Poetry: Renee Emerson

Renee Emerson (Poetry 2009)  is the author of Keeping Me Still (Winter Goose Publishing, 2014). She teaches for Shorter University’s online program, and lives in Arkansas with her husband and daughters.

 

I TAKE THE KITCHEN SCISSORS TO THE DOUBLE-STROLLER

slice along the plaid print, trace with blade the baby-pink grid. Puncture the double-set of thin, rubber-shrieking tires, that rise at me like fists when the stroller is locked up tight as a wallet, curled into the entirety of the trunk, one of those trap-door spiders only really on Animal Planet. No one knows how to jimmy the safety-lock thingy, especially not me, clamping one baby to my hip while the other clasps the hem of my shirt, becoming the tug of fabric at my back. She reminds me that we may cut objects with supervision but never our hair. In the Southern humidity, my hair sticks to my neck, the few bad words to my lips like a very red lipstick, a drink I’m not supposed to drink, or a Georgia peach, so sweet, I want to bite it through.

 

SNOWMAGGEDON

If you ask the locals, ground warmth makes a snow dangerous in North Georgia, where even the man-poured asphalt doesn’t know when to forgive its commitment to each and every sun-soaked day. Three inches fallen, and the governor declares emergency; our rhododendron, unheeding, begin their early blossom. We stay in our homes like orphans I’m told of in poorer countries, who know better than to waste their voices calling for human interaction. The papers say the power lines will fall, and the trees, our hundred-year-old oaks, unused to carrying anything other than their own ornament will split, uproot, landing where only a mindless thing would. But, if you ask the locals, what is really dangerous is not the cold of the world, but the people who do not know how to live in it.