Thorns of the Mesquite - Order today!
Dona Rose Willis’s life on a vast West Texas ranch in 1938, is shaped by hard work, a starkly beautiful landscape, and a loveless marriage. Everything shifts when her orphaned niece, Annalou, arrives, and Samuel Washington, a Black man, seeks refuge from a lynch mob, thrusting Dona into a dangerous fight against brutal prejudices.
A powerful and timely tale of historic fiction, Thorns of the Mesquite paints a stirring portrait of a woman’s awakening—of love and the resilient spirit demanded to fight for what’s right against staggering odds.
It is the intention of the author that all profits from this book be shared between organizations that protect the civil rights of all people, and those that serve and support victims of domestic violence.
Patricia’s debut historical fiction novel is available now from Levellers Press and Amazon. It is available in person at Broadside Bookshop, Northampton, MA.
A Kind of Yellow - 2005
A Kind of Yellow is a chapbook of 25 poems by Patricia Lee Lewis, MFA, Pushcart Prize nominee and founder of Patchwork Farm Writing Retreat. The poems tell a loosely consistent story, beginning with a little girl in Texas, and move through her pregnancy at 16, birth of her son, his mental illness and suicide.
Available from Levellers Press.
Her pigtails pull against
her scalp as she lets her body go
in the early morning air.
The bar is cool
under her hooked knees, her arms
hang like legs, her heart
thumps in her ears.
She watches the world
upside down, how people bounce
when they walk, their mouths
like fishes. Mrs. Miller
walks across the backyard
for morning coffee with her mom,
bouncing like a kickball. Her brother
grabs her hair. You bully,
she calls, but she doesn’t mean it,
really. He’s her little brother.
He has black eyes. Her dress is up
around her shoulders, the Texas sun
warms her knees, her ties, the place
between her legs she mustn’t touch.
She hangs in space, unexplored,
a planet slowly spinning.
I would be a woman mad with courage,
a moon on palm leaves, a lotus spreading,
a lily of the field, rejoice and weep. I would open.
I would bless my children with my stillness, mountain lake;
invite them to bathe, each one magnificent.
Find stories in the ashes planted among trees.
I would hold their power in one hand,
the other yielding, sky to stars.
I would listen to the stories where they wait
in tawny creeks and live oak trees that lean,
on altars where preachers look like fathers,
in sewing rooms where mothers rip
their skirts to make new clothes, in rooms where children
birth their babies, in campfires, old church
songs, in bodies growing strong as cats
and minds as quick as wings inside a trumpet vine,
in turtle rivers green with Texas sun, in padlocked rooms
where those whose souls are claimed
by demons live and die. I would be mad
with wonder, alive with love of darkness and of light.
I would be this one here, this plain decaying
body in this loud, expanding heart.
High Lonesome - 2011
High Lonesome is a pasture on a West Texas ranch, a state of being, an affecting personal mythology.
These are poems of landscape and family, heart and perspective.
Available from Levellers Press.
prickly pears and horny toads
scorpions under limestone rocks
longhorn bulls and scissor tails
a river green with moccasins
turkeys scratching willow trees
mesquite thorns and fire ants
worms on hooks catfish whiskers
black widows under outhouse seats
I am far from land
I love carefully
High Lonesome Pasture, Door Key Pasture,
down by the River Pasture, search
for the horn of a ram. Turn over rocks,
watch for scorpions. Find fossils in this
ancient limestone sea. All is dust and brittle
mesquite; cacti shrivel. In the time
of my childhood, peaches grew here,
and pecan trees shaded our fishing hole
where water ran over the dam. River
bottom cracks open, old as the planet.
The sheep can’t live in this, though
their yellow eyes stare back the sun.
My skin wrinkles with remembering.
At least the moon will come, at least
sometimes the mourning dove, its wings
a dusty rose, its voice still sweet as fruit.