Kathy Nelson
Abecedarian: My Great Grandmother Writes
to Her Mother after Moving West with Her Husband
to Live in a Sod House on a Wind-Shattered Plain
–for Lilly Belle Easterly, age 19, Red River, Texas, 1889
All riotous and flaming, I remember wild azaleas
burning coral, copper, nearly crimson,
coy among the leafing birches and sugar maples.
Does the dogwood still bloom?
Everything seeks sunshine. Sometimes, wakeful, I
find rest thinking of those blossoms trembling in a
gentle breeze, morning-stippled. How I would
hate to hear that looming sycamores have crowded
it, beclouded it, devoured it,
jailed it among their
knobby limbs and starved it of
light. I remember daylilies in a row along the fence.
Most days neither the screech and yowl of prairie wind
nor dust needling between the door and its frame
obliterates my memory of those stately maidens.
Please, think of me, remember me when they open,
quiet, along the fence between the house and the
river. When you walk the holler, let the
scent of sassafras bring me back
to you and Father and Luther, whose strong arm,
underlauded, churned the salted ice and cream to sweet
velvet. That memory
wrings from me every inkling. I’ll close now not to ruin the
x’s I’ve made along the bottom of the page.
Yours always. P.S. In the garden, find me when the
zinnias flash their gold.
Kathy Nelson
Kathy Nelson, James Dickey Prize winner, MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and Nevada Arts Council Fellow, is author of The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books, 2023). Her work appears in About Place; Five Points, a Journal of Literature and Art; Jacar One; New Ohio Review; Pedestal Magazine; Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review; Verse Daily and elsewhere.