
Rebecca Gayle Howell (ed.)
et al.
Published online:
18 May 2023
Published in print:
07 March 2023
Online ISBN:
9780813197418
Print ISBN:
9780813182438
Contents
Cite
Hedge Coke, Allison Adelle, 'Viscera', in Rebecca Gayle Howell, Ashley M. Jones, and Emily J. Jalloul (eds), What Things Cost: an anthology for the people (Lexington, KY , 2023; online edn, Kentucky Scholarship Online, 18 May 2023), https://doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813182438.003.0031, accessed 17 Apr. 2025.
Extract
For Rachelle Cruz 4/27/2020
Our moms were widows before they met our fathers.Their hair blue-black, their hands already chapped, caressedby Inglis die-cast tooling Bren light machine guns, Mauserammunition, or Browning Hi-Power handguns, torpedo warheadcasings, or reining sorrels’ leather when they made mountains home.Their first loves shot, stabbed, or lost in war.While our fathers picked cotton for a penny a pound,steeped in dust friction-screamed like cats in winds untamed.Rode fence to make it through school, GI Bills or not.Married our moms from wingman blind dates,worked side by side in the hospital in the peak of polio,then made our broadcloth shifts by hand for school,dragging thread through eyes, aiming needles clean, whileour widow moms were current fried in hospitals, asylums.By then, they’d most likely lost three or four kidsbefore any survived the early years. Those of uswho did, maybe never told their names, or toldso often we believed we remembered them with usat the table they were never big enough to seat.Our work permits in hand at twelve, fields, like oceans,called us. Factories, registers, bars, counters, tables, horses—but always the fields. You know the deal, back gone. The former field-worker retraining jump-started some of us from post–middleschool labor vacancies to college, by nearly thirty.For those of us, widowed just like our moms, with no onelike our dads to pick up our after. Who move through thislike walking rows, straight to the end, straight for drawson jugs, water, plain solutions tapped.For those of us who must write, who can’t sleep now, who do knowpeople who have died, are dying. Who have always knownpeople who have died, are dying, since the little ones whopreceded us as infants anyway and all the way here, if no oneelse nearby will, we will still lose somebodies.It’s the viscera talking now, the nerves, guts, bombs like sinew,blue-red deep inside entrails, webs, mussed up neurons,neural tissue, breaking brains, remains of hearts, like Chicletschewed up, spit, forked, forgotten.
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