The below poems in various versions were published in the following journals:
“Grits” appeared in The Journal.
“Convergence” appeared in the Adirondack Review and was First Runner-Up for the William Faulkner Creative Writing competition.
“Fire” appeared in The Southeast Review and in Verse Daily.
“Winfred” appeared as “The Aristocracy of the Plow” in the Southeast Review.
“Aunt Louise and Space Shuttle Challenger” appeared in Exquisite Corpse.
“Birth” appeared in Meridian.
“Why Should I Stand for Jesus” appeared in Harpur Palate as a Finalist for the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry.
Website Content and Poetry copyrighted by Scott Bailey
Why Should I Stand for Jesus
When I win four hundred dollars at the National Tobacco Spitting Contest, I buy a Civic, the paint peeling. I feel a Holy-Ghost freedom when I pass the fat, grinning, rich, daddy’s boy who calls me Buckteeth Ugly, laughing at my fake Reeboks. When he passes me in his silver Trans Am, bumper sticker Eat My Grits, I floor it; my motor blows, and I coast to the side of the road, fat boy flipping me the bird, driving on, most likely to Wards for a Big One.
I walk down a hill to a porch where an old woman stitches a quilt; she tells me to take it slow, just as she is, sipping on a glass of warm milk, sitting in her rocker, waiting for her dogs, already in heaven who met their fates on the road. I call Dad on her phone, a red rotary box, just like Grandma’s, which hangs on her wall under a stuffed sea bass that Grandpa catches while honeymooning on the coast.
Dad arrives, tractor chain in hand, and I drive attached to his beat-up blue Chevrolet with dents from pulp-wooding, the truck that my cousin and I drive to downtown Magee. It’s Crazy Day—wooden ducks, benches with heart-shaped backs, peanut brittle, hotdogs and powdered doughnuts—that kind of crazy; people crowd the streets to show off fancy cars, sparkling rims, spoilers, Motorola antennas. We never score a date, only invitations for mud-bog, beer-guzzles.
After months of looking, we place a newer-model motor in an older-junk frame. Dad loans it to me after my brother wrecks his car, skidding off the road and hitting an oak; the body not completely totaled, so Uncle Ulmer and Dad repeatedly pull the car with a tractor into a pine until the body is beyond repair. When we realize that the pine won’t live, the sapling my brother won as a prize for selling the most pies for Smokey-the-Bear Awareness Week, it’s a cold morning before school, the day my classmates swear to a walkout when our teachers don’t get a raise.
I crank the car, such God-awful screaming. I pop the hood to find guts, stool, hair, and fluffy tails splattered all over that newly installed motor. Another kitten, its butt bald without a tail, wobbles out from under the car that dies and won’t crank, so I have to ride the bus, bus 125 where I fight Tanya.
Four years prior she slaps my glasses off, calls me Sissy. I slam her on the floorboard and commence to punch, then her tall brother’s on my back, scratching me, kids screaming, Kick that bitch’s ass. Till this day, I don’t know if they were referring to me or to Tanya.
Her father comes to our house, and Dad whips me with a switch, tells her father that I won’t cause any more trouble. I’m confused. I’m just standing up for myself. But Dad says if I’m doing any standing up, I should be standing for Jeeeazuss. He drives a forklift at a plant all day. He knows the importance of standing. The walkout is a success. We make it on T.V.; Principal Bowen asks us to return to class, but we say, Hell No! We Won’t Go all the way down Main Street.
I hear that Tanya has a lazy eye with stigmatism, like a team of horses pulling in two directions at the same time. She’s married, wearing Dollar General makeup and feeding her kids baloneeee and welfare-cheese sandwiches. That serves her right, I think. Maybe, she’ll think twice before slapping another sissy.
Who knows where she and fat boy end, but I know Uncle Ulmer’s tilling gardens and Grandpa’s spilling heavenly seeds, that old lady taking it slow, stitching, sipping on a glass of milk, alongside her dogs panting with purring kittens, all watching Dad driving a forklift, praying I choose to stand. I don’t want to live or die. I want to be.
Grits
Before I’m born, a preacher prophesizes:
I’m a special child, and the devil wants to kill me.
My head’s so big,
Mom has two male nurses on top of her, pushing me out.
I’m saved at birth but not born saved.
I speak in tongues on the women’s side of the altar
a glitter from hair pins spurting from hairdos of charismatic aunts.
The first time I see a devil, he’s on all fours under the dining table,
scavenging the rug, his eyes and teeth, volcano red.
Mom turns the light on, her face warm as a washcloth
and loving as a page of St. Matthew.
She calms me with a bowl of grits, a bowl of grits with butter.
I hold those grits like my tongue holding on to God.
Convergence
I’m thirteen and allergic to the saliva of cockroaches
when Dad buys me a Huffy with a digital speedometer.
From then on, life explodes,
like drinking a hormone Molotov cocktail—
peach fuzz, crop-eared haircut, pencil mustache—
We ride while holding hands, legs lifting above spinning pedals,
the wind combing sleeves into bat wings,
untucking shirts to kite-tails at an unregistered speed,
but the coasting is too fast.
I must let go.
Sex will be different for me than for him:
a backward and brakeless pedaling.
Fire
Before the grass comes back green, we burn it.
It seems the whole world is on fire.
Weeds and lilacs rise in air, fall in yards or fields, with no root or slight seed—
they move like the cremated, no fear of the wind.
I’m the one who watches for flames that jump the guided path.
I tamp out what needs tamping out, knowing how to burn so the grass returns
like the blunted tail of a lizard.
The garden’s better too:
the corn’s yellow finally makes good, so pure, no weevils crowd its teeth,
and watermelons when thumped echo the Holy Ghost:
a peachy knocking.
This time, lost with charged ashes well over heads,
I forget myself.
The fire gets out, blackens the siding of our house.
I hose what I can, but fire’s a be-headed chicken, not knowing where to go, just going.
Winfred
1.
After scaling the fish, their heads nailed to the barn,
the grass glimmered with pearl-like shavings.
2.
We walked the field where he spoke of the sycamore
the tax collector climbed, the dogwood a remembrance of our sins.
3.
The yelp to lead Beagles home heeeeeee upbp.
4.
We ate sandwiches under a yellow plum tree
and cane-poled the highest plums down,
then headed back to check the trap for owls.
5.
Speaking in tongues, he baptized me.
The catfish water troubled: we learned of sewage seeping in.
Every year, we’d drain that pond.
We ate fish eggs for weeks.
6.
His gardens were Psalms.
He knew when and what to plant,
a quickening when seeds fell from his hands.
That same spirit that sat upon his feet
gave him a vision of a revival:
cars for miles, parked on the sides of roads in both directions.
7.
Grandma wailed over the casket, which I helped carry,
he there but not there, pocket bible under his armpit,
First Psalms 1:3 stuffed in his lapel:
like a tree planted by the rivers of water.
8.
On a white stretcher rolling down a pebble-cement step,
he turned his head: pray while tending to the cows.
Aunt Louise and Space Shuttle Challenger
No matter how much faith she has in her,
she’s afraid of strong wind,
but when weather’s fair, she rocks on her porch,
sipping some sweet tea,
old dreamer’s drink, she says, spirit water,
where she visions
a clock spinning on the tip of a shuttle
rising like cornbread in a hot, iron skillet,
smoke billowing to the ground
where people gather behind a fence,
their heads upward, her hands raising in prayer,
as now in church, in the front pew
where she prophesizes, then a voice
fancier than her own: time introduces us to dust.
Birth
The air—honeysuckle
and skunk.
In a barn, slimy legs are half out, a swollen belly is sliced open,
the forceps missing.
A calf flops out with a membrane, a cord round the neck.
I watch legs chained to a tractor and dragged to trees scratched by antlers,
left with velvet.
Atop and between trees where those bodies once lay,
a hammock of vines
ready to loosen and adjust to weight.
I lower to the bones of that cow, her face
a bouquet of briars,
her calf
a sponge of fungi.
Nearby, algae conquers a pond, and on that bank, crows
gorge on a moccasin.
I walk knowing that the body betrays us all.
