by Tina Mozelle Braziel

never fruits. Yet each March blossoms burst
along every branch raised over our neighbors’
bed of daffodils and glinting windmill art.

Its pale petals screen dark limbs, a bridal veil
drawing attention to what’s obscured.
Alive and flowering, it’s unlike the windthrows

or widow-makers Nick usually offers us to cut
and haul to our woodpile. Generous to a fault,
he grins as if we’re doing him the favor.

He says it has been pretty and still is. Tells us
they planted it on their wedding day. But now
that Judy says it’s invasive, it has to go.

Married four years to their twenty, what do we know
of when to hew and root out a beginning,
of how to save all that has been cultivated since?

We know oak burns steady. Dogwood catches quick.
Sweetgum is nearly impossible to split. Poplar
puts out too little heat. And flowering pear?

What else can we say? But that we need fire
and wood to feed it. We’ll haul it home,
fill our stove, learn something of how it burns.

____________________________________________________________

Tina Mozelle Braziel won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for Known by Salt (Anhinga Press), and her book, Glass Cabin (Pulley Press), co-authored by her husband James Braziel, was named Southern Literary Review’s 2024 Poetry Book of the Year. A meditation on hope, on frustration, and on people’s places in the wilder parts of the world, Glass Cabin chronicles the thirteen years the Braziels spent building their home by hand in rural Alabama.

by Tina Mozelle Braziel

by Tina Mozelle Braziel

never fruits. Yet each March blossoms burst

along every branch raised over our neighbors’

bed of daffodils and glinting windmill art.

Its pale petals screen dark limbs, a bridal veil

drawing attention to what’s obscured.

Alive and flowering, it’s unlike the windthrows

or widow-makers Nick usually offers us to cut

and haul to our woodpile. Generous to a fault,

he grins as if we’re doing him the favor.

He says it has been pretty and still is. Tells us 

they planted it on their wedding day. But now

that Judy says it’s invasive, it has to go.

Married four years to their twenty, what do we know

of when to hew and root out a beginning, 

of how to save all that has been cultivated since?

We know oak burns steady. Dogwood catches quick.

Sweetgum is nearly impossible to split. Poplar

puts out too little heat. And flowering pear?

What else can we say? But that we need fire

and wood to feed it. We’ll haul it home,

fill our stove, learn something of how it burns. 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tina Mozelle Braziel, author of Known by Salt (Anhinga Press) and Rooted by Thirst (Porkbelly Press), has been awarded the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, an Alabama State Council on the Arts fellowship, and an artist residency at Hot Springs National Park. She directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at UAB. She and her husband, novelist James Braziel, live and write in a glass cabin that they are building by hand on Hydrangea Ridge.