Poetry by Doug Van Gundy, Amy Le Ann Richardson, Susanna Skelton, Evelyn Bales, and Matthew Gilbert

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I won’t weigh this letter down with too heavy of a garden metaphor as I did with the spring installment; gone is the competition between me and my yard’s rabbits. I’ve resolved now that if they can reach it, they can have it since the top half of the tomato plants continue to yield more than what’s humanly possible for me to consume. In Appalachian culture, food is often the center of our homes and families, a handbook of knowledge and tradition we share the same way ancestral stories are handed down from generation to generation.  

Doug Van Gundy of West Virginia starts us off with his poem “The Way We Do Things.” In it, he speaks of the dead’s deep connection to the living, how they are good company as well as consultants for moments when “we’re at a loss.” His line here is referring to returning to our family recipes, that they’re “a charm against forgetting” and a way to conjure the sensory memories of the dead back to our present moment. When selecting the poems for this installment, I decided that poetry, too, is a charm against forgetting, one of the only ways humans have figured out how to freeze time, slow it, and spin it backward.  

This August series of poems brings us to the summer harvest table, and beyond, with candied pecans, cathead biscuits, donuts, sweat tea, cornbread, and beans. More than just a reminder of the sustenance this earth can provide, these poems consider other ways we find forms of nourishment, or tradition, sometimes in unlikely places: music, graveyards, mountains, prayer, clotheslines, porches, and among the trees.  

Kentuckian Amy Le Ann Richardson slows down time in the two middle poems of her selection, giving thanks for the rooster and her chicken, Syrup, and the “ephemeral little flashes” their existence brings. But her first and last poem provide a thoughtful foil to these moments of peace as they consider the more complicated relationship we humans have to the land: the juxtaposition of praying for rain to combat fire season after so much recent flooding destruction, and how in Appalachia we often consider our identities to be intrinsically tied to the mountains we inhabit — so how do we process corporations coming in to cut them apart and haul them off?  

Susanna Skelton’s three poems give us an arc from elegy to ode in the center of this installment, beginning with a study of the Eastern Hemlock and ending with “Appalachian Pastoral.” This final poem opens with honeysuckle, and the form follows suit using a windy sensory thread, transcending between the physical world and the spiritual, describing, “These hills have ears / and voices too.” Evelyn Bales continues with poems rooted in observation, quiet meditations of a Wood Thrush, red fox, and luna moth. Her final piece conjures back the memories of being a first generation Appalachian college student here at ETSU in the late 1950s as she and her friends cruised around in “the great unknown.” To close, the poems of Matthew Gilbert of Virginia encapsulate how poetry can be a “charm against forgetting” in the way that they ground readers in action, such as the muscle memory of the clothesline, and what feels lost now that doing laundry is modernized by technology. It reminds us that reinhabiting our ancestors’ acts of labor, too, can return us to the past and provide connections to those no longer living.  

This installment’s final poem, Gilbert’s “hues of scattered memory,” is the ultimate closing piece to witness a poem’s ability to manipulate time, even if the memories we reanimate are imperfect or incomplete. Thank you for finding your way to this installment. I hope you will pull up a chair and join us at this supper table of the senses, tradition, landscape, music, and poetry.  

Lacy Snapp 

Guest Poetry Editor 

Doug Van Gundy: 'The Way We Do Things'; 'Our Music'; 'An Alleghany Prayer'; 'For the Dead of West Virginia, Still Waiting for a Better Day'

Doug Van Gundy directs the West Virginia Wesleyan College Low-Residency MFA Creative Writing program. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Guernica, Poets & Writers, and The Oxford American. He is the author of a book of poems, A Life Above Water and co-editor of the anthology Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Contemporary Writing from West Virginia.

The Way We Do Things 

Around here, we keep our dead real close, 

set them a place at table, keep buttermilk 

in cartons at the back of the fridge for them. 

We lift the fiddle from the peg and play 

tunes they know, listening for their unbearably  

sweet humming and the patting of absent feet. 

We know the lightning bugs are their weightless souls 

hovering over the lawn on summer nights. Give them 

a little music and watch the pale lights form figures: 

Right hand across — how d’ya do? Left hand back — fine thank you. 

We have all their recipes in a tin box on the counter, 

consult them like tarot cards when we’re at a loss —  

apple stack-cake, cathead biscuits, venison jerky — 

We make their favorites as a charm against forgetting,  

saying their names: Ida, June, and Vernon; Moses and Wilda, 

as we ladle and spoon, slice and serve. 

My father is getting ready for the day he meets  

or re-meets them, quizzing himself on names and dates 

with homemade flashcards, cocking his head like a spaniel 

when he feels one enter the room. Uncle Richard, right?  

We hold family reunions in the graveyard, set baskets 

of cold fried chicken and ham sandwiches on the slabs, 

say a little grace, then eat. After cake, and black coffee poured  

from my grandfather’s battered thermos, I lay on the lawn 

among wilted carnations and feign sleep, turning my face  

to the ground, whispering the news they need to know. 

Our Music 

My music is the jangle 

Of rusty plows banged together… 

Don West, “Dark Night” 

Don’t forge it into something it’s not: 

keep your music rusty.  Everything you need  

is caught up in those fiddle tunes and ballads,  

protected by decades of sweet neglect. 

The shiny stuff? The songs that shine 

like headlights on the highway? Worthless. 

Just pot-metal and silver plating,  

the junk you win at carnivals that turns  

your sweetheart’s finger green. 

The rust and rough edges are how you know 

there’s sweat in there: mettle and dirt and strength. 

It’s not silver that gave the red dirt its color;  

the very earth is rusted red like our music, 

that stain is in our blood and packed under 

our nails and worked into our hands. 

It takes callused hands to make music 

that isn’t callous — music that can’t 

forged into keen blades (our ploughshares remain  

ploughshares), it must keep its jangle and wire edge  

if it is going to sound like our lives. 

An Allegheny Prayer 

for Rosalie Haizlett 

Praise be to clubmoss, to tree ears, rock tripe,  

and red British soldiers huddled in damp hollows  

beneath the mountain’s peak. 

Praise the Autumn goddess in her robes 

of yellow-on-yellow and the late-blooming hazel 

and witch’s butter who are her handmaids. 

Sing psalms of stream-music  

in the wettest register of your voice — harmonize  

with raven and cicada, screech-owl and kestrel. 

As offering and benediction 

empty your pockets and take off your shoes. 

The mosses will welcome you into their fellowship. 

For the Dead of West Virginia, Still Waiting for a Better Day 

Our ancestors are sown into pocket graveyards  

throughout these mountains, private plots  

lucky to be mown monthly by some volunteer 

from the Presbyterian church or an inmate  

from the county jail. Their headstones lean  

into the hillsides, and they wait patiently, 

bony wrists crossed, for the new body  

they were promised from the pulpit 

as they sat aching on bare wood pews  

after six-day work weeks felling and barking 

timber, or killing and cooking chickens, or wielding  

a pick and shovel in a four-foot seam  

half-a-mile inside a mountain. This isn’t to say  

they didn’t know love and joy, that they didn’t  

revel in pleasure and play. They held their children 

in their laps, and sang loud and out of tune, and fought  

and laughed, of course, because that is the unkillable kernel  

at the heart of being human. But know this: they never knew  

any work that didn’t hurt, and they only ever worked  

because they had to, because there had to be a better life  

beyond this one. But there they lie, still moldering, still  

waiting, and maybe beginning to believe they were sold  

a bill of goods, and this hole is the only home they’ll ever know,  

from here on out, forever and ever, Amen. 

Amy Le Ann Richardson: 'In Crisis'; 'Rising'; 'Fleeting'; 'Indivisible'

Amy Le Ann Richardson is a writer, educator, and Eastern Kentuckian whose creative work is deeply informed by her life on a multigenerational family farm in Carter County, Kentucky, where she grows food, makes maple syrup, and homeschools her children. Her writing and art explore themes of place, memory, environmental change, and Appalachian foodways, often rooted in her lived experience as a farmer and her commitment to rural community. She is the author of three poetry collections and the editor of Rooted, Resilient, Rising: Women Growing Food across the Mountains (University Press of Kentucky, forthcoming). 

In Crisis  

Watching trees  

bunched around hillsides  

change shapes, leaves curly,  

green fading in the drought 

walking beneath the canopy in the  

forest feeling dry soil  

puff like powder  

around the edge of my shoe. 

Two summers ago,  

there was too much water  

taking towns and lives 

drowning everything  

we thought we knew here 

but now it’s all ripe for fire season and 

we are praying  

for rain. 

Rising  

Thank God for the rooster 

whose call cuts the morning sky wide open,  

ripping right through those songbirds’   

sweet-sweet-sweets and drink-your-teas 

as a knife across dough ready for the oven, 

the butter of sunrise melting into those  

crisp edges when it’s through.

Fleeting  

Frost-tipped weed husks 

and jewel-lined grass sparkle 

bright in morning sun.  

Yesterday afternoon, I sat on the front steps playing dulcimer. The light lingered at the hilltops and my brown chicken Syrup hung close by hoping for treats. I watched her scratch the ground and pluck at bits of lawn, angled sun illuminating her feathers, an ethereal glow surrounding her as I picked through Big Rock Candy Mountain. I thought about how beautiful she was, how ephemeral little flashes like that stick with us. I thought, again, about this moment the next morning when I woke to see brown feathers strewn across the lawn.  

Indivisible  

I’m supposed to write about mountains but  

all I can think of is how we keep  

tearing them down to spite ourselves, 

cutting into the core of this place, 

ripping our roots right out of the earth. 

We’re all hollow now, 

raking stones across valleys  

where mountains stood, 

stuck in stark sunlight,  

exposed,  

naked  

where shadows should shroud us most of the day, 

quilt us over in greenery, spring ephemerals 

busting through detritus. 

I’m supposed to write about mountains 

as they disappear 

generations lost to holes that held them 

how is there a way out 

if they keep hauling it all off? 

If every beautiful thing is destroyed,  

how do we see ourselves reflected in this place 

but in the desperate cries of its people  

longing for their roots 

for Mamaw’s cornbread recipe 

for Papaw’s fiddle tune 

for the tincture Granny made that’d cure about anything. 

I’m supposed to write about mountains but  

I can’t find a way to forget or forgive the injustice of  

razing them.  

I’m supposed to write about mountains but  

I can’t find a way to separate them from myself.  

Susanna Skelton: 'Elegy for the Eastern Hemlock'; 'The Hunters'; 'Appalchian Pastoral'

Susanna Skelton (she/her) is a poet who holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University. Her work has appeared in Eclectica Magazine, Stonecrop Magazine, Sheepshead Review, Sequoya Review, HerStry, and others. When she’s not writing, she’s likely hunting for treasures in thrift stores, tending to her houseplants, or spending time with her beloved cat, Phoebe.

Elegy for the Eastern Hemlock  

Branches like spindly veins 

mark their magnificence.  

Sunlight slips through the cracks  

between bug and branch,  

which skews the shade for tiny trespassers 

looking for relief in the cool shadows.  

Pools of rain and remnants of dew drops  

collect at the trunk, tucked between  

neighboring needles and finite nodes. 

The cone strives to spread seeds  

but the centuries-old giant  

may not survive to see saplings.  

Their bodies bend under the weight  

of globbed mascara branches  

with sap sucked by prying pests.  

Hands with wiry fingers reach out  

to touch coat hems of people passing  

before the conquered conifer.

The Hunters 

Tobacco fills the morning air, cool and pervasive, as the girl zips up her jacket, waiting patiently by the door for Dad. She carries a pair of antlers, tied loosely together with a strand of cotton rope and thinks about what she might soon see. The two stray further into the woods as the sunlight peeks over top of the nearby ridge. They say little as they sit on the frozen ground, propped up against the tree, listening. Dad’s head tilts back, skull to bark, asleep. The hunter rests while the young one keeps watch, an inversion of nature; prey searching for prey. From valley to peak, all is still until time to return home. They leave behind two trails of crushed leaves in their wake. 

oaks watch the moment 

walk like the prey does, heel-toe 

carry the gun still

Appalachian Pastoral  

A honeysuckle- 

lined stream’s perfume 

can’t be trapped  

in a candle  

like candied pecans, a flea market  

delicacy. The scents of home,  

the sense to lock the door before dark, 

The porch lights left on for dad. 

Grazing cattle chew 

and gazing children dance  

across the lush mountain. 

These hills have ears  

and voices too. 

Gunshots ring after dark 

and spook the staring eyes  

reflecting from the woodline. 

Mamaw stands on the front porch  

drinking sweet tea  

with lemonade. She’s got cathead biscuits in the oven  

and the house filled with tissue boxes,  

  figurines of Jesus. Grandkids make noise  

and we listen.   

Evelyn Bales: 'Wood Thrush'; 'Red Fox Encounter'; 'Luna Visitation'; 'Commuters: ETSU, September 1959'

Evelyn McAmis Bales is a poet who writes from her ridge-top home in a rural area of  Kingsport, Tennessee. She has been published in Appalachian Heritage, (now Appalachian Review) Kudzu, Bloodroot, Anthology of Appalachian Poets and Writers, Southern Poetry Anthology, Tennessee Edition, as well as other journals and anthologies throughout the Appalachian region and beyond. Two of her poems were performed by the West Palm Beach, Florida, Repertory Company in Tapestry: The Voices of Women Poets. Her chapbook Kinkeeper was published by Finishing Line Press. Her chapbook Seasons on the Ridge is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Wood Thrush 

I long for the wildness…where the wood thrush forever sings. 

Henry David Thoreau 

In the morning stillness 

a wood thrush song  

wafts over the ridge 

like summer rain after a drought. 

Yesterday’s storm 

awakened the woods creatures  

from suffocating heat 

to breathe soothing, moist air.  

A Mourning Dove has cooed 

for two days from far away. 

The spring peepers are singing 

from the neighbor’s pond. 

A bullfrog croaks in the midst 

as if establishing his authority. 

At twilight we saw the season’s 

first lightening bug, a good omen. 

The wood thrush flutes his evensong 

as sunset covers the ridge in gold. 

Red Fox Encounter 

Be like the fox… 

Wendell Berry 

An old adage says it’s good luck to see a red fox.   

Old Reynard of ballad and lore, the forest trickster, 

lives on our ridge but rarely makes himself visible, 

but when he does I see beauty, not deceit. 

One morning in Spring he appeared in early mist 

standing on the edge of driveway in regal pose 

surveying these woods and grasslands he owns. 

Whether looking for prey or enjoying the view 

I cannot say. As I watched he looked around  

his domain and seeing nothing of interest 

went sauntering back into the woods 

his coat gleaming in the early morning sun. 

In late winter with spitting snow 

my dog and I met him in the woods 

walking as if he were on a mission 

never pausing or looking our way.   

The dog, awestruck as I, did not move.  

Then, oh sweet magic, a few yards behind 

his vixen was following. As we watched  

they vanished into pine wood thicket. 

Luna Visitation 

You come at midnight, 

a flutter against the screen 

calling Come, come see. 

I expect you in early Spring, 

your winged eyes drawing me 

to the cool night to see lovely 

moon-laced, pale green body 

luminous as the moon herself. 

Frail creature from egg to larva, 

to pupa, to adult hatched to suspend 

yourself on flower or window screen 

to dry your wings, mate after midnight, 

lay your eggs and die. 

Your thrashing before death    

leaves me in tears for such beauty, 

destined to live and die 

as quickly as sun and moon 

measure a week. 

The next morning I gather 

your tattered, broken wings 

and scatter them like a 

a loved one’s ashes 

in all the holy places. 

Commuters 

ETSU, September 1959 

Six freshmen in two-toned,  

brown and beige ’56 Chevy 

carpooling to the great unknown 

squeezed so tight and me  

in front seat middle, my left knee 

just below gear shift.  

Classmates since first grade 

comforting each other as only familiars  

we knew on campus. Scared first generation 

Appalachian college students. Family pride 

riding with us every day. 

Born in Pearl Harbor year, 

time now moving toward Vietnam. 

The Cold War already on, 

boys unsure when their number 

would be called to leave college. 

Precarious times, but Krispy Kreme 

had just opened in Johnson City. 

Every Friday we pooled our change 

to share a dozen of those luscious, 

melt-in-your-mouth treats.  

To have those days back, 

I would buy each of you 

a dozen just to watch them 

rolled into mouths one-by-one 

in that crazy, swirling movement  

you boys perfected.   

Matthew Gilbert: 'A Gift of Water (a golden shovel)'; In the Rise Cycle'; 'A Cindered Circle'; 'hues of scattered memory'

Matthew Gilbert is a writer originally from Southeast Virginia whose work often explores memory, place, myth-making, and the natural world. He received the Jesse Stuart Prize for Young Adult Fiction, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Arkansas International, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IX: Virginia, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Jimson Weed, and others. 

A Gift of Water (a golden shovel) 

Spring heat couldn't peel greasy beans from our fingers then, 

toes kneading the daffodils, drenched in water hose dew on 

Sunday. A cackling gosling skirted the Clinch riverbank, tremulous 

from a wayward detour along the flood, its wing 

wounded by some animal upstream. The coal drag came, 

thunderous screech of wheels along the sloped track, back- 

ward grinding, route collapsed. My grandmother scooped the duckling to  

bed it in a willow vine box, then presented the gift to me. 

The box rested under my grandmother's tropic snow tree, then 

youngling nestled, nipping at leaf-rollers, fluffing off the dew 

of spray bottle spritz. Feathered diddy flapped and was 

quackling before the week's end, child-month gone, 

lost in the tangled play of the lanced leaves, and wanting that 

live June bug that flitted around the room. We made 

a wire fence along the water outside, no need to tame his 

spirit when the river called his name. He pecked at a blade 

of grass growing up from the mud, and the wind blew so 

solemnly it called his mother back, keen 

on sweeping him away with the water’s—     

In the Rinse Cycle

When I was small, you taught me to pinch the pin jaw 

to fasten clothes on the line so wind would thrum  

a rhythm and story I only half understood.  

Your hands secured corners over the fishing line —   

slow and sure, mismatched socks and shirts hanging  

with promised tomorrows between branch and porch  

braced like spruce-firs on Mount Rogers’ peak.  

Sheets fluttered, flipping around 

until we pinned the bottom corners down.  

They spoke in breaths I never could  

understand, then,  

promise of ripening colors, falling.   

Now, I toss jeans, sweaters, and tees into a machine,  

hum and rumble, click, and water-swished spin,  

quicker, unattended. I don’t acknowledge the breeze 

outside, through the glass of the sliding door.  

I remember you standing at the foothill river,  

filling the wicker with cotton, wool, and mottled linen.  

You folded edges into place like the mountain folds  

spring into valley blankets beneath it.  

Still, we both know the weight of this task,  

but the space between us grows quieter,  

weathered meander eroding the path 

where stormwater runs downhill.  

Those coyotes call us both back,  

mournful as moon grasping for day,  

but hundreds of miles I map a different peak  

squinting to pierce through the fog:  

two shadows dance in the soapy water,  

washed away with the rinse-cycle buzzer.

A Cindered Circle 

I still stone my palm closed tight 

and avoid the bare dirt footed 

by the railroad-track slopes and dried up ditch by my home —  

seven white houses have been rebuilt since then. 

That evening burned so hot 

the anger scabbed over my skin 

and sunrays bounced from the corrugated pipe 

I ventured to escape. 

No child could survive that whittling down 

or flash-fire torch of gasolined mud castles  

and dandelion seeds, gray exhaust choking the lungs 

outside the trailer door. 

My uncle took a swig of some hypno-water 

and lit up a stream of yellow jackets 

in conjured ribboned flames that stung his legs  

before he tumbled. 

My father and their friend guffawed like skunk apes, 

and the hidden nests glowed, smogged into dusk. 

I rose at dawn, the house still smoked 

from pyre dreams, to sit  

with a heated ring, 

no longer buzzing in the pit. 

White mushroom remains singed-black in my hands, 

small stoops where a butterfly — ink-stroked, swallowtail yellow —  

once danced. Now a charred circle 

crumbles under the scar. 

When I brought in a crisp banded carcass, 

I hid it in the windowsill crack 

to remind myself of the spell  

I released,  

breathing with the air.

hues of scattered memory 

i remember your gravel laugh — curbside lemonade stand, shirt soaked through in muggy mountain sweat. cameras hadn’t digitized then. later, i learned how to upload and crop the focal point, bleed the saturation into creek-bed mud stains.

i remember your lip curling into a smile, the playful shock of an ice-water bucket cascading your shoulders and back. i wanted to become that body glistening in the red swelter cast. was it that summer halo in the irises of your oak eyes that rooted that moment in time? 

i keep falling back  

to this moment and linger  

in the vastness of looping.

i try to brighten your eyes, but the network doesn’t register the shade — only the swollen pupils. i fill in the color with desire: laurel green — no haint blue — they must have been chocolate brown. 

i remember tire-picked street-corner grass, water-balloon slip. i remember the pale flax tarp, barnwood slats, analog calculator and purchase log. i remember the rose-bed soil under your nails and your car engine rumble, you turning left — but did i turn too? 

i can remember. i can remember. I can remember.

i turn neural dials in my head, searching for natural light — what’s scrapped when the flash is gone. spark of technicolor heat — electric highway behind blind-spot eyes — scanning for edits in the afterimage. 

raindrops on black umbrella

clouds split, spill their heavy gut —

skirting the dirt road.