Peek inside a Glass Cabin

Thirteen years ago, in a desire to live an affordable and creative life, Tina Mozelle and James Braziel purchased ten acres of land and began building a cabin made of glass in Remlap, Alabama. Through a constant bargaining of time, resources, and words, the couple created a home made of hand-me-down glass — and a book of poetry that lets us see inside. 

Glass Cabin, by James Braziel and Tina Mozelle Braziel, is Pulley’s next release, set to come out Spring of 2024. Pulley is proud to present a first look at three poems from the work. 

Hold Still
Tina

Puddles around here dry up
too quick for tadpoles to frog and toad. 
My casserole dishes hold 
only so much rain, never enough 
tadpoles to keep their choir 
crooning. Once a whippoorwill 
blued our nights, a call so anxious
we joked he couldn’t get any. 
Or enough. Like the Bob White 
I whistled to as a kid, he’s gone. 
I’m trying, but I’m no good 
at being a puddle. Or knowing 
how fast Thwaites may melt. 
But I get how hard it is to hold  
and hold still, to be sucked at 
from below and above, to be overflown, 
to keep edges gradual. 
I want tadpoles to taste land
and return. And bees to wade in
and take a sip without drowning.
But it’s hard to keep clean
and remain dirty enough
for mosquitoes, dragonflies, 
and toads, to be both 
watering hole and open womb.  

Odds Are
Tina

We have been betting on nobody but us
moving out here, betting hunters would go
on bagging bucks and leasing acreage,
betting nobody rich enough to dig a well
would want to drive a rutted road past
rusted semis and trailers. We bet on cedars
thickening into ramparts around our glass 
walls, thwarting everybody from our sleeping
beauty. Odds are against us winning the lottery.

Friends said it’s easier to get struck by lightning, 
claimed only the poor get duped by somebody winning. 
Like capitalism I thought but didn’t say or admit 
we’re poor enough to sometimes bet our ages plus the date 
we met will win us a year living in the French Quarter, 
a new truck, and a restaurant for my brother.  

But now new neighbors push through the cedars and gouge 
the ridge here to move dirt there, we bet more often, 
trying to win what we have right now. Odds are against
that pair of bald eagles gliding over to survey 
the ridge will nest in our pines, against trillium 
remaining untrampled, against Sally Branch sallying 
forth forever. Ain’t that America for you and me? 
Where winning means buying it all, gating it off, 
keeping this wild slumber to oneself? That’s the dream, 
to be the valiant one. Nothing like those people.

Where We Live Is Who We Are
Jim

The Romans read places like faces, as outward revelations of living inner spirit.

—Charles W Moore et al.

The dog whimpers at the door, so I come down from the sleeping loft to unlatch the lock. She bolts into the open without a kiss. Out west the moon nestles where the sun will set over Cherty Ridge this evening. But right now, the sun is throwing a pink curtain for the dog to run through. If she jumps out of her mind and bites the moon—she’s done it before—I’ll have to get my coat and hat, call her down. And if she does not fall to me, I’ll have to climb the ladder she made out of cedar branches, retrieve her like I did my daughter who wouldn’t let go the top of a tall holly once. She was four. The dog is nine. I can no longer reason love. But I don’t want you to wake up to worry. 

Before dawn, a star spun through the skylight to soothe my ear’s tuning fork ache. When the burst of light ended, I heard your first car—a green Dodge Dart Swinger—race up from the bottom of our ridge alongside hooves stabbing the earth. The car swerved, vanishing with the deer into the trees.

Last night, the ridge became a humpbacked whale with the moon out, with all those spiny hawthorns on its black porcupine back. This was before I climbed the ladder to our loft bed, before the star spun ear bones into light, before the hooves and the Dart. I looked but could not find the possum tail of ridge, though I have walked down and found the spring under its belly. You sloshed tadpoles into the spring’s clear water in October to make them into winter pollywogs. “Survive,” all that you whispered.