where you are planted

By Evie Shockley Evie Shockley

he’s as high as a georgia pine, my father’d say, half laughing. southern trees

as measure, metaphor. highways lined with kudzu-covered southern trees.

fuchsia, lavender, white, light pink, purple : crape myrtle bouquets burst

open on sturdy branches of skin-smooth bark : my favorite southern trees.

one hundred degrees in the shade : we settle into still pools of humidity, moss-

dark, beneath live oaks. southern heat makes us grateful for southern trees.

the maples in our front yard flew in spring on helicopter wings. in fall, we

splashed in colored leaves, but never sought sap from these southern trees.

frankly, my dear, that’s a magnolia, i tell her, fingering the deep green, nearly

plastic leaves, amazed how little a northern girl knows about southern trees.

i’ve never forgotten the charred bitter fruit of holiday’s poplars, nor will i :

it’s part of what makes me evie : i grew up in the shadow of southern trees.

Source: the new black (Wesleyan University Press, )

Biography

Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, poet Evie Shockley earned a BA at Northwestern University, a JD at the University of Michigan, and a PhD in English literature at Duke University. The author of several collections of poetry, including a half-red sea (2006) and the new black (2011), Shockley is also the author of the critical volume Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry . . .

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