in Ohio, Mother
hung our laundry humming,
clothespins in her mouth
in Texas, she made my father
buy a dryer after angry wet sheets whopped her face
more than one blustery afternoon
scarcely a score before
Panhandle winds were often roiling clouds,
black as charcoal, laying waste to everything
that grew and breathed
old men at the feed store talked
about the dusters from back then
and about every drop of rain,
every white flake that fell
I missed going barefoot
and fast learned to hate goat heads,
and all thorny things that thrived
in that flat land
Mother despised the hot winds almost as much
as the cool stares she got from the church women
whenever she opened her mouth, revealing
she wasn't one of them
Mother ended words
with “ing,” the extra consonant considered
superfluous at best, blasphemous
to some
men and women both
sounded to me like they had grist
from the silos in their mouths
my father had lived there
as a boy, swore he would never return
the dreaded dust still clinging to his clothes
when he left for the war
oil money brought him back
but only long enough for his skull
to be cracked dead by hard pipe
his insurance settlement
bought us a place in the Buckeye State
as quick as the lid flapped shut
on our mailbox
Mother wept little
until our first night back
in Ohio, when a blizzard knocked out
the lights, and our two candles burned flat
in the cold
my uncle brought bread, butter
and warm soup, which we ate in the gloom
while Mother told my father's favorite brother
how much we loved the Texas sun