The Pecan Tree Leaning Away from My Childhood Home
BY MICKIE KENNEDY
I sutured slats of wood to the trunk
and called them stairs. A split
of branches midway up, ripe
for the plywood perch I cobbled together
with scavenged nails. I felt exposed,
but I could see everything—
two male jays nipping at the almost-ready
ears of corn, my mother at the window
flicking ash, a possum in the burn barrel
searching for a curl of singed potato.
All summer long, the tree dripped sap
On Mother’s silver Buick,
and for ten dollars a week, I scoured
those spots with Dad’s old undershirts.
Before he died, he said the tree was older
than the house. Older than all of us
combined. It smelled like soil,
like locker room funk, and beneath
each flake of bark, a seething gloss
of ladybugs—dotted, arterial.
Some nights, alone on my perch, I lowered
my shorts. Hoarse cicadas, the lemon smell
of just-cut grass, Jessi Colter love songs
slurring from my mother’s bedroom.
On my thighs, up my shirt, the scratch
of insect legs. I still don’t know
if they were real or imagined.
AAA Carolina Gold
BY MICKIE KENNEDY
We left my mother at the kitchen table
surrounded by a congregation of Svedka bottles.
She’d meant to take me days ago, before the fair
had turned to this—a broken-tooth scatter
of stalls and tents. All the rides like ornate parrots
put to rest beneath a sheet. Quiet as clouds,
sweat-smudged men dismantled things,
their beards like rashes built from shadow.
Uncle Roy’s forearms flexed as he coiled cords,
dark as the hair on the back of his hands. Nobody
paid me a lick of attention. Like they knew
I was useless. Delicate as a cat with a hurt paw,
my t-shirt heavy with sweat, I roamed the lot
until I finally found my way to them—
the butter busts, painfully pale, sealed
behind the glass of a squat display trailer.
They looked otherworldly. Like themselves,
but smeared. Griffith, Graham, Earnhardt
and Carolyn Leonard, the first lady
of North Carolina, smiling sourly.
The sun was relentless, a sculptor in reverse.
Dale’s nose, a clot on the plinth. An alien
smoothness where Billy’s mouth used to be.
And Carolyn’s eyes, half-gone but still
staring blankly through my face. As if I was
the thing a crowd would pay to see—admired
for a week, then left to melt in the gut of September.
Mickie Kennedy is a gay writer who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, POETRY, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Sun and elsewhere. His first full-length book of poetry, Worth Burning, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2026.