Suzette Clark Bradshaw

Suzette Clark Bradshaw from western North Carolina, is a self-taught poet and sculptress. Her poems have appeared in Dead Mule, Branches, Women Speak, and more.

Waiting for the Reckoning

Halfway up the mountain lies an uninherited farm.
Free-range chickens feast along the weed-choked boundaries
while confined red cows search meager pasture grass,
their somber white faces never lifting.

The man who bought the place is scared –
of what he doesn’t know – yet he stacks
his attic with dry beans, bandages, rice;
his cellar overflows with plastic-bottled water.

Every day he practice-fires an automatic rifle
fifty times or more, each single blast
an audible prayer-bead of holy belief –
a foreign mantra forced upon hillside and holler.

He shoots at painted haybale targets – hot
bullets pummel the red-centered eyes
of unidentified foes until nothing remains
but hollowed-out sockets,
ruined winter feed.

Sometimes It’s Just Too Difficult to Discuss a Daughter’s Mental Illness

My fourteen-year-old refrigerator
breaks down again –
five times now in six months,
an apparent flaw
in the self-regulation system.

I got professional help
with the first malfunction,
but the abnormal
cycles of freeze and thaw,
the debilitating
meltdowns with strange sounds,
still come out of nowhere.

I try online DIY solutions–
get it going again.
But then there is another relapse
and the frost dam breaks,
saturating soft butter,
drowning
ham and cheese.

I run into my cousin at Food Lion.
When she asks about my refrigerator,
I confide the challenges.
She hugs me long and hard
then steps back and says her own daughter
has a new therapist, new meds now
and is doing great.

I return home,
find the kitchen floor
flooded. I mop, swab,
wring out towels, hang them
outside on deck rails to dry next
to the thick thorns, delicate pink flowers
of a trellised bougainvillea.