Saltine

How well its square

fit my palm, my mouth,

a toasty wafer slipped

onto the sick tongue

or into chicken soup,

each crisp saltine a tile

pierced with 13 holes

in rows of 3 and 2,

its edges perforated

like a postage stamp,

one of a shifting stack

sealed in wax paper

whose noisy opening

always signaled snack,

peanut butter or cheese

thick inside Premiums,

the closest we ever got

to serving hors d’oeuvres:

the redneck’s hardtack,

the cracker’s cracker.

Fresh or Fried: A Southern Cultures Seafood Reader

Twelve fish(ish) tales from the archives (with accompaniments). Read the whole platter here.

Michael McFee has published seventeen books; his tenth full-length collection of poetry, A Long Time to Be Gone (Carnegie Mellon University Press), won the 2023 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry from the North Carolina Literary & Historical Association. His Appointed Rounds: Essays (Mercer University Press, 2018), contains two pieces published in Southern Cultures, “My Inner Hillbilly” and “Just As I Am Not.” He is the Doris Betts Term Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 1990.

Poem copyright © 2012 by Michael McFee from That Was Oasis (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 2012). First printed in Threepenny Review 107, vol. 27, no. 3 (Fall 2006). Poem reprinted by permission of Michael McFee and the publisher.

Header image: Julienne Alexander, YSSRS Creative