The Great Depression

She has no desire. She has a ring, a ring on her hand that she twists and twists again. She has a word, one word in her chest that pushes its way on an ache of air to her tongue. But she does not speak it, will not say its name. Here where she sits she cannot see the corn, spreading its arms,

Twisting its way up the rope of the sun, or the cotton’s brazen white blooms. She cannot see the men in the field or the stone from the field they were clearing. So many stones, egg white, flinty grey, pink flecked sun warmed, black with blood. There were three shots from the field

That day. For the women at the well it was a signal they knew, knew like the snake’s hiss from the deeps of the hawthorn thicket, and they hurried away. She stood dreaming at the hand crank, listening to the bucket suspended below, the creak of hemp, the plash of thick water clover honey brown, and the flies,

Bottle blue and thick as her thumb, buzzing loud as mowers. Later, they told her what happened to Sweet, his fall from the wagon, the stone arching to meet him. How no one moved, then all moved at once. They told her this, those hard men, faces like teak, hands of tree bark, tears standing in their leaf brown eyes.

Now it is she who does not move. She’s ill, she knows; they do not make her work, slap her hands from the biscuit dough, say she’ll curdle the milk in the churn. She spends her afternoons on the porch where the wind in the pines seems a live thing bent on thrashing all the bobwhites and whippoorwills from their nests. They complain so loudly the voice of the child at her knee disappears—

disappears into the radio’s buzz, the low song of women, disappears into the scraping of cicadas, the hot, hot tongue of longing. The sun.

Selected works by Kendra Hamilton:

• • The Great Depression

• • The Science of Wearing a Dress

• • The Refrigerator