Poetry by Matt Wimberley, Melissa Helton, Mary Alice Dixon, Megan Krupa, and Lydia Gwyn

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As I write to you, we’ve passed Imbolc, the calendar’s middle point of winter in East Tennessee, the center between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. Now, the ground will start to warm after its months of hibernation, crocus flowers sprouting from the moss, and the days will stretch toward lengthening light. If you’re sensing there’s presently a different poet behind the keyboard, you’re right. This is Lacy Snapp, and I’ll be this year’s guest Poetry Editor for Appalachian Places while Jesse Graves is working hard on other projects. I am a poet, woodworking artist, literary event organizer, and professor here in Johnson City, Tennessee. I find our celebration of New Year’s in the dead of winter to be a paradox: we set goals for change and self-improvement, but nature knows better, that the cold season is one for rest, a preparation for renewal. I know that as I read the works of the poets in this installment, I was filled with more echoes of paradoxes: stories of both silence and owl screeches, nature constructing and collapsing, the having and losing of parenthood or womanhood.  

We begin with a series from Matthew Wimberley in which the speaker navigates between listening and speaking. As he observes and chronicles changes in the natural world, his poems contain tender attention to his children, the normalcies of brushing hair and bicycle rides in the driveway as he looks for the right words to teach them of this place, “something you won’t mistake / as a metaphor.”  

In choosing the next grouping of poems, I was struck by the way the selections from Melissa Helton, Mary Alice Dixon, and Megan Krupa seem to talk to each other — the presence of stories and folklore, how the more-than-human world can be a lens for understanding, and the interconnectedness of women’s experiences: “It is the way of perseverance / that what one woman discards, / another will pick up / and attempt to build with it.”  

This installment ends with the words of Lydia Gwyn, a wonderous mix of prose poems and haibuns. I felt as though they wove together the thematic threads of the rest of the installment with their “songs of morning bells ringing,” “wild violets, buttercups, grasses, dandelions,” resilience of humans and the land, and the stories of children and ageing, the way life’s “gravity can’t stop pulling.” As we’re pulled by time towards spring, I hope you’ll find moments to slow down, as I did — to exist in the worlds these poets create in this installment, to be both unbothered and enchanted by the paradoxes, and to remain open to the seasons of making and unmaking we all cycle between in this life.  

– Lacy Snapp, Guest Poetry Editor

Matt Wimberley: 'What's Over'; 'Spring Branch, 2023'; 'Painter's Paradox'; 'Down the Flyway'; 'The Story I Keep Telling'; 'The Influence of the Sun';

Matthew Wimberley grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Daniel Boone's Window (LSU, 2021) selected by Dave Smith for the Southern Messenger Poets series, and All the Great Territories (SIU, 2020), winner of the 2018 Crab Orchard Poetry Series First Book award, winner of the Weatherford Award. Winner of the 2015 William Matthews Prize from the Asheville Poetry Review, his work was selected by Mary Szybist for the 2016 Best New Poets Anthology and his writing has appeared most recently or is forthcoming in: 32 Poems, Image Journal, Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, swamp pink, and The Threepenny Review. Wimberley received his MFA from NYU where he worked with children at St. Mary's Hospital as a Starworks Fellow. He teaches in western North Carolina. 

What’s Over  

Beeches in a thin frost 

windthrown sometime 

before you wake — the splinter 

of moon across a horseshoe  

ridge, smoke from a woodstove 

above the rust on roofs 

& the rust  

no longer a pattern 

for stars.  

I listen to a voice  

drift the cemetery —  

all the browns and grays, 

& shade. The words  

are faint as geese 

gone into twilight 

or a child running  her fingers along the rough 

pine wall in a room  

where she should be  

sleeping.  

The dead haven’t slept, 

some of them, for centuries. 

I’ve been here in late May —  

rhododendron blooming 

under the full oaks 

& the numb sky still 

looking like snow.  

It grew darker then  

& bothered 

no one else 

that I waited  

for someone  

in the stone church 

to touch the rope —  

the bell pealing  

just over the silence.  

Spring Branch, 2023 

In the country of violence, I wash 

my first daughter’s hair — the day’s dust 

& the film of suds along her arms; all 

the light corralled in her eyes which  

could be mine. Before my name  

turns to ash or the crude excision  

of stone there’re a few wayward  

scythes of my breath up against the glass 

making a trace I’d like to take 

all the way to the end. Before  

the curtain raises on its one scrawny rope 

& the folds in the velvet roll onto  

themselves. Before I have to say 

something worth saying in the first place 

about a country quiet as an owl in flight. 

The scientists have their instruments 

tuned against the long experiment of silence, 

the hush-a-bye baby of wings the owl makes as it moves —  

still, there’s almost nothing in the arc of flight 

the shotgun mics can register.  

What I’ve learned is how death can be a whisper  

or mimic the voice of a father on the sidewalk 

along Sunset Park, asking his child 

to stay close, to pay attention, dirtied scraps 

of gum wrappers, and the tumble of Styrofoam, 

the arguments of street sweepers 

& the whir of the twenty-four-hour laundromat 

all tied to the shadows coming off the sycamores 

Tonight, the water keeps turning cold, and so the air outside 

must be below freezing. The machines can’t keep up.  

At birth, when I held you, I didn’t understand  

how small you were, only how when you turned 

in my arms I’d go lightheaded, as if I could float above myself and witness 

the two of us for the first time become a vanishing point: 

light and shadow and matter all headed in the same direction. 

I thought you were so big, I watched you  

fall into your first sleep and back into the dream  

of this life. But I was wrong and for three weeks 

you wouldn’t grow, wouldn’t breastfeed, 

shrunk ounce by ounce so we filled syringes with formula 

& placed them in the corners of your mouth 

the way I recalled my stepfather  

feeding newborn blue jays who always looked wet  

making a little music I can almost remember 

as they struggled to live. 

Painter’s Paradox 

At dusk, I watched you pedal from the end of the driveway 

up the long hook of it toward the house — eyes flashing like little keys 

locked on your feet, as if belief and will might vanish  

if you turned elsewhere. At the last judgement 

Gabriel will be too stoned to play his trumpet. 

Instead, these doves coming to rest on a powerline 

turning into silhouettes will have to do. Listen close, 

the wings making all the music — and the miracle 

of flight, like all other miracles, is mostly just calculation: 

Columbus conjuring a lunar eclipse — the way the ink 

dried on the story, or a footprint centuries later 

somewhere beyond the Sea of Tranquility. The bloodred 

sky tonight is at your back, the incinerated haze blown down  

from Canada as the first fireflies draw bizarre symbols  

in the bluestem I planted from seed  

the summer you were born. 

Down the Flyway 

Little thorn of light. Little dark curl. The likeness of one thing 

can stand in for the other just like that. Now and then, erased 

by the sound of buffleheads coming down to the dammed pond —  

my face reflected there in a pothole which tells me nothing, 

my breath forgets me as I walk along the tangles of blackberry 

imagining the source and rootstock, what it must have looked like 

three hundred years ago. The past is a kind of silence. This morning 

I’m walking from town toward Flannagan’s where the steering rods 

on my truck had to be replaced, rusted, and warped. 

I’ve been scared to take my daughter down the road —  

even for ice-cream in a cup, or to a park where the grasses 

never grow in all the way to the driveway and the rust  

of swings makes the high screech of an owl. 

The Story I Keep Telling 

Pattern of flesh knotted in the dark —  

the stars coruscating through the crib bars 

winter has made of the forest — the black cherry 

the locust, the oak, the magnolia, the shagbark, 

all bare — farther with each breath from the warm sculpturing 

of beginning than you’ve ever been. Pattern 

I look through into the snowfall, 

made of the shadows I lose meaning in,  

like the frayed quilt I found, worn and fading, 

at the bottom of a chest, under newspapers and unpolished  

pewter. The thread through the fabric 

like twilight coming over the ridge, each stitch a few seconds  

locked now in the design — red and blue pinwheels, carrying you forward 

when I think of their endless spiraling, their stillness tonight. 

I want to tell you every secret I didn’t know was secret 

but right now it is just this I am trying to get down 

while you sleep — one moment at the heart of every moment up ahead. And, I want to tell you something artless 

even if you have to notice the three crows  

watching me from the cemetery arch. 

You never see them move. I want to say something 

with that kind of ease — something you won’t mistake 

as metaphor. The downed pine needles 

I kicked around at dawn are beginning to ice over, 

frost, and gray, and the pasture’s grass — and all the time 

you are entering the world. Something about  

the row of streetlights just now, the few needed to travel by, 

the way the white tendrils of trees make the sky just above darker. 

For a few months the roads are busier; there’s traffic! The dogs bark 

at the deer which stand around just across the fence line. The signs go up 

while you dream — more of the forest bought and sold. I used to come 

up to this room to look out across the crown 

of trees, west into Tennessee — farther in winter. Now,  

you’re here too to see the way people once stood for photographs 

just waiting around for the light to make them permanent. 

Their finest clothing must be dust now. If the land 

remembers it says nothing. The wallpaper was faded 

in the hall and the birds in the design barely sang, 

(lightheaded from hanging upside down 

for decades). It’s January and you sleep less and less.  

The moon barely there — a tooth cutting through a gum, 

hours ago. Sally and I unload 

the dishes and stack them as always; we rinse 

out the wine glasses by hand. Everyone goes on 

as always — the metal edge of a snow shovel scraping  

against concrete. Rock-salt melting the ice. We make lists for groceries 

& collect the mail. The same people tell the same stories 

right on cue when I see them at the bar 

or in line at the Exxon trying to buy a quart of motor oil, 

the valve seal too expensive to fix.  

The days move a little too slow 

like a kid in an oversized jacket who can’t keep up, 

always pulling his jacket together. I wonder 

again how long before the blight reaches reach us? If you 

will ever see a hellbender? A monarch?  

Most of my life I’ve spent learning the patterns of shadow 

moving a little day after day, the light opening on the mountainsides, the hinge of dark

collapsing, 

I’ve watched the endless migrations of sunlight, seven minutes 

from the source all the time and everywhere I looked — passing through the sparks in the welder’s shop, swirled across the Formica countertops at the delis and restaurants catering 

to tourists, the tables always a little sticky from dried bleach, 

the sandwiches delivered wrapped in red and white waxed checker paper. 

Sometimes I am under the spell of the backscatter of dust making a river of the air  

as the day breaks apart. And even now, while I tell you all this, 

how your childhood will slip by you before you know it —  

a wish you cast already blown through the seedhead — the vortex ring 

carried off — how already you have no control over it; I’ve seen it 

all before, the pattern winding and unwinding and holding still. I’ve seen 

the world ahead. One day I know I’ll be gone, but I’ve got these little tricks 

I’m learning — how the ocean appears in the cup 

of a shell you hold to your ear. A few more seconds have already gone — vanished 

in the light coming through the trees. Look how day loosens 

the dark from the branches the way this old quilt I wrapped you in earlier 

has started coming apart at the seams. I watch you breathe in,  

your chest rising and falling. A surf erasing and remaking the earth.  

The Influence of the Sun 

It’s all I’ve got. The owl against the dark background 

& the highspeed cameras and an undisturbed 

bedding of down feathers used to show how perfectly 

still her wings are. The bones are hollow. 

Is it indecent to say death is beautiful 

here when all the evidence collected points us 

elsewhere? Did Audubon, as he painted  

in the feathers and the dark curves  

of talons, disappear as he worked into a childhood 

where he strolled through the sugarcane 

& never broke a sweat? It’s no wonder  

he had time to perfect color and light and shadow 

mistaking it for a gift. Champion of birds 

which only return now as monuments and the silence 

of paint, taxidermized into the scent of oblivion —  

air thick and all the flowers  

beginning to open up like silence itself. 

Melissa Helton: 'Ekphrasis: Holding the Head of the Holofernes'; 'Doctor's Notes'; 'Introductions'; 'In Place: A Parable'; 'Scavenge'

Melissa Helton is Literary Arts Director of a cultural nonprofit in Kentucky after teaching in colleges and universities for 17 years. Her work has been in Shenandoah, Women of Appalachia Project, Still: The Journal, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, and more. Her chapbooks include Inertia: A Study, and Hewn. She is editor of the anthology Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky and Untelling, the literary and arts magazine of Hindman Settlement School. Her work has been supported through the Kentucky Foundation for Women and has been awarded prizes in poetry and nonfiction. She is a dual citizen in the United Kingdom. 

Ekphrasis: Holding the Head of Holofernes 

--after Gustav Klimt 

From a forest of rounded moss and feather-limbed  

trees, out walks the woman I always  

write: gilt, threshed.  

Jeweled collar. Open  

mouth. Resin skin. Gauze.  

Eyes allowing you your moment.  

Obsessions are so good at keeping us  

busy, a head in our hands. Lovers and poets  

become caricature, me most of all. I don’t know  

how to do this and not show you what I am.  

Doctor’s Notes 

— after Phyllis Koestenbaum 

Basically my body is a florist shop, gardenia-heavy and taking  

orders — discounts for veterans’ funerals and wedding corsages. 

Sometimes I’m convinced my body is a sheet of plywood.  

I must concentrate to witness the bread rise. I imagine  

the yeast burping out those gasses, a sugar feast orgy.  

I will shortly put them all to the flame to feed us.  

Twice last week I was the construction fencing  

around his demolition. Orange is never flattering  

on my skin tone, so I apologize for how I glare. 

To stay awake I clench an ice cube in my fist, imagine  

hypothermia and frostbite, death in the arctic. In bed, I pop  

the knuckles of my toes, recalling my favorite steps of the day.  

At the border, a man has been convicted of leaving  

water in the desert for migrants because humans are broth and bullet.  

I am also a border: a body demarcating before and beyond. 

I dream of the purple aurora borealis, and my body  

embarrasses us all, I’m sure, at times. In illness, I crawl  

obediently under the porch, my smile filleted.  

Yesterday I sat on a concrete wall, summoned the Stonehenge  

lichen under my fingers, tried to recall if the Slaughter Stone  

was warm from the sun when I snuck and laid across it. 

Introductions 

— after Irene McKinney 

He is the one filling pockets with acorns. 

She is the one folding compost. 

He is the one measuring magnetism. 

She is the one not here. 

He is the one sitting under the centennial ginkgo. 

She is the one inside out. 

He is the one adorned in jangling yellow shells. 

She is the one taking down the history. 

He is the one tending the pyre. 

She is the one unblinking. 

Where elevation heaves, he is the one raising a sign. 

Where chalkboards hiss, she is the one sleeping.  

Where the bed cools, he is the one chopping vegetables. 

She is the one wearing a garland. 

He is the one upside down. 

Where there are lightning flashes, she is the one counting before thunder.  Where there are muddy fields, he is the one with a telescope. 

Where there are seagulls, she is the one yelling. 

Do you shudder at the bell ringing? 

He is the one. 

Do you flinch with that cramp at your core? 

She is the one. 

Don’t expect the bee swarm to even notice you. 

Don’t expect a song. 

Among those who do not expect, they are the one. 

In Place: A Parable 

We humans think our stories are so damn important.  

Remember that the worms in the ground  

weigh 55 times more than all the people above it,  

and it takes 7 billion fog particles  

to fill a teaspoon. 

Scavenge 

 It is the way of perseverance  

that what one woman discards,  

another will pick up

and attempt to build with it.  

Draw the ink out of the free box books 

and write your story on the wall.  

Gather the bags of junk clothes 

and sew your own funeral shroud.  

Harvest the abandoned tomato plants  

after the old farmer’s death to feed the 5,000.  

Net the bed sighs from the air around us 

and baptize your specters.  

It is the way of the world that hers  

is mine is his is theirs is no one’s is ours  

is yours. It is always yours. Everything 

I will ever do, is yours. 

Mary Alice Dixon: 'Granny Sharps Tells of Graveyard Fields Grace'; 'Granny Dreams Herself a High Country Bear'

Mary Alice Dixon grew up in Appalachian coal dust and Carolina red clay. She is a Pushcart nominee in poetry, winner of the NC Writers’ Network 2024 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition and has been a finalist for both the NC Poetry Society Poet Laureate Award and the Broad River Review Rash Award in Poetry. Her poetry is in Fourth River, Kakalak, Main Street Rag, Pinesong, North Dakota Quarterly, Stonecoast Review, storySouth, and elsewhere. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she facilitates hospice grief writing workshops that include nature rituals, found poems, and blueberry scones. Her passions include growing sunflowers with cow manure and talking with the ghosts of her grandmother and her two dead cats, Alice B. Toklas and Thomas Merton. 

Granny Sharps Tells of Graveyard Fields Grace 

When I was young, Granny said,   

Grace, the seamstress, taught us girls  

how to find the muscle in our fingers 

the backbone in our hands, how  

to cut a belt to fit the flesh we wore,  

not what others wished we were. 

Some say old Grace is dead now, 

buried with the wind-thrown  

spruce under Graveyard Fields. 

But my eyes have seen Grace rise,  

moon-fat and spirit-wise, spinning  

stars, unfastening Orion’s shining belt 

Look up. See the threads of Grace  

sewing revolution. 

She works with God the Mother  

expanding heaven’s seams.  

Granny Dreams Herself a High Country Bear 

Slumbering in Hungry River hills, 

smelling of sorrow and shale 

my bear bones dream 

the birthing cold, 

how snow once 

warmed my den 

winter-sleeping keeping  

me alive,  

blue ice unmelting life, 

I dream a world unburning, 

surf unfrothed with fire, 

the globe of earth unwarming, 

I dream life  

with cooling hope.

Megan Krupa: 'Interview of the Mother'

Megan Krupa is the author of the poetry chapbook, Heirloom. A 2025 representative of the Women of Appalachia Project, her poetry appears in BOAAT, Driftwood Press, Broad River Review, and is forthcoming in the 2025 Anthology of Appalachian Writers. She is an undergraduate alumnus of the Literature and Language Department at East Tennessee State University and received an MFA in creative writing from The University of Tampa. She is scheduled to complete her PhD at the University of Tennessee in Spring 2025. She works as an Assistant Professor at East Tennessee State University supporting undergraduate and graduate teacher candidates.

Interview of the Mother  

This (child) is deliberate.  

She is taking more and more 

from the pocket of air,  

under my skin, in the place  

where it aches deepest 

most of the time. 

You’ve asked me to tell you about her. 

All I can say is  

there was weight taken out of me 

and away when she left.  

And if you don’t belief my grief,  

it is not the mother’s burden of proof.  

So when you ask me  

to tell you  

why I didn’t  

hold onto her hands 

every second, of every day. 

Like there was nothing left in me  

but to concentrate  

on not unloosening.  

All I can say is 

I wanted this world to be hers. 

Lydia Gwyn: 'Sing a Lullaby'; 'I Get on My Knees'; 'Seasonless Time'; 'Unbury, Unbury'; 'Come Close'

Lydia Gwyn is the author of the flash fiction collections: You'll Never Find Another (2021, Matter Press) and Tiny Doors (2018, Another New Calligraphy). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best Microfictions 2024, F(r)iction, Mom Egg Review, Waxwing, The Florida Review, Fractured Lit, and others. A selection of her fiction is also available in mini-chapbook form in Issue 22 of Ravenna Press’s Triples Series. She lives with her family in East Tennessee and works as an instruction librarian at East Tennessee State University.

Sing a Lullaby 

Sing a lullaby. Looking glass, billy goat, song of morning bells ringing. Sing a mother’s delight. You will miss them even while they’re still with you, growing old, breaking bones, breaking fevers, breaking hearts, driving away from you the way gravity can’t stop pulling. Son and daughter–local moons directing tides, the steely oceans of your life. Sing with twin hearts in your throat, your lungs like a splay of wings, feathering over them. The tank of your heart swells its seams when you hold them, and when they are too grown to be held, when you lay beside them, soothing, soothing. Sing into the playground, the pepper edge of tampered grass, chain-link bucket swing, cloud and branch and sky. Sing the baby’s hot cheek, the child’s wet hair, curled hands. Sing into the precipice of sleep in a dim bedroom. You sway, you rock, you pat-pat. Rhythm of rotating galaxies, slow-moving pearl of host clouds. The baby, the child, always somersaulting away toward the boundaries of the world, toward night, toward day, free of you. 

I Get on My Knees 

The April dirt is cold and damp. I won’t plant anything into it for another few weeks, but I will remove things. Fleabane, the starts of flame bush that come up from a rhizome and take over every gap in the garden. The money plant that volunteered itself beyond the borders of its bed and into the mown yard. Wild violets, buttercups, grasses, dandelions, even the geranium which crops up at the base of the oak leaf hydrangeas. All beautiful things that will choke out other beautiful things. I give my yard a pedicure, clipping and extracting, buffing out the rough spots, polishing. I get on my knees and I stay there most of the day, the soil taking up residence in the threads of my jeans, two rain-soaked neighborhoods on the hills of my knees. While I’m down there, I think a lot about my grandparents’ land and all they grew there over the years. The orchards, the rowed gardens, the beds of old-fashioned flowers. The pink sweet-peas that popped up along the bank, where my grandmother tossed food scraps, reaching their tendrils up the hill and opening their frilled buds like baby ears. I think about my grandfather–a veteran marine and mechanic, a rabid democrat, who’d watch CNN all day and yell at the TV the same way his son’s lost their minds over a football game. Inching closer and closer to the edge of the recliner, until the edge ran out and he had to stand. I think of him giving my grandmother injections in their bedroom, when her cancer returned. I can see him now with the black medical bag unzipped on the bed, measuring out medicine from a small jar. Helping her to sit, so careful with her body, which was as soft and pale as the peonies in her yard, the fluffiest flowers, whose centers looked like children lost in bonnets and petticoats. I think of my grandmother’s red spiral candles at Christmas and the soft wooly ribbons she used to decorate her gifts. How the ribbons and the candles shared the same qualities. Both bright and fat and cheery at a time when the view outside had shrunk away to bare branch and gray sky. I think of Easter and the eggs hidden in tree trunks and grasses and my cousins and staying up late in our grandparents' kitchen to color the eggs in cups of vinegar and dye. And then later, autumn’s bowl of apples always on the table. The plush cats my grandmother sewed and displayed at Halloween. Her hands, when they were up to the task, fingers with such aching attached pearly button-eyes, embroidered an upturned mouth. 

Seasonless Time 

I read that scientists must redefine loneliness, a word which now includes a sense of lost identity and a disconnection that’s always been there, along with silo and oneness, less and loss. Fewer boreal forests for the chickadees, and for Chinook Salmon–no roads home. The game run dry. The cattle sliced thin, and the herdsmen, who without their herds, are just men. A seasonless time. For me, it was a mountain removed from the horizon. I stood in my new town–a young mother, a transposed wife–and stared across the bay into the shipyard and a wall of blue and rusting cargo containers, sea cans stacked like Legos. I could feel it in my chest — new loneliness expanding like a parking lot, filling with commuters by the minute. A shadow moved across my life like the lie within a smile. The bay lapped up jump ropes, medical waste, dirty diapers folded just the way I folded my son’s — tight as empanadas. The bay brought shoelaces, beer bottles, blue grocery bags, little rivulets of agent orange. And the cormorants kept on diving and dining on mentholated fish. For me, there were few graces — the sidewalk sedum, the city’s feral cats and the woman who fed and watered them, rock doves, purring pigeons, a handful of squirrels. The gales within the seagulls. 

Roadside goldenrod

– Wands of rayed florets nodding 

The world is yellow 

Unbury, Unbury 

I nurse my baby in bed, streetlight through windows, inky hills of neighborhood. We drowse on a pontoon of oxytocin, and I become a mother snapping into place. Baby is so small, and his face glows–sun within a son. I become and become. Learn to swaddle, to fasten, hold like a football or cradle, to sway constantly. Learn to close the rooms of another life. But old doors crack open and old selves slip through in the smell of upside-down roses and teenage candles. Cold windows in the farmhouse, oil furnace sounds. And all I thought I’d sealed away returns. My brother’s child-face before life’s complications. Our grandparents’ house on Robertson Road. Fog of grapes on the vines. Yo-yo’s loose string, wheelbarrow rides. Again, we wander the neighborhood, and I keep my brother close. Again, he’s smaller, always smaller than the other boys. How I miss these beautiful things, which leak a kind of sadness now in my brother’s absence. In dreams, I unbury and unbury him, another mother’s son, and he lives again, but it’s not the same. In waking life, I cannot put the baby in his own room at night. He stays with me, and I count out my worries in the lace skirt of the bassinet, the turn of cups in cabinets, plates stacked just so, the correct number of times to say amen. I enter rooms as though I’m standing outside myself. And my hand reaches down to hold another hand. Baby is so small. I bounce him and rock him and walk with him. Pat, pat, pat his back. Rub knobs of shoulder blades and thin bracelets of ribs. When baby sleeps mid-meal, his mouth softens, unlatches from me. Where is the moment when his thoughts become dreams? 

Down the road from us

 yellow sways of buttercups

 spring from winter fields  

Come Close 

Come close, little self, and into the peopled homes, the chase of steeples around the road, brick churches, plain as metal folding chairs. See the houses set into the side of the mountain on a slope so steep you think everything there may slide with the next hard rain. The road is full of turns. So many turns, the word “bend” is in the street name. Move up the road of bends, past the camellias hiding flushed as faces in the leaves. Have you ever seen camellias in the snow? 

Come higher where you can glimpse the lake through the trees. Sometimes, sailboats. Sometimes, red buoys that resemble sailboats. Race the turn where oncoming cars shine like twin suns in your eyes, the turn where your uncle crashed his motorcycle, where your mother drives with both hands. Come higher still then glide down the road and move past swimming pools that turn green in winter, past brown dogs tethered to yards.Posts in the ground, nets around trampolines, gravel driveway leaking into the street. Dead yards and dirt yards and kale-green yards. 

Arrive at the yellow house you know so well. A weekend home. A pause in your child’s life. Smell the apples in their bowls and the soup beans in the kitchen. See your grandmother tying laces, sewing button eyes. A twist of rope pulled from a drawer. There’s a horse race on TV, and your grandfather is out of his seat, on his toes. Uncles, aunts, everyone holding their breath. 

You remember this room a different way — fire in the fireplace, soft carpet, gentle dozing. But today, the horses are neck-and-neck, their coats teddy bear brown and glistening. The room is on edge. See the horses racing for ovals, racing for the good apples, racing through their lives just like your parents, just like you. Any moment one of the horses might bust out and gallop into the parking lot down the street, through city after city, town after town until it reaches yours. Running hard, sweating, losing its jockey in the road of bends. Up the turns, past the camellias, and into your grandparents’ yard. A horse might be outside right now on the porch waiting for you to hop on. Go to the door, dear one, and turn the knob.  

A door of flowers

 Relatives come and grow old

 A turn of seasons