Driving Interstate West through Georgia

Already I am become an outsider, a visitor seldom and hasty to my community of pecan, cedar, pine, oak. A forgetful witness to the smell of peaches liquoring the air. I see this land the way I want to remember, do the same for childhood love.— The rough hand that touched me but didn't scrape down to bone. Like those Africans choking down mouthfuls of home before they were loaded onto the boats, this place might move through me soon and be gone.— The clucking of grown folks' voices as they prayed over daily meat. The branch cradling the blood's neck, patch of green fed by offhand screams. If this earth is denied me, then what do I know? That before you travel to the prairie's open fields, you must follow the southern tangle? That if you try to pull up something unfinished from the ground, the clotted sounds of lament still cling to the roots?