a promise in the air, radiated by
the heat of our bodies, everything
suspended,
her chest rising and falling
awaiting my response. “The year
I was born,” I answered, causing
the number to dissipate suddenly, no
more than an afterimage then, and I
wondered at the staleness filling the room
then, something rank lingering in my
mouth for as long as I remembered
the stars that predetermined the words
I was doomed to speak, every woman
since then the bearer of something precious, if only
I could make the numbers come
out right.

by Douglas Ford