Fork-tender, a hyphenate, is the phrase for the delicacy I wanted to achieve for the stringy turkey before putting it on a plate. This was meat my husband shot, this was early, before I could claim him with that name. This is one of the first offerings he ever brought me.
Tower kill refers to when birds fly into cell towers and, from the impact, die. The existence of this term means a great many have, in this manner, ceased to be. That they’ve stopped singing because of how we’ve sent out our calls.
Yet, I’ve kept on with words. When my love took up pursuit of different game, fishing, I learned that a fly tyer bringing together feathers to make a lure describes the action as marrying. Also, those who are less lofty than anglers and baitfish instead may dangle maggots from their hooks, referring to them colloquially as gentles.
And I’ve read that the scales of little fish who bore the name of bleaks were nevertheless used in the manufacture of artificial pearls. Artificial or costume or faux.
My love is none of these, though I can’t be sure how well I’ve ever managed to tell feelings to him.
I do know there’s a word for the enormous perfume bottles displayed above cosmetic counters: factice. Better that than dummy. I know those models hold only colored water. But I can ask the salespeople for samples, get little vials of the real thing, and the vessel, at that scale, is full.
Small fry are little fish. Hard fry is to cook fish crispy, through and through.
To play hardball is to be unyielding. Hardball is also the stage when the sugar is hot enough that it is time for the candy to be formed, when syrup clings to the spoon, ropy and sweetly binding. Yield can refer to ceasing to argue, to texture that lets touch sink in, or how much a recipe or a tended field gives to feed us at the end. I was speaking of tenderness when, with piercing tines, I chose to begin.
Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Colorfast, Forage, and Its Day Being Gone, from Penguin Poets, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books. She is co-editor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, from University of Georgia Press, and the journal Southern Humanities Review. Rose has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences; served as Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place; and is winner of the National Poetry Series, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry, among other prizes. Her work has appeared in publications including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Oxford American. Currently, she is Lanier Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University.
