Meghan Hickey

Meghan Hickey
from Volume 3 Issue 2

Handsome Women

There used to be handsome women.
Strong-chinned, they were solider then,
broad-backed and rough-handed.
Their beauty was measured in volume-
they'd fill a room with their burlap laughter
and you'd reach out
to weigh their words there in the palm of your hand.
Hardy women, un-delicate.
What did they need of a second skin
when they could feel the world around them with
bare hands
-hands hewn from rock and wood
remedies in their heads and blessings
tied about their hair to keep the dust and impropriety
from settling in.
Full of themselves, of life, of children
forged by tongues at fire's side
any legacies of wiser lips
and wizened eyes
breasts, hips, the fullness of ripening pears
that a speckle with the time and season
herbs and sweat and pollen to the tasting, with
winter
to cure and summer to thaw and drop heavy down
tying up with a fistful of twine.
And so I re- member them,
these handsome women
-I, the sum of many hands.
They hand me down,
stitching to show
the workmanship:
Women
working, bending over
candle, callus
sore eyes loving what they see
what I will be-
handsome
me.

Lode

My grandmother dreams of houses.
She builds them with paper, water and oil
and hangs them, a gallery on her wall.
She walks through these homes in her sleep
touching the furniture, opening drawers
knowing what will be inside
smelling the smoke of the floorboards and walls-
the smell of a time when coal was burned for fuel
and wood, for cooking and comfort.
Her grandfather was a coal miner
come from the Olde Sodde
could not farm the new
so he crawled beneath it-
land that coughed up soot, blackened his lungs
and turned his hair and early grey
so that his family might call it "home"
so that my grandmother might look
onto a generosity of soil and sky and see
the coming of the wind
and the dust, visitor without welcome.
By 1945 every farm in the county
had been sold and stripped of its coal, leaving more
than footprints behind:
today, there remain long snaking mounds
where dirt was not replaced
and trenches were left to be filled by rain.
Her father did not own the land he farmed
but it was no less hard to leave-
the town became my grandmother's home,
a tidy plot of grass and fence
with little for horizon
Tonight, my grandmother dreams
of a farm bought back, a house rebuilt.
Brown as paper, it casts its shadow
on land that was never hers
and has yet to be mined.

Color

Sundays the white steepled hall where the
council meets becomes the cinema
shadows stutter on the blankest wall
behind the flag stand, thrown from a
clicking reel.
There I saw the Wizard of Oz
my first movie, how bright the colors
were, I remember mostly the field of poppies
as though I had never seen red before.
Our fields blink gold and black in summer
butterfly fields of whispering wings
and then there are grasses. I savor these colors
suck against my teeth to taste them
which is bitter, which is sweet
strands of grass with the feel of twine, from a
moist earth I know must taste of molasses.
In winter there is white and silence
an occasional tree, the barn, my house
their long dim shadows cast in blue
the land is wrapped in linen so it will be
fresh to serve when the company comes in the thaw
of spring and the whispering begins.

Meghan Hickey, (exotic) Chicago, Illinois, is "heir to a long line of troubadours, truth-tellers, yarn-spinners, saints, martyrs, bullies and thieves. She is some and none of the above. She was introduced to Porcupine by her grandmother, Mary Jeanne, the inspiration for Color and Lode. Handsome Women is a tribute to all her mothers." Meghan says, " I shared the news (of being published) with my grandmother... and she was left speechless, a state little known to her." Meghan has published work in Amelia Magazine's 1997 Nova Trembly Ashley Short Poem Contest, The Nassau Literary Review, Nebulosi.