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Pamela Uschuk
- USA
Nothing But Southern
| For Teri
Hairston-------- |
I
am
not happy, you sway like a bear
at
an empty hive, shaking
the
health conscious oatmeal cookie
inches
above your coffee.
This
doesn’t have nearly enough sugar.
The
vending machine is out of
honey
buns, and gloom takes over
your
sweet tooth’s afternoon.
I
am
nothing but Southern, your voice glazes
the
humid air compressing the office,
and
I laugh. My accent is clipped sage
next
to the deep espresso yours pours
to
jazz even the dullest duty
as
we bend over budgets and the endless press
releases
we’ll send before five. Sometimes
we
sneak away from the four white walls
of
the institution we serve like we did last Friday
when
Mars loomed like the clarified
eye
of an Amazon, closer to Earth
than
it has been in 60,000 years. At midnight
we
floated in a rich man’s Olympic pool
while
he slept, and we became our own true animals
craving
what’s sweet, two bears and an antelope
whirling
in night’s indigo tea.
While
my grizzled love twirled me,
a
compass needle homed to the steady red gleam,
you
paddled, dark calves glistening like slick fur,
your
laughter deep as the raven’s wing beat,
and
we forgot for a moment the centuries of slave blood
that
fertilizes this southern earth, blood
of
your grandmother, blood
of
your great grandfather, the way
that
skin color still chains the passports of the world.
Mars
gave up its mean battle gear
in
the sugary arms of late summer,
and
while the rich man you take care of slept
we
wrote a new history
carried
in the cool stream of the Milky Way,
licking
from the honey tree of our unchained delight.
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|
Eightieth Birthday
Eighty.
Mom, I can hardly believe the roundness of the number,
a
fat ant body or ice-skate track of time, how
it
always brings us back
despite
irony, love or distance to where
we
started from, the curve
of
the fetus in the womb, arms
pinned
to the sides by amniotic fluid or stroke,
fish
mouth cocked open gulping air.
I
didn't send you a birthday card. I drew
an
iris for you in my head
but
it never made it to the paper.
I
picked yellow roses. My ghost arms
hugged
your shoulder blades veiled by blue skin.
My
heart is a huge womb of grief
when
I think of you curled, a comma of skin
stretched
over bone, in a hospital bed this long year
and
a half, how your mind howls like a coyote
in
a
desert terrorized by memory.
Does
the white cat still stalk your bedclothes,
bloody
buffalo still rise from the tiled floor?
I
remember the china fragility of your creased forehead
under
my lips, the iron stubble of your hair
whirled
like those English fields by crop circles
at
the back of your head where it dents the flowered pillow,
your
sea green eyes tuned skyward.
What
do I remember at the bottom of the loop? The time
you
fashioned the magician hat, a paper cone
with
a blue scarf sewed on
for
a veil I refused,
and I was ten
and
stupid enough to want something else.
The
yellow slew of roses you snipped each June
to
celebrate your easy short labor,
my
tiny face at your breast. The way you carved
gardens,
Canterbury bells blue as exhausted lids,
bright
lipstick-colored peonies,
the
brash solar explosions of gloxinia
and
deep velvet tongues of snapdragons
from
losses that accrued each year.
Death
drove your shoulders, but refused
to
take you on the road all those whom you loved
sped
down so prematurely. What fairness is there
in
a
universe that pinned your spirit like a moth
wriggling
on its mounting board of fear?
Eighty,
Mom, you're eighty and your mind
caroms
like shrapnel shattering time. Eighty, dear Mom,
and
there's nothing to celebrate but love from the daughter
who
was never good at numbers or good-byes. |
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Of
Russian/Czech/English/Tartar descent, Pamela
Uschuk was raised on a farm
in Michigan. She holds an MFA in Poetry and Fiction from the
University of Montana. Author of several poetry chapbooks,
including the award-winning Without
Birds, Without Flowers, Without Trees and Heartbeats in Stones, her work has
appeared in over two hundred journals and anthologies worldwide,
including Poetry, Ploughshares,
Parnassus Review, Agni Review, Parabola, The Asheville Poetry Review
and others. Her two books of poems, Finding Peaches in the Desert (2000)
and One-Legged Dancer were
published by Wings Press. A CD, Finding Peaches in the Desert with
musical accompaniment by the band Chameleon, Joy Harjo and Dan van
Kilsdonk was released in 2001. Her literary prizes include the
2000 Struga International Poetry Prize, the Tucson/Pima Writing Award
and awards from the National League of American PEN Women, Chester H.
Jones Foundation, Iris, Ascent, Sandhills Review, and Amnesty
International. Her work has been translated into Czech, Spanish,
Swedish, Italian, Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Korean.
She sits on the Board of the SW Writers Institute. She is the
Director of the Center For Women Writers and Associate Professor of
Creative Writing at Salem College in Winston-Salem, North
Carolina. She divides her time between North Carolina and her
home in Southwestern Colorado. For more of Pamela Uschuk see:
salem.ed thedrunkenboat.com flumepress wingspress.com pamuschuk |
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