B ecause the cookie store was only three minutes from my house, and it smelled like heaven. Because the cookies were still warm and the soft, doughy middles and the melted chocolate chips tasted like heaven. Because I didn’t eat them all at once (because my heart might not take that). Because I ate just a tiny piece and saved the rest for later. Because there would be more tears later. Because my horse died that day, and I didn’t see it coming. Because he was given a clean bill of health just two days before. Because that morning he ate all his hay and his timothy pellets with gusto. Because I turned him loose in the round pen and asked him to move in circles around me. Because he was nineteen years old, and he knew the drill. Because his lips were closed tight, his head up like a sail, and he covered the ground with his hovering strides. Because he was strong and beautiful like that. Because the morning was cool and the movement was easy. Because no alarm went off to tell us to stop. Because he hit the side panel and one back leg curled up, and I thought it was broken. Because he fell to the ground and all four legs went limp. Because he was shaking, and I sat by his head and stroked his soft cheek and told him what a good boy he was while he breathed his last breath. Because he’d carried me safely for seventeen years. Because the cowbirds rose from their roost on the rails and circled and spiraled above where he lay. Because I was numb when the woman arrived with a trailer and winches to pick up his body. Because she looked at his handsome fit frame and said, “This isn’t right.” Because she took him away and I don’t know where and I don’t care because it wasn’t him anymore. Because his pen is now empty in a row of pens holding horses. Because my heart now has an emptiness I don’t know how to fill.
I’ve been searching all day for a little piece of heaven.
Because all good horses go to heaven, don’t they?
Author's Comment
The world, with all its splendor and all its heartbreak, gives writers an endless mishmash of material to dig into and pass from hand to hand until some essence is left that inspires words to flow. With my writing, I strive to create little pieces of beauty with words. In this case, the use of anaphora helped me access and process difficult emotions in real time.
Snakeberry Mamas: Words from the Wild
by Mary Alice Dixon
In Snakeberry Mamas Mary Alice Dixon’s words from the wild conjure an Appalachian landscape of lust, where sex, song, and witchy women charm the reader with chant. From the crossroads of Witcher Way Holler to the waters of Hungry River, these poems carry you into a magic world of owl-women, dandelion girls, and the memories of dead mothers alive in the heartwood of trees. In these liminal places grief makes knife blades of red pickled eggs; a goddess offers salvation in tongue of fire; a hellfire-and-brimstone suffragette shares a recipe for britches with balls. Mary Alice Dixon makes poetry that muses mountains and maps gardens you will never want to leave.
"Mary Alice Dixon casts a luminous eye on the hardscrabble sacred—braiding grief, grit, and grandmotherly magic into song. These are poems of invocation and inheritance, rooted in the red clay and mythos of mountain women who birth themselves from “bloodroot” and "fire.” Dixon writes with fierce tenderness and hard-earned clarity, inviting us into a world where “owl women brush you with wishbones” and “the moon bleeds” our names. This is Appalachian lyricism at its most incantatory, subversive, and deeply alive."
— AE Hines, author of Adam in the Garden and Any Dumb Animal
www.maryalicedixon.com.
Available from CharlotteLit (the literary and artistic center of Charlotte, NC)
Paula Brown is a writer and poet whose work has appeared in the Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Anthology Nature, Wising Up Press Adult Children Anthology, Adirondack Review, Whitefish Review, South Dakota Magazine, and North Dakota Quarterly, among others. She lives in Tucson with her husband and a pack of dachshunds.