Sundays After Breakfast: A Lesson in Cotton Picking
South Texas, 1943
It was a kind
of dance: feet
shuffling in dust,
fluttering
hands like birds:
nest-building:
blood staining
brown birds red.
Cotton sacks, twelve
feet long,
dragging behind
like a tongue—
fat and slow
as sun.
I watch him:
slow weep
of his eye
remembering
the girl who’d name
and nurse
nine children.
He picks
my grandma
by the color
of her dress,
her eyes,
and because she’s lucky,
not
by how much cotton
she can pick.
by Laurie Ann Guerrero, originally appearing in A Tongue In The Mouth Of The Dying (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013)
Laurie Ann Guerrero is the author of A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Her poetry and critical works have been published by Huizache, Texas Monthly, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. Her chapbook, Babies Under the Skin (2008), won the Panhandler Publishing Award, chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye. Guerrero is a visiting writer at the MFA Program in Creative Writing, University of Texas at El Paso and co-editor of Texas Poetry Calendar 2014.
This article appears in Apr 17-23, 2013.