Terry Hill

Postcards to Self, Peanut Harvest

The roads in Dixie are crooked, they bump against short horizons. 

Driving truck in the minimum wage briar patch of my birth is 

a step up from repetitive monotonies at shelling machines.

Hijinks on tractors now punctuate my day. The peanut hoppers 

are heaped with bounty, and I get off on the butterflies and hawks.

Daddy says to me, as you get older you’ll realize more and more 

that nobody gives a damn about you.

My hands are heavy and rough, like his. Heedless, 

I read Baudelaire aloud at midnight in the empty church.

Why shouldn’t I go for drinks with Charlie, well-seasoned and wise?

Watch this, he nudges, as a white man walks toward us, 

and I’ll show you how racism works. 

The Chattahoochee muscles past and pays me no mind, 

green-brown river in the sun or unseen river beneath the fog.

Its history heaves itself into mills and emerges in present tense.

Retreating to the lost family farm at sunset, a dozen of my dead kin 

lie under red cedar and pine, tangled underbrush, untended

amid perfunctory gravestones with no names.

Gunshots echo through the woods as I tally my excuses 

and count the days before I take my leave.

Terry E. Hill is a physician in Oakland, California. Recent poems have appeared in Vita Poetica, Intima, The Healing Muse, and the All Shall Be Well Anthology. He grew up in rural Georgia and earned his B.A. in literature from Reed College.