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© 2013 Jennifer Wagner
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She grew up in Nixa,
barefoot,
hay in her hair,
with a
penchant for buttermilk
and married
men.
Now I ain’t
excusin’ nobody,
ain't judgin’neither,
just tellin’
it how it was
there in the
sweltering heat of a late-July June.
She drove a
charcoal-painted Mercury Comet
with a side
window
busted out. Never fixed it,
said it was
because she liked the sound
of the
thunder rain coming through,
like horse
hooves,
at full
gallop.
A tube of
lipstick in a gaudy orange-pink shade,
rolled around
on the dash,
its contents
melting in the sizzling sun.
One time, as
I sat shotgun and bumping along dirt roads,
the smell of
the sweet, warm earth in our noses,
I asked her
why she kept it there—
the rattle
of it being a continual poke to the nerves.
She said it
was on account of how it reminded her
of the dog who’d bitten her and blotted out all her suns.
I always
thought it was a joke I never understood,
but would
when I hit
that magic year
when things
adults said became clear.
She always drove
barefoot,
tossing her
boots in the backseat,
and pulling
her flowered country dress up
while
slipping down on the pedals,
a jar of
sweet tea between her knees.
The winds of
change were coming,
she’d say,
and get that far-away look
like she’d
seen her last blue Missouri moon.
The day she
burned out,
I’d felt
it.
Like being
stranded
in a float tube
on winter’s river.
She’d gone
to Springfield to catch a glimpse of her little boy
playing in
someone else’s backyard.
A woman came
out and was applying a Band-aid to his knee,
he’d called
her ‘Mama’.
And that’s
how one word can break your heart.
When we knew
she’d met the fate of comets,
I ran to my
room to bleed myself onto paper;
to write dreams
of life lived violently, cursedly, and then
of green
grass and white daisies,
and things
that never end.
And to cry.
She’d left
the lipstick tube for me,
on my
scarred wooden white-painted dresser,
with her
empty jar,
and 3 sets
of Newberry’s dime store earrings
in the shape
of mini stars, moons, and daisies.
I drank the
tea in 3 gulps,
slid the
tube in my pocket,
stuck the
star-shaped earrings through the holes in my lobes;
and then
with all the voice I could muster,
I vowed to
keep my sky,
that no dog
would blot my suns,
and that
he’d have to kill me
before
he could
ever take my heart.
Copyright ©
2013 Jennifer Wagner
