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

Getting Experience;

M I L L E R W I L L I A M S Getting Experience The first real job I got was delivering drugs for Jarman’s Pharmacy in Bascum, Arkansas. If everyone was busy or in the back I sold things. A cloudy woman with pentecostal hair Softly asked for sanitary napkins. She brought the Kleenex back unwrapped in twenty minutes. Shame said Mr. Jarman. We shouldn’t make a joke of that and made me say I’m sorry and fired me. When I found out what it was the woman wanted I had to say I did what they said I did. That or let them know I hadn’t heard of Kotex. Better be thought bad than known for stupid. The first hard fight I had was after school with Taylor Wardlow West in Bascum, Arkansas. Ward West chased me home from school when I was lucky. My father said Ward West was insecure. Go smile at him He said and let him know you mean to be his friend. My father believed in love. All day I smiled and twisted in my seat to see him all hate and slump by himself in the back of the room. The 1970s ❚ 85 After school he sat on my chest and hit me and then his little brother sat on my chest and hit me and then his little sister sat on my chest and hit me. She made me so ashamed I tried to kick her and kicked Ward West in the face. When he could see I was halfway home. Jesus. Jesus. Next day everybody told me over and over how I had balls to make those stupid faces, him the son of a bitch of the whole school and how I surely kicked the piss out of him. Ward had to go to the dentist. Also his father beat him. He didn’t come to school for two days. Then he left me alone. He said I was crazy. Everybody thought I was a little crazy Although with balls. I just let them say I was. Better be thought mad than known for stupid. Sneeze, belch or fart. Choose if you have a choice. Nobody’s going to think you’re good and sane and smart. How, Having Given Up the Classical Temper for the Romantic, We Try to Find Meaning in Death It’s hard to think the brain a ball of ropey dough should have posited pain or come to know 86 ❚ The 1970s how to distinguish legend from life and let it go and think we live, and imagine that makes it so. If these are things we lend a fragile credence to we come to comprehend or think we do how something which has the skill to think of the mouth kissed should lose the words and will and not exist or look at itself astonished as it does now, and know all things are good and honest as this is so. The 1970s ❚ 87 ...