Mississippi Waning

watch the screen door slam. watch the echo, the way it shakes this foundation, the way his pink gums slurp and suck buttermilk from cornbread. the way he

watches his ford pickup, baby blue, stalled among graveyard roses.

baby powder lifts from card decks. i watch numbers and jokers and spades shuffle through blooming white fingers. velvet jesus hangs from a loose nail

in shoe-brown paneling. salt pork sizzles and window-unit freon opens my nostrils until summer fills my belly—

and i can hear her. spent feet shuffling in slippers from sink to stove to supper.

ii

granddaddy sits in his lawn chair. i watch heat rise from metal armrests. toasted grass crunches

underneath the weight of his silence. he watches grandma. she leans into cracked earth, her cotton dress

lifted above dirty knees. her fingers sift seeds and sweat slides down her temples. i eat black grapes

from wilting vines. when she loses her wedding ring beneath the thick of roots, granddaddy spends

a week searching for gold, while i sit in the shade with purple fingers, shelling peas. i’m nineteen when

he cries into the receiver, she’s gone. i am far from childhood and the flattened land of mississippi

and i feel the phone booth shrinking around me. when i see him again, he eats watermelon and forgets my name.

i hide in the church’s bathroom, watch a bee suck nectar from wallpaper roses. after the funeral,

when he tells me goodbye, when he tells me we won’t see each other again, i tell him he’s silly,

hug him and hurry down the road, his shrunken body blurred. a yellow rose in grandma’s garden.

iii

he paces parking lots while grandma paces piggly wiggly aisles. i shuffle between

pennies on cracked blacktop and day-old bread. he found a fifty once. luck tucked

in a tire-streaked envelope between shopping carts and pockmarked pavement. that day, we drank

grape soda, ate banana moonpies—yellow crumbs hanging from thin lips.

years later, when i am thirty-three, i will take my baby daughter to the cemetery where morning

glories climb the backs of graves and oak trees have arms that carve holes in the sky. we find

granddaddy’s place in the earth and sit with him. i trace his name on broken ground. my daughter and i

share a moonpie. when she shovels a fistful of earth into her mouth, i will watch her smack her lips,

black drool falling. and ten years after his death, for the first time since his breath pulled away from us,

i will watch sky open with echoes that penetrate the bark of ancient oak trees. and i will wipe the dirt

from my knees, from my daughter’s lips, my granddaddy’s stone, from the tears breaking from my eyes.