We just filled the last slot in the Summer Issue of the Dead Mule, online June 15.  We’ll have another 20 poets in that issue.  But poetry submissions are closed until after the 4th of July. Please DO NOT SEND POEMS before July 5.

Editor’s Note:

What could be more southern than a Poet Laureate of a Southern State? Each April the Dead Mule endeavors to publish one of these special poets atop its list of fine poets. This year’s honor goes to Sue Brannan Walker, Poet Laureate of Alabama. Sue is the fifth in the Dead Mule’s April Poet Laureate Series. She has published prose in the Dead Mule, but these are her first poems.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I think that the prettiest woman were raised in trailers.
I think it is pathetic that any man would pay more that $6 for a 12 pack.
I do not consider hookworms or chiggers as evil.
I think gator tail nuggets are best with real Louisiana Hot Sauce.
I recently added to my bucket list: Spend a weekend working with a certified Florida Gator Trapper.

Southern Legitimacy Statement #6:

My daddy used to say that if you ever felt lonely, run naked through a patch of weeds. “There ain’t nothing like a family of chiggers to remind you that you’re not alone,” he’d say, with a chuckle. I don’t know whether or not he was speaking from personal experience, but I can tell you one thing: A mason jar of moonshine will make you do foolish things.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and bred barefooted on mill hills and the concrete yards of trailer parks in and out of McAdenville, North Carolina, better known as Christmas town, U.S.A. In the 70’s, I ran around as a lint-headed tow-head, chasing lightening bugs for my Mt. Olive Dill Pickle jar and shoving Charles “Charlie” chips in my mouth by fist-full. My favorite memories (played back in sepia, of course) would be squirting each other with the hosepipe; being way down at the river pulling up cattails; playing kickball or jump rope ‘till twilight where mommy would whistle us home for supper – a big pot of pintos, turnip greens and cracklin’ cornbread. Poetry/song/play followed me around and were my best friends. When I got older, I ran off to college (a family first) where I majored in Theatre Arts Education and minored in English. When the International Phonetic Alphabet helped me remove my Southern accent for the stage, I had to lay it on even thicker around my folks or I’d be misunderstood!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I love shrimp and grits better than anything except my sister. I live in NC and love the heat and even the snow that comes from southern skies. When it snows, I don’t leave my house even when it’s only 1 inch. I’ve learned to be southern. I hunker down and wait for the sun to melt the ice off my car so I don’t have to scrape it.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I live in North Carolina, which is often considered to be in the South—at least some portions of it. We go back to our former home in Madison, just a bit north of Greensboro (where we live now) and eat Fuzzy’s Barbecue, along with hushpuppies and cole slaw. When I was 12, I lived in a country called Brooklyn where folks talked funny, but soon was able to translate for my mother, a Virginian. I listen to country blue-grass when I feel my pulse begin to weaken, and it peps me right up. I like fried chicken and home-made tater salad and lots of greens. My Daddy came from Davidson county, not far from here. I think my family, just like me, are genuine Southerners and this is our loyalty, along with hollering for Carolina Heels.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

So there I was, minding my own business in my big garden just outside of Mobile. You don’t know this, because you’re not really from the South, but that coastal strip has all four kinds of poisonous snakes. Cottonmouths, Coral Snakes, Copperheads, Rattlers. One spring, I was tilling up the melon patch, getting ready for planting, and tilled up a whole nest of baby Copperheads. Geez, there were pieces everywhere! Anyway, this particular day, I was walking by the bench I set right at the edge of the forest, down near the sassafras tree, and I heard a rattle. Now, when your garden is between a stream and a forest, you’d better always have a shovel nearby, and I had several. I was never more than a few steps away from one, even though I also carried a machete on my belt loop. But when I looked down and saw the size of that rattler, there was no way I was going to just swing a machete at it. It was as big around as my leg, ten feet long if it was an inch, and all coiled up, ready to strike. The air was hot, so I knew it would be fast, and I’d only get one shot. It was coiled on an old rotten stump. I hit it with the sharpened shovel as hard as I could, and the whole scene collapsed into a big hole I didn’t know was there: stump, snake, most of the shovel.

I didn’t go back for the shovel until the next day. That makes me an honorary Southerner. Only a Yankee would try to wrestle the shovel from that snake!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Legitimate? Why I once stayed two nights at the Grand Hotel in Hazard, Kentucky. When asked how I would pay replied, “American Express.” The night manager looked at me and said, “Fella, when you come up up here you can leave home without it!” I have fly-fished the Watauga; savored succulent Lexington Style BBQ; crossed the Bonner Bridge to the Outer Banks and ferried out of Okracoke. I’ve been towed by the Coast Guard from Shackleford Banks and been stranded for hours in a half-inch snowfall less than a mile from my home. I met two elderly sisters in the Mississippi Delta whose mother had given them the same exact name. Why I’ve even been known to say, “Ya’ll.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’m not Southern by birth or accent, though I’ve spent almost half my life below the Mason-Dixon, and my wife tells me my voice sometimes slips into twang—particularly when I’m eating barbecue or chicken wings. I haven’t converted to Southern Baptist, though some of my best friends are Baptists, nor have I abandoned my roots as a lifelong Steeler fan, though I will confess to a mild subversion by the NASCAR culture that has driven me to a minor lust for horsepower. I think my attitude is what makes me most Southern. Not the part about being overtly polite regardless of what I really think; the part about always being right. Yeah, I think that’s where the bulk of my Southern-ness resides, being right.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

This is my fourth Southern Legitimacy Statement. One thing I know for sure: once the South is in you, it is in you _____________:
A. obstinately
B. persistently
C. joyfully
D. inspiringly
E. definingly
F. insidiously
G. parasitically
H. consumptively
I. regeneratively
J. All of the above

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

If being born in North Carolina is not enough, I claim Southern Legitimacy by virtue of the following loves of my life: shrimp and grits, not just grits made with water but the kind made with cream, and garnished with a slice or two of andouille, washed down with a good Pinot Grigio; fried green tomatoes, homemade biscuits with sawmill gravy, string beans seasoned with a little fatback or bacon grease (very bad for you, I know, but don’t you hate it when the restaurant serves you haricots vert that are practically raw?); visits to Charleston; vacations at Myrtle Beach; pulling for the Carolina Panthers (even when they suck) and being on one side or the other of any of the following college football rivalries: UNC vs. N.C. State (or Duke), South Carolina vs. Clemson, Georgia vs. Georgia Tech, or LSU vs. Old Miss.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I hearby swear that even though I live in New Jersey, which some cartoon characters pronounce as Joisey, I do think about the South at least once a day and I do know where the Mason-Dixon line is, unless somebody went and moved it. Also, my personal food pyramid contains sweet tea ’n and cheese biscuits.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’m an ecstatic transplant… from the cold dull winters of Michigan to the lovely mild seasons of Atlanta. Summer is even more wonderful when I spend it in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Catfish, sweet potato fries and biscuits now play a major role in my diet, while contra-dancing burns off the calories. However, after almost 30 years in the South, I still can’t say y’all convincingly, much to my chagrin.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. I was educated at the University of Tennessee and the University of Southern Mississippi. I was in the same graduating class at USM as Jimmy Buffett. I have lived in West Tennessee, South Mississippi and Eastern North Carolina, where I taught as a Professor of Biology at East Carolina University for 39 years. I just recently retired, living on a Preserve/Farm in Falkland, NC where 5 colleagues of mine and I were funded as conservations buyers to protect the creek and forest habitat from development. A bunch of carpetbaggers were going to put in a golf course and pollute Otter Creek and the Coastal Land Trust funded us as Biologists to “preserve” the beautiful habitat. I have a wife and 3 children, all of which have graduated (or soon will) from southern Universities as well. My great grandfathers fought for the Confederacy during the war of northern aggression. I am also both a cook and chef, specializing in southern and continental cuisines as well as entomophagy.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Ok, it’s happened. It’s taken me twenty some years in the South, but I have finally determined that yankees sound peculiar—like they’re pinching their noses when they talk. Hey, I’m not making fun of you northerners, I’m one of ya! Or I was anyway until I decided y’all just talk funny.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in the Southern part of North Brockton, in the South Shore area of Massachusetts, to parents who may as well have been Southern rednecks given their politics. I lived in East Durham during the 1980s, heated by a coal stove—I thought the fumes were supposed to flow out like smoke from a dry ice machine. I could say I was so poor I swaddled myself with collard leaves and slept on a bed of sausage gravy, but I’m not looking for pity.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Echols County, long the least populous county of Georgia but in recent years having lost that title, was named for a gentleman who, reportedly incensed by his brother-in-law’s death at the Alamo, volunteered for military service against Mexico and died there by falling from his horse. Years later, his bones were returned to North Georgia, where, years later, also reportedly, a Jim Walter home was built on top of his gravesite. West of the Okefenokee on the Florida line, divided by the mighty Alapaha river, Echols County gave some people, including me, a decent childhood.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I can legitimately claim Southernership due to my native Floridian status, my conviction that no one on the planet has ever fried okra or creamed corn better than my late grandmother (no breading for her, thank you very much), and my creed that good manners are next to godliness…in addition to other reasons too numerous to list here.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up in Wilmington, NC, and, before I moved out West, achieved any number of Southern-certifying tasks, including: drinking Cheerwine and RC Cola, stealing Krispy Kreme doughnut shipments from outside the Rose’s Dept. Store, before it opened in the a.m., and biking away no-handed eating them out of the box, breaking limbs on a skimboard, skateboard, the stage (Shakespeare, Moliere) and a running flip into Cape Hatteras surf, favoring grits with red-eye gravy, putting peanuts into a bottles of Mountain Dew to chug, performing at bluegrass festivals, anti-nuke rallies, anti-death-squad rallies, rockfests, and numerous squalid coffeehouses, and founding and directing the NC Writers Network.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born way yonder in the hills of East Tennessee. When you live in Tennessee, East gets capitalized. I ran away from home at age 25 and moved to Memphis, knowing nothing about the place except that I loved the blues, and truth be told I felt a little blue. A decade later I still live in Memphis, and truth be told I still feel a little blue. I got a Ph.D. and tried to become a sophisticate but the southern Appalachia upbringing keeps rearing its head, like when I say things such as, “rearing its head,” or when I crumble up day old cornbread and cram it into a tall, clear glass, pour milk over it and eat it like it’s cereal. I grew up listening to my mom’s stories of Pineknot and Stearns, Kentucky, of coalminers and farmers, a family lawyer, and folk who done plumb ran out, and to this day I still am trying to figure out who the heck the people are she keeps talking about in those stories. I reckon, they be ghosts populating a worn-out town. I sure glad I met ‘em.