What the old folks called anything crooked,

was like the snaking water course of the crick

bowed like grannie’s back, broke by a wagon.

Cockeyed voices brought me into being—

the Ozark crackle of peanut brickle,

the perfect rhyme of den and kin that no

school could untangle from my crooked mouth.

When I swallowed a watermelon seed,

they said it might could grow in my belly

and I couldn’t sleep for fear of bursting—

what happens to girls with too much to say.

I’m always barefoot in my backwoods dreams

carrying the crook-tail cat named Wampus,

my toes clinging to those lopsided roots.