The Cakes of Your Grandmothers
Originally from Tennessee, a longtime Florida educator considers hunger, place, and memory.
December Rest Area
Your hunger overtakes you by the side of the road
winding into the past. Long ago, poverty made even
corn pone into joy. Now, we dread getting fat
worse than the sin of greed itself, celebrated
in so many prosperity gospels. In your dreams,
the cakes of your grandmothers eat you instead
of the other way around, and you fear them:
amalgamation, coconut, apple stack, caramel
spice—suffocatingly sweet. Love and shame mingle
in so many bites, in so many trips across the state—
temptation, then barefaced blame. You cannot visit
these dead folks anymore, but still they bind
with the crabbed handwriting of recipes and letters,
passed on to you in bundles tied with faded ribbon.
On your way back from this distant homeland,
remind yourself that even fancy foods rise up
out of the dirt, same as the plain purple chicory
and blazing black-eyed Susans that run alongside
the weedy highways. Fear not your hunger
nor its satisfaction. Stop in the frost and have
a chilly picnic of stale biscuit, even cake. Keep
only the good taste in your mouth. Fill your belly,
and bin your doubts in the rest area trashcans.
Leave the remnants behind for raccoons. Let
the crumbs sustain the souls who beckon to you
from the other side, waiting patiently in the dark.
Cataloochee
We hiked there as a family in my distant past, so tangible when I return, when I listen to the hauntings. The central fields almost always stretch out yellow with grasses, but the hills and mountains rise so steeply that their shadows sometimes fall green or blue across the landscape, changing reality like a funeral. Like civil war. Like genocide. Yet the same mists rise up. Smoking. Steaming through the air and around the pines, even on crystal summer days. Still standing—the white steepled church with its tombstones scattered and broken along the slope. Thoughts not quite fenced into a cemetery. Still standing empty—Caldwell House, which I drew at age sixteen in weathered-gray pencil from a photograph my brother took that first hike. Its silver boards nearly fallen then, covered in kudzu. Now I find it blue with white trim, as though it has always been painted. A trail leads through thigh-high weeds, single file.
alwayschorus of insects
alwaysburbling creek on mossy rocks
alwaysechoed axe on wood
About the author
Lisa Roney grew up back and forth between Knoxville and Memphis, Tennessee, and is from a long line of Tennessee farmers and teachers. She taught creative writing at the college and university level for twenty-five years, edited The Florida Review for five years, and currently is returning to a focus on her own writing. She is the author of Sweet Invisible Body (Holt), Serious Daring (Oxford), and a chapbook of poems, The Best Possible Bad Luck (Finishing Line Press), as well as short work in many journals.