Poets love the later days of spring and the early days of summer. We love the wildflowers and the leaf-sprouts that shake us from our rain-shower-induced melancholy, though we all know that’s the best weather for writing new poems. This is the season of abundance, and our Poet’s Table runneth over at Appalachian Places, as we introduce a couple of promising young writers from eastern Kentucky, Ian Hall from Raven and Stacey Lounsberry from Greenup. We have poems of memory and the close connections of family and place from Kingsport, Tennessee, native Mitzi Dorton and Lovingston, Virginia, poet Frederick Wilbur. We close this literary ramble over “curious hills” with a delight-inducing set of new poems from recent West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman. Before we jump into poems, I would like to say a heartfelt thanks to a crew of graduate student assistants from the East Tennessee State University Department of Literature & Language — Erika Perez Cortazar, Jake Lawson, and Tanner Linkous — who have helped me keep track of submissions, proof-reading, deadlines, so many things! The best part of my job is working with such talented and capable students, all three excellent poets in their own rights. Onward and upward into poetry!
— Jesse Graves, Appalachian Places poetry editor
Ian Hall: ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’; ‘Psalm to be Spoken Inside a Hill’s Ribcage, Where the Heart Ought Be’
Ian Hall was born and reared in Eastern Kentucky. His work is featured in Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, and elsewhere.
Every Day is Like Sunday
God always speaks to me
like hot grease
on a blouse. Sudden
enough to murmur
the heart. When I’m at the stove, worrying
over breakfast, & the whites of the eggs run
into something that resembles his son’s
fuming tunic. & later, when I’m up to my goof
bone in a sink
chatty with dishes, the soapcurds going in
tender disbelief over my hands
like Thomas. He’s there in the family
room, in the ignorant
parboil of noon, the TV turned on
a local-access fishing show, when I’m folding
laundry. When I’m liable to nurture
a quiet, ladylike spite
for my two sons & husband — who has the horsepower
of a floor mop — sawing logs. He’s there when I’m ruing
all the dewy choices
I made in girlhood. I don’t know
where he’ll be when I’m going through this whole
rigmarole again for the sake
of their lunch & supper. When bitterness settles in me
like buzzards in a treetop. & he’ll be lost
to me still tomorrow morning, in the grocery
store parking lot when the car won’t start, the sun
on me like acetylene, & it’s two hours
till I can get a stranger to give a jump
that doesn’t take. & after, when I go to the bank
& clean out our account & it’s just enough
to pay the tow truck driver
& shiftless repairman, I like to think
he’ll at least be there
to damn the moneychangers. I like to think it’s him
making himself known
on my way home, when every pothole I hit
is shaped like a heart.
Psalm to be Spoken Inside a Hill’s Ribcage, Where the Heart Ought Be
All hours, they are clomping through sluice
that’s shoe-mouth deep. & with them totemic the little lilies
of blister & slough floating
Zen in their boots. But getting from A to B, coal vein to conveyor, on feet
turned Styrofoam is the measliest of their worries. There are cairns down here
that an Egyptologist couldn’t excavate, let alone those cardboard cutouts
at OSHA. & there’re whole wiffleball rosters of men who one dawn jittered into the gall
bile of this mine & come quitting-dark never surfaced. Gone so long their common
law spouse is named Rubble. & behind they leave women whose only recompense is a company
ham each Christmas, some tattered & hand-me-down
condolences from the foreman when he chances by
that house with the gutters ramshackling off
like a ’70’s hairdo — a litter of children, all runts, in the yard pretending
that the cornpone & Crisco they’re jawing on are smooches
of Hershey. But this crew is extant, swinging mattics. For quorum
there’s the nerve-doping jar, biceps fuzzy as bad analog, of bladepeaks clacking
against bubonic zinc. Only trace amounts of that chewy idiom. Mostly men looking old
testament at each other. Like that water torture they’re doing
dissertations on in the Orient, the stalactites slobber on them
immemorial. Gloveless, their palms are fractal & cratered
as bold moons. They’ll soldier on like this, artisans of the callous, till it’s time to leave
things for the mausoleum shift, who’ll probably be damned as well
to ascend into the unhomely
brine of 6 a.m. Truly, what necromances these men
off their scrawny bedsteads each morning, takes them down
into the daggerish pitch? I’ll flat tell you: it’s the chirp
of eggs in a skillet, mothers bitching
into their toddler’s earache. Homespun quilts
of gravy on your catheads. A pup neurasthenic from table skimmings. That leisurely
poached cabbage smell
of thrombosis stockings airing out over every vent. The jaundiced newborn
put to candy in blunt sun. & each does it
for the other, of course: that miner beside him
made Dalmatian by coal spume. Even Levon — the Armenian who fled
Ataturk’s malignant pen — always beaming lopsided & saying how
do you are? Brought-on or not, they respect him because he works
like Hephaestus. Heaping coal & never once begging
off because gahdamn I tweaked my shit-chute or my good lung
is a mummied fig. Above ground, they rib him for the hifalutin
beading on his skull cap, the baklava in his lunch pail. They take
as sacrosanct his Istanbul yarns. Listen cross-legged like schoolchaps. They all laugh
out black chaff at his mimings of them, their puzzling diction. They have him over
for supper & for their fidgety kids
he is Kubla Khan, scimitar up, loping into Damascus. He plays
a mean horselord. Even the parents — puddled into wicker
rocking chairs, worn clean out — can’t conquer a grin. & that rarefied smile
of Levon’s is chronic. Underground, even. & in a year when they find him
whey-faced from too much methane, he’ll still be grinning
neon & neighborly as a vacancy sign. For now though, things are just
so. Down there, it’s dim enough that the miners have all learned to see
in sepia. To not wallop each other in the teeth
chattering sanguine. But occasionally Levon, pale as a geisha, steps into the pilsner
of another’s headlamp
& nods.
Stacey Lounsberry: ‘Sleeping through the Southern Winter’; ‘While You Were Grieving’
Stacey Lounsberry received a BFA in Creative Writing from Morehead State University and an MAT in Special Education from the University of the Cumberlands. She is a full-time mother and writer, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Ariel Chart, The First Line, CafeLit and others. Her poem received an honorable mention in the 2007 Sarabande Books Poetry Contest. She is seeking representation for her recently completed middle grades chapter series. She lives in Eastern Kentucky with her husband and two young sons.
Sleeping through the Southern Winter
The top layer is my mother's quilt,
Its dimpled, silk flowers like skintags,
Splintered threads pointing up,
Reeds in a wrinkled pond.
How I miss the fat sponge cake swing
That romped beneath her praise-God arms.
The second is my aunt’s,
Bound with only crooked, worn hands
While someone painted her likeness
To hang behind a beige factory-store matting
On my white wall several decades later.
Sometimes her head breaks from the acrylic clumps
To grimace when I add white sugar to my cornbread.
But the layer that touches my skin,
Which rubs against the cold prickled hair standing
Up on my legs, the rough cloth not yet washed
Enough to soften, still soaked in the pesticide
Or formaldehyde
Or femicide
They use at the chain store factory,
Is my own. I guess,
Mine.
While You Were Grieving
Mama, we skirted the rocky side of the ridge,
Each of our four dirt bikes consuming the quiet
Of the night like an indelible feast.
Your coven of girls, can you imagine?
Dirt-tipped manicures and mud-dropped
Beauty marks. We forgot in the woods
The empire of man.
In a lazy mess of leaves we laid, your Sarah
Syphoning gasoline from my bike to hers,
Your Julie braiding back Bri’s hair and
Your Bri spinning devilish stories, Oh Mama
You would have smiled
If you had been there.
Mitzi Dorton: ‘The Ancestral Voices of Autumn’; ‘I Am the Keeper of Your Stories’
Mitzi Dorton is author of the book, Chief Corn Tassel, Finishing Line Press, Literary Global Book Award finalist in history/biography. A multi-genre writer, her poetry appears in Rattle/Appalachian Poets, SEMO Press, Poetry South,Women Speak: Women of Appalachia Project, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel and others.
The Ancestral Voices of Autumn
Leave the leaves. They nourish the ground,
I hear the voices that echo from the old-timers,
She acquaints me in this way,
Sharing the walk, through woods of her girlhood haunts,
Finding buckeyes for good luck on the downward trail,
Like an Easter egg hunt among yellow leaves
----
On tree-lined streets of my childhood,
The advent of maple-red,
Melding orange,
Folding,
Crisp, crunchy on sidewalks,
As we slosh forward.
She shares stories,
Ensuring I know where we've been.
I Am the Keeper of Your Stories
I am the keeper of your stories, Mama,
What stories? she struggles to say,
Oh, that time when
The string from your bloomers untied
And you had to hold them up
While walking home with a boy!
She has almost forgotten everything,
Her shared secrets
It’s mostly me talking
But we are both laughing
She closes her eyes
As if to say
She wants to feel the moment
The way we do when we savor
This scooting in, mother and daughter,
To grasp the last of everything.
Frederick Wilbur: ‘View from Elliewood Avenue: a meditation’; ‘Monarch’
Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out (Kelsay Press) and Conjugation of Perhaps (Main Street Rag Publishing, Inc). His work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah. He is co-editor of poetry for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize by Midwest Quarterly in 2018.
View from Elliewood Avenue: a meditation
Through rain-ragged window,
we gaze toward railroad tracks that foretell
a train’s appearance, toward warehouses
grungy with vacancy. Dust on the chessboard,
dog in the doorway, dawn opens
like a book with the cadence of promise.
She stands naked in a white sheet, living marble,
quilted flowers left in confusion on the bed;
the glorious unsaid unsaid like the sun
we know is there behind the scribbles of love.
Black birds jockey on wires as visible music,
but coal cars, filigreed by aerosol artists,
will frighten those ersatz angels to flight.
And our messages to the world will not circle back
except as another day’s literary lint.
Dreams scamper to their day-jobs,
coffee fills the room, current scones are timed out,
and for all today’s horrible news, we do not presume
a yellow caboose will trail our accomplishments,
nor will wings lift us from our grounding,
toward some blessing we do not seek or need.
Monarch
I pull my fluttering pick-up into Payne’s Garage
for its obvious need, a stronger sparking.
A wounded butterfly falls from crinkling grill
as an orange flame, autumn omen.
Entering oily darkness, the oldy-goldy, King of the Road,
dances jocular above the cuss of ratchets and wrenches.
They say my sufferings are mechanical.
My word-worn body and rusty chariot have conquered
a dozen epic highways, our fame trailing
like bark shards from a tractor-trailer load of pine logs.
Restored— a new set of plugs, a tweak or two,
a paycheck poorer— and we’re on our way again.
I place those quivering wings on the dashboard
as our Buddha, our compass. As humble
travelers of this world’s beckoning, we renounce
the Self’s desire, find peace where we find ourselves.
In twilight, we ease southwest down Route 151
toward the river we must cross to enter another realm.
Marc Harshman: ‘HUNGER’; ‘READING’; ‘DANCING BELOW THE CURIOUS HILLS’
Marc Harshman’s Woman in Red Anorak (Lynx House Press) won the Blue Lynx Prize. His 14th children’s book, Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece, (co-author, Anna Egan Smucker) was published by Roaring Brook / Macmillan and named an Amazon Book of the Month. He is co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and his poem, “Dispatch from the Mountain State,” was printed in the 2020 Thanksgiving edition of the New York Times. A previous volume, Believe What You Can, (Vandalia Press/WVU) won the Weatherford Award. His most recent publication is Dark Hills of Home published by Monongahela Books in 2022 to celebrate his 10th anniversary as Poet Laureate of West Virginia. He has recently been commissioned to write a poem celebrating the 40th anniversary of NPR’s Mountain Stage. His fourth full-length collection, Following the Silence, recently appeared from Press 53 of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
HUNGER
White peonies border the stones of the old foundation.
At the edge of the meadow peacocks fan light
into small rainbows of flame.
You listen for the soft step of a bear,
the black paws’ chuff upon the leaf litter.
An old road closes its arms around the forgotten,
fallow fields.
Your brother will return from there in the chiffon silence
of the afterlife, wrap you in a reassurance
unavailable from any altar.
And here, where the sun slips into the tangle of forest,
a barred owl is singing for his supper as he always does
with a question much like your own.
Who’ll cook for you, who’ll cook for you, who’ll cook for you?
READING
I was reading the lawn where it rose
below the wind-flicker
of shadowing leaves, reading
for the news, and
found it was singular
as the best news often is.
There was a spider, not at home, but
through its web, present,
and within which could be
seen a bleb of the sun
caught inside the dew
threaded just so
along the falling light.
And beyond the light a woodpecker hidden
but with its resonant sounding board
I could find my way to it
without any need
of looking for anything more
than this one foot in front of the other.
Where I hadn’t thought to look and
what I hadn’t thought to see,
let alone name, was applause:
the applause of the long-necked mullein
and ragweed, the insidious wild garlic
and nettles whose whiskery,
breeze-driven ovation was unexpected
and undeserved.
These, then, I decided were more of the news
for which I’d been looking, another
new thing, singular
among the many and
enough to be just that,
enough.
DANCING BELOW THE CURIOUS HILLS
Despite the poor wages and the decline
in morale, we kicked up our heels
and stomped like there was better music
than an upright and a limp tambourine.
You’d done a balloon and your smile was going
green and soon Frank would be ready
to climb walls with the fierce abandon
of the already doomed.
We’ve been convinced for years there was no way out
but still some nights believe spring’s somewhere
in the progression of days, that there could be
Mendelssohn, there could be Frühlingslied—
what a lazy dance of tears that would be!
But, no, what time there is shall be danced tonight
with our own familiar drunks, and the jukebox
when the piano dies, and the sharp crack
of dead soldiers sparkling in the back lot
of Roy’s Rod & Gun Club will provide
ambience, and ambivalence about it all
will not stop our dancing for ours shall be
a dance we dance all the way
into the amazed morning that slips
her rose-colored petticoats over the cold
rocks of mountains who surrendered long ago
and from whom we are only just now learning
to do the same knowing the stern master
will yet join us, lead our dancing in that long line
leads away from dawn into a night
where the gray rains of oblivion outlive us all.