I Was Dragged Down

I was dragged down from my room at the top of the house one year when the wind threatened. Momma had heard it first on the radio and had turned it off, and all the lights off, and would have torn the telephone from the wall, thinking the wind and electricity would be attracted to us down the wires, but father would not let her. I was dragged down and in my father's arms and I was small enough not to understand the noise I heard nor the smell of fear, my mother's voice sounding harsh and angry as she coaxed at my sister to be calm--at me, although I was rolled up like a little cat against my father's sweaty shirt.

Things broke free from the house, clattering against it. I slept tucked into my father's arms, his chest noisy against my ear. I woke up sometimes and saw my sister sitting in a chair near mother, the both of them stiff as my sister's dolls. Their hands held in fists between them, and their eyes were open so wide I saw the whites clearly even in the dark.

The room we were in smelled wet and I could not remember it, it was so changed by the light. The chairs rose and fell, opened and seemed to bend from stalks that began under the floor of the house. The tables glowed, their polished faces bright as the edges of flowers.

"O Momma, we'll be killed," my sister cried, and as I looked at her, the light seemed to break her face into pieces.

I took that image of her into my sleep, and cradled in my father's arms I dreamed she walked out into the rushes and weeds near the river, and was taken slowly by the black water, first to the knees, her arms held out stiffly in the air, then to her waist, her white dress floating out around her like it was growing up from the water and she had entered it, the meaty, large petals of a flower. It was like a bell or a globe; she hung at its center, and I watched the petals lift up and close around her. I cried out for her to come back, but the flower sank into the water. I made a net of my hair and cast it into the water, dragging against its weight. A dark thing, woven of sticks and reeds, rose up from the water. I threw handsful of mud and weeds at it, but it pulled at the net, drawing me into the water. I awoke, believing that it held me. My father tried to comfort me, alarmed at how afraid I was.

Faye Kicknosway

---

First Mowings

Moving blades slice the rabbit's nest.

Blood splatters out over new cut grass.

First mowings set the summer's rituals:
Alfalfa mounds, wet fur, crushed bones,
Sweet-scented hay in the weathered barn
To fatten still other beasts for slaughter.

Scythings: the season's sharpening stone.

While on the breeze as evening settles,
Lingers the smell of wildrose petals,
Of honeysuckle, where fieldmice nestle,
Spared for now from the razored steel,
Springing life in those shearing blades,
Whose shadows blot a blooded horizon
Where a striking-red sunset blazes, fades.

Darlene Mathis-Eddy

---

Responsibility of Being Young

All I knew concerned my
errand and I felt proud
to be entrusted with that.
My breathless haste prompted
bare legs and feet. Father
needed Andrew to help with
the work, and I knocked at
his mother's door. The woman
who opened it had long sad eyes.
"He can't come," she explained,
"he drownded Sunday, they was
all swimming and he drownded."
Her words flew over my head,
their sense out of my reach.
"But papa wants him," I insisted,
"to help with the work."
"He drownded yesterday," she said
and gently closed the door.
I stood outside, hands full
of my unfinished errand, wondering
if Father would be cross with me.

James Hearst

---

A Purely Black Stone

sign say
we be close
all day
we done shut down

doan leave no laun-de-ree
no shirts from the hath-a-way
no sheets from the kay-kay-kay
and doan leave no messed-up towels from the turk

bee-cause
he dead
our mis-ter ed
our pore mis-ter ed
is dead

we gonna hold
a pass-the-hat burr-i-al
at quarter to four
in the back
of the laun-de-ree store
so we kin
buy a stone
for one of our own
a purely black stone
for he grave

bee-cause
he dead
our mis-ter ed
our pore mis-ter ed
is dead

Ann Petry

---

Lures
(For Charley)

It was timber-raped land
in that high north,
the stumps of white-pine left
like riddled tombs
in the midst of slash
and upstart, peasant jacks.
But in winter, long after
the mosquitoes' whine,
our lakes were fat with ice
and food-keen pike.

We hunted them in their cold palaces.
We is a braggart's term.
I was a child but I helped
when my grandfather
with heavy thumbs
and pipe-grooved lip
made his crude lures from whittled scrap.
They seemed to me high art,
those rigid minnow shapes
let down through green-blue circles
sawed in a fishhouse floor
to tempt the hungry gleams beneath.

Our rude bait swiveled, swam,
at the set line's end,
adorned with hooks.
They flashed like dreams of jewels
though they were dreamless fakes,
their fins and tails cut from a coffee tin.
A hunk of solder in the belly
weighed them down,
Mine was the final touch:
the burning-in with a redhot pick
of eyes and gills,
even an upturned mouth.
I was good at this, people said,
and I took pride.

I wonder now how much my smiling decoys helped
to kill.

What I remember--

and without guilt--
is the sweet flesh steaming on my plate,
and how the old man and I,
in silence, bowed over it,
and ate...and ate.

Adrien Stoutenburg