Uncle John
By Sean Hill (’99-’01)

That was the year
Granddaddy Thomas died
Left the family worse than broke

Uncle John stole a ham
from Mr. Ennis's Meat Market
He was seventeen

Lost his taste for it
locked up
fourteen years

Ham salt cured and earth-red
sliced with the fat hanging on
yellow sunshine on a white plate
The hambone cut crosswise
rings marrow
a dark eye
All in the skillet
making gravy for grits

Lost the taste for all things salt
The ocean he hasn't seen
Woman and man

He don't never want to see
no more ham on his plate
Hates pigs
Was hard for him
Hates white folks too

Time off for good behavior
They didn't hold him to the last six.

He's a hog farmer
only eats beef and chicken and turkey
fish turtle and rabbit
squirrel possum and coon
and he seasons his greens with smoked oxtails

Can't raise white folks to slaughter.

Copyright © Sean Hill. All rights reserved. Used with permission of the author.

A native of Milledgeville, Georgia, and Finalist for the 2006 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Sean Hill currently lives in Bemidji, Minnesota. He earned an M.F.A. from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where he was awarded the 2003 Michener Fellowship for poetry. He has also been awarded the Academy of America Poets Prize, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2000 and 2001 as a Waiter Scholar and a Working Scholar. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, Painted Bride Quarterly, Indiana Review, lyric poetry review and Pleiades, as well as in the anthology Blues Poems (Everyman's Library). In 2004 he was awarded a grant by the Region 2 Art Council of Minnesota. Most recently he was awarded a 2005 Bush Artist Fellowship from the Bush Foundation.

Copyright © 1997-2006 by Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

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