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

Drought

K AT H RY N S T R I P L I N G B Y E R Drought The smell of dirt, always the smell of dry dirt down in Georgia where I sweated through summer, my father complaining about the blue sky stretching all the way west into Arkansas. Dry ice they’d tumble from planes sometimes. Thunder and strong wind might come but no rain. The pigs grumbled from sunup to sundown. The cows stood immobilized under the oak trees, their turds turning black as the biscuits I burned while I daydreamed. Where I played I saw corn dying year after year, teased by dust devils leaving their dust in between my toes and in ring after ring round my neck. I scrubbed ring after ring of black dirt from the bathtub at night. I got used to my own sweat and so much hot weather the silly petunias collapsed by mid-afternoon. Without looking I knew what I’d find, the whole flowerbed lazy as I was. You hold up your shoulders straight, I heard a thousand times. Books on my head, I’d be sent out to water the flowers as if that would help salvage anything but my good humor, the smell of wet dirt The 1970s ❚ 83 my reward, for which I knew I ought to be grateful. I am grateful, now that I’m thirsty as dry land I stand upon, stoop-shouldered, wanting a flash flood to wash away Georgia while I aim the water hose into a sad patch of pansies as if nothing’s changed. I can still hear my father complain while my mother cooks supper and I swear to leave home tomorrow. In Oregon dams burst but I don’t believe it. Here water is only illusion, an old trick light plays on the highway that runs north through field after field after field. 84 ❚ The 1970s ...