The Dead Mule needs a few Black history poems. Please do not send poems about white people whose families were “different” from the rest; that isn’t Black history.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Despite being born in central Texas, I was raised among the wheat fields of Oklahoma. Where the lazy hawks swooped through tornado alley and we all would get sick from eating too many crab apples. The land of the Indians, the outlaws domain, and the center of Big XII football was my home for 10 years of my youth. Now, living south of the Red River, I enjoy the winter season in shorts and sandals, a snow cone while Christmas Caroling, and wonder why anyone would want to shovel snow. If that is not enough to prove my southern legitimacy, please note: my grandparents were second cousins!

Retreating Aggressively into the Dark Poems by Harry Calhoun Hi all, Won’t take up a lot of your time, but for those of you within shouting distance of Raleigh, my book is now being carried by Quail Ridge Books. And the bookstore also has a lot of great reading and music and it’s right around [...]

When editors are not editing, they are often engaging other creative pursuits. That’s certainly true for me, Helen Losse, Dead Mule Poetry Editor. Now you might recall that I took a sabbatical last summer. During that time, when I wasn’t reading and posting poems on the Mule, I put together my second full length poetry [...]

SLS: Some of the best days of my life were spent in the state of Virginia.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Although I live up north, my mom was born and raised in Georgia, and most of her side of the family still lives there to this day. We settled up north due to job opportunities, but many parts of the south still remain with us: grits during breakfast, okra for dinner, and boiled peanuts are only a few of those southern delicacies we enjoy as often as possible.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: The first time I went to Tennessee we visited Mud Island and I clearly remember walking in the Mississippi. The second time I was much older and with my wife and we felt skinny and overwhelmed by rocking chairs. Most recently, I learned that Tennessee Williams’ real name was Tom, and that makes me the most sad of all.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I’ve been in the field, I’ve been under the humid, and hot corn canopy, I’ve been roguing out the pigweed. Prickly damned, tough, damned, sticky damned weeds. We can’t let so much of it go to seed, the seed will travel down east from Goldsboro. It’s a nightmare. It’s 106 degrees, and the sweat pours off us drenching our clothing. Finally, it’s lunch time, pulled pork, hushpuppies, and sweet tea. The sun is hazy in the humid sky. We just learned that most sun block is worthless, 100 spf doesn’t mean anything – and tests out to about 8 spf. We aren’t surprised.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Eugene Bruns was a lawyer, but he got better. He currently resides in New Orleans (for the second time) and has lived in Arkansas(thrice, Florida(twice, North Carolina and Alabama. His father was a traveling salesman whose territory was restricted to Louisiana and Mississippi, and Eugene carried sample cases for him while subsisting on a diet strictly restricted to chicken fried steaks. Eugene believes that Instant Grits are a harbinger of doom, grows his own collards and has no respect for anyone who disputes the fact that Hubig Fried Pies are the best in the universe.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
When people ask me—a Northerner—what brought me to the south, I tell them “my ex-husband.” Some twenty years and two kids later I’m still here in north Alabama. I’m now married to a man from Illinois who has also called the hills and hollers of this region home for the past two decades. We liberally pepper our conversation with “y’alls” and drench our chicken in white sauce. I eat fried okra like popcorn and chase it down with sweet tea. Ok, ok, I still say “pop” instead of “Coke” or “soda,” which causes the locals to snicker, but I reckon I’m still accepted as one of their own. Roll Tide!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I moved to the Carolinas during hurricane season a while back. Now I have a hound dog from the pound, a Parkway singlewide with bay windows, and magnolias and gardenia bushes out front.

I never saw a snake climb straight up a tree until I moved here. Big snake, too.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I grew up in southern Kentucky where poke sallet was considered a delicacy and the blackberry squall was something to be feared. My grandparents still slaughter their own hogs, and I prefer riding in the back bed of a pick-up truck to leather upholstery any day. Still to this day it makes me miss home when someone asks “Your last name is Tucker and you’re from southern Kentucky? Well, you must know such and such?”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
As a kid I lived in rural west central Alabama. Artus was just one of many people that were part of my everyday life. It was a good time to be alive.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I currently live in the south… southwest. Things are a little different here than the actual south, but I have seen a mule here (not dead).

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Some may think Texas is not necessarily a legitimate part of the South, but I once almost picked up a copperhead in an East Texas corncrib and I’ve eaten Black Diamond melons before the 4th of July in a hot sand field my granddaddy plowed with a team of mules.

I left Texas many times but I’ve always returned and sit at home in the Texas hill country right now. It’ll likely be my final resting place.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

While my body is in New York, my mind is elsewhere; stuck with the likes of Atticus Finch and the dreaded Snopes family. Southern literature has always be a consistent part of my constantly growing reading list, and I carry my Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor nearly everywhere I go. The short story included here, “The Collector” is set in the South, a land perhaps similar to that of O’Connor, and I think that remembering that as great as we are, there are somethings we can’t just win against. Hopefully this story carries that message.

My father was born in Florala Alabama, and although the Navy shipped him north around the time I was born, I grew up on stories of my Grandma whacking gators in the head with her purse and Grandpa shooting rattlers right between the eyes on orange dirt roads deep in panhandle country.

My Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My great great grandparents on both sides of my family arrived in TX from Germany & Austria in 1850. My maternal grandparents were born in Round Top TX; paternal grandparents born in Caldwell TX. My father was born in Cooks Point TX, my mother in Dime Box TX. I was also born in Dime Box TX and have lived in Texas all of my life.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I have spent my entire life below the Mason-Dixon Line. Yes, Maryland is part of the South. Even if my early years were spent in the city of Baltimore, my Tennessee grandmother kept us fed on southern classics when we ate dinner with her every Sunday. Each move I have made has brought me further into the South. I bore my own children in Richmond, Virginia, and then moved them to our current location in the buckle of the Bible belt here in Salisbury, NC – sweet taters, Cheerwine, and persimmon puddin!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

You may blame my Yankee mother when I pour milk and sugar on my grits, but it’s actually my Southern father who hates the cheesy, peppery, gravy-thick, “true” Southern kind. And maybe that’s the point of my legitimacy statement: we’re more than a collection of stereotypes, more than our collards and black-eyed peas, more than our Tennessee Williams and Flannery O’Connor, more than our ass-backward politicians and televangelists and stubborn pride in relatives who fought on the wrong side of a long lost and regrettable war. I am a Southerner, a Floridian, an atheist and a vegetarian. I drink horchata and sweet tea. I listen to Trick Daddy and Loretta Lynne. I love these Southern contradictions, my heritage, but, heaven help me, I don’t like grits.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My wife and I are not presently living in the South; I wish at times we were. My wife lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee for a year or more. She didn’t quite pick up the accent, however. Oh, and all my ex’s live in Texas, just don’t tell my wife.

We hope to move soon to Tennessee, when I retire in one more year. I am living in New York State, but some of my relatives are still living in the South; three nieces and a nephew. My younger brother lived in Savanna, Georgia for years before moving up North. I loved the music, the food, and the people I had met, when I previously spent time down South. I have no living parents, so someone from the South could most certainly adopt me. Why not? Cheers.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Although I was not born in The South, I have often regretted that fact.

I not only know where the Mason-Dixon Line is, I know what it is,

I have been in each of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia at least twice. I have written about Louisiana and South Carolina. I have consumed, and enjoyed, both bourbon and sour mash.

Grits are certainly one of the foods I enjoy. I admit that I prefer them fried.

I can now add, proudly, that I have written of mules.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’ve lived in the South all my life–southeast Georgia, in fact–and currently live so far in the sticks that the turkey buzzards feed on the other turkey buzzards that have lost a vehicular battle of one sort or another.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I keep my poems in a carpetbag. And I keep that carpetbag in another, larger one. Both carpetbags were handed down to me by one of my relatives. I don’t know which one it was. Because they wouldn’t tell me. However, if I ever do find out, I’ll be sure to let you know, as I feel that this is the kind of information that should be shared. I keep both carpetbags in a closet where I also keep a small scale replica of Ft. Sumpter. The closet is in a room overlooking the backyard in which my own mule was buried not too long ago. We needed a special license to bury him there, but didn’t bother getting it. So maybe you can send us one of yours. After all, we feel that’s what friends are for. And we’re unanimous in agreeing that your license, printed on that lovely vellum, would look great on the wall in the room where we store the oats.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

When our white mule, Kate, died, us kids cried a little … no more climbing up on her back. Far sadder was Victory, our milk cow, following the slide up the road with old Kate being pulled by a younger mule, to her resting place. Victory followed as far as the barbwire fence would allow, lowing, moaning, mourning.

Southern born and bred, farm fed, I went away but came back to my roots.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

When people ask me—a Northerner—what brought me to the south, I tell them “my ex-husband.” Some twenty years and two kids later I’m still here in north Alabama. I’m now married to a man from Illinois who has also called the hills and hollers of this region home for the past two decades. We liberally pepper our conversation with “y’alls” and drench our chicken in white sauce. I eat fried okra like popcorn and chase it down with sweet tea. Ok, ok, I still say “pop” instead of “Coke” or “soda,” which causes the locals to snicker, but I reckon I’m still accepted as one of their own. Roll Tide!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

It was 106 degrees, I was under the corn where the air does not move, pouring sweat and roguing out the pigweed. Lunch was pulled pork, and sweet tea, and hush puppies. Then back to the corn; back to the pigweed—our arms itch, it’s summer in Goldsboro, NC.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I live in NC and eat grits. When I lived in CT, I had no idea what a grit was. My favorite dish is officially shrimp and grits. I also eat biscuits not from a can but from legitimately southern Bojangles chicken franchise or Biscuitville. I think about snow that we don’t get much of and love the 70 degree weather when we can get it.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I live in Tennessee and hail previously from Alabama and Mississippi.

My submission is about past life in the rural south.

I can recognize the Mason-Dixon Line.

We all took our holiday meals at the home of Mama Too and Daddy Will, our maternal grandparents.

The preacher came to dinner twice a year after church service at Shady Grove Methodist.

Both my grandfather and my grandmother dipped snuff.

Daddy Will always sipped his coffee from a saucer.

We had a barn, several chicken houses and a smoke house for curing meats.

A mule named Molasses does play a small role in my poem.

Our personal food pyramid included lard fried apple and peach turnovers, banana cakes (with ripe bananas used as the frosting – they turned really brown after a day or two), turnip greens and cornbread, unpasteurized cow’s milk, and churned butter. We were allowed to buy cokes and cupcakes when “the Peddler” came to our farm on Wednesdays in a yellow school bus.

We had no running water and an outhouse, at both my home and my school. We drank water from a well, picked cotton, chewed sweet-gum pulled from trees, and used the smelly lye soap made by my Mama Too’s strong, sacred hands.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Although I have not personally lived in the south, my father is originally from southern Texas, and the times my father has taken me and my family to his old home town have been fun. I have a deep appreciation for southern literature from famous writers like Mark Twain and William Faulkner.