Paulding County

Everyone who’s always lived here
is friendly to everyone who doesn’t
live in a subdivision. They all remember
when this was just a dirt road, they say,
and it shut down whenever it rained too hard.
Now the roads twist like the lines
on Grandmother’s face, and cars careen
cautiously through like the tributaries
of spit and dip inching down her chin.
Somehow, hordes of same-faced mothers
squeezed their SUV’s on the tar-stuck streets
and picked plots of land to fence in
and keep the farms at bay. You used to have
twenty cows and a vegetable garden.
You’ve since slaughtered eight and a Kroger
opened up on either end of the street.

Your family goes a century back
on these eighty acres, and when you were
the first female born to your family
in five generations, did your parents think
there goes a good thing? How did they
waste their youth? Where did they go
to drink warm beer when the draught of ‘79
dried up the High Shoals waterfall?
To where did they cruise
before it was an easy twenty minute drive
to Waffle House? Did they worry, too,
that Paulding is their oyster, and all the prayer
in the world won’t change the fact they’re sand?

Getting out begets coming back.
All the B students went to Kennesaw,
and the drama kids that fantasized
about Broadway stock shelves at Target
and wish toy boxes were as symmetrical
as the butterfly tattoos on the smalls
of their backs. They can’t fly away either.
But the dropouts still have bonfires every weekend
and can probably still sell you a ten sack
for eight bucks.