Elegy To my Southern Accent

How loud do the bugs need to be, little ones thick and glowing on a porch

wooden and warped from choking humidity, rain stains, rings from glasses of tea?

How much sugar should I add, how about Sweet-n-Low? I’m waiting to be told again

how I don’t have an accent. My mother does, her mother does, and her father too. After that,

we only keep track of the men. My mother’s oldest aunt kept records of our kin, insisting

she’d find that sixteenth Cherokee. I broke my faith looking down all that hot family blood, lines bitter

with too much salt. Grandma first taught me how to cut branches, go find me a switch, gave me

the knife. My mother told her stop, that she had to be sweet forever. We drove to Daleville

to eat at that McDonald’s across from the high school on church Sundays. Over fries

with her oldest sister, I’d read the funnies while they returned to words the new pastor said

about God. They were surprised because he was such a young man: a brother of a classmate,

a cousin somewhere. In this blood, we’re related to everyone here, and no one really died

like they were supposed to. No one shot in a trailer or blown up cooking something nasty.

This baby died, this girl died, so-n-so’s uncle, cousin, daddy, mamma, kin of kin, God-

loving people died. Someone giggling at someone’s floating body, a boy caught in the river’s

current while the children watched. Uncle Joe had an aneurysm working construction,

got on disability. Meth with a needle and spoon cemented him in jail. Alone in that cell,

he was told two days late his mother was soon to die. My grandma, sweet from God

and Coca-Cola and a bowl of Lay’s potato chips every night, who smoked

a pack a day for fifty-nine years, whose tar-filled lungs housed all the deaths

of kin, got cold and hard. Soon she’d stop breathing. Another uncle read the bible,

my mother listening as my grandma convulsed in her hometown hospital bed

as a good, old Southern woman. She loved her family and she loved

God. And the South loves God. And I guess I lost my accent because I don’t love God.