Sing Unburied, Sing
by Jesymn Ward
"The goat smells like beef when it boils. It even looks like it, too, dark and stringy in the pot. Pop pokes it with a spoon, testing the tenderness, and cocks the lid crooked so that steam billows in the air." pg. 16
"I pull out the pack and Michael looks as if he wants to turn and run--and then like I am holding his favorite food, macaroni and cheese, and he wants to eat. Instead, he grabs my hand and pulls me toward him, surrounds me, breathes heavy into the hair at my temple, making it flutter. Five minutes later, we are high." pg. 148
"Dying young? Never finding love? Or if I lived, bent by hard work and hard living? Growing old with my mouth twisted and bitter at the taste of what I'd been accorded in the feast of life: mustard greens and raw persimmons, sharp with unfulfilled promise and loss?" pg. 40
"Then they go off to Riv's garden and pick strawberries and blackberries and weed until the sun is high. They eat berries from the bush. I expect to see a winged shadow over them, but there is nothing but this: the garden, green and sweet. LIfe-giving flowers, ushering forth sweetness and fruit." pg. 239
"Mam always made me red velvet birthday cake. She began when I was one. When I was four, I knew it well enough to ask for it: said red cakeand pointed to the picture on the box on the shelf in the grocery store. The cake Leonie brought is small, about the size of both of my fists together." pg. 27
"Me and Kayla eat crackers and pimento cheese and some smothered chicken legs Pop got in a skillet on the stove, wash it down with water. I think about putting Kayla in the tub but then I hear the shower, and when I hear Mam's and Leonie's voices in the room and see Pop's lighter flash on the porch, I know it's Michael." pg. 220
"He cuts little slivers of butter and slides them into the steaming insides of the biscuits he mixes and kneads and bakes. The butter melts and oozes out of the side, and I would give anything to taste bread made with such care: I imagine it moist and crumbly." pg. 239
"When Al handed Michael the sandwiches, Al was sweating all over, damp with salt and smelling like raw onions. He'd packed the sandwiches in a small hard plastic bag, a portable cooler with a Chimay logo printed on the side. 'We don't want to take your bag,' Michael said. 'I insist,' Al said, his breath shuttering in and out of him fast, his eyes everywhere: the woods, the yard, the house sinking in gentle decline. Al was high again." pg. 152
"I slide a pack of saltines and two bottles of juice I stole out of that house into my own plastic bag.... I hand one cracker to Kayla and slide one into my mouth. We eat like that: one for me and one for her. I let the saltines turn mealy and soggy on my tongue before chewing and swallowing so I don't crunch. I am silent and stealthy in another way." pg. 89
"I palm two bottles of Powerade and set them on the counter. The woman smiles, and I realize she's missing her two front teeth, and a scar meanders in a scratchy line across her head. I wonder if she just has bad teeth, or if whoever gave her that scar knocked them out." pg. 99
"I stare at the glass, imagining how wet and fizzy a cold drink would be, swallowing against the parched closure of my throat: dry as a rocky river wash in drought. My spit is thick as paste. I look back at the clerk and she's watching me, so I take the biggest Coke and don't even try to slip another in my pocket." pg. 65
