Trailer Park Exit Strategy
BY LIE FORD
Double knot your boots. Pack lightly,
and leave some things behind:
The peaches on the kitchen table
green and hard as fists,
the kitchen itself, fly shit pointillism, the
rusty screen door amputating off the house,
the word “house,” this fear
of calling things what they are,
the day you ask your mom for peaches
and she tells you how she wants
to break your teeth on concrete,
those dreams where the double-wide
crumbles like day-old cornbread
under bone-knotted fingers,
the gnat halo over the peaches
as they blush pink and soften
under a dusty gleam choking out
that too-tight window,
the bedroom carpet, so sticky from dog piss
it tries to walk out with you,
the Camel smoke you can’t smell
but everyone else can, the yellow tint
in the drywall, the holes, the knuckles
and the spaces in between, the people
behind them and their belts,
the buckle shaped bruises, the peaches
your mom bought to say sorry,
brown and puckered, slippery flesh
seeping rings into the wood.
On God and Responsibility
BY LIE FORD
Mamaw has a way of making it all God’s fault.
He always makes a way, she’d say, last few
dollars ashed in the tray, burnt for a hit of speed,
pack of menthol LDs, some green-fingering rings,
another pocket Bible, other shit she doesn’t need.
We ate church food, canned beans, mayonnaise
sandwiches with lettuce. God kept us poor
to keep us with him. Gave us hunger so food
became divine, illness so health
could be granted to his hand. She kept saying
I don’t know why God kept me, and nothing
about Doctor B, the days I slept in a hospital room
at UT. I woke up to Papaw on the phone at 5AM.
When we found her bleeding in an upside down
Nissan I took several names in vain. She always said
I could say anything, anything but G-D, but it was
God who taught me that there were several names
for I love you, and some of them are violent.
It was us she called, not an ambulance.
She prayed before she drove, but it was us she called.
