High Horse

Turkey Vultures        

by Tina Mozelle Braziel

All afternoon, vultures

  glide over the ridge,

turn and dive, tilting

  to rise and circle.

All day, no one holds the ladder

  as I climb up to keep

the skylight’s pane in place,

  as you climb down for a drill,

more screws, something else we forgot

  or keep getting wrong.

Not one vulture flaps a wing.

  They just stretch out

wide into all that blows against them.

  Let that be you. Let that be me.

Let that wind fly right in our faces.

September Prayer                                        

by James Braziel

Wake up, set hands to measure, saw-cuts and branch-scrapes scabbed over, tendonitis in the right elbow getting tighter with each hammer strike. This is the arm for power and chigger bites we never feel until the red knots swell into itches at 3AM. For now, you square frames in one corner. I lift glass into walls. We have to get dried-in by winter. So hang with me, baby. Ride ‘em Radiators to get warmed up when a cold front shoots through. And look at the long rafters holding ceiling boards steady. Don’t you know impossible? Everything we’ve done so far, this wood cut by steel, is coming into being. 

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Tina Mozelle Braziel is the author of Known by Salt (Anhinga Press), winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and Rooted by Thirst (Porkbelly Press). She has been awarded a fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, an artist residency at Hot Springs National Park, and the first Eco-Poetry Fellow for Magic City Poetry Festival. She and her husband, novelist James Braziel, live and write in a glass cabin that they are building by hand on Hydrangea Ridge. Their collaborative collection of poems, Glass Cabin, will be released in 2024 by Pulley Press.

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James Braziel’s most recent book, This Ditch-Walking Love, tells the stories of people living on Alabama’s Cumberland Plateau. Ditch-Walking is the winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award (Livingston Press, 2021). He is also the author of the novels Birmingham, 35 Miles (Bantam, 2008) and Snakeskin Road (Bantam, 2009) about the survivors of an environmental disaster in the future South. He has received fellowships from Hot Springs National Park and from Georgia and Alabama’s arts councils. He and his wife, poet Tina Mozelle Braziel, are currently completing Glass Cabin, a book of poems about their life in rural Alabama building a home by hand. Glass Cabin will be released in 2024 (Pulley Press).