Pictures for a Wedding Book
This article originally appeared in Southern Exposure Vol. 4 No. 4, "Generations: Women in the South." Find more from that issue here.
1969.
I marry the banjo boy.
It is quick:
in our parent’s church,
with his aunt’s ring,
our turquoise-pink-lace
weeping mothers,
our fathers
grim in black;
uncles, aunts,
war hero cousins,
everybody embarrassing
everybody else,
and the banjo boy
as pale and mum
as if he is about to be
wheeled in for surgery.
And I: silly in the virgin white,
saying kind things for once
to my sister, who at fourteen
is five feet ten
and licking her chops
for sex.