L. A. Lawton: Four Poems
I've lived more than half my 74 years in the South, mostly by choice. I regard "y'all" as a perfectly legitimate second-person plural. I make super crabcakes and key lime pie, but I don't eat grits out of loyalty to my mama's Hoosier corn pudding. I have a photo of me with Eudora Welty, dated one of her cousins in New York in the sixties, and wish I'd ever encountered Flannery O'Connor; I knew a man who had. I've been kissed on the cheek by two Southern bishops, one for a glass of wine and one for finding him a C.S. Lewis poem with the word "longanimity" in. One of my great-great-grandmothers was a Virginian who eloped with an abolitionist lawyer and another one pioneered Midwest from Carolina, where I plan to leave my dust.
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