Oh Honey, Bless Your Heart
There’s nothin like Nana’s kitchen
with the angled door frames and the sound
of everybody bein ugly.
It smells like
biscuits year round, even when we got
the heat runnin. Salt clings to the air
and nobody goes hungry unless they choose to.
This is the kind of place where the people
who brush your hair will smack you
into next Tuesday
and flick your wrists
for gettin seconds. They never did have trouble
sayin I love you. They say it like the world’s
gonna end, like they scorched the Earth to hell
in a handbasket, like they watched their parents
lay hands on their brothers. There’s love
and then there’s Southern love.
All the other girls
got two names, Mary something, like Jesus
was born for their double dutch. I swear to God
they could skip to the moon. I wish they’d take me
with them. I’m always swearin at the wrong time,
sayin the wrong thing. I damn near broke
my grandma’s heart sayin
I won’t eat her chicken
pot pie no more. She calls me soft, but I’m bone
thin, my lips rusted shut like a good girl.
When I bend down to pull the dish out the oven,
the heat knocks me back like a corkscrew.
She tells me if it were a snake
it would’ve bit me,
would’ve swallowed my left hand, would’ve
slowed my heart to ready rhythm, would’ve
filled my veins with butter. Everybody’s waitin
at the big table, their mouths watering
more than they can swallow.
I wipe that ugly thing
off my face, do as I’m told, fix
my frown with crescent rolls and jelly.
When we sit down to say grace,
I count the syllables, close my eyes,
hope to God
someone remembers
to bless the meal. I know it won’t be me.
My tongue wasn’t made for that kind of love.
Angel Hour
In that still October heat, Mary lays her head
on my lap, blonde hair curled across my ankles.
We’re trading starved stories for attention, cutting
class like paper dolls. This town is blistered.
So hot the atmosphere tingles, and none
of our secrets will survive angel hour. At fifteen,
we’ve been so close to death already. A shimmering
we can’t return from. In grief assembly, Mary braids
my hair on the pull out bleachers of the gym. Our friend’s
father pulled himself up into heaven two weeks ago.
It’ll take years before we realize it had nothing to do
with us. We learn from the children of the dead. Bodies
moving like ours, but they let time pass over them, standing
where the waves can’t lick their ankles. When a boy’s boat
flips and drowns him in the twilight hours of Tuesday
morning, Mary holds my hand outside of home room.
It doesn’t always have to mean something, her lips
parted like a story. But I want it to.
Angel hour, our midday ritual. Clawing at the cusp of age,
we learned to lie to keep our parents safe. I squeeze my eyes
shut so hard I can see the galaxy, the angel’s doing crosswords.
They’re there until they’re not. Mary is so still I wonder
how she’s breathing. I want to ask her what it means,
that this moment can only last in our memories. I want
to ask her if she knows what happens next. I bite
my tongue. Pray she’s there when I open my eyes.
McLeod Logue is poet from Birmingham, Alabama. She recieved her MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she taught creative writing. Her work has appeared in The Pinch, The Nashville Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, and elsewhere.