Rachel Richardson was born and raised in Berkeley, California. Her first book, Copperhead, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in spring 2011. Her poems have appeared in the New England Review, Slate, Southern Review, Ninth Letter,Blackbird, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan and an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina. Her […]
Somewhere on the road is everything you want: cantaloupe, okra, roast peanuts overflowing their bags. Muscadine jelly and moonshine syrup, each in a heavy glass jar. Everything rises: mayhaw choked by cane. Thank your rubber tires and the smooth coins in your palm. Thank your grandfather and his battalions of boys. The road here to […]
From the first it was Let’s pretend and the game had a beat behind it, sinewy and breathing. She belted praises in the Baptist choir. The Latin boys at the Quick Stop watched her walk, and her math teacher leaned close to her desk, examining her proof. She smelled like watermelons, blushed when they voted […]
In the distance, wild blue cane, the fugitive strain. He bows in them old cotton fields back home. Angola: twelve-bar blues, fiber thick in his fist and the law cuts him deals, leads him in and out of farms. The boll is parenthesis, the weevil his voice. And the city takes him back, in soot-stained […]
Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, 1997 To highway-road, to rock-build. To tree-split, fence-string, hammer. Prisoner porter, prisoner freight. To hammer, to hammer. You hold bags open, you funnel the sand. You tie them closed and load here, to the truckbed. Prisoner faithful, prison of storms. To harbor and winnow, to salvage. Your mothers unmothered, you bolster. […]
My grandmother is not hurting anyone. Blackberry and dewberry vines will cover all this in a month or two. King’s Jambalaya Café and the Lucky Lady Lounge. Thursday, I wrote. Call Grand Hotel Avoyelles. AAA. My grandmother’s gas checks come the first of the month. When you catch a snapping turtle, you have to cut […]
No one’s heard of the man I’ve invented to marry, from another parish and all dressed in rags, no hat on his head and no coat, either. No one’s heard his walking step, the way his boots drag against the dirt like steel balls, like his feet are his binding, like he’s coming for me […]
Rachel Richardson talks about the form of her poem “Leadbelly in Pinstriped Suit.”