Michael Lee Johnson: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I'm not southern as such, having lived most of my life in the Midwest United States, and 10 years in Canada; however, I did live in Florida for three years under humid, stressful times and a divorce. I'm not sure if Florida even qualifies as the South with so many “Florida Snowbirds" coming and going. In Florida while walking near a cypress swamp along a water canal area I was about a half-mile down the trail when I saw at least five cottonmouth snakes on the other side of the bank or my side, with their white mouths wide open. I had foolishly purchased a 22 caliber pistol a few days earlier thinking I was going to shoot at some birds or anything else that moved. At that moment, a cottonmouth snake slithered across my tennis shoes, startling me, and I fired, almost shooting my own foot off. I ran faster than any rabbit back to my car, to my sheltered life. Does that qualify as southern?
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R. W. Haynes: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Pushing grits and Confederates aside for the moment, I'll just say that my recollections of childhood in southern Georgia are illuminated in strange and intriguing ways each time I return to William Bartram's Travels, a book Mark Van Doren suggests Wordsworth took with him to Germany in 1798. OK, back to hog-calling, possum-wrestling, and turpentine-drinking.
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Steve West: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in the Arkansas Ozarks, taught high school at Shirley, Arkansas (population about 600); went to graduate school in Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and have taught at a college in Pulaski, Tennessee, for 28 years. That’s pretty well covering the South, especially as Pulaski is infamous as the home of the Ku Klux Klan, a dubious honor that it has been diligently trying to overcome for years now.
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Jill White: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
For more than twenty-five years, I have lived in the Panhandle of Florida, where the humidity curls my hair and hot hushpuppies curl my toes. I live for the scent of confederate jasmine in April and the sight of dolphins at play in the bayou. If you call me on the phone you can even hear my Southern legitimacy first hand!
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Adreyo Sen: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in India, which is where I now reside, in the gloriously dirty and laidback city of Kolkata. I’ve been educated on the eastern seaboard of the United States on two separate and unequally instructive occasions and as far as the south goes, I have no legitimacy. Save a great fondness for Margaret Mitchell’s ‘Gone with the Wind’ and a fine lady by the name of Ada McCoy.
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Wanda Reagan: Two Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Born and bred in the Deep South, heart of the old Confederacy
Red clay under my nails and a voice as sweet as soft iced tea
I explain myself better in verse:
Natasha Wall: Two Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I love being Southern bred and born. I love the simplicities of life and the nuances that we hold. I love how we like sweet tea and Kool-Aid--affectionately known as "diabetes in a glass."
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Deborah R. Majors: Two Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Even though I've lived overseas and up North, living in the Florida Panhandle since 1969 and having a father from a small town in southern Georgia makes me, I believe, a true Southerner. As a child, I've smelled the dried tobacco leaves of Georgia tobacco farms, climbed the same oak tree my dad fell out of as a boy and broke his arm, sat on a creaky wood porch swing and listened to the adults until shooed off to bed, ate peaches--fuzz and skin if I didn't have a knife, walked to the store for a grape Nehi which we plucked from a chest refrigerator, slept in Great-grandma's tin roofed house with a fan and no AC, swam in many-a-creek, eaten mullet and shark, went crabbing and floundering, and sugared my feet with the white sands of the Emerald Coast, which was called the Panhandle's Playground in 1969.
As an adult, I've walked up on a gator, shot what I thought was a rattler, had an escaped ostrich run beside my van on a country road, and had a neighbor's cow look at me through my living room window. Mimosa, honeysuckle, yaupon, tall pines, turkey oaks, live oaks, magnolias, dogwoods, wild azaleas, blueberries, scuppernongs, broom sage, and a slew of other southern flora dot our 30 acres. I often sit on my porch at night, listening to the kudzu grow, sipping sweet tea, reading Paula Deen's cookbook, and swatting skeeters.
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C.P. Varnum: Two Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born and raised in Tucker, Georgia, a sleepy little town with a main street bisected by train tracks. I grew up barefoot and tree climbing every chance I got; until the long piercing whistle of my grandfather would call us in to wash up before supper.
My teenage summers were spent: sneaking cigarettes at church camp, listening to Lee Greenwood over the loudspeakers at the Laser show and sharing Coke and cherry ices from the Milk Jug on Hwy 29.
After a gracious yet failed attempt (phew) as a debutante—I hitched a ride north to the Appalachians, where I quickly acclimated a love of moonshine and mandolins.
I currently reside in Charlotte, NC with my partner and four-year-old daughter. In our yard there’s a broke down 1974 VW super beetle, enough weeds in my flower beds to make my mother cringe, and a fire pit covered with a plastic baby pool so it won’t get wet. It’s not red-neck, its resourceful southern planning.
My white chicken chili is the bees-knees.
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G. C. Compton: Hillbilly Heaven
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was jerked up by the hair of the head between Doc Bill Holler and Buzzard’s Roost, Kentucky. My daddy was a coal miner but could read writin’ and knew all the words to “Sally Goodin.” I’m a member in good standing of the Game Fowl Breeders Association and drive my wife to church in a four-wheeler. I don’t eat grits but like soup beans, taters and dry land fish--for breakfast. I’ve got a Rebel flag in the back widow of my pickup and a sign on the front bumper that says: Honk IF You Love Jesus! I don’t speak nary a word of plain English and always thought the diphthong was what the purty girls wore at Myrtle Beach.
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Evelyn Seay: On the Dock in September
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Born and raised in Yorktown, Virginia I recently relocated to study Poetry at George Mason University. There, I have learned that I miss drinking real sweet tea on my humid back porch, watching my 4th of July Fireworks on the Yorktown Battlefield and seeing people dressed in colonial-era garb on a regular basis. My fondest memories stretch across the south, from Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and Tennessee's Appalachia to Lake Gaston and the Outer Banks of North Carolina, then farther still to the swamps of Florida.
Editor's Note:
The Dead Mule is always pleased when we learn that we are the publisher for a poet's first published poem. Congratulations, Evelyn.
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Mary Laura Philpott: Sisterhood
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
We moved around a lot growing up. Born in Nashville, now in Atlanta, I’ve left pieces of my youth in Chapel Hill, Hagerstown, Memphis, Augusta, Davidson, and Charlotte. I married a boy from the Kentucky bluegrass, and our babies wear seersucker and say yes ma’am. I learned to snap beans from my grandmother in Birmingham and perfected the art of deveining shrimp with a Palmetto Pale Ale cradled in my elbow during summers in South Carolina. When asked where I’m from, I just say “the South.”
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