Maya Jewell Zeller
Winner of the Dogwood 2012 Poetry Award
The theme is autumn, and we try to justify
every play with a story, careful
to make these letters mean things
they didn’t mean in the darkness
of their silver bag, the straight coffin of tray,
our shaking fingers shuffling them onto a board,
weaving each new word to the beginning
of school again, pep rallies, lockers,
to football, the punts and throbs—
not things boys are but things boys do,
make girls do.I was not interested
in football, but the idea of football, of a riot
of muscle and light, the kind of playing
we girls did when, from horseback, my best friends
and I slung mud. The goal
was not to win but to be the one
so covered in mud she looked like
the swamp woman, a monster
come down from the north, somewhere
more wild even than here. We didn’t know
if that was possible, but we wanted
to know. The sloppy dark
muck lay around the old tub we used as a trough
where the horses and mules had their meals,
stood to switch flies from their flanks while
their hooves made the hard earth soft.
We’d lean down and scoop, throw
and ride, spitting, doing the gross things
we’d been warned against
since we were six and our mothers threatened
we might become tomboys.It’s too late
in this story—these girls growl, yip like wild kazoos
a vendor might sell for ten cents a-piece
at the fair where nice girls take their horses
with manes combed and plaited
in ribbon, where girls comment
on dahlias, touch doilies, and blush
in their pink dresses. These girls are not at
that fair. They gallop the trail that runs
past the flipped truck with its shattered
windows, axle rusted raw as my mouth
when my mother slapped me for saying things,
past the logs some flood left in this vast
field, the beams of pine robbed
from another field further upstream. The whole
place a maze of stream rock and clay
and grass and new hay. We didn’t know football
or the things it could lead to. This
was the jet-white game of mud. We pulsed
with girlhood, and from a brown
crusted body my eyes shone out like a cat’s
from under the barn, straight lye to scrub
the sky down with. I had mud
in my hands, and I was going to throw.
They each had mud, and they
would not quit until they could no longer see my skin,
there would be no going home, no searing race across
the floodplain, no nap unfolding its dreams.
If we could shriek and play this game,
we could do anything.
If we could be slick, slick, smothered
in these shells, we could
emerge something else entirely. Even now
it makes me think of fish frozen in ice,
motionless for winter. Even now
I want to crack each girl’s sheen
and watch the animal underneath
groan back toward the light.
