Poetry by M.E. Gibson

Porchlight Prize in Poetry, First Place

M. E. Gibson, native of North Carolina, now lives in Maine after sojourns in Asia and Scotland and years of teaching in North Carolina. A former editor of Chicago Review, she has published poems and fiction in Carolina Quarterly, International Poetry Review, Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Numen: New Writing from the South, among others. Residencies include Wildacres Retreat and Weymouth Center for the Arts. Her latest book, from Anthem Press, is an edited collection of very early futurist fiction fiction—Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835-1905: Five Stories of Speculation, Resistance and Rebellion.

Appalachian Trilogy

"I’m not sure I can define southern, though I’ve been known to try. Let alone southern Appalachian culture, though it’s where I came from. So here I just talk about food and water, growing things and making things. In the language of small farms and the people who farmed them."

Ruby Offers her Granddaughter
a Drink of Spring Water

You can’t beat spring water
on a hot day. Better than from the well.
Clean and sweet. Till I was twelve
or thereabouts, nearly tall as you,
it used to be our only water.
Not enough to pipe in. Daddy
drilled the well first thing
when he got cash, went to town
to work. The well’s good water too,
compared to town water, but Daddy
always said it tasted galvanized.

I used to lay down my hoe and run up here,
mama calling behind me, where was I
going. I’d just pour a dipper
over my feet and arms and dry them
on the grass. She’d be calling, Ruby,
young’un, you going to take all day?
I’d take my time, just
to spite her. You ever do that?

The cold’s nice now, feels good
in the heat. But in winter I’d have to get
two buckets every morning. Thought my toes
would freeze to the ground. You wouldn’t want
to spill a drop. Them buckets bruised
my ankles, banged my shin bones. I was so
small for my age—none too strong.

We had a hard time to keep clean.

Ruby Remembers Hunting Greens

We ate what we could.

Molasses and oatmeal,
potatoes boiled with salt,
cornbread in buttermilk,
an egg when we could get it.

All winter, dilly beans
and kraut. Come March
down by the creek
we hunted creasy greens.

Tasted like heaven. You’d wilt them
with hot bacon grease
and have a sliced spring onion
to your bread.

Raymond Passes the Time with his Grandson

That's where I learned to fix machinery
bending over that tractor,
always something broken, some metal piece
to be taken off, hammered straight,
replaced if we could manage.
And then I went to work for the state
and only plowed on Saturdays.

Weekdays, I fixed their road machinery.
I could fix anything then—
truck engines were simple—
and I could make do
for parts. I saved them
a pretty penny I can tell you.
I got used to the smell
of grease on my hands
and an orderly shop.
I liked that hum when something
went together right.

Still when my twenty years was up
I was glad to get done.
The DOT gave me a plaque
with my name in fancy letters.
It's in the strongbox under the bed
with my Army papers. Funny
I can't tell a one of those years
from another. I tell time by home things.
Nowadays I fall asleep in my chair

but I think about tractors,
that feeling on the edge of the field
when you start into it—how the blade
digs in and damp dirt breathes back at you.