I am an Appalachian woman longing to be a red wiggler worm, longing, when night darkens to rye to burrow again in your belly
filling my flesh with the salt of the earth, the brush of dark dirt
holding memories of me, sliding in you, sparkling with mica
quilted with moss, feeling the honeysuckle thrum
of the Appalachian sun calling geysers to spring
catchweeds to sing, snowfall to melt when coral bells ring.
I remember the grit of your grain, seeded with ghost tales
carrying cries of dead trees, their trunks uprooted from you
as am I, my limbs living lonely in the landscape of woman
longing for the lost life when I night-crawled in you
in the deep sweet where seed lives before birth
wiggling in wonder, all of my skin a tongue, wet
tasting you, my mother, my earth.
After her night at Bad Daddy’s Bar, Teacher tells Sunday School she found the foreskin of Moses
lying in an Asheville gutter, a wholly human relic feathered with miracles, leather-weathered with scars only the abstinent know.
A skin, Teacher says, whose touch grants levitation of body to bird to beatified being, freeing flesh from chaste habits, springing sorrow to sparrow, lifting wounds to sacrament sky.
Teacher holds up a dry crackled skin looking like the wing of a fried specklebelly goose she places on a plate
with her Fat Tuesday cake, steam-baked, sugar-faced, cabernet-laced, indulgence-graced, candy-cherried bad-girl-good.
A skin leading fast to the circumcision of tongue, the disappearance of Teacher, excised from Sunday School teaching her tall tales, spiced
with the Lenten forbidden, delicious with sin
leaving me reading my Bible, hungry for skin.
Mary Alice Dixon, author of Snakeberry Mamas: Words from the Wild (Charlotte Lit Press, 2025) is a co-editor of Kakalak Journal of Poetry & Art. She is a multiple Pushcart nominee, a past finalist for the NC Poetry Society Poet Laureate Award, and a winner of the NC Writers’ Network Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition. Her work appears in Fourth River, Main Street Rag, Plant People, storySouth, Swing, and elsewhere. Mary Alice lives in Charlotte, NC, where she leads bereavement writing workshops, grows sunflowers in cow manure, and sometimes talks with the ghosts of her dead cats, Alice B. Toklas and Thomas Merton. Find her at http://www.maryalicedixon.com.
