Tag: Mesquite Bend

Posted in Poetry

Mesquite Bend: Coming Home

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

30 days poetry

Homecoming

They all say they will find
a way to leave Mesquite Bend,
especially the sophomores huddled
in the dark parking lot behind the DQ
in the last hours of a Friday night.

But no one ever leaves the memories
of windy, summer days when the sand
slashed a gritty taste in the mouth,
touch football stirring up dirt where clumps
of tenacious grass strove to grow.

And what about cool evenings in Fall
when a full moon perched above
the high school gym so that students
snaked to the roof like ants,
achieving stardom with an imaginary touch?

Those who stay are said to have cotton
in the blood, but they know the call
of a coyote on a winter’s night
and the promise in the hawk’s flight
of lazy circles above a field full
of grain.  Only they know
the mystery in a ’57 Chevy propped
on cinder blocks, a 20-foot mascot
statued in front of a tire store,
and the glow of campfires,
the only light for miles of flat plain
in every direction.

Ramona Levacy
April 9, 2015

Posted in Poetry

Mesquite Bend: The Wall

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

30 days poetry

This Small-Town Rebellion

Rumor has it the first slash
of black paint across the new brick
outside the Piggly Wiggly appeared
within a week of Charlie’s hiring
of that Curtis boy, the youngest

in a long line of cotton pickers,
the first Curtis to make it to tenth grade
and counting.  Since the word, America,
seemed impossible to scrub away
without offending at least somebody,
it stayed, a brazen reminder

that each generation seeks
its own two feet.  As the war
in Asia flashed across the television
screens each night, body bags
mixing with casserole dinners
until no one thought about the faces
beneath the thick, black plastic,

more words followed.  Clean words
like love, mercy and peace.  This town,
Mesquite Bend, embraced them,
especially when a brave soul dared
to scrawl the name of their first war hero
in bright red in the middle of the wall.

In the ’70s, the paper first made
the act of putting one’s name
on the fast-filling brick official,
capitalizing the Wall in black and white.

Today, each Senior takes a midnight
ride past the dark glass of the grocery store
and sprays a message for eternity,
the rite of passage a dedication
to a world where even a blink in the road
makes a mark on what is possible.

Ramona Levacy
April 8, 2015

Posted in Poetry

Mesquite Bend: Reunion

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

30 days poetry

The Gazebo at the Park

The asbestos-roofed gazebo,
painted freshly red each summer
by Boy Scout Troop number 22,
stands taller than even the oak tree

that Mesquite Bend Class of ’22 planted,
the ground everywhere cast in yellowed grass
and sand that goes on forever.

In October, the Zimmermans gather,
seven generations of blonde-haired beauties
and men with hands as thick as meat slabs.
For four days, they circle the gazebo
with RVs and pop-up tents, badminton sets
and tournament Monopoly.

Niles Zimmerman, reigning elder, holds
court in his ancient fold-up chair,
centered under the gazebo.  Babies
and graduating grandchildren fly
before him, each receiving Niles’
offered shiny quarter like a blessing.

The women rule the barbecue pit
in the park’s North corner, their recipe
contests legendary.  Only Nana’s Pie,
a coconut cream confection they have passed
down for centuries, claims the role
of undisputed champion.

Even though the loudest sounds
for four days are the triumphant
giggles of the grand bingo winner,
Mesquite Bend heaves a sigh
as RVs and tents and Monopoly boards
roll away from the one park
the town calls its own,

the empty gazebo an ever-present promise
of that which passes from us and yet
must be filled.

Ramona Levacy
April 7, 2015

Posted in Poetry

Mesquite Bend: The Cotton Queen

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

30 days poetry

By the Seasons

Flyers go up for months
as if a single citizen would forget
the day in early Spring when Mesquite Bend
crowns what is the best among them.

She must glide like a dew drop
on a blade of grass early Fall mornings,
blossom like a cactus flower,
wear the pungent scent of cotton ginning
like Chanel No. 5.

Roberta Watts held court
for five years running, but her
days of glory have dried up
like the creek bed cracked
more days than water flows.

Young Lucy Mann reigns these days,
her twenty-something youth
the image of glory they all
long for.  How many crops
have withered no matter how hard
they pray nightly, through years

of war and drought and even
slaughtered Presidents?  Yet she
donns the finely-woven fibers
of the county and parades
around the square as if the world
were watching.

Her world watches, for no
Cotton Queen would dare
to long for any higher honor
than that paid by hands cracked
with blood wrung from their dusk
to dawn reality, this life they chose
at the mercy of Mother Nature
and the calling of those
who came before.

Ramona Levacy
April 6, 2015

Posted in Poetry

Mesquite Bend: Jelly Bean Smith

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

The Feed and Seed

This feed store, filled with fly bait
and the musty scent of alfalfa bundled,
centers the world of Josiah Smith,

known as Jelly Bean to every
Mesquite Bend local.  He runs
the old munitions-factory-turned-city-heart,
this place where even the women
from the Tea Club gather
to share gossip and peppermint sticks
Jelly Bean keeps in a large, glass jar
on the wooden counter smoothed

by years of transactions filled with men’s sweat
and the honesty of a sturdily shaken hand.
Only Molly Nunnelly never ventures
into the aisles of threepenny nails
and cattle feed, through the inventory
of d-rings and nylon rope that Jelly Bean
carries in his very cells.  Sweet Molly

who moons after Jack Long, the one
Molly has loved since all of them made mud pies
in the back of the cemetery, scaring
each other with stories about the ghosts
of scalped ancestors.  Even after Roberta Watts
walked down the aisle with him, Molly still
watches Jack with dreamy eyes
Jelly Bean would give all
his coveted fly traps to own.

But Jelly Bean, well past thirty,
hopes as he watches Molly in her pew
every Sunday, her hair in perfect ringlets
hugging the stiff collars of her best dresses.
Only old Ben Hurley knows Josiah
is more man than any of them.  Who
would answer to a childhood cruelty
except a man more than comfortable
in his lonely skin?

 

Ramona Levacy
April 4, 2015

Posted in Poetry

Mesquite Bend: Ben Hurley

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

Even When It Rains

 

Every morning, he greets the sun,
his oatmeal sitting heavy with the third cup
of black coffee in his belly.

His face bears the lines of days spent
out in the open, where wind whips
grains of sand or pellets of ice,
both in one day many an early Spring.

His hands, old since his twenties, curl
in a perpetual claw that makes the young bride
at the farm two miles over wince,
but they still guide reins as well as any cowboy.

Hurley strokes the collie at his knees,
his 80-year-old eyes roving the bent and brittle fields
that define all the world needs to know
about “poor Ben,” who went to Europe
to save the world and came back a blunt
and dark-eyed man.

Even the pain in his belly he tries
not to think about cannot keep him
from walking the rows of cotton spiking
as it has struggled for generations
of Hurleys holding sharp bolls in practiced hands.

If he hadn’t left that pretty red-head in the pub
at the east end of London, Ben might not be the last
of cotton men in a family that once
ruled this country where the sand follows the rain.

Ramona Levacy
April 3, 2015

Posted in Poetry

Mesquite Bend: Molly

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

The Ladies’ Tea Club

 

Tuesdays, half past two,
the ladies of Cornerstone Baptist sit
in formation to a pattern as old
as Miss Thelma, the 92-year-old founder
of this gathering of faded teacups, lace doilies,
and the stretchy jeans and gym suits of women
with laundry drying on the clothesline and supper
dangling like a loose participle in the back of their minds.

Only Molly Nunnelley, eldest daughter of the Reverend who has served
this congregation for four, long decades, shows Miss Thelma
her full due, the young Molly’s hair always coiffed just so,
her full frame forced into a fashionable dress
made perfect for a woman half Molly’s size.

Roberta Long, confirmed coffee drinker,
mocks the Earl Grey swirling with cream,
her tall mug of Arabica wafting circles
towards Molly’s lavender-scented kerchief,
Molly’s only link to a reality
where a handsome bachelor once
held hands as they strolled
down the dusty path near Hurley’s cotton patch.

Roberta knows those hands better than Molly now,
fifteen years later.  Thin Roberta with her
curvy hips and Miss Thelma’s happy smile.
The Tea Club loves Roberta, who mocks
them all with more than her coffee cup.

If only one of them would notice
Molly’s neatly trimmed nails
and sling back heels.  If only her days
were more than Tea Clubs and steamy novels
stashed away from Reverend Nunnelley’s watchful eyes,
the only pleasures of a grown woman
still sleeping on her childhood bed.

Ramona Levacy
April 2, 2015