Summer/Fall 2015

By George Drew

ON READING AN ANTHOLOGY OF MISSISSIPPI POETS

Like me, they all were raised on peas
picked fresh from the vine, on
butter beans musty with bean odor, on
cornbread and grits and country
fried steak and breaded chicken and on
hot buttered biscuits from Granny’s oven.

Like me, they all know what a sunset
on the Mississippi in December is,
what cotton fields wet with April rain
look like, what ice storms make
of bushes and limbs and wires and what
sad music the sound of pecans
thudding too soon on the ground is.

Like kudzu the hills around Charleston,
the one who keeps creeping up on me,
awake and in dreams, is the one
who measures in meter the cold form
of her husband stretched out like a shadow
on the bathroom floor, as my grandfather
was in six inches of snow—hers the one
in which Mississippi yokes us, bone to bone. 

THE I DON’T KNOW THE TASTE OF CHITLINS BLUES

Mama’s gone now and I don’t go home much,
and even if I was a singer, which I’m not,
I’d most likely sing about a snowy night
in New York, not a rainy night in Georgia.

I’m from Mississippi, not Georgia,
and the last time I was in Georgia
a state trooper pulled me over and when
in response to my New York plates asked

where I was going, meaning what in hell
was a Yankee like me doing in Georgia anyway,
and I said Mississippi and he asked why
and I said to see my mama and he said

I didn’t sound much like no Mississippi boy
and I commenced describing my mama’s mouth
watering cornbread browning in a skillet he
scratched his head and said Well, I’ll be damned.

I don’t know what it’s like riding a boxcar,
but being damned is what the blues are,
and though I never owned a guitar,
if I did I know the blues are what I’d play.

The blues are like the chitlins my stepdaddy
loved so much: sizzling-hot and so
gut-churning funky if the devil himself
threatened to lock me away in Hell with no

hope of ever getting out I’d still refuse to let
one touch my lips. I’m from Mississippi,
not Georgia, and though I might not
abide the taste of chitlins, I adore the thought.