ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Three Poems
by Elizabeth Hughey


Son On a Hill

I can’t see my son anymore.
He is so tiny,
the size of a pencil dot.
In the shopping mall,
I find a new son.
A black man in a baseball cap
looking at telephones. Son, I say,
because I am your mother, that’s why.
I’ve missed you, he says.
We leave and drive back to the house.
Look, kitchen, I’ve found him.
See how little it takes to make a nose.
An angle is all. A dot for an eye.
Dear god, Son, you are growing by octaves.
You are getting too big for this lap,
for this room, for this street!
A siren splits the day into two lungs.
One inflates and drifts out over
the backyard. Go on, I say, and there
he goes. A tulip droops around noon.

Swamp Cache

One tupelo harvest Smiley awakes in the middle of the heavy, dark seventies. The menus are crowded with crawfish. Smiley drives by the high school until eleventh grade shifts to endless sandy shallows. He remembers his oysterman’s fingers, phasing out of bivalves and into 1987. Easing up the Emerald Coast by barge, drop by drop, soaking up pools of aftershave, Smiley moves his blinking road sign into the soft fluff that is the tupelo flower.

Veronica

I know that day. That is the day a man crossing the park found a bottle of gin hidden beneath a bush and in one swig turned his chest into a bedroom slipper, fur-lined and foot- warmed. Not a day that birds sang with their feathers, only an occasional dagger of song. Every apartment building was attached to an apartment building. I caught a calendar page on my tongue. I am no across-the-room beauty. I am the dark side of a sequin. My dimple behaves like a reflecting pool. That day, my hair grew right into her style, brioche mousseline. No time to wet it down, I took her boots and went as Veronica to the New Year’s party. We never seemed to get around to midnight.