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“Sister, that sounds like fortune telling. Isn’t that a sin?”

What would happen to the rest of us who die swallowing pennies and buttons? But not wanting to be the rooster, I stay silent.

Mary Alice Dixon treasures a tattered old index card on which her 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Elvira Friend, wrote the recipe for her Happiness Cake. Mary Alice, a multiple Pushcart nominee, won the North Carolina Writers’ Network Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition and is a past finalist for the NC Poetry Society Poet Laureate Award. Her chapbook, Snakeberry Mamas: Words from the Wild (Charlotte Lit Press, 2025), offers poems of Appalachian women and folkways. She lives in Charlotte, NC where she grows sunflowers in cow manure. Find her at www.maryalicedixon.com.