December 2014
My poetry is born, as was I, out of the Eden Hills of Kentucky, an area of steep grades and hard yellow clay on the south side of the Ohio River. I have two books, The Woodcarver's Wife and Weaving a New Eden. and my poems have been published in numerous periodicals, including The Cortland Review, The Louisville Review, and Kestrel.
A Visit to Granny’s
I slept upstairs under the eaves,
Granny’s suit-wool comforter scratching my chin,
the stilted cadences of Dad-Dad’s reading voice
muffled by the door between.
He read aloud from True Detective every night.
Sometimes Granny spoke, her voice asthma raspy.
Gunfire and soundtrack music,
my cousins’ bickering
welled up through the heating vent.
Though I focused on my ears with all my might,
I couldn’t make out my grandparents’ words.
-
I slept upstairs under the eaves,
Granny’s suit-wool comforter scratching my chin,
the stilted cadences of Dad-Dad’s reading voice
muffled by the door between.
He read aloud from True Detective every night.
Sometimes Granny spoke, her voice asthma raspy.
Gunfire and soundtrack music,
my cousins’ bickering
welled up through the heating vent.
Though I focused on my ears with all my might,
I couldn’t make out my grandparents’ words.
-
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In Granny’s Kitchen
Her cast-iron
wood-burning
cook-stove
stood
hitched to the flue
by black
stove-pipe.
A forked handle
fit a slot
on the burner plates.
When she’d lift
those black moons,
flames flared
from white hot coals.
Her cast-iron
wood-burning
cook-stove
stood
hitched to the flue
by black
stove-pipe.
A forked handle
fit a slot
on the burner plates.
When she’d lift
those black moons,
flames flared
from white hot coals.
American History: Chandler Brothers
The sloppy farm-road mud,
the cold implied
by Uncle James’s up-turned collar,
hunched shoulders,
sets a mood as bleak as dead weeds
and the broken-down Buick,
a twenties model maybe:
frog-eyed headlights, wooden spoke wheels,
and at the base of its chrome radiator,
a hole for the starting crank.
Daddy bent deep under the propped-up hood
is a shadow obscured by deeper shadows.
Car and brothers bleed
over the left.
Hills and leafless trees
dominate the right,
and margin to margin,
like a line of static,
the cut of a vertical crack.
Uncle James, his body half out of the frame,
bucket slung over his arm,
stands twisted,
looking back to confront the camera,
eyes unsmiling.
The sloppy farm-road mud,
the cold implied
by Uncle James’s up-turned collar,
hunched shoulders,
sets a mood as bleak as dead weeds
and the broken-down Buick,
a twenties model maybe:
frog-eyed headlights, wooden spoke wheels,
and at the base of its chrome radiator,
a hole for the starting crank.
Daddy bent deep under the propped-up hood
is a shadow obscured by deeper shadows.
Car and brothers bleed
over the left.
Hills and leafless trees
dominate the right,
and margin to margin,
like a line of static,
the cut of a vertical crack.
Uncle James, his body half out of the frame,
bucket slung over his arm,
stands twisted,
looking back to confront the camera,
eyes unsmiling.
Father and Children in Sepia Tones, 1937
What is she looking at, off to the right,
my three-year-old sister, her hair a blond bob?
Her coat hangs open from the top button, cuts
a diagonal across the snapshot’s right angles:
the clapboard wall of Granny’s house,
my father’s hat brim, the massive poured
concrete porch where she stands. My father,
perched on the edge of that high porch,
also faces right. His outstretched leg, the pipe
dangling from his mouth, match the line
of my sister’s coat. Between them, a fat-cheeked
toddler in a coverall, my older brother, stands
straight-on to the camera, as he always does
in these old photos, his eyes cast down. A limb
shadows my father’s face, making it evening.
How static the photo is, except for my sister.
She leans a little toward our father, her coat
swings open, she’s ready to run
to whatever it is that’s out of the frame.
Credits: A Visit to Granny's and In Granny's Kitchen were originally published in Avatar Review; American History: Chandler Brothers was originally published in Inscape; Father and Children originally published by
http://accents-publishing.com/blog/2013/06/19/father-and-children-by-sherry-chandler/
http://accents-publishing.com/blog/2013/06/19/father-and-children-by-sherry-chandler/
©2014 Sherry Chandler