Gayle Ledbetter Newby

Cotton Picked Early
After Frank Stanford

Doesn’t matter how it started.
Water sluicing through the fields,
pointed privilege, lover’s tryst,
you sang them all. River prisons,
throbbing eros cutting through the
endless pain---the halt, the blind,
strange fruit on mottled vines.

 Cup of molten lead.
We remember still.

 

 

Gayle Ledbetter Newby has been published in After the Pause, The Broadkill Review, decomP, the Hiram Poetry Review, Gravel Magazine, Literary Orphans, and others.  Her poetry chapbook, Once Appointed, (Plan B Press) was published in 2017.  She lives in Mississippi.