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.