How a Woman Becomes Herself
When the neighbor’s weed tree drapes over the power lines and shades her garden, she contemplates going out by moonlight to dump salt on the roots—but that could backfire and flow instead into the garden, be its ruination. These good neighbors invite her over for fine smoked brisket and can’t even see the problem from their side, so why doesn’t she just grow a pair and tell them, but she takes the aluminum ladder and reaches to the highest branches she can lop off with her superloppers, so maybe they will see her teetering and mistake her for a dragonfly. Truth be told, she’s out there iridescing for her ownself and no one else, her own muscles braided in the sun, yes, muscles at seventy, her arches hugging the top step, balanced as the scales in her Libra rising, Libra the sign of lovingkindness, and maybe they’ll hear her prayer for a little rain, a prayer that some of the body’s salt sours a root or two—because she’s no old wife in this tale, no wife at all, and who can say how it pours when it rains, how in the end it all comes out in the wash—weed, pride, sweat—all but the wings, or the shadow of wings.
Sassafras
Don’t you be sassafras, my daughter
says to her daughters, and so it goes,
straight from my mother’s shush of seen
and not heard, my mouth not to dispute
her word. Now a woman of a certain age,
word-hunger rages to depths even I
cannot sound, tongue burnt with all
manner of truths: a voice unrecused
to witness, laced with cinnamon bark,
cardamon fire, tea for fatigue and fever.
I speak my palmate self, canopy untold,
oils applied to sting and sprain,
my unquiet seams. I purify the blood,
neither sugar nor spice, but healing sear
for whatever stubborn wound the world
hands out. More than match struck
to tinder, more than knocking on wood’s
door long enough to shatter the walls,
more than sass or backtalk or sulled-up lip
or any tabula rasa, I will be sassafras
and more, all that indisputable more.
Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Baltimore Review, Shenandoah, and American Life in Poetry. Her sixth collection, Valediction, contains poems and prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Image credit: Erich Ferdinand via a Creative Commons license.
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