Poetry By Linda Parsons

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LEARNER’S PERMIT


Not so different from a Tennessee backroad: grasses feathered to summer’s call, mid-June, already hitting high heat. This road slinks into woods and centuried-chinked walls, my remote retreat near a medieval village. Another road, the crooked way past memory, winds white with dust to an overripe kitchen, sliced peaches, two high-strung girls in a country diner. Your grandmother sets us to the supper pies: thumbs wrapped against the blade, a mountain of furred peels weeps on aproned laps. As hot then as now, only a fan for relief. The close air, sugared and salted, barely stirs. We wash off the slippery hours, beg and wear down your mother, high on her powder-blue Fairlane. We say whatever it takes to sieve our own juice and sweat, to lay down the dust, down to the River Breeze Drive-In, to the boys under the floodlights, the bats’ skitter across our sunburned shoulders. Never mind that we stuck to the seats, drove blind with no license—our fruit yearned so to be picked. The irony of Rosemary’s road to perdition, swaddling her wild-eyed baby, was not lost on me, even at fifteen. How many dark cars lay ahead, flashing high beams like moths to the flame, how many nights parked without forethought before the road turned to lush undergrowth, sparked by desire alone? You might say butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths, no matter who or what we fought off in the dead heat of reckoning. 

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Linda Parsons is the Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee. She is also the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection is Valediction: Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville.