by Debra Daniel
Some things will never be in my poems, like plaid. Although the old back road to the beach — the one with squares of tobacco and corn, two-lane blacktops, red clay firebreaks — wove a plaid landscape I liked. And at my high school’s holiday formal, I wore a Christmas plaid skirt and satin blouse. We posed next to the tree. Me with hair slicked into a twist so tight it wrenched a grin my eyes disowned. Plaid may have a place in fiction where no one cares if it makes a woman’s hips appear larger, but plaid is too plainspoken for poems.
I will not write poems about taxes. Although the giddiness of April itself can inspire even the boys at the Bowman hunt club to quote Shakespearean sonnets, and precise accountants questioning hotel receipts can expose deception enough to fill a steamy novel; but my first year single again I had to pay additional taxes, sold the silver trays once wedding gifts. That’s a story maybe, but not a poem.
Then there’s my ex-husband and how he drove so fast on trips that I could not admire the scenery much less nap, but he would doze whenever I took the wheel, and how the morning a few weeks before the divorce he slipped into the bathroom while I showered, took the ruby ring — the one with the cluster of diamonds from his late mother’s watchband — sneaked it without a word from the easy neck of the swan soap dish on the sink. I would have returned it anyway.
No, my ex-husband has no business in any poem of mine, especially considering the last time we met to calculate our taxes — already divorced half a year, filing separately, untying our ends for Uncle Sam. He got a refund, but I had to pay.
Imagine H&R Block, April, him wearing that damn plaid suit.
(Debra A. Daniel was named the SC Arts Commission Fellow in Poetry for 2006 and previously in 1994. Her poem, “Hymn of Invitation” won the 2002 Guy Owen Prize. She has also been awarded fellowships in poetry and fiction from the SC Academy of Authors. From the Poetry Society of SC, she has been awarded the Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Society Prize, the Lyric Prize, the Post and Courier Prize, the Broulik Prize, the Carruthers Prize, the Rutledge Prize, the Peale Prize, and the Doyle Prize. In 2006, her poems held two of the twenty places as finalists in both the SC Poetry Initiative and the Inkwell competitions. Her fiction has won six SC Fiction Project prizes and was included in Inheritance: an Anthology of Fiction Project Winners. She received a scholarship in fiction to attend Squaw Valley Community of Writers and has been a featured reader at Francis Marion University, the Black Cat Readings in Salisbury, NC, the Savannah Poetry Rendezvous, the Sundown Poetry Series at Piccolo Spoleto, and the Inkwell reception to honor its 2006 issues. She has served as a member the steering committee and has taught for the Lt. Governor’s Academy of Young Authors. Her work has been published in Kakalak, Emrys Journal, Pequin.org, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Gargoyle, The Poetry Society of SC Yearbook, The State newspaper, the Charleston Post and Courier, Inheritance: Selections from SC Fiction Project Winners, and Twenty SC Poetry Fellows.)
