Two Poems by Patricia “Trix” Watts

I Go Back To the Tale of Charlotte’s Web

My third grade classmates seated around me, 
desks in neat rows and columns, as if each one 
of us were a number on a multiplication table. 

No one knows what we’ll amount to yet, 
but there’s that one boy with a cowlick
who picks at a scab, knocks clods of dirt
from his sneakers. He’s wrapped up in a drama
of his own while the rest of us listen.

We are sons of butchers, daughters of farmers,
some of us runts like Charlotte, at least 
one of us with words unspun inside herself.  

Mrs. Orwig turns the page and I hang my hope 
on the thread Charlotte spins. Something good 
for Wilbur, please. And for the cowlick boy, too, 
I think as my fingers roam the underbelly of my desk 
and land on a lump of gum, hard as death.

When it’s Charlotte who dies, only my tears spill. 
Fingers point, the butcher laughs, even the teacher
has shut the book ready for the next lesson. 
Still I sat, emotions spooling, trying  
to thread us all together.



The Ride


I could have said my father was one, too: 
a truck driver, a man who ferried goods—
corn by the bushel, hogs by the head,
radioactive waste by the barrel--to wherever
it was headed next, places like Sandusky, Ohio
if you happened to be a hog penned for the ride.

A man with the mind of a map and eyes
as blue as the sky who felt the engine roar 
through the thick soles of his boots. All roads
lead somewhere--grain elevators, slaughter houses,
or big holes in the earth: anti-wombs where 
the waste no one wants to be born again lies buried.

Once I watched his big rig roll down the highway, 
one lone barrel chained to the flatbed trailer--a pariah 
of contaminants inside—the scene oddly reminiscent
of a beauty queen waving from the back of a convertible 
except more sinister, this ride to de-throning.

I could have said my father was one to the trucker
on the bar stool next to me, his outstretched hand
a route of deeply paved lines and calloused mounds 
of flesh. But I gripped my stool instead. 

His steely eyes racing with Trucker Speed, his ear 
too close to my mouth, as if the hum of the road 
we were on in that bar were so deafening that 
he’d never hear what I already knew about the ride.

Patricia “Trix” Watts is a retired ESL teacher and language program coordinator, finding her authentic voice writing fiction and poetry. This is among her first non-academic publications.

Photo by Stephen Locke

Guest Editor Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 24 books, including How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems; Miriam’s Well, a novel; and The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body. Founder of Transformative Language Arts, she is offers writing workshops, coaching, and collaborative projects YourRightLivelihood.com with Kathryn Lorenzen, Bravevoice.com with Kelley Hunt, and TheArtofFacilitation.net with Joy Roulier Sawyer. CarynMirriamGoldberg.com.