WORK EXCHANGE IN MISSISSIPPI//Carson Wolfe

South of Taylor, somewhere along the 328,
Cajun James who played bass and decapitated 
copperheads with a shovel. Worked the land 
daily, somehow always had money for PBR, 
just him and his two kids, Mama off in Oxford 
with her new boyfriend. I was a young single 
mother, where I’m from this usually means 
never leaving, but I found a cheap flight 
to New York, left Stretford for the America 
I’d seen in movies. My daughter was four 
when we settled in the garage beneath James’s 
house, we slept in an old metal bunk surrounded 
by broken motorcycle parts that stunk of oil.
For breakfast, I walked barefoot down a dirt
path to collect eggs, as soon as the coffee pot
was empty, we set to drinking, the only time
we left the farm during the week was to drive 
to the nearest walk-in cooler, come Sunday,
we’d head over to Foxfire Ranch, it was tradition 
in Marshall County, to attend church, then dance 
to the blues all evening, James wasn’t religious, 
but he worshipped at the amp of Mississippi,
praised God in the flavours from Annie’s kitchen: 
pulled pork barbeque, pot roast, fried chicken.
Annie said this was soul food, couldn’t understand 
why I was vegetarian, the music brings people here, 
but the food is what keeps’em coming back, what kept me 
coming back was Kingfish, Lightning Malcom,
Watermelon Slim, and Duwayne Burnside inviting
me up to the stage to strum a chord on his guitar.
Our kids chased fireflies, ran wild on the land.

Carson Wolfe (they/she) is a Mancunian poet and winner of New Writing North’s Debut Poetry Prize (2023). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming with Rattle, The Rumpus, The North, New Welsh Review, and Evergreen Review. They are an MFA student of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and currently serve as a teaching assistant on the online writing course Poems That Don’t Suck. Carson lives in Manchester with their wife and three daughters. You can find them at www.carsonwolfe.co.uk.