"Heritage Patch" by Jordan Cobb

I want to own that electric blue Ford Fiesta again. Drive all night, & all day, & all night through. Let the odometer eat the miles it takes to marvel at an endless Texas, until the car runs out of gas, & I am staring down the old shingles on the gazebo in the town square in Calhoun City, Mississippi. Back to the place where my grandmother was raised (the last of eight), & my grandfather is known by his middle name. Where we spent a sweet tea summer bottle feeding the puppies sprouting from under the neighbor’s porch & I learned to play checkers on black & paint picket fences white. & got good at using the old broom to knock down hornets nests in the attic bedroom. & there was still time to sit in Bayne’s back garden, call him great granddaddy once more, while he stood between the vines of his tomato patch, peeling away each soft leaf to reveal the globed fruits. In the palm of his hands, the army knife from his daddy, the great-great unknown, unfolded to divide orb from stem; those hands, blue-veined & knobby at the end of August, that stayed clasped together while he waited. I remember, I wanted to dig down into the loam & take a piece of that place, craggy & soft, with me. Wanted that earth to know me, the ridges of my tongue, the way I took communion. How I too knew what Piggly Wiggly was & how to dress when called for Sunday Service. Proof that I knew the patience of that harvest, ripened in those hills. The red clay, no, maybe, maroon, like the tomato, served on a paper plate between white bread, or bitten through the flesh right there in that garden, where wet tracks from the seeds ran down my cheeks; my voice, a lullaby, humming for the trees. ————————————– Jordan Cobb called us from New York, NY. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems