The Sister’s Supper Club
Tonight at the Sister’s Supper Club the big news story is Dori’s half brother Abner went out to the backyard in his pajamas Christmas morning and shot down a six-foot goliath bear with just a bow and arrow. That’s a lot of bear meat, we all agree. Paula has one hundred fifty chickens and prays for each one daily, by name. Donna nearly fed her hens to a skinny motherless fox come prowling, especially that exotic bonus bird thrown in for free from the 4-H people, who had feathers on her feet like a diva in bedroom slippers, but couldn’t even fly up to roost on the barn rafters with the others. Someone slipped on spilled grape soda at It’s All Good Market but no one cared. Someone else found money in a hole she dug in the ground out back. Kim tries not laugh. She looks like a young Joni Mitchell with clear eyes and blonde meadow grass bangs, before all the rock and cigarettes. Wanda smiles like my mother, kind, passes me the carrots nicer than any woman has ever passed carrots before. Yes Lord! Thank you Jesus! You are faithful! They all pray. They believe in the demonic, but their Jesus is stronger. Swaying around the table they look a field of wildflowers happy, sure that rain will come soon.
The American South
The air is tight as if all your life you’d slept in a sealed envelope on elegant paper sheets.
About the Bible Belt
My best friend in college is from Taiwan, but in America she is a debutante, parts her lacquered hair to the extreme side, wears her pearls to the gym and tries to be a Southern old money swan. Don’t tell me those Virginia fraternity boys with Daddy’s cufflinks won’t notice her skin is the color of yellow Post-Its. They dream of beer and MBA’s, and two-car garages filled with steel power tools that sing an opera after the pews have been filled, emptied, and swept Sunday afternoons.
Danna Molly Weiss was most recently published in New Contrast, the South African Literary Journal and From the Depths. She was trained at the poetry workshops at the University of Virginia, University of New Orleans, and Harvard University. She is currently revising her first collection of poems.
Steel Toe Review 