Jo Angela Edwins, a native of Belvedere, SC, is Assistant Professor of English at Francis Marion University in Florence, SC, where she has taught courses in composition, literature, business writing, and poetry writing. Her poems have appeared in various journals and in the literary anthology Migrants and Stowaways.
Manuscript Title: Only Human
Organic
I watch you, alone in a curved aisle,
bend to scan the lower shelves--
tall jars of spiced apples,
peppers packed in long-necked bottles,
vinaigrettes sealed like fine, red wines.
You find the thing you want, and I am glad
you stay squatted, statued, reading lengthy labels,
the woven wools and cottons of your trousers
stretched full across taut thighs.
Busy on searches of your own,
you cannot sniff the bright blood orange lifted
this close to my nose, cannot hear the liquid
strummings of my fingers on ripe melons,
cannot see me tug loose lettuce leaves
backwards to expose the fisted core.
Late berries stain my palms. All I think,
as I watch you rise and turn, is ruddy-tongued.
Tonight you will peel and dip sweet pears
in bowls of cream, and every rivulet
of milky juice that rings your expert fingers
will linger like dewdrops on these thirsty lips.
At the Fresh Market
You bought a two-ounce bottle of
Canadian maple syrup,
twisted the top in the car
and stole the slightest sip.
Enough to coat the tip
of your quick tongue. You are
my butterfly man, my cut above.
You groaned and called it sweet.
I watched a droplet slip
down the center of your lip.
I said I wanted a taste.
You had just replaced the cap.
Besides, you said, too good, too good–
too expensive to waste.
You thought you were wickedly cute.
Or maybe you misunderstood.
I tasted the maple that barely clung
to the tip of your quick tongue.
Incurable
The doctor this morning
told me the ache
in my hips was real.
Too much stooping lately,
gathering to throw away
newsprint and broken twigs.
But the weather this weekend,
sun-gold and seductive,
somehow I had to make it serve...
And you should see the place now:
the yard like a beaten rug,
the house clean as a hospital,
and my guiltless fatigue. I wished
I could show it off.
I’m paying for it now.
The doctor put his hand
right on the pain before
writing my prescription,
big, blood-red pills
to be swallowed without food
three times a day.
They should ease the pain
until my hips decide to heal
on their own. Which they can,
unlike other wounds
I never mentioned to the doctor, since I knew
that mean cliché is true–
Nothing we can do.
Last Dinner Together
We had said goodbye already
but were lingering
over cold coffee cups, watching
dusk slip into darkness through
a window smeared lightly
down the center. We had arrived
at what is called “a mutual decision”
three days before and met then
to exchange plastic grocery bags
filled with relics: the razor
you left on my nightstand, the coffee cup
I left on your desk, my hairbrush woven
with your steely hair, your book--
a history of ancient Greece–
long abandoned beneath my bed.
You made the inevitable comparison
to the ruins of war, and we both smiled
to imagine our skirmishes in league
with Troy, Normandy, Gettysburg.
Then you lifted your hand to wipe
a crumb from your lip, and I noticed
the white scar on your forefinger.
Tapered like an hourglass,
it seemed an intentional wound,
a badge of honor commemorating
some forgotten boyhood blood oath,
some thing you swore to do before
you grew old enough to understand
that promises break like daylight.
Horrified to know
I had never seen it before, I stirred
at the memory then of your hand--
that hand–touching my face,
my breasts, reaching its way
through the core of me, my breath,
my veins, the race of my heart,
and I wondered if nerves survive
the buffer of deep scar tissue.
When the waitress
wanted to freshen our cups, we stood,
shaking our heads. I gave you back
what you had left behind. You did
the same for me. Not sure what then,
you reached out your hand.
I took it and held it awhile, although
the muscle and bone already felt gloved
in the familiar foreignness
of almost-strangers, of stars
flickering in the thick night sky
that graves them guiltlessly, unaware
that they exploded decades before
we could see them, before we were born,
hundreds of light years
apart.
Old Wives' Tale
With a kitchen knife I nicked my thumb
the night you left. But I want you to know
I washed it, wrapped it, kept going.
I peeled potatoes, freshly dug and rain-scented,
chopped carrots, onions, tomatoes,
scraped Silver Queen from the cob
into the wide pot warming on the stove.
Like our quiet mothers and grandmothers,
I gathered ingredients, spiced and stirred,
and when the time came to let the stew grow
to a gentle simmer, I sat and sipped tea,
falcon-eyed, watching the pot build its heat,
proving one old story, at least, untrue.
When my supper was ready,
I ladled thick liquid the color of blood
into a bowl deep as fists,
and when the tall shaker I never used fell,
salt spilled in long tracks, blanching the tablecloth.
With a folded napkin I wiped the fine grains
into my cupped hand and tossed them
first over the left shoulder, then over the right,
not, as they say, for good luck, but to keep
such stuff away from fresh wounds.
I finished my supper, down to the last spoonful.
That night I slept like deep roots in winter
imagining the tremors of spring.
Blasphemy
The smiling Southern preacher
at the church where you are only a visitor
has a scar beside his right eye.
He never mentions how or why
it got there, and as he repeats
four verses from Galatians a third time,
you give way to wild imaginings:
an angry wife throwing a dish,
a bar brawl over losing at cards,
even rough sex. God forgive me, you pray,
then imagine your mother and grandmother
in their personal heavens gone suddenly sad,
disappointed at the devil in you, though how
anyone in heaven should be sad or disappointed
your mind can’t quite work out. Nearby,
a curly-haired man who, minus the sport coat
and out-of-style tie, looks like Bob Dylan
shouts out “Amen!” to the red-faced preacher,
so you make yourself listen again.
He tells the story of his grandmother
forcing him down on his knees to pray,
how every misdeed made her bellow,
From dust you came, to dust you shall return!
“Oh, the whipping I got,” he says, “that evening
when I looked underneath the bed we knelt by,
and when Grandma said Amen! I asked her,
Are these people goin’ or comin’?”
Everyone laughs, and you try to recall
where you’ve heard that joke before.
It’s then you decide you like this preacher
as a person much more than a preacher, and when
he quotes Galatians again, you imagine
this time he wrestles with angels, one of whom
has a mean left cross, or better yet, you decide
maybe he tripped while running from grandma’s
self-righteous hickory switch, his head
banged hard on the compact clay road that led
from her house to town. Maybe he stood,
wiped the dirt from his face, told it hello,
fervently gripped it like dusty hands of sinners
laying down narrow highways to God.
Accepting It
The final diminishment:
the moment you realize
even grief will leave you,
the glaring world recedes,
a haze of lace.
Then no tears come,
only the dust of slow blinkings—
the dust, the dust
each one returns to,
no particle recollecting its kin.
In Dreams
Often in dreams my mother is not dead
but run away, her old silver LeSabre
–unused, unplated now beneath the carport--
gleaming, speeding down highways I’ve never seen.
Or sometimes she’s been away but has come back
for a moment only, a cup of instant coffee,
a gathering of small things, movement toward the doorway,
and I stand pleading. My father sits still.
In dreams like this she’s often young and rose-skinned,
a way I never knew her, black-haired, laughing,
never slow or sickly. I ask her to stay
so we can be girls together. She vanishes.
In other dreams she wears unpatterned scarves
around her head. I know then she is dying,
and no one else does. I tell her she must stay
since time is poison. She waves a fading hand.
Sometimes when I wake I open my eyes
and wonder how often she wished before she fell
ill to leave the cracked walls that caged us,
unwashed, unpatched, crumbling to dust behind her.
Sometimes when I wake I keep my eyes closed
and wonder what she would say to me that morning
if she were alive. I hear outside the train songs,
the rush of jet engines, the distant traffic’s hum.
Commemoration
On the eighth anniversary
of the last day my mother was alive,
Columbia shattered on re-entry.
TV anchormen in crisp, dark suits
spoke in dulled voices,
groped for explanations,
interviewed professors,
insisted they knew nothing official,
and mispronounced the astronauts names.
By late afternoon we’d seen pictures
dozens of times, the ice-white trail slicing
through a baby-blue sky, dark metal twisted
like a modern sculpture imbedded in the center
of some small town square, as if the citizens
sanctified the site for their own fallen children.
They were warned not to touch what they saw.
That afternoon my sister,
seventeen years older, called
from three hundred miles away.
We were nearer each other
than we were the disaster, but she
needed someone to talk to then,
and I suppose I did too. Both of us
unmarried, overweight, overeducated,
we knew without saying that what we feared
was our own lonely deaths, the mystery that scared us
that moment into buzzing silences.
In her new house back home she sat,
surrounded by boxes, listening to the television
droning in the other room.
“Those poor families,” she said,
her voice as tired
as the thin winter sunlight.
At first I said nothing. Then I remembered
a sad story we shared:
the time two springs before when I stepped
out to my car and found underneath it
a thin, silver cat, yowling as if
I were his mother. I lured him out,
patted his head, tickled his chin,
told him I wished I could keep him to myself,
but already I had one more cat
than the building allowed. My sister wondered
why I didn’t at least feed him
a bowl of milk, a can of tuna,
something. I couldn’t answer.
“You’re cruel,” she had giggled. Retelling
the story, I giggled myself, but she
said nothing this time. “I don’t know why
I reminded you of that,” I said.
“Me, neither,” she said. “Come home,” she said.
Then nothing.
Until
we spoke our small goodbyes. The phone line
crackled, and the TV showed again
sky burning vivid as superheroes,
next only to God,
too strong and too distant
for dazed, hungry people to touch.
