By Kelsey Erin Shipman
I buried my bones in your backyard. Three cats, two dogs, and my favorite guinea hen. Alone in a rocky yard, shovel in hand. I gave you my adolescence. Popsicles and sister fights. Black Widows and pickup trucks. You had me on those nights—awake on a tiny cot at the foot of my mother’s bed. You had her too, poor and sick, snoring on an old mattress. Wildflowers were never enough.
She slept and ate your days away. Milkshakes when drunks shot fireworks and sent the dog cowering. Hotdogs when Meth-heads bartered old refrigerator motors, dragging beaten women behind. The night our neighbor gunned down his brother in the barbeque joint across the street— Potato Salad. Onion Rings. Barbeque.
I could not sleep then, and I lie awake still. Gone ten years, and there you are in the whir of the ceiling fan, in the rumble of motors without mufflers shaking the walls at night. There you are cockroach in the sink, weevil in the flour. You old trailer stripped of wiring, copper laid bare in the yard. There you are dead dog in a ditch, cat stuck up a tree. Every country road twists with your oaks and withering patches of grass. There you are starving horse. Abandoned Christmas tree farm. There you are brush pile and cattle guard and empty shack by the road.
I want to leave you. Long drive home. Stack of photos burned and buried. But I know you will keep me. Like Terri and her four children—one in prison, two dancing, the last lost for good. All black eyes and broken heels. Like Jennifer, the factory worker who lost a finger on the line. Like James and Henry and old Jay in the truck. Like Ethel in her barbershop. Like Angela and her potbelly pig. Like Lila and her birds. Like my mother, asleep with her cats, waiting for the day to end.
Kelsey Erin Shipman is a writer, educator and performer. She earned her MFA at Texas State University and is the founder of The Freehand Arts Project, a nonprofit that brings creative writing classes to Texas jails and prisons. Her work has been published in The African American Review, The Dillydoun Review and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. She served as the 2013-2014 Writer-In-Residence at the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center and was the recipient of the 2007 San Jacinto & Althean Literary Societies’ Grand Prize in Poetry. A native Texan, she loves big dogs and breakfast tacos. More at kelseyshipman.com.