Wearing My Grammar Girdle

Shedding my grammar girdle, hill talk sighs onto blue lines, fat on the page, word endin’s gone, the very words poured out by uncles and aunts in stories on porches and dinner tables on Double Creek.

Looking the lines like Mama looked soup beans, I throw out the little rocks and pieces of twigs, run my fingers over the mess, and feel the perfect shapes, silky, smooth.

Them prepositions, sister, are the hardest to rout; like dandelions, they turn up in batches, pop onto the page and take up lease as if they have a quit claim deed.

I pull in my gut, wince at what I up and done. My pen a willow switch, I whip across lines, scratch away the lazy words, and scream like my Aunt Alice yelled at the cat that climbed to the top of the Frigidaire, “Get down off from up on top of there!”