She thinks about all the ways that girls bleed while she follows the red dirt road to the pasture. Dust covers her bare feet because it is August & dry. She squeezes under the barbed wire fence. Brambles catch her legs; blood beads from ankle to shin. The scratches itch, so she wipes her leg distractedly, realizes the sting, licks her finger, tastes iron. Grounded by a root as white & hard as bone, the pokeweed is as tall as she remembered, stalks towering like in the fairy tale with the giant, a canopy overhead. She’s after all the berries she can reach but not to eat. She crushes them until they explode like fireworks, purpling her hands. She tints her cheeks, her lips. Her mother won’t let her wear makeup. She remembers her father telling her they call the plant “poke sallet,” that sallet means cooked greens. Its berries are toxic, some say; others say a tonic, medicinal. She thinks about the girl in the Elvis song who was so hungry she ate a mess of the greens just to survive, so unlucky, her family in trouble. Did “Polk Salad Annie” ever eat the fruit, her arms aching from toting the stalks for miles? She will tell her mother it was an accident, the day she stained her shorts, her white cotton tee, anything she should not touch. She wipes her hands on her clothes, heads home just before sunset, paints herself into the horizon where magenta & lavender swirl in the sky.

Publisher’s Note:

In 1970, both Elvis Presley and Tom Jones sang versions of “Polk Salad Annie,” the song written and recorded in 1968 by singer, songwriter, and guitarist Tony Joe White. Released as a single from his first album, the song peaked at Number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969, making it his biggest hit (source: Wikipedia).

See White’s live performance during his legendary concert for Austin City Limits in December 1980 (YouTube video, 5:12).

Elinor Ann Walker

(she/her) holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, lives near the mountains, and prefers to write outside. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Bracken, Cherry Tree, The Ekphrastic Review, FERAL, Gone Lawn, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Jet Fuel Review, Nimrod, Northwest Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Plume, and The Southern Review, among others.

Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and nominated for multiple awards in various genres, such as the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. Two of her prose poems have been selected for a forthcoming anthology of contemporary prose poems (Madville Publishing). She has recently completed a full-length manuscript of poetry and is working on two chapbooks.

More details are available at her website: https://elinorannwalker.com