Stutter-Step
Tina
We are all stop and start,
our home a tremble from hammer
and drill, the shriek of saw,
the waver of glass walls.
Never steady or still,
the walking sticks and praying
mantes judder across our porch
and deck. Like the root-bound
and breeze-rattled bluestem,
they quaver here to there.
When folks ask if we’re done
with the cabin or the floors,
I answer we’re somewhere
between halfway and never.
No doubt some wonder when
we’ll be done going without
plumbing, living in one room.
Maybe they think I mean soon.
But I don’t. And I don’t prize
journey over destination.
We’re here. We have arrived.
Each choice our own. We build
deck before bathroom,
still learning turn, sway,
how to fashion our own step.
Call it shillyshally
or lollygag. We step
to the rhythm of breeze
and breath of this place.
Weathermyth
Jim
My world now is a glass cabin I’m building with my wife on a ridge. Lightning is plentiful. When it strikes close, our home shakes. If it were to strike closer, our view of the woods would shatter.
Lightning struck a pine on Pop’s farm in Spring ’96, and a long branch fell on four of his cows, one a favorite bull, black-and-white speckled. Or maybe the blue gash he found burning in the trunk made the cows gallop until their four hearts ruptured. Pop had seen them moseying under thunder’s crackle or cackle—“How you say it, depends on how you hear it,” he said. “I’ve never found truth in the exactness of things, have you?”
Pop was close to a strike once in a pasture, said it felt as if he got pushed by a wall. Sent him to the grass. Blackout. Damned headache. He said, “Stings and strikes—that’s where my memory takes hold.” I heard it different. He had a bald spot on the back of his head, and I told my friends that’s where lightning brought its haymaker. Just look if you doubt. Haymakered him to the dirt. Then Pop got off the ground.
I remember walking behind him after I’d decided on my version of his story—me, only so tall and staring at that spot way up. Meaning, I had a lot of growing up to do. Meaning, he was more than just my pop, a part of him had become myth. I was reading about the Greek Gods, and Zeus kept throwing lightning bolts down at the county farmers and their peanut fields, the boundary of my whole world then.
Pop, though a mortal, had been slammed in the head by Zeus, and he walked as if that strike was nothing of a worry. The gods either get you or they don’t. You’re either here or you’re no longer.
Even though Tina refuses to look at our glass walls when trees start bowing in a storm, she’s not one to pray. And I am my father’s son. But when a storm turns into a polygon on the weather authority’s map—high winds, hail, a tornado starting its spin—we join the shared hush of everyone in Alabama holding the same breath, sending the same prayer to the sky—
“Don’t let my neighbor get lost in your fast winds coming. Don’t let a body ride a road flash-flooded out. Please stop the wanderer from wandering under your sturdiest tree. And put us not on the path of a barrel-whistler, a trailer-tumbler. Just love us, deliver us, hold us tight.”
Until there’s damage to tell of, and we sigh, “Those poor people,” about those taken, names not given so we can forget.
Rounds
Jim
After the storm, there are more power poles at Alabama Power for the taking. And my neighbor’s building a house, this one for his son. The scraps they can’t use, I can. So I get up. I make the rounds, checking for a call, looking for wood. These have become salvaging days, a kind of divining, like begging a story from old words.
I get to Alabama Power, cut one pole 15’, length enough to bear the corner of a deck, what I’ve built over and over—the motions of it, the thoughts of it not yet real. The real is picking up this pole no one wants ’cause it’s too gaffed from workers climbing to the transformer and lines. ’Cause the storm snapped it at its base. ’Cause it is ancient.
And yet, the pole will outlast me, preserved in harsher chemicals. I just have to get it in the truck, which takes a lot of summoning, hands on hips figuring, walking around delaying because dead weight is always more than I can reason. At some point, I have to lift.
Back home, I leave the pole in the truck. There’s supper and sleep. By morning the carpenter bees are cutting rounds in the eaves. I sit on the stoop to write and sawdust sifts over these words. These very ones. Sawdust is a little bit heavier than pollen. And while I don’t like carpenter bees chewing up the house wood, I understand their want for a home. The only end to want is bodies failing.
Built By Hand Ourselves
Tina
isn’t to say we pulled ourselves up
by our bootstraps or these walls up
by scaffolding. Pop lent us that
and set us up with two lines of credit.
It means no crane, no backhoe,
not even a Bobcat, and no contractors,
just our muscle erected this glass cabin.
And ourselves really means Jim hefted
every board and beam here. Means Dylan
helped raise wall frames and rafters.
Means I shellacked boards, framed windows,
and built steps. Think of me as fry cook,
Jim as head chef, Dylan his sous.
Ourselves means Jim Owens bringing us power
poles to hold up our floor. Means Madi digging
post-holes and building our poop bin. Means
Jeff and Nancy wrangling rafters into the sky.
Means Tom, my neighbor in Oregon, telling us
how to insulate an exposed beam ceiling.
Ourselves is Dave McCrae wiring the power
from the meter to the breaker box, shoving
our woodstove up ramp and over threshold.
And Traci giving us our first rain barrel
and cat. Aunt Trish and Uncle Gene giving us
windows, Ted and John, boards. Nick splitting
red cedar for our deck rails, offering up
every windfall for firewood. Ourselves is that
single breeze on the stickiest day when chiggers
swelled our every crease and we could have
boiled right over if it hadn’t blown
across our necks just then. Ourselves isn’t
Whitman’s multitudes, isn’t the shoulders of giants
Einstein acknowledged he stood on. Ourselves are
that many, that huge, but they are all around us
still, real, and forever lending us a hand.
This excerpt originally appeared in Glass Cabin, by Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel, published by Pulley Press in 2024. It is reprinted by permission of the authors and press.
Glass Cabin chronicles the 13 years Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel spent building their home out of secondhand tin, tornado-snapped power poles, and church glass on Hydrangea Ridge in Alabama. Their alternating voices support one another like parts of their cabin—every board needs its nail, every window needs its frame. These poems explore the work it takes to measure cuts for stairs, to haul one ton of water up the mountain, and to write. It is also a meditation on hope, on frustration, and their place in the wilder parts of the world.
Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel are a husband-and-wife writing team. They have received fellowships from Hot Springs National Park and Alabama State Council on the Arts. James Braziel’s book, This Ditch-Walking Love (Livingston Press), winner of the Tartt Fiction Award, tells the stories of people living on Alabama’s Cumberland Plateau. His novels Birmingham, 35 Miles (Bantam), and Snakeskin Road (Bantam) are about the survivors of an environmental disaster in the future South. Tina Mozelle Braziel is the author of Known by Salt (Anhinga Press), winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and Rooted by Thirst (Porkbelly). Her work has appeared in POETRY and other journals. Tina and James live and write in a glass cabin that they are building by hand in rural Alabama. Pulley Press, whose mission is to highlight rural poets, has recently published Glass Cabin, a book about their experience.
Header photo of the Glass Cabin by Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel.
