Every year the sweet corn craved
by farm clients shot up in June fields, suffered
heat—sometimes drought—and the hunger
of caterpillars, raccoons, and skunks. Small
return. Cheap sugar. In Tennessee we slip
and call it culture, since our grandfathers
were the first to try these purebred supersweets
and we were kids and ate it like candy. Silver
Queen. Sugar Pearl. American Dream. Now,
my friends’ fields grow cousins and ancestors,
untraceable heirlooms, dehybridized sweet
corn and el maíz criollo sent by Alfonso, one
of the last two farmers from El Sauzal to plant their
milpas with the corn of their grandfathers. Lalo
walks the fields in August, scanning stalks for ears,
ears for wrapper coverage, and cracking off
a few to dent with a thumb, to taste. Bright
strips of kernels grin like I imagine his father
must have done, like his tousle-headed son.
Without supports, the corn my grandfather grew
weakens, tasseling at chest-height. Irrigation-
plumped kernels will shrivel to almost nothing
in next year’s drought, or storms. If I’m future
tripping, it’s because of you, East Tennessee,
who love your stringquilted heritage so much
you forgot who made it with desperate fingers,
stitching a bitter inheritance, craving any sweet
distraction. Meanwhile the corn of mesoamerica
rises dark green and ancient, towering above us
as cartels, corruption, and climate push it north,
north to freedom in this acre of East Tennessee
where it arrives in a rough palm, as welcome to us
as gospel.
A quality of stillness, active as the pointing
hound, and a resignation steely and focused,
never turning aimless, this is one inheritance.
Survival was my mother’s first daughter and
your mother’s, raised among us like another
child of the family. We knew her, we loved her,
we spoiled her. When I wake in the morning,
or pause at any of the day’s thresholds, I
remember her. How she steadied my hands
as a child and gave me bread and honey, and
again when my daughter was a baby, so I
could give her bread and honey. My sister.
The stillness of the rabbit in the lawn as I run
by unable to catch my breath, its face set like
an unliving thing toward what approaches,
ponderously, shaking the earth, and we won’t
be caught sleeping or naked or fearful or porous.
We imagine all futures of wreck or famine,
we set a mask of aloneness toward doom. Oh
mother oh me oh brown oak leaves clinging
on through winter, hunched over leaf scars
till new leaves emerge in the spring.
Anna Laura Reeve is a poet living and gardening near the Tennessee Overhill region, traditional land of the Eastern Cherokee. Previous work of hers has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, ROOM Magazine, Terrain.org, and others. She is the winner of the 2022 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, a finalist for the Ron Rash Award and the Heartwood Poetry Prize, and a two-time Pushcart nominee. Her debut poetry collection, Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility, is forthcoming from Belle Point Press (April 2023). Find her on Instagram @annalaurareeve and on Twitter @AnnaLauraReeve.