Jessica Hudgins

Two POEMS


Poem with Bougainvillea Losing Its Leaves

Watching my brother pull
a torso-length catfish from the pond 
or run seven times around the house 
or wiggle a tooth free over her black-eyed peas, 
Grandma shook her head and said, 
you’re somethin’ else,
a phrase that, walking along the sidewalk 
in my long sleeves this morning, 
I’m startled to hear 
from a neighbor on his porch 
alongside some bougainvillea,
somethin’ else, ain’t it?,
startled to have my thoughts spoken 
before I could have spoken them,
to have been regarded but not 
described, somethin’ else, not because words 
are insufficient but because |
some things are before words, 
like attraction, and happiness, 
and knowing kin.

Strandline

We found skate egg sacks washed up 
where the dried sand is firm 
and the slow waters of high tide 
leave seaweed to sand-hoppers 
and seaweed flies. Bits of tree 
like blown tires along the opposite shore, 
mosquitoes, in swarms, 
and old horseshoe crabs 
meatless on the dunes. 
Mom said one time she’d been driving
and in the rearview caught sight 
of her dad, her college friend 
who’d died, her grandmother –
the shape was turning one 
into the other until something 
she didn’t recognize appeared, 
and she looked away.
When I read through Bible verses
my grandmother copied down
a month before she died,
love like her presence
took me in. The egg sacks 
were black and plastic-seeming;
we pried them apart and they were empty. 
Pelicans, hungry for leftover bait 
and greasy on the docks 
are sleek in a wave-crest,
and stingrays breach like whales: 
their fins are called wings.
We stayed for hours 
and didn’t argue once.

 

Jessica Hudgins lives in Mansfield, GA. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Nelle, Indiana Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

 
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