Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

It Begins

M A R K D O T Y It Begins with a fragment of conversation you probably misunderstood, a blurred remark that perhaps didn’t refer to you. Or were you sleeping? Then it’s something in the way the distant, familiar skyline is arranged this morning, a steeliness in the click of your new shoes you hadn’t noticed, something in the click of the taxi door, even the short black hairs on the back of the driver’s neck seem to be clicking. It’s the kind of day your sentimental mother would have said the clouds carried baskets of fresh laundry, or the angels were waxing the floors of heaven blue. You’d have laughed, but by noon you wouldn’t be surprised if the clouds rained wet sheets, or huge knees bruised the upper atmosphere. It’s as if you have aluminum foil on your fillings, you tell the office manager, and by three you’re home, leaning into the gilt zero of the bathroom mirror, watching for signs in that changeable forecast, your face, bending into the noose of white, advancing weather. The 1980s ❚ 151 ...