Why I Flinch at the Thought of Daylight Squandered

2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY JUSTIN HUNT

Deep into her last year, my mother would rise from breakfast and proclaim, Gotta get movin’! She grabbed time by the neck, throttled every second into purpose and task: dishes washed and jangled back to shelves, floors swept, sweaters knit and hauled to church bazaars, flowers planted and watered from the well-pump hose she dragged across her yard, housedress aflutter, knees stabbing above her knotted, twitching calves –until she could drag and twitch no more.

And so it was with my father, too, that life-timer in the art of harnessed living, graduate cum laude of my granddad’s open-air school for cattlemen, butchers, and farmers. Like a plow horse, he never slipped the reins of work, never balked at the gee and haw of doing,

JUSTIN HUNT grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. His work has won several awards and appears, or is forthcoming, in a wide range of literary journals and anthologies in the US, Ireland, and the UK, including Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Florida Review, Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, Crab Creek Review, Cider Press Review, and New York Quarterly.

My Father’s Hands, from the series Simple Truths, 2009 (gelatin silver photograph, 28x36) by Linda Foard Roberts

though late one summer I saw him sitting on an old railroad tie at the end of the driveway –squinting into sun, legs like sticks in tattered Bermuda shorts, purple veins spidering into frayed socks and a pair of wingtips too worn for anything but puttering. Ninety years old. Retired at last, not long before the stroke that cut him down: eight months in bed, lucid until the end, chained to not-doing and the anguish of knowing it.

Weddington, NC, native LINDA FOARD ROBERTS lives in Charlotte, NC. She received a BFA from Intermont College and an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her work has been exhibited internationally and throughout the US. Her first monograph, Passage (Radius Books, 2016), debuted at Paris Photo. In 2020, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship Grant in support of her series Lament, a song of sorrow for those not heard, which was exhibited at Annenberg Space for Photography and Mint Museum of Art. Her work is held in numerous private and corporate collections, as well as in the permanent collections of Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, Davidson College, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Ogden Museum of Art. She is represented by SOCO Gallery in Charlotte and Sol del Rio Gallery in Guatemala City. See more of her work in NCLR 2011, 2014, and 2017.