I have been  published in The Chaffin Journal, The Litchfield
Review, Bellowing Ark andBibliophilos and appearing as a featured
poet at The Kentucky Folk Art Center in Morehead, Kentucky as well
as being selected as a finalist in the 7th International Poetry
Contest sponsored by Mattia.  I have had several nonfiction articles
published as well and was recently awarded first prize in The
Heartland Review's short-short fiction contest and received
Honorable Mention for Lucidity's winter volume.  As well as being
on staff at a local newspaper, I currently teach reading and writing
at the middle school level.




Three Sisters


Their pictures hang in a row
above grandmother’s fireplace,
oval frames holding
rounded brown vignettes of
children who look vaguely familiar.

The oldest, first to go was Aunt Cleo.
A too-young girl in a yellowed
wedding gown, face somber
knowing the ending already.  
James was true until the wedding
when the truth of him was revealed;
He loved too much for her, he said.
What time had she for understanding
with a baby to feed and fill and
her little green house on the hill
that never got warm enough;
Nights spent shivering
underneath crazy quilts
that smelled of mothballs and time,
preserving her loneliness.
Her legacy to me was the cold.

In the middle, a golden child
with bouncy curls and blue eyes
that can still twinkle in sepia’d photographs.  
Her home was warm and full of children;  
Four of us would sit around the table,
two girls with dark slanting eyes
and shining hair, their smiles
timid and deferential; the smallest boy,
younger by more than years, all sunshine
hair and eyes that laughed and danced.  
I would tell him, at eleven, and
take the sparkle from him
I thought he knew, everyone knew
of the other mother who came before,
in the war from Vietnam to
our tiny mountain town
and left two dark girls for my sunshine aunt.
Her legacy to me was the lie.

My own mother, last in the line.  
Lace frilly dress on a summer blanket
squinting into a future too bright
for her eyes.  Only her picture
is flanked by bronzed baby booties,
their heaviness slanting
the picture too much to the right.  
Perhaps the weight of them
held her back,
to waste her only star on this one man,
this one town, this one child.  
A woman who settled
for singularity
and spends her Sundays
at her mother’s house,
mopping the floor
dusting the photos of the three sisters,
watching the dust fleck off
and spin in the afternoon sunlight,
leaving trails of yesterday’s glory.
Her legacy to me was reality.

My life is a story
wrapped in their stories,
passed down to me,
a legacy of regret and lost chances,
preserved in crinkled brown tissue.

CC Thomas