CAMP SORGHUM, LATE 1864 BY ANNE CHADWELL HUMPHRIES
In an open field above Saluda rapids, I guard fourteen hundred Union officers who dig troughs by hand and cut limbs for shelter. Unfit to fight, I was drafted for these last days. Twenty men share one broken spoon for meals of rationed cornmeal, mostly roughage and weevils. Like them, I eat it raw with sour sorghum. Can’t remember when I was paid, so I take bribes. Wearing rags this winter day, we march to the walled asylum to wait for Sherman.
Ann Chadwell Humphries of Columbia has poetry in The Collective I, a chapbook of poetry and prose released with the “Selfies: Real or Imagined” show at Gallery West, as well as in the 2015 and 2016 Poems on the Comet. She takes writing classes with Shepherd’s Center and Hadley Institute for the Blind.
60 . JASPER READS