“Honeysuckle Roadside Doves”
Amy Wright is the nonfiction editor of Zone 3 Press and the author of four poetry chapbooks. She received a Peter Taylor fellowship to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and she was recognized as an Emerging Writer at the Southern Women Writers’ Conference. Her work appears or is forthcoming in a number of journals, including The Kenyon Review, Passages North, Southern Poetry Anthology, and Tupelo Quarterly. An associate professor of English at Austin Peay State University, she lives in Clarksville.
Honeysuckle Roadside Doves
Vaughns work Gatorade’s second shift
while Fraileys fertilize bluestem
with its nitrogen runoff. Alma Pristridge
brings hot dogs to the barbeque—one pot
of wienies redder, saltier than the other,
reserves her wide smile for demure Boos
who wait politely while others grab
thickest-iced cupcakes, sweeps as the wind
sweeps — continually, without expecting thanks.
Mutts sleep beneath creaking planks, after
Running foothills with mountain neighbors,
killing sheep in fits of neither greed nor mercy,
though a pure bred Labrador is put down for it.
Copyright (c) 2014 by Amy Wright. All rights reserved. Wright will read from Cracker Crumbs in Bed, Rhinestones at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville on April 1, 2015, at 4 p.m.
