Leaving Tulsa

for Cosetta Once there were coyotes, cardinals in the cedar. You could cure amnesia with the trees of our back-forty. Once I drowned in a monsoon of frogs— Grandma said it was a good thing, a promise for a good crop. Grandma’s perfect tomatoes. Squash. She taught us to shuck corn, laughing, never spoke about her childhood or the faces in gingerbread tins stacked in the closet. She was covered in a quilt, the Creek way. But I don’t know this kind of burial: vanishing toads, thinning pecan groves, peach trees choked by palms. New neighbors tossing clipped grass over our fence line, griping to the city of our overgrown fields. Grandma fell in love with a truck driver, grew watermelons by the pond on our Indian allotment, took us fishing for dragonflies. When the bulldozers came with their documents from the city and a truckload of pipelines, her shotgun was already loaded. Under the bent chestnut, the well where Cosetta’s husband hid his whiskey—buried beneath roots her bundle of beads.They tell the story of our family.