Jessica Fordham Kidd
Under Granny’s Wings
Half-drunk, blood slowing in the cold,
Bad Jamie wakes sprawled on a schist outcrop.
Tiny grains of mica shine on his face like magic.
He slips out of the mountain’s arms—
pine trees withered with disease and chestnuts bristling—
to find warmth in the bed
of a rusted-out pickup.
When the pickup gets scrapped,
Bad Jamie crawls through the rotted wall
of his grandmother’s old house
and smells for her in the corners.
There’s love there that grows back
like apples when it’s picked.
Granny’s there too. In her feathered form,
she drops white stars from the rafters
and her constellations are the Earth
moving slowly toward some kind of mercy.
Jessica Fordham Kidd is a lifelong Alabamian. She is the associate director of first-year writing at the University of Alabama, and her poems have appeared in Drunken Boat, Storyscape, Tinderbox, and The Paris Review, among others.
