Mustard, Milk, and Gin

By Megan Denton Ray

Megan Denton Ray's debut poetry collection follows identical twin sisters in the wake of their parents' addiction.

The collection features an impressive sonnet crown section exploring sisterhood in the face of a broken family.

Mustard, Milk and Gin is the winner of the 2019 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize as selected by G.C. Waldrep.

Megan Denton Ray is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize.

Her work has appeared recently or will soon in Poetry, The Sun, Salt Hill Journal, The Adroit Journal, Passages North, and elsewhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hub City Press
• Release date: Mar 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781938235658

Megan Denton Ray

Megan Denton Ray received her MFA from Purdue University, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared recently or will soon in Poetry, The Sun, Salt Hill Journal, The Adroit Journal, Passages North, and elsewhere.

Book preview

KETCHUP & MUSTARD

"Sometimes I wanted to go and live in a place apart forever,

a place where I could roll around in the dirt and lick things."

—Lauren Slater

HEAVEN HILL

What is the sound of a child remembering herself? Dry-salt

of my past, retrieval of my edges: am I finally at the top

of a long gravel driveway? Is my father out again

with his articulate shovel and dump-truck? My mother:

fixing the brown box mashed potatoes. Me in plaids,

florals, prints. There are cows across the street.

I stand beneath a cumulus cloud—feeling no joy,

no deliverance. I stare ahead, a chilly blonde speck

with pointy elbows and milk teeth. Did I know then that

my parents dragged their warm bellies over the earth to feed me?

Did I know that my father buried a bottle of whiskey

in the backyard? My mother: an iris bulb in the freezer.

I’m not them I tell myself. I’m not them. The silver bodies

of our sprinklers emerge and contort. They scream

from every blowhole. See, this is the sound of my father

returning from the fields, barreling his dump-truck down

that gravel driveway—a stunt, like Jesus swinging his hips.

Producing a penny from behind my ear.

A MOTH NAMED KOMATSU

It’s true. One of my first words

was komatsu. The black and gold

bulldozer. The little pine tree

in Japanese. The moth that ate

the caterpillar, I was told—though

I’ve found no evidence for this, Audubon

or elsewhere. I was in my car seat

in the back of a forest green

Lincoln Town Car. My grandpa Pete,

President of Power Equipment Company

pointed them out as we drove by. Komatsu.

Komatsu. Meg, can you say komatsu? I did.

The moth that ate the caterpillar. The moth

was black and gold—this excavation queen,

this flint-colored cocoon. Copper eyes,

feathered antennae. She came toward me

with pine needles in her mouth. She nuzzled

my cheek like a great scaled cat. I stroked

her wings. Pretty girl, pretty girl. Come

and see the family. Come and see

my runaway bundle: my dillydallies, red shoes.

JEWEL TEA

Heaven is a kitchen full of jadeite dishes. It’s here,

inside our little brick house on Grigsby Chapel Road.

I am wearing my overalls, the ones made of

buttercream corduroy. I am four, standing

beside my mother, on a stool at the stove, still

I am barely tall enough to peer into the big, deep pot—

its waters gurgling, its copper bottom blazing. Yes,

heaven is here, and I am unwrapping the five or six

Kraft cheese slices from their plastic sheaths, carefully

folding them into tiny squares for my mother’s macaroni.

I put my squares into exquisite piles, while my mother

stirs and stirs with her long wooden spoon, one hand

at her other hip, massaging. I wait for her to pour