Recipe for Blackberry Cake

Carol Donley

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781612772202
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Recipe for Blackberry Cake is a collection of poems about women's lives—poems about girlhood, about mothers and daughters, about how relationships between women are distorted by violence in the home. The poems tell the stories of four generations of women, beginning in the coal camps of West Virginia in the late 1940s and ending in a shopping mall in Ohio some 50 years later. At the heart of the collection is the choice to tell how dangerous and how brave the lives of our mothers, grandmothers, and daughters have been.

II

It is almost too long ago to remember—

when I was a woman without children,

a person, really, like a figure standing in a field.

—Sharon Olds

SAY YOU ARE ALL ALONE

Everyone you love is gone—

not in a bad way, but through

some happy circumstance, something

kind of wonderful sent them off,

left you here in your good house

for six months, say,

maybe a year. Who knows

what all you might do?

You might walk everywhere.

You might do one thing

all day long. Every day

you could remember something

about how you walked

to school, what your mom said

to wake you, the thing

your mamaw did

when you were leaving.

You could write it all in your book—

what you love about a road, the way

it follows after you, a short-legged

and faithful little dog that slows

your steps. Or about how snow

from the field, your favorite

shortcut, packed cold

into red boots and stuck to socks

in small, odd clumps, like pills

on an old sweater. How your mamaw

watched your small face grow smaller

in the rear window, as the car

bumped down off the hill.

How you loved her.

You could settle quietly

on your porch in the company

of your own good heart, lean

far into the evening,

let each skein of your life

unspool into its poem.

ROOM 19, EAKIN ELEMENTARY

There’s a boys’ line and a girls’ line

in Miss Sharp’s room, and line leaders.

Three reading groups—Lions, Tigers, and Zebras.

Miss Sharp tells you once,

then it’s up to you—Remember what you are.

It’s not allowed visiting with your neighbor.

It’s not allowed poking your pencil

through your milk carton for the straw,

you get lead poisoning.

It’s not allowed telling what you dreamed

for sharing, you have to bring something

people can see. You have to write

with fat pencils that make you

write slower. When you write capital letters,

go almost to the top line, but don’t

touch it, it’s poison. When it’s free time,

you have to use it wisely. When it’s recess,

girls hold hands and march

between the tetherballs, teachers, and boys,

and they sing with their faces

pushed out real far—

We don’t stop for nobody

We don’t stop for nobody

DOES NOT USE FREE TIME
WISELY

Color pictures 1–10 and underline the ones that start with F. Number 1 on the phonics paper is a fan, F. It’s a lacy fan, so it should be white. It’s shell-shaped, with lots of circle, triangle, thin oval shapes, and wavy line shapes drawn inside it for the lace. It’s hard not to color in the air between the lace. The ladies at my Grandma’s church in West Virginia have fans, but they’re cardboard, round-corner...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Way Home to West Virginia
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• Notes