“Renewed Hope”
Wendy Balconi
Collage
Rising with the last
high tide of summer,
where the river
salts to sea,
I harvest husk to ghost,
nothing left of me
to feed your hunger
but tales of kernels
once raw,
sweet with milk.
Still I stalk
you in dreams
of my long silk hair,
the heat of tassel-torn nights
when you ground me
to meal, fattened
your tongue, ripe
with my fire-crusted bread,
when you willingly
swallowed
my gravel,
accepted, unsifted,
the grit in the fine
of my grain.
When you take me
in your mouth,
Cooper River gator,
when you teeth-tear me
with your jaws,
my soft human hide
heats your cold
reptile blood,
melding me
into the tough
of your skin—
skin that one day
my daughter’s daughters
will walk in
with high pointed heels
bearing scales
borne on feet
wearing ancestors
who speak
with their teeth,
women wearing flesh
that refuses to crawl,
knows how to bite.
Mary Alice Dixon: “I grew up in Carolina red clay and Appalachian coal dust. I’ve been a door-to-door book seller (yes, I’m that old) and a professor of architecture and landscape history. I live in Charlotte, where I teach hospice grief writing workshops that include nature rituals, found poems, and tears. My passion is my garden, all trees and the liminal, alligator-infested land around the Cooper River. I regularly seek the magic of Carolina low country live oaks and abandoned corn fields where I walk with ghosts of my dead cats, Alice B. Toklas and Thomas Merton. I also write poetry. In terms of identity, I identify with a wounded Mother Earth, magnolias and maples, owls and sparrows, plus sometimes, the bones of extinct bears and dry husks of corn. Yes, I’m a mess. And mostly passionately happy while trying to make the world a better place.”