Memoir Poetry
"Labels"
(international version) by Sara Holbrook People get tagged with these labels, like African, American, Native, Indigenous, White, Asian, Hispanic, or Euro-Caucasian -- I just ask that you get my name right. I'm part Willie, part Ethel, part Suzi and Scott. Part assembly-line worker, part barber, a lot of dancer and salesman. Part grocer and mailman. Part rural, part city, part cook and part caveman. I'm a chunk-style vegetable soup of cultural little bits, my recipe's unique and no one label fits. Grouping folks together is an individual waste. You can't know me by just a look, you have to take a taste. |
"Where I'm From"
by George Ella Lyon I am from clothespins, from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride. I am from the dirt under the back porch. (Black, glistening, it tasted like beets.) I am from the forsythia bush the Dutch elm whose long-gone limbs I remember as if they were my own. I'm from fudge and eyeglasses, from Imogene and Alafair. I'm from the know-it-alls and the pass-it-ons, from Perk up! and Pipe down! I'm from He restoreth my soul with a cottonball lamb and ten verses I can say myself. I'm from Artemus and Billie's Branch, fried corn and strong coffee. From the finger my grandfather lost to the auger, the eye my father shut to keep his sight. Under my bed was a dress box spilling old pictures, a sift of lost faces to drift beneath my dreams. I am from those moments-- snapped before I budded -- leaf-fall from the family tree. |