Corrie Lynn White

Only the Edgeless and Soft

i.
My boy bolts into the loblollies,
strips bark. I worry what could hurt.
What could open. 

A broken hackberry shades the soybeans.
A redneck arch. 

Before I became a mother,
I’d walk to the edges looking for beauty.
To trade family enmeshment
with snow or aphids in September.

Hills made fire in my thighs.
Ferns and moss put it out.

ii.
My boy eats a tangerine
backwards on a rocking chair.
My hands keep him from falling.
My body is the road he took. 

I can only do everything correct—
salmon, mashed potatoes. Can’t die.
Can’t exhale tobacco at the chain-linked moon.

The sunset, ripped by powerlines,
puts orange in his eyes, which I kiss.
A kind of eating. All of it ancient:
anger at rocks and ledges,
seeking laps on which to lie down
and not be writers of anything.

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Corrie Lynn White's poetry has appeared in Oxford American, Poets.org and New Ohio Review, among other places. Her full-length collection—Gold Hill Family Audio—is distributed by Bull City Press. Originally from North Carolina, she now lives with her husband and son in Chattanooga. Read more at www.clwhite.work.