Fanny Says Read online

  I’ve become? Will you be cross,

  your face a streak of all my

  desire, telling me I was a fool

  to yearn to follow her? Or ashamed,

  will you turn away your face and hold up

  a shard

  of that mirror,

  showing me

  I’m going to hell?

  Fanny Linguistics: Thaumatology

  There are words I want to give

  you now, Fanny, words that

  might have eased your way.

  Words for trees,

  not just tree

  but Sycamore & Beech & Cypress,

  words that make that “b” in subtlety

  make sense, words that make

  differences into dimensions,

  that make salt—

  just about your only savory spice—

  into coriander & cilantro & saffron.

  I want to give you geophagy—

  a word for those women you knew—

  the ones who ate dirt—then tell you

  about the work I’ve done—

  years of geophagy—

  marrying catsup & collating & kneading crust,

  and once even when I was paid

  to think—paid to run the meeting—I was scolded

  for not making the coffee right.

  I want to whisper thaumatology—

  the study of miracles—

  because outside this cabin is a forest:

  deer moss & sand berries & White Pine

  trees that drop the weight they don’t need

  as they age. Imagine

  even hummingbirds here, Fanny,

  gray ones no bigger than a thumb

  suckling tiger lilies, right outside the door.

  A miracle, because inside

  I am warm, my own pot of coffee on;

  I’ve got nothing to do today

  but write you &

  write down

  what you say.

  The Family Celebrates Independence

  It’s the 4th, the sky at noon already hungover with gunpowder and the birds frightened from their roost. It’s the 4th, the family without Fanny but still talk talk talking of Fanny. The family piles out with plastic forks and paper plates and paper towels, the family piles out with deviled eggs and macaroni salad and Benedictine and chips. It’s the 4th, and Mama’s husband’s grilling a 24-pack of franks, ten pounds of hamburger, and one veggie burger for miss tree-hugger here. It’s the 4th, the heat so intense even the uncle with the glass eye church-fans himself under the ginkgo tree, Hot damn, it’s the 4th.

  It’s the 4th, and the little purse dog dressed especially for the occasion in a striped doggie dress is shitting and shaking; the aunt with all the gold bracelets tries to calm him as you would an autistic child—with compression, tight wrapped in a kitchen towel. She’s begging the boys to lay off the bottle rockets, You boys are about to kill Pookie here. It’s the 4th, and We need another bag of ice; it’s the 4th, and Somebody get more beer. Damn it if I told you once already will somebody move the ice-cream maker? That salt’s going to ruin my lawn. It’s the 4th, and Has anybody seen the baby? I hear the baby crying. It’s the 4th, and the baby is screaming Darth-Vader-style into a box fan—Will somebody watch the baby’s fingers? and Is that my glass? Has anyone seen my glass? Where’s my pocketbook? Do you think that mayonnaise might be carny by now? Well, pitch that shit before we all get sick; we only got one toilet here.

  It’s the 4th, and the tall cousin is getting taller and the fat cousin is getting fatter, Bless her heart; it’s the 4th, and the pretty aunt with big teeth nurses a cup of milk for her throat. It’s the 4th, and the cousin with the dragon tattooed on his thigh shoots tree frogs with a pellet gun; his wife is pregnant again, grinning hard as a suck-egg dog. And somebody says, Where does that come from anyway—suck-egg dog? and Hell if I know, the cousin says, but she sure is craving deviled eggs; she’s had five already.

  It’s the 4th, and Doesn’t anyone have an Alka-Seltzer? Tylenol? Rolaid? Band-Aid? Serving spoon? Tommy Tippee Cup for the baby? Where is the baby? Has anyone seen the baby? Good god, precious angel, step away from that fan, you’re about to cut off every one of your fingers. It’s the 4th, and for one day this summer, even the conductor must have a day off: The train’s not howling down the tracks, and the neighbor’s wolf hybrid isn’t chained and snarling through the fence, and Mama’s got on her bra, for company’s sake. It’s the 4th, and Some genius brought red, white, and blue cupcakes. Who thought blue icing was a good idea on these white counters? Specially with all these messy kids, they eat one after another, look at that baby with its blue mouth, watch his fingers on that box fan.

  It’s firecrackers and bottle rockets before dusk, and after, it’s Roman candles brought over the state line; it’s the kind uncle with the whiskey sweats spitting chew into one beer can and drinking from another. It’s the 4th, and Does anybody want to take home this fruit salad? Cause we’ ll never eat all this fruit. Now, lettuce you can feed to the your chickens, take that, but those onions, mercy, those onions are too fucking strong. Nobody wants them onions. Throw those out, but here, take a pie home—cherry or apple, take your pick—and this taco salad’s been out too long. Throw it out too. If somebody gives me a black plastic bag, I can pick up these cans, and look, the neighbors have already started in: Hear that little dog just a howling. That was a good one—all them purdy colors—there goes another one in green. Where is the baby? Okay, somebody take him in. Don’t you dare give him a sparkler, he’ ll burn himself to ashes and a puddle of grease. Take him on in, that diaper’s ripe. Ain’t that ice cream ready yet? Anybody seen my keys? and Damn it to hell, shew have mercy if I don’t have some heartburn now.

  Boy, them fireworks sure are beautiful, don’t you think?

  An Invitation for My Grandmother

  Satisfaction is a lowly / thing, how pure a thing is joy. / This is mortality / this is eternity.

  —Marianne Moore

  When Mama called to say you were

  gone, I was in New York and climbed

  the impossible top of a brownstone to talk

  myself down. Don’t get sentimental; dying is what

  grandmother’s do, was what

  I told myself, but what I should have done

  was invite you there with me. You’d never been

  further north than Cincinnati, and the view—

  the spatter and fleck of all those lights—

  you’d have to see to believe. So now that you’re

  on the other side and got your knees working

  again, a proposition: Come, lace up your Keds,

  walk with me awhile. I won’t say the world’s better—

  it’s not—since you left, I’ve seen a pelican

  stretch her wings to dry, the dripping

  petrol making her into a bent crucifix of oil,

  and the penguins have dropped their proud

  eggs into melted ice, and this spring, yet another wind

  bulldozed my neighbors, all their homes razed

  to slab foundation, their trees now

  splintered bone. But we can take a train

  out of here—Come, sit next to me,

  because out the window

  a girl on a horse jumps a junkyard fence.

  She wears a shirt the color of poppies, of bright

  soda cans, and I bet you’ll agree: blurred,

  it is a brown pony with red wings.

  And three years ago: Can I take you there?

  My sister, sitting up during a contraction,

  how she reached inside

  herself to touch the crown of her son

  not yet born. I want to show you the look

  on her face and that cord

  cut, a rich earth of blood, a thick black

  joy. And please, take off your shoes now,

  stand with me last October when

  I took a wife, barefoot in the g
rass.

  We made our vows, and after, when she held

  my jaw with both hands, I could feel

  the bones of my skull

  rising up to make a face finally

  seen.

  A Prayer for the Self-Made Man

  —for Monroe J. Cox

  who lost his mother to tuberculosis and his father to drink,

  who curled in doorways and boxcars until he found work hauling crates

  to the market and sweeping the market floor, who grew enough to cradle

  a black plum in his fist and eat it, two bites down,

  who grew forearms big as a kid’s thighs and took aim at a nail, sinking it,

  a single blow. A prayer for the man, self-made, snatching up a bride of sixteen,

  a girl so country he had to teach her—how not to smear red lipstick

  when he comes home, how to keep the groceries cool by hanging them in a bag

  out the window. For the locket he bought her—ten dollars, two weeks’ pay—

  because exhausted he fell asleep on the phone, and though it took two tries,

  she flushed that necklace down. A prayer for the man who not only

  learned to hammer but became a hammer, hammering the sun up,

  hammering the light back down with its hot grit of shingles, so many blows

  to hold together the raw frame of homes. A prayer for the man

  who worked until his heart stopped then ripped out the oxygen tubes,

  knocked down the nurse, and worked some more. A prayer for the man

  who had his ribcage cracked open four times before he slowed but did not

  stop, for that long purple scar, for the blood that would not fill him to pleasure

  anymore. A prayer for his thumb and pointer, chewed off by a jigsaw,

  for the numbers he never learned in school but swore he could use

  to unlock the code of the Florida Lottery. For those yellow legal pads,

  all twenty-six of them, filled with winning combinations, for that rectangular pencil,

  sharpened with his fish knife. For the bass he pulled from the lake.

  I was a girl, squatting behind the kumquat tree, I saw how first he slit

  them open, yanking out the bubbling guts, then, the fish still jerking,

  he lopped off their heads. I was young, I didn’t know there was a kinder way—

  a prayer then for the slop of pink dumped in the canal, for what I saw on his face

  as he prepared the flesh she was expected to fry up and we were expected to eat.

  A prayer for his anger, I think I might understand, a prayer for his ridged

  teeth and knotty scalp, for his paint-speckled belt and paint-speckled watch.

  Can you tell me what time it is, Grandfather? I have kept your gears wound;

  I wear its huge face on my wrist. Put your ear to me: I want your ghost to hear

  this ticking. I want your bones to know it is time now: lay it down.

  For My Grandmother’s Perfume, Norell

  Because your generation didn’t wear perfume

  but chose a scent—a signature—every day

  you spritzed a powerhouse floral with top

  notes of lavender and mandarin, a loud

  smell one part Doris Day, that girl-next-door

  who used Technicolor to find a way to laugh about

  husbands screwing their secretaries over lunch,

  the rest all Faye Dunaway, all high drama

  extensions of nails and lashes, your hair

  a breezy fall of bangs, a stiletto entrance

  that knew to walk sideways, hip first:

  now, watch a real lady descend the stairs.

  Launched in 1968, Norell

  was the 1950s tingling with the beginning

  of Disco; Norell was a housewife tired of gospel,

  mopping her house to Stevie Wonder instead.

  You wore so much of it, tiny pockets

  of your ghost lingered hours after you

  were gone, and last month, I stalked

  a woman wearing your scent through

  the grocery so long I abandoned

  my cart and went home. Fanny, tell me:

  How can manufactured particles carry you

  through the air? I always express what I see,

  but it was no photo that

  stopped and queased me to my knees.

  After all these years, you were an invisible

  trace, and in front of a tower of soup cans

  I was a simple animal craving the deep memory

  worn by a stranger oblivious of me. If I had courage,

  the kind of fool I’d like to be,

  I would have pressed my face to her small

  shoulder, and with the sheer work of

  two pink lungs, I would have breathed

  enough to

  conjure

  you back

  to me.

  Fanny Says Goodbye

  Now, Koey, we won’t have no goodbyes now. You know better, and you make sure to lock that back door. Now, go on. You remember what I told you, and lock that back door.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the editors of the following publications in which these poems first appeared, often in different versions:

  Broadsided Press: “Pepsi” (excerpt);

  Cave Wall: “For My Grandmother’s Feet, Swollen Again,” “The Dead”;

  Central Arkansas Broadside Project: “Dixie Highway” (excerpt);

  The Cortland Review: “A Translation for the Spiritual Mediator Who May Speak for Me to Frances Lee Cox, Wherever She May Be”;

  Ellipses: “To My Grandmother’s Ghost, Flying with Me on a Plane,” “Pheno”;

  Iron Horse Literary Review: “EPO,” “Fanny Says at Twenty-three She Learned to Drive,” “For My Grandmother’s Teeth, Pulled When She Was Thirty-six”;

  JMWW: “Go Put on Your Face,” “Your Monthly”;

  The Literary Review: “Crisco”;

  Los Angeles Review: “My Book, in Birds”;

  The Oxford American: “Fuck”;

  San Pedro Review: “A Prayer for the Self-Made Man”;

  storySouth: “Fanny Says How to Be a Lady,” “Sweet Silver”;

  Tahoma Literary Review: “A Genealogy of the Word”;

  Waccamaw: “Hettie,” “Pepsi”;

  The Wide Shore: “Clorox.”

  “For My Grandmother’s Perfume, Norell” and “Fanny Linguistics: Nickole” were selected by the Academy of American Poets for their Poem-A-Day Project, and a nascent version of “Sweet Silver” appeared in Wingbeats, a craft anthology published by Dos Gatos Press in 2012. A version of “My Book, in Birds” won A Room of One’s Own Foundation’s Orlando Prize for Poetry in 2010, and Cornelius Eady chose “Clorox” as the winner of the Cultural Center of Cape Cod Poetry Competition in 2013.

  Quotations are from the following sources:

  Allison, Dorothy. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. New York: Penguin, 1995.

  Baldwin, James. “Stranger in the Village,” Notes of a Native Son, New York: Beacon Press, 1955.

  Moore, Marianne. “What Are Years?”, What Are Years. New York: Macmillan, 1941.

  O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.

  I am indebted to my family for their support of this book, in particular my mother who gave me courage (who always gives me courage)—these stories here are not entirely mine to tell, but she lent me strength to put them to the page. I also want to thank her sister, my Aunt Toni, who, after reading the manuscript, called to say I did right by her mother’s story. She’s not one to hesitate to say exactly what she thinks, so although I know there is much I missed and perhaps got wrong, I take her at word. I would not have published these poems without their blessing. I would also like to dedicate this book, in part, to Ethel Pearl Graham, who helped raise me, and to the memory of my cousin, Eric
Cox, who died tragically and too young.

  I thank the late Kurt Brown and his wife Laure-Anne Bosselaar, my sweetest friend and best damn teacher I’ve ever had; and thanks to my longtime pal Raymond McDaniel who dished out some solid editorial (and life) advice when I needed it; and my dear friend, Nicole Pollitt, whose own mama could rival Fanny in just about anything. I also thank my little sisters Hope and Rachel, who help me remember, always (and took care to remind me that Fanny let them both try cigarettes before the age of ten). In addition, I extend gratitude to the many friends who’ve helped me these past ten years as this book took shape: Lisa Hunt, who leans into the world with a strength and kindness given to her by her own coffee-swigging granny; Leslie Wilson, who knows what it is to love a fierce grandmother fiercely; Travis Carmack, who still laughs with me over these old stories; Pee Wee Watson, who bought me airline tickets to visit Fanny those last few weeks of her life when I didn’t have a dime to my name; Patricia Smith, who helped me navigate my most difficult poem in this book; Rebecca Gayle Howell, who always brings me back to my Kentucky home.