Redneck Press with Fried Chicken and Coffee

Busy times here. I wish I could say I'm hav­ing fun, but I'm not. Look for new con­tent very soon, though. In the mean­time, I ran across this poem that hits me where I live in its last few phrases, though the water where I grew up was hard, turned blue jeans green and whites yel­low in the laun­dry, fizzed like pop and sep­a­rated into two warm and evil-tasting lay­ers, heavy like saw­dust on your tongue except drink­able. I can close my eyes and taste it in my mind and know how far away from home I am, because the water here tastes clean and cold, like a rich man's.

Ter­rain by Crys­tal Wilkin­son (from Appalachian Her­itage)

the map of me can’t be all hills and moun­tains even though i’ve been geo­graph­i­cally rural and coun­try all my life. the twang in my voice has moved down­hill to the flat land a time or two. my taste buds have exiled them­selves from fried green toma­toes and rhubarb­for goats’ milk and pine nuts. still i am haunted by home. i return to old ground time and again, a hom­ing black bird des­tined to always return. i am plain brown bag, oak and twig, mud pies and gutwrench­ing gospel in the throats of old tobacco brown men. when my spine crooks even fur­ther toward my mother’s i will con­tinue to crave the bul­bous twang of wild shal­lots, the gamey famil­iar­ity of oxtails and kraut boil­ing in a cast iron pot. i toe-dive in all the rivers seek­ing the whole of me, scout vir­tual african ter­rain try­ing to sift through ances­tral mem­o­ries, but still i’m called back home through hymns sung by stout black women in large hats and flow­ered dresses. i can’t say the land­scape of me is all hon­ey­suckle and clover cause there have always been mines in these lily-covered val­leys. you have to risk the briar bush to reach the sweet dark fruit, and ain’t no coun­try woman all church and piney woods. there is pluck and cayenne pep­per. there is juke joint gyra­tions in the youngun-bearing girth of this belly and these sup­ple hips. all roads lead me back across the waters of blood and breast milk, from ocean, to river, to the lake, to the creek, to branch and stream, back to the sweet rain, to the cold water in the glass i drink when i thirst to know where i belong.