Planted by the Signs. Misty Skaggs

The Scanner

       Lovel Gets the Last Word

       How Not to Act Right

       Double D Dilemma

       Ode to the Bethany House

       Babysitting

       An Aria for Isonville

       Daddy Issues

       You Might Drown

       Taters and Rainbows

       Mongrels

       Roadwork Ahead

       Royalty

       Scorpion Tattoo

       Stubby

       Honky-Tonk Dreams

       Mountain Lion

       Cat Person

       Goodnight, Gramaw

       Gooseberries

       Mommy and Mamaw and Them

       When the Signs Are in the Reins

       Breathing Ghosts

       In the Dark

       Bitter Berries

       Accidents

       Housefire on 504

       Bless Her Heart

       Hard to Swallow

       The Art of Falling Apart

       The Rain

       Going Shedding

       Super Moon

       Giveaway

       Truck Stop Strangers

       The Lilac Bush

       Wood Paneling

       Blooms and the Blood

       Attempted Escape

       Funeral Flowers

       Powerball Power Play

       From around Here

       Picnicking with the Dead

       Preface

      At Great Mamaw’s house there was always a pone of cornbread on the kitchen table. And maybe if you were lucky some buttermilk biscuits leftover from breakfast. At Great Mamaw’s house there was always something to eat fresh from the garden. And there was always something to read, too. It was heaven on earth for a fat little hillbilly word nerd.

      There were back issues of National Geographic stacked up in the corner of the living room. A basket of trashy romance novels with seething, sultry, shirtless men overflowed next to Great Mamaw’s recliner. There was a Kennedy biography and a beat-up, flea market copy of Profiles in Courage displayed on the side table right next to her commemorative presidential plate. The family Bible squatted solemn and thick and reverent on her nightstand with its gossamer-thin pages at rest and not to be disturbed by the grubby, clumsy hands of young’uns. Out in the rusty little camper where she stored all the scrap material from her quilts, she also stashed the racy True Detective magazines I was never supposed to find.

      My favorite book was her favorite book. The one she made good use of and referred to most often. The book that Great Mamaw kept tucked in her apron pocket or laid out within reach, easy to get to on the crooked little coffee table—The Old Farmer’s Almanac. My Great Mamaw lived her life by the signs. She knew when the moon waxed and waned above her little holler and she knew what its moods meant for the soil her roots were planted in.

      This collection is inspired by and written for my Great Mamaw, Lovel Blankenbeckler. It was my honest-to-goodness honor to care for her at the end of her life, and many of the following poems were written during that time. My Great Mamaw taught me her ways, those ways forgotten and buried in the pages of the almanac. She taught me to look up at the sky, to feel the stars move through my body and right on into the ground. She taught me to know when to plant and harvest, and she taught me to know when to bloom.

       When the Signs Are in the Head

       Wet Dew

      My place is five fifteen

      in the morning

      in a plastic lawn chair.

      The kind you buy

      four for twenty

      at the Dollar General.

      Flecks of red spray paint

      cling