Southern-Fried Sundays
By Nathan Brown in Hobson’s Choice
Edmond, OK: Greystone Press, 2002

Mine was a
Sunday-after-church-fried-chicken-childhood.
Cornbread-n’-squash-casserole-afternoons gave way
to mandarin-orange-Jello-salad-sunsets.
Sweet-potato-evenings by roasted-marshmallow-fires
always left time for devil’d egg-stories
n’home-made-ice-cream-tunes.
guitars were the nuts n’ chocolate sauce
of unenforced bed times.
It was a mythical age when fam’lies stuck together
like day-old steamed white rice.
And laughter was as simple as a tipped-over-lawn-chair
and ashes on the end of a burnt hot dog.

Baptists’ll tell ya’ “church is everything.”
But they all know without saying—
God is in the food
and licked fingers
of a Sunday after noon.

Updated Sunday, March 07, 2004