Linda Larson is a gifted poet, the former editor for Spare Change News, and an activist and advocate for the mentally ill. And she just so happens to have been awarded an honorable mention for the annual Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award. Below is the very honorable poem.

Sweet Dixieland, Early Sixties

I do not recall

any fine summer evening

at Jewel and Mae’s

without a spreading of

the daily paper

on the picnic tables.

We cousins, second cousins

and  poor neighbor

children were heaven-deep

in flushed, icy pink clots of melon

with our elbows parked

on the soaked-through newsprint,

appearing in rows of black ink

on our forearms as bits of

wet, rosy sugar punctuated by

slanted black seeds dripped

from our chins, our fingers raw

with cold, as we lazily

spit the seeds across the table

at one another until ordered to

quit it.

The aunts neatly folded up

the newspapers with their wet,

sticky contents and before our baths

we fed the watermelon rinds to the horses.

In the moonlight, our faces white as milk,

we were corralled by heat lightning

and distant thunder

onto taut, crisp, cool sheets

where we were forever safe and

even nightmares dare not intrude.

Years later I was to learn

what was written

in the newspapers

wet with melon,

discarded and forgotten

in the coming darkness.

– Linda Larson