what i know for sure

1.  recipe: crab salad and dump cake

2. wherein I’m naked in a stark-barren field, surrounded by black, Novembered trees; standard-issue, late-90s bush modestly obscured by my mother’s folded hands, as if in prayer to the spirits that always inhabited her, for some reason, as the moon; her face exploded into my belly, hips, and right thigh; the remnants of her high cheekbones and lined lips hovering my navel, a hole to nowhere; my hands rolled into fists stuffed with ferns and tulip-tree petals; the havoc of the wind

3.   Corsicana Daily Sun, Monday, April 8, 1968 

4.   the price of a bushel of apples, of peaches, of cherries, of pumpkins fed with milk in the years before I was born

5.   in the wet heat of August, the pores of her skin sidle up to every exotic draught of Michigan wind allowed through the orchard branches; there are new kittens sunning in the drive and she watches as men hang slick tubes of bratwurst over clothesline; she wanders the orchard peering through the windows of the workers’ cabins, running her hands over the scattered tractors, cherry-pickers, marvels over the decadent evil of the reaper’s trailer; she asks someone where the foreman the boss or whoever hires people is and he leads her to my father weaving wire through a broken bushel basket

Nicole Mason teaches writing and literature in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She's a poetry editor at Third Coast Magazine and her work has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Slipstream, Crab Creek Review, Five-2-One, and others.