Nearer to Vital Truth

We Have Come
Through to the Grass

after James Still

All the little calves rising
all the mud all the sarvis berry
wild cherry the valentine tips
of maples and plum all
the lavender of unopened
oak velveting the mountainside
all the morel all the smell
of chicken shit spread on fields
all the suffering stink of it
lay me down beside your dying
my shame is that I wasn’t there
to hold you keep you clean
conjure lambs and measure
morphine moisten your lips
tell you the story you told me
how your father once
hid a case of moonshine
from the law that was knocking
on your door by tucking jars
all around your mama dog
and her new puppies suckling
on a pile of rags in the basement
and you knelt there tending
them while the men shined
flashlights over your mama’s
canning the inside of her chest
freezer the wardrobe full
of clothes and found nothing
while the puppies whined
and struggled to draw closer
to their mother their eyes
still closed their bellies
still tender from their bitten
umbilical cords knotted blood
you could feel against your palm
as you lifted them to your cheek
their paws scrabbling the air
and they searched blindly
with their perfect snouts
trying to lift their heads

—Annie Woodford ’99, M.A. ’00

LITTLE REED CREEK

Here’s about to, the prepwork,
saprise & seepdrip. Here
is all there
isn’t to know.

*

Schisms in the soilsphere –
toothwort, violet, cleaver.

*

Early April,
poplar’s green shiver,
visibility for glades.

*

This ridge Terrapin Mountain,
that one, White Oak Knob –
no morels yet, many ferns still curled.

*

Plungepools & pocketwater –
trillium there, & there, trillium.

*

Don’t call it work
what the boulders do,
but what they don’t do, the rest.

*

The punchbowls, the hollows in every hollow.

*

Here is lair, and the waterthrush
at evening piping up,
at morning, too.

*

Still a little bite in the air,
still a little gobbler scratch, & rue.

*

The duff a treatise on parchment,
weather’s imprint,
notes on the future,
the last next generation all at once.

*

Buckrub & split trunk, a tick in your flanksteak,
deadfall, more deadfall.
If zest, if spritz.

*

That it go on, the hellebore,
the black birch’s shelf life,
polypore & parasitic burls.

*

Anemone, anemone.

—Thorpe Moeckel
first published in Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review

HeLa

Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant across the tracks in my

town in 1920. My mother was also born at home in the same

town in 1918 and named Joyce. After being dropped in Clover when

her mother died, Henrietta had to plant and harvest tobacco

until her hands were sticky and stained. Growing up, my mother

spent as much time as possible in the public library, turning

pages of books. In college, she got a summer job there. Joyce and

Henrietta both married in 1941, one couple in April, the other

in June. Henrietta already had two children and would have three

more. Ten years later, Henrietta Lacks died from cervical cancer

in Johns Hopkins hospital the year my mother gave birth to

her first child. Nothing touched the pain Henrietta endured.

Without her knowledge, her cells were harvested and cultured for

medical research. The HeLa immortal cell line is still doubling

and redoubling in test tubes around the world. Both of the

houses where Loretta/Henrietta lived in my town have been torn

down. The houses where my mother lived are still standing.

My mother died in 2016 of old age without any grandchildren.

I asked her to spit into a vial, so I could learn more about

my ancestry. She was skeptical but took the test for me. When her

results came back they revealed mostly what she’d said, British

Isles. I have no idea where I’m going with this. There’s really

no comparison to make between my mother and Henrietta Lacks.

—Cathryn Hankla ’80, M.A. ’82, professor emerita, Immortal Stuff: prose poems (Mercer University Press, 2023)