My Father’s House Had Wheels
for Michael Williams
Somebody ought to chronicle all the pretty
trailers people make in my part of the country—
the ones covered in cedar shakes or paneled
inside with pine. My daddy added
a room onto ours and then my cousin
bought it and put in tongue and groove floors
he’d reclaimed from a cabin falling in
somewhere in the southeastern woods. Woodsmoke
rises out of their creek-rock chimneys,
woodsmoke rises out of my chest. God
is a widow-woman lifting up
her gold-rimmed glasses to wipe at her tears.
ANNIE WOODFORD is a native of the Virginia Piedmont. Her mother’s people moved down from the mountains in the early 20th century to work in the furniture and textile mills that used to dominate the economy of the Piedmont. She earned her MA in Creative Writing from Hollins College and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage, The Southern Review, and Blackbird, among others. A winner of the Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets, she has also been awarded scholarships from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. She teaches at Wilkes Community College in North Carolina.
