POETRY

A Poem in Which I Grab My Poverty Like That Jaguar in the Video Grabbed a Crocodile Out of the River and Carried It into the Jungle

By Annie Woodford     VOLUME 53.2

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My daughter said
           You think it’s the wind,
           but it’s the highway.

Pot smoke       wafts
from a passing car,
           caress of funk and fable,

though, at eleven,
           I don’t think she knows
the scent. We walk

the grounds of the school
she was zoned to attend,
      the highway and Walmart

still visible through
      woven plastic fence.
We toss the half-deflated

hearts      of playground balls
back into the packed
dirt yard.         I find a child’s

sweater on the gravel,
vinyl butterflies
        pressed across its chest,

its thin acrylic knit
wet with dew. I drape
        it across the gate,

bright totem of all
           the love I send and forsake.
My daughter grabs my phone

           and poses her face—
seeking her own beauty
in her smile—in front

of our distant mountains,
egalitarian in their soft pink excess,
planes         descending

from places we never
have the money to visit,
           wingtips         luminous

with low sun,     while all over town
                          tonight people sleep
                          in their own piss

because Medicaid
must make profit.
           A coyote tried

           to hide behind
the trashcan at the jail
today but it was shot.

Inmates used to shout
from out the window slots
until those slots were sealed.

You’d think it was catcalls
or something unspeakable,
but it was really         the wind,

if God is the wind
        and sometimes takes the form
of human voices.

 


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ANNIE WOODFORD is the author of Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, Spring 2019), and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Epoch, Waxwing, Blackbird, the Southern Review, the Sewanee Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She has also been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences as well as Barbara Deming Fund and Jean Ritchie fellowships. A native of Bassett, Virginia—a mill town near the North Carolina border—she now teaches community college English in Wilkesboro, North Carolina.


VOLUME 53.2