The Places In Which We Begin

The Places in Which We Begin


“Town or poem, I don’t care how it looks.”
Richard Hugo, “White Center”



North on 319 from Tallahassee
and in no hurry. 84 East—
Thomasville, Boston, Dixie,

a median lined with dogwoods,
branches so heavy with life, some blossoms
hang suspended in the air, attached

to the sky, hardly moving.
This is Quitman, Georgia. Notice the sun,
how it hugs the children playing

in front of Delia’s Kitchen, how it
savors the words scrawled
on the sign leaning against the store—

Boiled Peanuts by the Bag, Pecan Rolls:
Make You Slap Your Mama.
I am with the woman who will

become my wife, but on this day
we watch the roadside, having little interest
in the future. On this day, our foresight

is limited to a craving for peaches,
which we will buy on the side
of the road, off the back of a truck,

from a man shaped like a sackful
of doorknobs. His face the face
of the fruit he will rub in his large hands

and drop into a paper bag—
colored red in all the right places,
coated with a dust so fine.



Dan Memmolo

Posted over on Main Street Rag