Thom C. Addington
A Crown of Haikus on Beaver Branch
A creek calls different
than rivers or oceans; it
speaks in small roarings
long, echoic thoughts,
shifting their “-o” ends to “-er”
like your Gammaw would.
It tells its epics
in small type, like a penknife
that cuts history.
For what’s history
but the silting of all lives
in the earth’s creek bed?
Water needn’t flow
quickly, with flash, or with force
to move memory,
to headwater myth.
God’s might could unfold the sea
within the holler,
but He stays busy
as bees in a tar bucket
tuning the creek’s call.
Gammaw, Contending
Settling in for General Hospital,
Gammaw pours mini chocolate chips
into a jar of peanut butter
and draws each morsel out
with the tip of a butter knife.
This repeated morseling
closes out her daily clearing
of mess and gom, her “piddlin’.”
I don’t think about the years-
old spices in her dusty pantry
or the mouse leavings in her cabinets
or the pruritic medicines that made her
hairbrush her skin with more intensity
and less grace as she aged—no, I remember
a little woman from a small place
smalling the world around her,
wresting it from entropy
and our coming heat-death
with preciousness made portable,
with sweetness drawn from the day
like deep-welled water.
Thom C. Addington (he/him) is a queer, Catholic, rural Southern writer with Appalachian roots raised on Rappahannock land in King & Queen County, Virginia. He currently serves as Associate Dean of Humanities & Social Sciences at Reynolds Community College. Expat Press, DON'T SUBMIT!, Burning House Press, Soundings East Magazine, and Neologism Poetry Journal have accepted his work for publication.
Artwork: “title” by Daniel Lurie
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