Alabama

by Connor Watkins-Xu

I used to say I was a miraculous birth,
some poor child divinely snatched

from a couple in the Boroughs and placed
in my mother’s womb instead. I wasn’t meant

for a Southern accent, and avoided most of it,
except the word buggy for shopping cart,

like my ancestors must have ridden on and on
until the Black Warrior’s song became a start.

Alabama, you taught lessons with bees and heartbreak.
A sting on the eyelid at Snow Hinton Park, lust

for love (Freud might say) divorce planted in me.
You didn’t care for the women’s jeans

I wore when the bling era reigned supreme,
the off-brand Air Forces on my feet while country

cowboys fed their families with factory work,
their boots licked with sparks from welding cars

they couldn’t even drive to the lot. You blew
my swish of bangs into my eyes, depression

into my lungs. The Nigerian sisters at church
said I must be hiding someone behind all that hair.

There were the times I collapsed to the floor
at pastor touch and spirit fall, and all the promises

God gave in that broken place within your bones.
Have you taken them and locked them away with

old skin shed? You saw the seasons when friends
would go mute for a day, make me invisible

for a trick laughed-off last minute, and the gay
jokes shot like arrows towards any flesh left lying

still uncalloused in those underfunded hallways
of no electives and Spanish class broadcast on satellite.

It’s odd to miss the place I couldn’t wait to leave,
Stockholmed nostalgia for rows of corn and wheat

and little groceries changing hands, one-lane roads
leading away, away. How did you make fast food

feel like family tradition in my mother’s dog-tired hands?
Or hunting trips playing my Gameboy in silence, my father

staring out into the daybreak forest, returning home empty-handed?
I wish I could return—little piece of childhood, of sugar-coated

French fries, lighter fluid lit on ripped jeans, of fetish
peddled on P.E. bleachers, and first kisses in rumored

ditches, secrets kept until their power’s gone, where
across the tracks was just another neighborhood

and ambition went to settle down—where I would devour
desire you gave for everything not your crimson soil.


CONNOR WATKINS-XU holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland and a BA from Baylor University. His manuscript “Missing You” was named a semifinalist for the 2023 Tupelo Press Berkshire Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize and scholarships to the Southampton Writers Conference and New York State Summer Writers Institute. His poems have been published in storySouth, MAYDAY, and elsewhere. Originally from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, he currently lives in Seattle. Instagram: @connorwatkinsxu