192
2020
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2019 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY EMILY BANKS
Credit Where It’s Due Most of the time, saying grace is just a way to thank a man for what a woman made. I mean, go ahead and thank Jesus for your salvation if you want, but not for standing on his feet over a hot stove, chopping carrots, stirring herbs, pouring broth into a pot. Women were on that long before his storied birth. They say Mary could make a stew so thick and tender it would seduce God himself. Don’t they say that? I wasn’t raised to say grace, but I was raised to thank my mother. I was raised to secret the burnt bits and tougher parts of vegetables into my mouth before serving a meal. So if a woman swallows every imperfection in the world to make your table look like something Jesus himself would have set, if he ever set a table in his life, thank her. You never know how it will all spill out. What if one day she opens her mouth to speak and a life’s worth of scraps she hid inside herself come pouring out?
EMILY BANKS is the author of a book of poems, Mother Water (Lynx House Press, 2019), and her poems and essays have appeared in The Fourth River, New South, Superstition Review, Cimarron Review, Yemassee, and other journals. She received her MFA from the University of Maryland and her BA from UNC Chapel Hill. She currently lives in Atlanta, GA, where she is a doctoral candidate at Emory University. This is her first NCLR publication.