~
1968
. . . I must start
Where things began to happen and I knew it.
-“Ground Swell,” Mark Jarman
That summer transistor radios
popped as I teetered on stilts, unicycle,
a crazily painted barrel unrolling
my name on yards of grass. From a thick
trunk laddered with slats, I lofted
myself into elm, forks wedged
with planks—sat tall, drifted
among serrated leaves, imagined falling.
That summer I submerged my body
in the dark deep of a creek bend,
made camp under a heavy moon,
the night damp gauze, crickets
electric. I stowed hard sours
in slick cheeks like plugs of tobacco,
my parents, creased at the brow, hunched
over newspapers, Life magazine, photos
of body bags in long rows.
That was the summer I knew mistakes
could be lies, too snarled to be ordered:
a hurtful story passed on, taken
for truth, and assassinations, Viet Cong,
Tet. That was the summer when the plastic
horses I liberated to graze the front yard
balked at the porch’s edge. Cicadas—
fire red eyes and pulsing
screams—buzzed the leafy canopy,
spent shells clinging tight.
~
Annette Sisson, who lives in Nashville, TN, has published poems in journals and anthologies, including Nashville Review, Typishly, One, HeartWood Literary Magazine, Psaltery & Lyre, and others, as well as a chapbook A Casting Off (2019, Finishing Line). She was named one of seven 2020 BOAAT Writing Fellows, received honorable mention in Passager’s 2019 national poetry contest, and won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s 2019 poetry prize. Recently, she finished a book-length manuscript of poetry and is questing for a publisher.