Hello, and welcome to the drive-through window of the Poets’ Table. May I take your order? I have imagined from the start that our poetry gatherings in Appalachian Places would take place around a table, given that poems provide so many of us a genuine kind of sustenance, and that reading our poems would feel like sharing a meal with friends, some you may not even know yet. During the year I lived in New Orleans, I learned the term lagniappe, a word and concept so lovely I can hardly believe it didn’t originate in Appalachia. It roughly means “a little something extra,” an add-on for no reason other than to show a bit of gratitude and fellowship. For instance, there was a local hamburger chain that offered a “lagniappe bar,” basically any kind of topping one could wish to put on a giant burger, set up like a salad bar and offered free of charge. In this high summer installment, we have more poets than ever. We open with work from Cathryn Hankla, Virginia native recently retired from Hollins University, with poems from her forthcoming, career-spanning, New & Selected poetry volume. We follow with a deep-memory suite by James Owens, with lovely interactions with nature and landscape from Linda Behrend and Lee Clark Zumpe. Hilda Downer’s poem engages with Robert Morgan’s landmark study of Daniel Boone and reckons with a complicated legacy. Morgan was our very first poetry contributor in Appalachian Places and elsewhere in this issue, he is also our very first fiction contributor, with his short story “Timrod Hill.” We close this summer session with Kingsport, TN native and freshly minted UT-Knoxville Ph.D. Andrew Lee Butler’s ode to East Tennessee’s greatest fast-food restaurant, Pal’s: if you know, you know.
— Jesse Graves, Appalachian Places poetry editor
Cathryn Hankla: 'WIDOW'S TEARS'; 'A LOVE SUPREME'; 'A PASSING SONDER'; 'HOMING'
Cathryn Hankla is the author of multiple works in several genres and a visual artist native to Southwest Virginia. Return to a Certain Region of Consciousness: New & Selected Poems will be published by Mercer University Press in spring 2025. Recent publications include Immortal Stuff: prose poems, Not Xanadu, and the memoir Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home. A cloud-based planetarium show featuring poems from Hankla's Galaxies can be viewed at Digi-star planetariums nationwide. Hollins University professor emerita of English & creative writing, Hankla lives in Roanoke, Virginia.
WIDOW’S TEARS
Spring ephemerals:
May Apple, Dogbane, Horse
Nettle, Turtlehead, Flame
Azalea, Whorled
Wood Aster, Bee Balm,
Bloodroot, Butterfly Weed,
Common Rose Pink, Sweet
Everlasting, Foxglove,
Meadow Rue, Nodding
Ladies’ Tresses, Bluebell,
Pinesap, Trout-lily,
Trillium, Green-headed
Coneflower. Hour
by hour, I try not
to weep. I commit
your names to memory.
Blooming brief moments—
all of us, all of us
A LOVE SUPREME
My Coltrane’s a coal train,
my ordained undone.
Annealed scars annulled, a
shadow follows me
everywhere. Smoke signals.
I launched fireworks, but
later watched them fizzle,
their bright cause severed
from original acts,
the blasts that propelled
those streamers forgotten
now: love stays when all
else goes. You slipped away
on our bed, alone.
I’d waived my rights to all
but tears washing words,
our letters, poems— ink
plots, muddles, covers.
A PASSING SONDER
What’s more vulnerable
than two fleshy loops
plugged by steel or silver
balancing your face?
Touch? Don’t touch? Gauged lobes flap
and tatted elbows
mark a place I’d never
think to color. Your
spinning wheels pass as prayer—
all blessings must. Let
me bend your ear toward rich
entanglement one
more time on this earth we
share. What do you say?
Secrets aren’t safe in you
or in me. Listen,
lend me those bangled ears—
let us swop stories.
HOMING
Starlings in the attic,
vex us with screeches.
Speckled half-pints hatched where
bird-brained parents laid
a blue egg or three. I
wave blankets this way,
this way out. Never will
they—stubborn, starved—take
exit. Stupid, I want
to say but stumble
wooden stairs with bucket,
mopping chalk droppings,
maid to their sad homing.
Striped feathers sift in
dusty corners. Slits of
sun mean more nests. They
neither lift nor draw breath,
bundles that once flew.
James Owens: 'Not Long After on KY 15, Between Clayhole and Defeated Creek'; 'The Storm'; 'Caps'
James Owens's newest book is Family Portrait with Scythe (Bottom Dog Press, 2020). His poems appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Still: the Journal, Atlanta Review, Appalachian Review, and many times in Now & Then. Originally from Southwest Virginia, he worked on newspapers in the region, before earning an MFA at the University of Alabama. He now lives in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.
Not Long After Dawn on KY 15, Between Clayhole and Defeated Creek
The coyote is not going to yield. It staggers
in the road like the ghost of one of the old people
and bars departure. We were heading north again,
an early start, after this year's Christmas visit,
daylight breaking through fog, gifts wedged
between my son and daughter in the back seat.
After days of heavy food and talk and love,
the homeplace of my mother's loneliness,
I am relieved to go, ashamed to be relieved.
The children are growing nervous, looking to me.
The coyote is sick and is starving because sick,
ribs about to punch through skin, eyes yellow
and gluey and accusing, and it heaves out puffs
of vapor, showing how each breath hurts.
Legs stiff on cracked asphalt, it waits to eat or die.
“What now?” I guess the coyote thinks. “Fuck it,”
the coyote thinks, like one of the old people
who died in fury, their bones now weightless
knobs and splinters in their blind graves.
Which grandfather does it want me to remember,
what long family debt of money and torment
would this slavering revenant have me lay to rest?
I keep its threats secret between us, thinking
of rabies, how tender are the hands and throats
of my beginning-to-be-worried passengers,
who have left off playing with their new toys
to look up and ask again why we have stopped.
Soon, I will tap the gas and ease around the coyote,
which will not waste breath in pleading, will snap
at the tires and wait for the next holiday traveler.
We will drive toward snow and Midwest wind—
but for now, not yet gone or staying, this standoff
beneath beautiful rags of sunlit mist that hang
from the unleafed hickories and diseased pines.
The Storm
—Sandlick Elementary, Birchleaf, Va., 1975
Sudden raindrops spit like pebbles against the windows.
A storm at school is a pleasure, our mood
out at the edges of us, expectant, ionized,
the loud air honed and tasting of metals.
Thunder rattles the panes in their sashes.
This time we are milling about the room,
when the lights fail, at an apocalyptic crash,
and Jeff, the rangy bully whom everyone fears,
whose father beats him, as we know
and are glad, turns in the brief dark,
leans into me, trembling, pressing thighs
and chest against mine, his animal, rough
breath, a moment of his hand at my crotch.
He is gone when the lights bring
the world back. Did he really slump into me,
like a tired lover hungering for warmth,
that hazardous surge of current through us?
Or more like a child sheltering from thunder?
He strides away and doesn't look back, ever.
Two minutes later, he is across the room,
growling, punching somebody in the eye.
Caps
—Prater, Va., 1970
He likes toy guns—not really, but he doesn't like football,
so he gets toy guns, cheap plastic cap pistols
and one heavy, real-looking revolver,
with a cylinder that swings out for reloading.
(Consider the frenzy of invention to engineer a cap pistol:
the mechanism that ratchets the caps
precisely between hammer and firing plate,
the triggered spring driving the hammer
with enough force for the satisfying bang,
and the caps themselves, a long paper tape
sprocketed like film to advance
the measured pockets of explosive.
There must be a machine designed
to mold each part, workers who live
by sweating daily on that assembly line.
You can sell millions of guns for a dollar each.)
He shoots all of his cousins, and they shoot him.
He can fire fast, without mercy, until
the air swirls with sour grey smoke,
and spent paper curls around his wrist.
Would it be fair to mention that the dads
and bashful uncles who give them guns
watch soldiers die on the TV news?
That everyone loves westerns and cop shows?
If you feel celebratory and profligate,
or too full with a vague grief, you might
lay a whole roll of caps on a rock
and smash them with another rock.
This makes a boom like breaking the sky.
Linda Behrend: 'Redbud, Blue Sky'
Linda Behrend was born and raised in upper East Tennessee and has written about the Appalachian Region in many publications, including Now and Then and The Encyclopedia of Appalachia. Most recently, she edited Anne Wetzell Armstrong’s memoir Of Time and Knoxville, which was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2022. During 1996/97, she served as acting technical services archivist in the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University.
Redbud, Blue Sky
Redbud,
Blue sky,
Green grass—
Mowing on an April afternoon
I want it to last forever,
Desperate to prolong this sensory overload
Even if I drown in its delicious depths.
In the backyard,
A carpet of bluets,
Sprung up wild
From the few I set out
In scattered corners under bushes.
The lilac, just beginning to bloom,
Joins in the chorus—
Anxious to be heard
Along with the others already on stage.
Redbud,
Pink dogwood,
Purple phlox—
How can I take you all in
And preserve this moment
That I want to last forever?
Lee Clark Zumpe: 'Nantahala'; 'The Same River'
Lee Clark Zumpe, an entertainment editor with Tampa Bay Newspapers, earned his degree in English at the University of South Florida. He began writing poetry and fiction in the early 1990s. His work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and genre magazines over the last two decades. Lee lives on the west coast of Florida with his wife and daughter.
Nantahala
silent pilgrims cast into the vast wilderness,
impeded by winter, embark upon
an uncertain journey.
trailing wisps of locomotive breath,
the mortal engines deliberately trace
an unfamiliar route
as morning stretches its arms.
soon, the daystar joins their ascent,
confident and noble.
the warmth of a whisper caresses Nantahala,
dispelling the snowy veil and clearing the path.
The Same River
I went back to that spot in the rapids
where once I’d planted my Timberlands –
fished for smooth stones beneath the sweetgum –
listened for whispers from the lazy shadows
echoing long-dead loggers
or settlers buried in Appalachian ground.
I went back to the Nantahala,
eager to find the same resolve,
prayed for smooth dreams and long days
and the illusion of immortality.
I went back to find something I had lost,
snapshot moments now buried in silty sediment
or washed too far downstream to recover.
the seasons, the world, the cosmos is in flux –
you cannot step into the same river twice.
Hilda Downer: 'No Signal'
Hilda Downer is the author of four collections of poetry: Bandana Creek, Sky Under the Roof, a Golden Nautilus Winner for Poetry; When Light Waits For Us, and Wiley’s Last Resort. She holds an MFA from Vermont College and is a long-term member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, North Carolina Writers Conference, North Carolina Writers Network, and Appalachian Writers Workshop. A retired psychiatric nurse, she lives outside of Boone, NC.
No Signal
(after Robert Morgan’s, Boone: A Biography)
The way wind rearranged pine needles
or smell of rain fused to boulders
revealed the exact location
to a blindfolded Boone.
Maybe he didn’t know he was lost
without today’s technology
in a time that changed the course of history.
A Fitbit would have
logged his steps more accurately
along Blue Ridge Mountains,
North Carolina to Kentucky—
so hard not to lose count
during frequent stops
to kill a bear or two,
altogether 90
at the same bend of a creek
at different times.
Setting a digital alarm
would have taken less steps
than scouting for a spring at night—
a full bladder to awaken him early.
A Fitbit would have proven the heart rate
increases when running a gauntlet
or that salt cured meat
is linked to high blood pressure.
He carried few provisions—
tomahawk, shot bag, powder horn, knife,
and his rifle, so precise
he nicknamed it, Old Tick-Licker.
Still, his wrist had room to fit a Fitbit,
Old Fitbitter,
but neither the sun nor compass
could have tracked an iPhone—
no satellite aligned to the time
when buffalo roamed Appalachia.
A Fitbit just didn’t work for Boone
who could winter the wilderness
without a blanket.
Now, the checklist for an hour’s hike
includes sunscreen, sunglasses,
granola bars, bottled water, and Off spray.
If only a 12-step or grief group had existed
when Boone’s slave, Adam, reported
teenagers sent ahead
had lost their way.
If only GPS had been available to reroute
them safely to their destination.
Stolen from his own country,
Adam had hidden deep in the driftwood
of a terrible and alien world
as James Boone cried out, Mama, Mama,
during torture by the war party
of Cherokee and Shawnee.
Rebecca braced at Boone’s footsteps
as she wrapped their son’s bloody body
in her best linen sheet for protection—
the hands that had tried to ward off attack,
sliced like signal bars indicating full strength.
Though Boone never stepped
on that Warriors Path again,
he continued his family’s move to Kentucky.
He couldn’t imagine the result of settlement—
extinct fauna with no place to haunt
amid razed Lady Slippers, trillium, and mother trees
on mountains removed for coal.
He simply couldn’t pay
for the collect calls from Greed,
couldn’t listen to Genocide’s voicemail,
couldn’t answer the Caller, no ID.
He was Daniel Boone,
not Jesus Christ
who was part of a trinity.
Boone’s affair with loneliness
started with his name,
containing the word
one.
Trauma bears its own brand of loneliness,
drums through generations.
The sins of fathers visited upon children,
a child disappears,
no bread crumbs to follow,
only prayer lost in molecules of air.
Suffer the little children—
forsaken and sold into sex slavery,
war-torn in the Middle East, Sudan, and Ukraine,
or murdered because of melatonin
meant to protect precious skin
of sons and daughters
from the tyrannical sun.
No behind bars for those at fault
for missing Indigenous American women,
smoke vanished long ago.
Perhaps their spirits have stepped
off the beaten path
back in time
where they can’t reach us
and we can’t reach them—
no signal.
Andrew Lee Butler: 'Palinode for Pal’s Sudden Service'
Andrew Lee Butler is a writer raised in Kingsport, TN, and a graduate of East Tennessee State University. He teaches writing at the University of Tennessee, where he recently defended his creative dissertation, Christ His Grace Is Sufficient Mobile Home Service and Transporting, Inc. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Oxford American, Appalachian Review, McNeese Review, and elsewhere.
Palinode for Pal’s Sudden Service
When I was a kid, I didn’t understand the phrase
You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.
The preterite seemed eternal promise: if you had
Boston cream pie or black forest cake
for dessert, that meant you ate it. Have meant will
eat. But then we grow up, or more or less we do.
*
I had Pal’s the last time I stayed in Kingsport.
I had Pal’s the last time I drove through Kingsport.
I have Pal’s anytime I’m in Kingsport since,
in the phenomenological way of things,
Kingsport is the Pal’s drive-through line.
*
You can’t write a contrapuntal about Pal’s,
at least not the kind where the speaker’s
interior monologue skirts around
the words found in the menu. At Pal’s,
they take your order too fast.
As soon as you ask for a razzie Dr. Enuf,
Dr. Enuf add razzie whizzes through the mic.
That’s the other thing you need to know about Pal’s.
They are fast. Their service is sudden. They entrust you
with their words: if you say Big Chicken,
they will believe you and start slathering spicy mustard
before you have decided on the drink. I have seen
lines of cars stretch back to the streetlight
on Fort Henry, swell to the circle on Gilbreath,
and still pulled in line, trusting
I’ll have my chipped ham with cheese before
the lone car at the Wendy’s next door has their nuggets.
*
Pal’s has a burger that it calls the Big Pal.
It has sweet tea and Coca-Cola products, optionally
sweetened with raspberry and peach syrups.
It has vanilla and chocolate and strawberry milkshakes
and peanut butter milkshakes at walk-in locations.
It has sauceburgers and chilibuns and this thing
called a Toasted Cheese. It has breakfast offerings
of biscuits and gravy and biscuits and meats
and these cheese-imbued hash browns
called cheddar rounds, which I will find a way
to end this poem on since they’re the only way
a poem about Pal’s can possibly end.
*
I have stood in mountain clearings
and ridden along high ridges, watching the towns
that speckle the valley, overcome with a want
to inhabit the view: to walk along streets with names
and eavesdrop on people with stories
and read letters to the editor each morning
in a favorite nook of the local library.
But when I wind back down the mountain,
I can’t find the town I saw from above—
just the same streets and storefronts I left behind
that morning when I went for a drive.
What we love is the dream of what we loved.
*
A Pal’s sits across the street from my undergrad
and I would often go, but every now and again,
on self-pitying evenings where I had an hour
or two worth of reading or a poem to write,
I’d sit in the Wendy’s next door
and order some chili, sometimes a Frosty.
I’d do a little work but mostly watch
cars amble their way through the Pal’s line.
You can’t get that view from the drive-thru
anymore than a cog can see the intricate machinations
its turning begets. And if I had gone to Pal’s
for dinner, I would have ordered a hot dog
and a sauceburger and found somewhere
to eat them. But in the Wendy’s next door,
an hour passes and the chili’s cold,
but I still have my view of Pal’s.
*
There is no Pal’s in Fayetteville, Arkansas,
where I did my MFA. There is a Wendy’s,
though. A slow one, where the only car
in line might wait ten minutes for their fries.
I went there some nights for their slowness,
expecting it. I’d bring up an article about Pal’s
by a Harvard Business professor on my phone,
embarrassed by my own sentimentality, alone
and wallowing in thoughts of something far away.
The article is jargoned fawning,
but I want to reach through the phone
and tell those people from other places
the secret of Pal’s, the same thing I said
to a friend from Florida after she told me
she drove to Morristown to try the Pal’s
up there and thought it was just okay:
If you don’t like Pal’s, you don’t understand.
If you love Pal’s, you don’t understand.
*
The problem with writing a poem about Pal’s
is that the Pal’s poem must one day be abandoned:
the accentual-syllabic chipped ham with cheese
will no longer haunt my every step
and the tupleted lullabies of frenchie fry
and peachy tea will cease shepherding my sleep.
That I may never capture in words why
a ditch brimming with sun-fried weeds
behind the Stone Drive Pal’s intrudes
upon my biographical imaginings.
That the rhythm of the Pal’s menu will no longer
subordinate each bored consideration.
*
For the past two weeks, I’ve listened to Frankie Valli
anytime I’ve been alone in the car.
“Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” mostly.
Something about it begs the back button.
It’ll almost end, the final chorus stubborn
in the same key, only a single sustained violin
marking the outro, and I’ll catch it just before
the track changes. It’ll play five or six times over
before I find a parking spot on campus.
I let the last time play out, listening for what it is
that sirens this song, and realize it’s the trombone
in the chorus. Underneath Frankie Valli, underneath
an unrelenting tambourine, underneath the voice
in your own head humming along, a trombonist
graces their way through clipped glissandos,
each one a burst, a self-contained cadenza, a love letter
to anyone who closes their eyes for the best part of a song.
For the past week, I’ve thought about writing a poem titled
“Ode to the Trombonist Bringing It Home
on Frankie Valli’s ‘Can’t Take my Eyes Off You,’”
but when I catch myself alone in a parking garage,
leaning forward to let my ear closer to the speaker,
I’m still thinking of Pal’s. The brief flourish
blazing beneath the noise. The wait for something
so quick and juice-filled, a flare of the senses
found while everyone else is clapping or shopping
and you’re parked in a strip mall, biting into a Big Pal
as drips of mayonnaise gracenote your tongue.
*
And so it is: the trick of Kingsport
is that it understands perfection
is attainable. Not in life, but in segments
of life. In the choreographed efficiency of buns
changing hands. In the town’s best-liked teenagers
serious in their aprons before they leave for college.
In a cup full of yellow soda, sunlight
glowing through the styrofoam.
*
You can’t write a Pal’s poem and finish it, too.
But I can dream of Pal’s. Count the cars looping
around it, the brown bags poking through the window.
And if I’m to spend all night dreaming about Pal’s,
I’ll dream a Pal’s poem that can last
through the night, the final stanza welcoming
daybreak. And since I’m up already,
I’ll run over to Pal’s and order two large cheddar rounds:
one to eat in the car and the other to carry with me
and offer to anyone I happen across that morning,
as a gift.
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