United States, (b. 1973)
Uncle John
- That was the year
- Granddaddy Thomas died
- Left the family worse than broke
- Uncle John stole a ham
- from Mr. Ennis’s Meat Market
- He was seventeen
- Lost his taste for it
- locked up
- fourteen years
- Ham salt cured and earth-red
- sliced with the fat hanging on
- yellow sunshine on a white plate
- The hambone cut crosswise
- rings marrow
- a dark eye
- All in the skillet
- making gravy for grits
- Lost the taste for all things salt
- The ocean he hasn’t seen
- Woman and man
- He don’t never want to see
- no more ham on his plate
- Hates pigs
- Was hard for him
- Hates white folks too
- Time off for good behavior
- They didn’t hold him to the last six
- He’s a hog farmer
- only eats beef and chicken and turkey
- fish, turtle, and rabbit,
- squirrel, possum, and coon
- and he seasons his greens with smoked oxtails
- Can’t raise white folks for slaughter.
© Sean Hill. Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press (2008).
Milledgeville Haibun
- Beat. Beat. Beats beat here. The sound of the train on the Georgia road, the measured claps of the wheels at the gaps of the joints of the rails is the beat of the hammer on iron and anvil at the smithy, Sol’s shop, shaping shoes for mules and horses; and the sizzle of red metal in water is the train’s whistle, and all echoes resound and effuse, and the last word returns like watermelons here with summer heat, beat with a hammer, beat when he, a boy, broke into the garden at the county jail at night when the beat men were asleep because theirs were the sweetest, so bust one open, the dull thud just before the crack, and eat the heart and move on to the next; and he moved on to women and settled eventually on one and finally busted her with finality, thud before crack, and he measured time raising the sweetest watermelons for a time and time served he returned, a man, and he lay on the tracks of the Georgia road cradled by the rails. Heart stopped.
- Old railroad, abandoned—
- between crossties trees grow,
- a feral pig roots below branches.
© Sean Hill. Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press (2008).
About the Poet:
Sean Hill, United States, (b. 1973), is a poet, editor and educator. He has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. Hill is a consulting editor at Broadsided Press, a monthly broadside publisher. He has taught at several universities, including at the University of Alaska – Fairbanks and Georgia Southern University as an Assistant Professor. Hill lives in Montana with his family and will be Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana for the 2020-2021 academic year. [DES-11/21]
Additional information:
- Sean Hill: https://www.seanhillpoetry.com/