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The Buford Highway Farmers Market
Diamond Forde (bio)
DO you remember flirting at the fish counter on Thursdays? At the Buford Highway Farmers Market—dark corners, concrete floors, & flags winking in an industrial breeze.
2 Their bread aisle, which wrapped horizons, tender clouds of challah, kaiser, croissants; rambutan in the produce section, large custard pies, & a seafood market—perpetually wet with a salt-brine stink, but you dressed up for it: low pumps & pearls on your ears, silky as molars.
3 My sister, cousins, & I—all child-hollers wailed between rows—but you stayed posed, perfectly unbothered, pushed the buggy slow. & when the fish man saw you, sung your sugared name like a soprano—Heyyy Miss Alice—you'd duet, a laughter bubbling up somewhere among the snapper, the whole cold aisle whizzing a tune.
2 I shoulda noticed how lonely it'd be to stop going. After your GM Cadillac gnarled into scrap metal. After the accident. After that stranger blinking satanic in red light. [End Page 118]
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Calling the sun to work, by Lindsay Adams, 2024. Oil on canvas, 48 × 72 in.
[End Page 119]
2 After that, your constant companion became boxed & bulky—a CRT TV propped on a cheap stand in the corner of your room:
3 Joyce Meyer, T. D. Jakes, Kenneth Copeland warbling. The only tunes you'd tend to, till the thin veiled hours shook you into prayer, then you'd turn to QVC.
4 Did you miss how shopping sounded in you? Is it why you bought a leopard-print jacket that didn't fit, made me promise to wear it, which I did—promise, flipping my fingers over the stiff denim, brown & bronze, dark spots flecked across the arms.
5 I loved it but didn't wear it in your lifetime.
3 The night you died, I sat in the dark outside my closet looking to where the jacket hung, waiting for sadness to talon from my throat.
2 I confess I couldn't keep my promise till my early twenties—my sister asked me to take her to a rock concert, & I agreed, though you wouldn't have liked their music, the two of us dressed 80s Madonna-chic, side ponies, mesh dresses & cheap pleather boots, & I decided then to wear the jacket, loved how it bridged the now with what was
3 before me—my sister & I, an act of curl-coiled joy in an emo crowd, sweat licking our brows. Perhaps this is why I wore that jacket—wanted to take you to places you would never know, wanted you close enough
to see, finally, joy: feet leaping, arms
leopard-stamped & reaching for sky. [End Page 120]
Diamond Forde
diamond forde's debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Forde has received a Pink Poetry Prize and a Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and she was a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Forde's work has appeared in Poetry, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more.
期刊介绍:
In the foreword to the first issue of the The Southern Literary Journal, published in November 1968, founding editors Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and C. Hugh Holman outlined the journal"s objectives: "To study the significant body of southern writing, to try to understand its relationship to the South, to attempt through it to understand an interesting and often vexing region of the American Union, and to do this, as far as possible, with good humor, critical tact, and objectivity--these are the perhaps impossible goals to which The Southern Literary Journal is committed." Since then The Southern Literary Journal has published hundreds of essays by scholars of southern literature examining the works of southern writers and the ongoing development of southern culture.