after Kim Addonizio’s “Winter Solstice”
I can’t think about the black slick on the river or the deer
who doesn’t arise from the slick of its birth, the mother
licking her fawn’s wilting body. Does she hear the morning
waking around her, the red fox niggling near the den, the squeal
of the field mouse when clasped by the hawk? I can’t think
about another season of slicing cold as the days shorten and leaves
slick the ground while darkness seeps across the day like another
black slick back in the Gulf after yet another storm. Catastrophe
never disappears. Pearly mussels are gone from fresh waters
of Tennessee rivers, killed by men in suits who designed the dams
to power the paper mills and chemical plants whose filth slicked
more waters. I can’t think about the Tennessee pearls
gathered like shimmery tears on my mother’s necklace,
now boxed in black velvet, and which I will never wear.
Slick
Marianne Worthington edits Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine she co-founded in 2009. Her work appears in Oxford American, Sweet: A Literary Confection, CALYX, and Chapter 16 among other places. She co-edited Piano in a Sycamore: Writing Lessons from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop and is author of a poetry chapbook. Her poetry collection is The Girl Singer (University Press of Kentucky, 2021), winner of the Weatherford Award for Poetry. She grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and lives in southeast Kentucky.