by JESSI LEWIS
My father is planning on burning the brush pile.
Pieces of childhood are gathered, braced with dead pines.
I don’t know if I recognize this stretch of earth, this mile.
Blueberry bushes bleed indigo, broken at their roots while
Snow crisps the nostrils. There’s the neatening field grass, the signs:
My father is planning on burning the brush pile.
Now, in this landscape, memory is on trial.
Twenty-nine is something else, a field of buried, touchy mines.
I don’t know if I recognize this stretch of earth, this mile.
Path leads to pulse—the Eonile bred the Nile.
A spark and rag will burst baring roots into blackened spines.
My father is planning on burning the brush pile.
He leans heavily in his tractor seat and practical guile.
When he calls to me, prediction fills in his voice, his lines.
I don’t know if I recognize this stretch of earth, this mile.
This field will end, the dirty knuckle, that smile.
Though, fresh Jack-in-the-Pulpits will rise just to tug on our vines.
My father is planning on burning the brush pile.
I don’t know if I recognize this stretch of earth, this mile.
—
Jessi Lewis grew up on a blueberry farm. Her essays, short stories and poems have been published or are forthcoming in Oxford American, Carve, Sonora Review, The Pinch, Yemassee, and Appalachian Heritage, among others. Jessi’s novel manuscript, She Spoke Wire, was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. She teaches writing in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.