Sara Claytor

Excerpt from...

THE QUEEN OF EGYPT

     Edith McPherson was a freak. Her parents kept her at home until she was 10 years old. She never attended school or went to church on Sundays, visited with any relatives on holidays or strolled down a street window-shopping. Only because her parents had the financial resources to send her to a special boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina, did she enter the real world of her peers. Even then, she was not in the true real world, for the school was selective, expensive, and catered to the needs or whims of “special children.”

     Edith's mother taught her how to read when she was four years old. From then on Edith absorbed every book and magazine possible in her old antebellum plantation home near Fairbluff, North Carolina. Edith's great-grandfather had built the home, plowed the land, harvested peanuts and tobacco. Now in the post-World War II years, the estate remained a lingering relic, sustained still by the availability of cheap and abundant Negro labor.

      Fortunately, the family possessed a library with high dusty shelves reached only by a sliding ladder and crowded with maps, huge dictionaries, and even a spinning metal world globe on which Edith would identify world continents with one of three claw fingers on her left hand. She preferred to use her left hand for most activities, even though she had four fingers on her right hand. Writing was often arduous, but she learned to balance a pencil in between her middle and ring finger. Her mother insisted she write right-handed; however, Edith secretly learned to be ambidextrous. By the time she was seven, she had advanced to drawing pictures of farm animals and even attempted portraits of her parents and the black hired help who worked in the kitchen and cleaned the twenty-two rooms of their stately mansion.

      On rainy days, she liked to nestle in the small parlor where each floor-to-ceiling window contained cushioned window seats. She would press her nose-less face against damp windowpanes, counting rain drops as they slid along the glass, dreaming of Egypt and the great wonders of the world:  the pyramids, the Sphinx. The mighty rulers who once reigned there intrigued her most, especially the queens whose profiles she had seen in history books, their noses prominent and straight, their high foreheads, their pouting lips. Haughty. Powerful. Beautiful. She wanted to be a queen of Egypt.

BETTER MOMENTS MAY COME

little girls dressed like pretty boxes

curled ribbon hair, paper-thin skin

chattering like birds in locked cages

unprepared for the texture of calloused hands

once tender as peach fuzz

caressing humming flowers

they never plaited hair with wild yellow daises

they never yowled at the sun

they never painted their toenails green

who would have known, as women,

bellies swelling into giant pumpkins

saving life minutes in a Mason jar

they waited for lovers to come to their senses

realizing too late, their lovers had no sense

merely vultures pecking at highway remains

lost husbands, now smiling photos on end tables

wives sprinkle ashes in flowerbeds

husbands still grow for them

every night they probe through memories

every day they rearrange furniture, switch paintings

buy Italian silk sheets for the king-size bed

lives coil into red spirals

skins shrivel into Saran wrap shells

bodies break like brittle bits of bone china

meanwhile, women still prowl store aisles, seeking bargains

still tempted by chocolates, dresses on sale, lips on their thighs

only to find paradise burned down eons before

Milton’s long-winded fantasy

SLICE OF LIFE

Tonight, moon like a piece of burnt pewter.

Your face slipping past the kitchen window, a pale balloon.

Staining my silk sheets, the maleness of your odor―

hair tonic, hint of sweat, tobacco smoke.

While you shuffle down a red dirt road, I howl at skewed stars.

Tomorrow, drag guilt around like a clanking chain.

First part of...

WHAT THE CHILDREN KNOW

We can’t tell what the children know.

Something lies half buried under

their vulnerable skins, something

twisting through sinew and bone,

something that marbles the heart with bruises.

Nothing’s ever remembered whole;

children’s dreams jumble into fragments―

yellow cars in pantry, snake swimming

in bathroom sink, purple moons

crashing down chimney.

RED LEAF ORACLE

We walked into the forest.

You saw a red leaf twirling

beyond the sun, a sign, you said.

We lay in the fall leaves,

your wool jacket rough

under my naked thighs.

Birds listened; sun rays quivered.

The trees kept our secrets.

Later, afternoon shadows crossed

our narrow path as we

shuffled arm in arm.

We felt night’s breath, knew we

were late for the supper hour,

the last bus to campus.

We raced towards the road,

our hair tangled, chased by

a black and white bird dog.

I lost a contact lens.

We missed the bus, a sign, I said.

REAL DESIRES OF THE PAST

A white stone birdbath left behind

where crows never balanced;

when a crow flies, the clock strikes,

the devil has his due.

Remember curtains puffing in the breeze,

dust powdered leaves of oak trees,

gazing up at a sky marbled with yellow-maroon clouds?

Remember red dirt roads, mud on tires,

mosquitoes with pipe cleaner legs, droning?

No bones in your milk, only a weeping girl

believing vinegar reeked from Jesus’ tattered body,

fearful earth understood the madness of it all.

Back then, you could read pores of rocks,

recognize leaves shaped like crosses,

smell blood wounds in wild onions.

Most of all, if you could return,

you would be there screaming

when Elvis left the building. 

First half of...

FLESH FROM BONE

Miss Lottie Jenkins lived alone with four cats,

taught Sunday school 39 years to 8-year-olds.

Her fervent Bible tale, Jezebel, wicked queen,

thrown from her balcony for wild street dogs

to rip flesh from bone. Blue eyes glazed

when she described screams and growls,

Jezebel’s tiny white hand left intact.

She told stories about demon faces in stained glass windows,

liked the Old Testament best, flowing of blood,

stoning of fallen women who broke marriage vows.

Revenge seemed a strong theme: “Eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth.”

We envisioned eyeballs popping and broken teeth

flying out of beheaded torsos.

Not much happens in our little town, occasional Saturday night brawl,

a cutting. Murder seldom graces the scene. Only secrets of the past

or family gossip rattle a placid surface. Miss Lottie’s father died

at the kitchen table, slumped in his underwear, face buried

in a bowl of potato soup. Some said heart attack; others said drowned.

His left hand was missing.