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Holly Salvatore Mar 2013
Dewey Dell Bundren
Had her baby
And ran off to college
Worked single-mother hours
To keep her ****** apartment
And never missed a class
She married the first theology professor she could find
The kind
With the horn rimmed glasses
Drinking imported scotch
Discussing literature around the fire at night
She got a degree
At Northeastern
High honors in history
She never knew all those books were about her
And the people she came from
The places
Had their stories told
In the pages
Shaped everything she had ever known
She was grateful
For her history
And once a year made the trip
Back to Jefferson
Mississippi
Put flowers on her mother's grave
Still tasting
the bananas
Hearing herself saying
"Hadn't you ruther"
Still hearing Jewel
Cursing softly
"******* you, ******* you"
"You sweet sonofabitch"
Still seeing the mules
Swollen
Floating
Bellies up
Past Cash and the coffin
Leg broken
In that biblical spring flood
This won't make sense unless you've read As I Lay Dying.
Primrose Clare Jan 2014
the burnt throat, sour as strawberries


*maple leafs gathered up into punnets,
syrups into leaks of old milk bottles,
with red strawberries, they read sonnets;
in stillness and grace, among daylighted face.

Some wayfarers' time, tedious, delight and gradual,
meretricious and surreal, like whimsical moon's moral;
yet so gentle and fine, ruther foul, alike of snow.
the smells of red berries with angel cakes coalesced,
a gallery of yarn meadows unhang, collapsed.
Dennis Willis Aug 2021
Drinks or religion
i'd ruther be
an honest drunk
than a lying liar
of mythology

— The End —