Yonder Mountain: An Ozarks Anthology

Sara Burge

Sara Burge Sara Burge was born in West Plains, Missouri, and she has lived in the Missouri Ozarks most of her life. She first attended college at the Missouri State University, West Plains campus, and eventually completed her MFA in poetry at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her first book, Apocalypse Ranch, won the De Novo award and was published by C&R Press in fall 2010, and her poems have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, River Styx, Cimarron Review, Court Green, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She teaches poetry writing at Missouri State University in Springfield. qQ Sacraments My grandmother took her chickens straight to the backyard’s stained tree stump, hatchet hanging above their squawkings a moment before slamming through neck to wood, their new bodies blind and bound to find Billy’s black-mutt jaws, slick and snapping. She explained nothing and I thought nothing of it. Once, while holding a log steady for my grandfather, the chainsaw chewed her right forearm 39 to the bone. Still she weeded her garden, was expected to make dinner, so she grabbed chickens with one hand, swung them around and whipped them like a wet towel, white feathers bursting into springtime twilight like champagne. Each Black Shell Spring-cold, beer-can-strewn, littered with hillbillies in canoes with guitars and red-bandanaed dogs— this was the river I lived on every summer as a child. My mother and father—drunk on Coors, not yet hating each other— searched the slick-stoned bottom for mussels and freed them from muck to suck them clean out of themselves. I understood only the literal, imagined bulging arms, legs filleted and twitching within each glistening shell. A grown-up thing to do, find a mussel and eat it. But then, I didn’t think of love as lying on a river bed, moss-haired and drifting. Didn’t think of love at all while skipping rocks at the cresting snouts of snapping turtles or waiting in the shallows until the settling mire revealed a crawfish side-shuffling from under algae stones. Its body blended waves of light and mud until snatched out, above the atmosphere of water. There, it turned hideous. Tiny leviathan, trivial as the air that stank of something dead banked and bloated beside me. 40 Sara Burge Once a shell cracks, there’s nothing but the bleeding out. Summers began their slow nodding, and my parents’ love began to swell and slack. Our last river trip as a whole, I didn’t hear footsteps snapping underbrush, only a voice asking why I was there. Words spoken by a shadow eclipsing the sun, a negative form with the outline of a shotgun. But my father appeared, offered the man a beer and a smile I didn’t recognize, then carried my shivering bones back to my mother. We crossed the river’s cold current, me whining that it wasn’t late yet. We still had so much time. Sara Burge 41 ...