by Brett Rutherford
1
“You’ll eat those words.”
We did: they sprang from the dirt,
ringed in the hearts of tomatoes,
bad news and outrageous claims
for miracle cures, crosswords
and obits ground up in pulp;
words we put in the ground
with the tomato starters —
on hands and knees in the garden,
we wrapped the roots
in old newspapers,
a wood-pulp wall
against the hungry worms.
Grandmother explained:
by the time worms ate
through the paper, the plants
were tall and sturdy.
At night I wondered
if the root hairs read
about Russia and fallout
before they sucked
the paper dry
of lampblack ink,
whether the red fruit cared
which party came to power,
or how tomato red was a color
to call someone a traitor with;
whether we are what we eat
as last season’s news fades,
yet stays in our genes,
bone marrow memory of fighting words.
2
One time only, I watched
grandmother kill off
an unruly rooster.
Over the executioner’s stump
her hatchet rose and fell,
one deft and practiced chop.
The hated rooster's head
lay there on tree rings
in a red pool, while
the rest of the bird
made tracks for the forest,
blood jetting in air.
The dog ran after, gleefully.
I looked down at the chicken’s
baleful, taciturn eye.
Did he regret now
the vicious leg-pecking
that led to his demise?
Did he disdain the race
the rest of him was having now,
in which the dog would surely
triumph?
The open-beaked, expressionless
head just lay on the block,
as dignified as a bust
of a Roman emperor.
The dog retrieved
the exhausted victim,
now off to the plucking.
Each hour I came back
from the defeathering orgy,
the gutting and cleaning,
to the discarded head.
What was it thinking?
What was it thinking?
It must be thinking something!
3
In early summer wood,
May apples pepper
the pine grove floor,
copperhead snakes flee
my grandmother’s
all-purpose poking and walking stick,
same stick that finds mushrooms,
morels, the best ones,
wherever they hide.
Pine's lower branch
drapes lawn,
trees hung
with bygone nests,
eggshell debris.
The black
snake molts,
counting the days
until re-birth and eggs.
Gone now three years,
grandmother returns.
I know where to find her.
I tear her from earth,
wipe off the sod,
know her face, graven
in May apple, mandrake root
4
Red sky,
that summer of twisters
and of Hurricane Hazel,
sent everyone down
to cellar-holes,
everyone, that is,
except our heathen family,
storm-loving Odin’s kin.
We watched
tornado pitch
rip arms
off poplar men,
heard not the song
the religious sang below
to bring their god down
to spare their cars and rooftops.
Safely on screened-in porch
as lightning jabbed everywhere
I made up my own
ascent into sky,
waited for wind
to peel the house
like an onion.
We were sad when the storm
ended. Everything else
was anticlimax. No one
we knew was carried off
into the funnel’s mouth.
Still, we would never forget
the wild song of the winds howling.
5
Grandfather never worked a day,
in all the years I knew him.
Content in his tar-papered house,
he sat in his long underwear —
what use to dress except for company?
But when the tax-day came,
he went to the mines,
spat at the very mention of them,
shamed
if one of his grown sons joined in
to help their Pa pay the property tax.
“I don’t want you going down there,”
he told his son. “No man should have to,
unless it’s that or starving.
I wish I had back the years I went there.”
Without a nickel between them, then,
they’d hitch a ride to the Hecla mine,
grim-jawed at the thought that earth
might swallow them each time they dropped
into the maw of darkness.
They left before dawn,
returned in time
to watch the darkening sky
spit diamonds.
They hung their carbide lamps
by the wash basin,
the musty smell
of acetylene mingled
with soap.
The tax bill paid, his son
would return to his paper mill
up North. Grandfather went back
to his radio, weeks in long underwear,
the day-count to the welfare check.
Inside him,
where the coughing had
already started,
a hardened vein
of dark dust and tar
exploded one night
and killed him,
as he always knew it would
