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Kentucky native CD Collins is the author of three books, a collection of short stories, Blue Land (Polyho Press), a poetry collection, Self Portrait with Severed Head (Ibbetson Street Press), and a novel, Afterheat (Empty City Press). Her fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines including StoryQuarterly, Phoebe, Salamander and The Pennsylvania Review. Her work is represented in five compact discs, one of which won Best Spoken-Word album at the Boston Poetry Awards. More information at www.cdcollins.com.

Miss Ludie

CD Collins

This woman with the mineral breath knows
you still speak to the forest animals,
that you once tried to make fireworks with flowers and precious sand,
thought you could walk off the chicken coop and fly.

She will hold all of you tenderly in your little desks,
Will free you as often as she can,
because your body craves tearing through the playground,
sliding onto third base, gathering as much dust as possible,
because you thrive in the dirt you’re made of.
She knows you need to stride to the pencil sharpener
just to relieve that spring inside you.

Her breath is silver with the frost of the mountain,
she has climbed down from,
to teach you letters and numbers,
which sacks have seeds you can plant,
which ones are too heavy a burden for your small bones to bear.
She will teach you that it not important to count the polished dimes
in the storm you got caught in,
but to watch them flashing from the sky,
under whatever shelter you can find.
She will show you to decipher letters and words
so that you can learn the stories of other children,
their small hands in the fur of the creatures that walk beside them.

Once, she dissolved a tiny square of paper in her mouth
Ate breakfast at dawn in the diner,
scented with the seductive oils of the Fryolater.
Saw the towers spring up and down like accordions,
The birds in the trees outside the library chattered excitedly;
she understood them.

And may divine you, too, if you allow her.
Miss Ludie’s eyes are the blue of the hyacinths
she brought in one day,
setting the vase on her oak table.
Gaze into her eyes, that unfathomable blue.
The color of the sea under a shimmering dome of sky.
You’ve never seen a blue like that before.

— CD Collins

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