Poetry by Harrison Miller, Summar West, James Bodenstedt, Daniela Summerlin, Mercedes Hawks, and Sean Kyte

(Photo by Harrison Miller)

Happy Springtime, fellow travelers, this is Jesse Graves with a bright and blooming new bouquet of poems for the centerpiece of our Poet’s Table. I am feeling a bit more reflective than usual for this season of fresh beginnings, as we approach five years together this September at Appalachian Places. In that time, we have shared poems by some of the real legends of Appalachian literature, with Robert Morgan as our first featured poet, and Fred Chappell soon after, and the final posthumous poems from Jeff Daniel Marion. We have brought out new poems from Frank X. Walker, Jane Hicks, Rita Sims Quillen, and many more giants. Morgan continues to write and publish some of the finest work of any living American poet, with a new volume, To Honor the Imagined Whole, due from LSU Press this August. But, we have said goodbye to Fred Chappell, who was Morgan’s teacher, and to Danny Marion, friend, mentor, and champion to more poets from our region that can be counted. Let’s take a moment to gather in gratitude for the work these writers have done, and to appreciate the many rooms they built for us on the foundation of earlier generations of Appalachian writers.

However, with all the green coming to vibrant life around us, let’s make sure we are saying hello to the new poets as well, the emerging writers who bring with them the promise of the future. This installment features six younger poets you may not have read yet, Harrison Miller, Summar West, James Bodenstedt, Daniela Summerlin, Mercedes Hawks, and Sean Kyte, and Lacy Snapp and I are excited to share their work. We have always made it a priority to showcase new voices alongside our old favorites, and this springtime feels like the right moment to introduce several together, who come to us from all across the region. The energy of their poems is electric, and their willingness to experiment with forms and subject matter impresses and moves me. Lacy and I feel like these are poets we will be reading for years to come, and we hope this “Emerging Poets” edition shows how deep the well is for Appalachian poetry.

Be sure to check for poetry in other sections of this installment as well. We have a travelogue in verse, with photos, by Shawna Lichtenwalner — it’s a beautiful excerpt from a longer manuscript about the commitments we keep to ourselves and to those nonhuman lives for whom we take responsibility. We also offer a feature on one of the greatest American writers, Ron Rash, who may be best known to some as a fiction writer, but whose poems are among the best our region has ever produced. These are indeed high times to be a reader of Appalachian literature, and the future looks promising. 

                                                                                 Jesse Graves

Co-Editor, Poetry

Harrison Miller: ‘To Give It Up’; ‘Nana’s House Burns’; ‘House Mountain’; ‘Ochre & Evergreen’; ‘Without the Wisdom of Silence’;

Harrison Miller (b.1994) is a poet and photographer from Knoxville, Tennessee. He is the director, co-editor, and lead designer of Underlife Editions, a photobook publisher that focuses on works in the genre of lyrical documentary. He has published a mixture of photographic objects and photobooks through Underlife that feature his photography, with titles such as “Sundial,” “Valleys,” “Cross Section of a Field,” and “Yellow Pine.” Both his photography and poetry convey an intimate journey through his home in East Tennessee and contend with lineage, rootedness, greed, identity, hopelessness, and gratitude. His unpublished first collection of poems, House Mountain, is an homage to Knoxville, his dad, a departed brother, and the hills within which the drama of poverty, death, and parables echo and fade.

To Give It Up 

I move through this corridor  

of winter, unshielded  

from huge wind 

that must throw fire  

across the mountain.  

Embers of dusk  

on one half of everything here. 

It is useless to be afraid. 

Oaks stronger than me are  

broken by this world. 

I dig my hands  

into a corpse of coal 

once my favorite tree 

wondering if it ever  

had a name.

Nana’s House Burns 

Body in a cold wind. 

Must have blown through her 

in her pink robe. 

Must have taken everything  

to not fall down. 

Too old, she may have thought. 

Too old to lose control like that. 

Too old to pound the dirt. 

She wouldn’t be able to stand. 

Wouldn’t be able to fall 

and not break something else. 

In her pink robe she 

must have stood there 

in her pink robe 

naked underneath. 

Beneath everything  

she must have thought 

Who’s that, in there 

in the smoke? 

She must have seen  

countless things 

never to remember  

in the dusty sky 

the dirty winter sky 

black. 

Countless things  

she’ll never remember. 

Imageless. 

She's only ever prayed to ghosts 

whose names are now lost  

imageless in ash. 

A cross on the side of the road 

she stood there like a marker of a lost self 

bearing the clothes of final days. 

We all remember her this way 

too old to change. 

Too old to forget a life of dust. 

Staring in a cloud of life 

shapeless 

changing 

too old to change everything 

not now. 

House Mountain 

We surrendered ourselves to it. 

Dark enveloping, entangling  

our awkward bodies in the night  

suspending us on this one ridge  

overlooking our whole lives. 

I come often to see what seasons have left. 

Years etched in foot trails. 

We were sixteen back then. 

Loose flesh knowing nothing. 

Chain smoking three cigarettes  

falling down, dazed beneath midnight’s  

stars, tracing selves against Orion. 

Breath of white rose born inside 

smoke of laughter. 

We hiked in the light from Chris’s hand. 

He made the forest tremor  

and we thought of nightmares 

made them with our tongues. 

Crow black, disfigured shadows. 

Thought we were lost, and we were. 

Tripping over ourselves 

our dangling shoelaces. 

Jeans and roots at our feet. 

Drifting anatomies unknown. 

Those kids are still here 

somewhere beneath thirteen winters. 

They dreamt of each other. 

They dreamt of Chris. 

Lost to the blunt edge of suicide. 

His own hand burying  

his own story like 

raindrops in switchgrass 

like dying fire wind. 

He found a nice spot  

among grasshoppers and quartzite. 

Laid down for thirteen years. 

We came to see something that night. 

Anything at all from the top. 

Looking for any reason to care. 

We saw the lights of Knoxville.  

Nothing else. 

We listened to stories 

listened to ourselves breathe. 

Listened to our steps 

unsure who was who. 

Didn’t care if we ever knew. 

Ochre & Evergreen 

In the backlit hours 

I’ve been drawn to slight sounds. 

Breaking water against limbs  

stuck in a low creek.  

I want to wander off  

bread in my stomach and be still  

in every world 

full of white farm houses  

lit by faint lamp of dusk.  

I want to sit in brown grasses 

hear stems break beneath my weight.  

Watch jays dance like blue sumac  

in a winter palette.  

I wallow in dying dreams 

only half realized.  

In front of me an entire universe 

begs for my delight. 

I wish for rip tides, boulders drifting  

toward an empty horizon. 

Taking my creek and its little sticks  

for granted. 

Without the Wisdom of Silence 

You are buried in gray light 

beneath warmth  

of evening autumn. 

This autumn is fading. 

These words will be an excerpt 

from the journal of an  

abandoned dream. 

Standing inside Obed River. 

With it, the small water  

carries its own quiet  

and disturbance. 

I listen for voices below cracks  

below stagnations. 

There is not one I recognize  

as the Christian prayer  

that I was taught. 

What did I do 

in the fall of my youth?  

Many years younger  

many days forgotten.  

Morgan County 

today I was your low 

and broken farms 

your dried maize 

your sycamore, poplar 

naked of their leaves 

isolated in hollers. 

Silhouettes traced 

from harsh November light 

against generations of loss.  

Distant ridges  

of distant years 

I am your son.  

There will be a day  

that I forget who I am. 

Old bolder in a wild river 

foot trails gone in November’s skin. 

Names of Cherokee erased.  

How many years of rain  

can the limestone take?  

I am yesterday’s dream. 

Ash and smoke smeared  

in the palm of the hills. 

My name goes in the grave. 

My thoughts, to where 

they were first born. 

Summar West: ‘Directions’; ‘Tellico River’; ‘Quare Pastoral’; ‘The way we made’; ‘Sing’

Summar West’s poems have been published in a variety of journals, including Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, Construction, Ellipsis, New South, Prairie Schooner, Still: the Journal, Tar River Poetry, and others. Born and raised in east Tennessee, she now resides in coastal Connecticut. 

Directions 

Watch the lowering of the matriarch’s casket  

because it is our family’s duty to wait. 

Say a final time, stay with us, while your mother’s 

tears become the atmosphere under the green canopy.  

Stand north of death in Sweetwater.  

Stare at the box with the arms of Christ  

hinged on every corner while the pall bearers 

put out their cigarettes and take up shovels. 

Listen to the falling dirt, 

to the robins fluttering among us for crumbs. 

Remember how she would say,  

I get lonesome for the mountains. 

Imagine her there: south on sixty-eight, past the post office, the camp, the churches. 

Stretch from Ironsburg to Epperson and find her 

somewhere on Mocking Crow, Unicoi, or Tellico. 

Tellico River 

I no longer know how much of the story is true—  

D. washed up, beaten-down-drunk, crawling out of you.  

Rainbow trout  

lapping at his bare feet. 

Running from the law,  

they chased him down,  

a hellbender too slippery to be caught. 

Except when they did, took turns with 

their fists (that part I know to be fact, 

like the time a bed of logs rolled off 

his truck and crushed his back).  

How much have I made up? 

How does a life become a myth? 

(Not the stereotype-story 

we’ve heard before: salvation 

from the outside folk, here to 

save us from our sorry selves.  

Teach us how to talk.  

Take a practice, make a product, 

baskets and baskets it goes).  

I’m remembering all this history  

here in Normal, Illinois,  

where I’ve come to see some quilts, a silken tapestry,  

and a sequin-river my friend sewed together.  

I’ve spent a long time following her threads. 

The last time I remember D. losing himself 

he’d pitched a tent in the back yard, 

had me come inside to browse clothes 

he’d strung across a line. 

(Is this just the story that’s told?) 

Some time after that, 

he dosed a normal pill 

  until he sobered up. 

(That part I know to be fact.) 

How many normal pills did I need to swallow 

when I was losing myself on Sevierville Road?  

I could’ve become a cunning wreck, 

pitching tents and stringing clothes,  

driven to your water, 

waded in and let my body be beaten down 

your stone-lined bed 

because I could not stop 

drinking the centuries- 

old proverb: 

you never know what  

is enough unless you know 

what is more than enough. 

Instead,  

I followed the voices 

that said, go home. 

Remind me, Tellico River,— 

how we’re all myths, 

how we’re all water and veins, 

threads of storied-love 

of heaven and hell  

that gleam and flow. 

Quare Pastoral 

Listening to the Riverside Recordings, with the Grasse running a half-mile from here, the memory returns: the drive along Old Walland Road. On one side, corn fields tilled for the spring planting. On the other, cabins sloping toward the water. We climbed the Parkway in his forest-green truck, Virgil pointing out Chilhowee’s crest that stretches all the way to my home county. How far away now—a thousand miles—but even further back then. County of kin, county of boundary, county of country, county of conflict, county of longing. He pulled in at one of the Parkway’s empty lots, eased between the lines while a dogwood’s limb scratched the roof of the truck. I can still hear the limb across metal, a sound etched in my skin. We sat in silence until I could utter my desire: to write poems for her ears alone. All he could say: I know. At least that’s what hindsight hears: two poets and a coming-out pastoral, a rewritten psalm deep to deep, with a panorama of the Smokies. Decades later, it washes over me: I want beauty at every threshold. I want a song that follows, that wraps around like the Little River we wound home, a song that says keep going and stays within my body no matter the state, the county, the country. 

The way we made  

was tricultural, full of contradiction 

and flavored with erasure, accents 

and pickled corn.  

We plodded out in the country off backroads 

even when we were a mess, a sight  

for those wanting straight lines.   

We dug until we found bloodroot and honesty, 

a little patch of bluets and some pine beams 

to hew a homeplace.  

Steeled our consanguinity by grit from the holler 

and big gulley until we proved  

that rivered souls could thrive.  

Sing  

1. 

At Quarter on the East Side of the River, 

     once home to a woman’s art colony,  

she walked through 

the art museum’s doors and 

O-me-O-my— 

If I’d lost  

the heart’s steady beat 

to an arrythmia   

somewhere along I-81, leaving behind  

my Smokies, heading north toward 

Green Mountains,  

then further into the 

Anorthosite Adirondacks (may as well 

have gone all the way to the moon)  

I heard in that instance  

the heart’s insistence, 

a hammering rachmaninoff-rachmaninoff 

and I knew that here in coastal Connecticut 

in a gallery—   

among letters folded into bottles and retrieved 

from the sea, the abandoned buoys and dinner  

party dishes, the lighters flamed out, the beautiful  

wreckage emerged and preserved in a six-foot 

installation—  

Tennessee still shines in me 

and sings the body electric! 

2. 

This is the female form that lit the way through the gallery 

where we walked painting to painting,  

where I followed her words and smile   

and tried not to trace my mind’s finger 

 around the corners of her eyes 

   and 

O-me-O-my—  

her mouth—  

better than any poem.  

Forget the landscapes, the light and thick strokes, 

never mind the still-life strawberries 

and the many framed cows.  

All fell aside 

and there was only her 

presence unraveling every filament in me.  

O, Lord,  

my Appalachian vertebrae 

linked and lit like 

crimson bee-balm in July, 

so may I remember, 

the gates of the body are the gates of the soul.  

3. 

In Westbrook,  

no matter the watermelon crab salad 

or the man near me bellowing his stories 

like some sailor home from sea, 

time fell away, listening  

to the worlds she contains. 

The desire to know her  

is like practicing the eternal questions: 

who, what, where, when, how 

do you love? 

The desire to know her  

despite the sandy grains of unknowing  

is like practicing delight:  

I swim in it as in a sea.  

4. 

Here I am at the page, 

taking time back  

from too many years away.  

Blame the pandemic plus 

bodies politicking too far  

left, too far right—ain’t no 

way to be in a Tennessee 

state of mind.  

Does that 

sound a little too quare of 

me to say all the way up here 

where the skies are blue? 

Feel free to apply a more  

modern term to me but  

go near my gay brothers  

with a deplorable word  

and I’ll come for you,  

mandolins ablaze. 

Here I am practicing, 

waltzing to the sound of her 

double-name on the tip of my tongue 

while my blood streams that scene 

back in Westbrook,  

where I walked her to her car: 

we had lingered in a restaurant over conversation 

about a theater director in need of a sabbatical—  

an idea we might extend to all the boys  

on the proscenium who need to step back, 

laze and loafe and recollect to be with those I like 

is enough, to remember how they once loved 

the world and knew to be surrounded by beautiful,  

curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough.  

I want to say to all the directors, enough— 

go on now, let a woman like her move  

a new playbill forward, light up the house,  

cast from greenroom to curtain call  

a hold that will make everything 

good again.  

I digress, 

need to take us back to the night,  

out the doors, 

on the walk—  

the one from restaurant to parking lot 

where heart jumpstarts between  

loins and lips and the imagined  

but not-yet-known that will be  

the two of us flesh-to-flesh,  

spirit-breathing-into-spirit-yes— 

and there by the spotlight that was the pole light  

(why, Lord, such light in this of all places)  

in that empty parking lot stage, 

I could not kiss her. 

(Listen, it’s been a decade where this eros-electrical  

system has been parked in a hangar in middle-of-nowhere- 

Arizona desert, gathering charged particles that might  

set the thing soaring with just the right angle of light) 

5. 

Later, I drove toward her, 

Stonington to New Haven, 

wrapped inside Fur Elise Reverie. 

The piano took me back to Rural Vale (rule-vell) outside

Tellico, near Reliance to that day when driving down the

school-hill road, I heard for the first time Beethoven’s bliss that spilled across 

the blue-green hills, the Conasuagua creek,

forming this hillbilly in every poem that’s

followed me since.  

(Speaking of which, in a used bookstore 

on Chapel street, I browsed the poetry  

aisle while she rounded the prose, 

waiting, and later revealing: 

I don’t read poetry. 

Is it wrong to have felt such wonder 

and delight at her exquisite balk?)   

Later still, 

after a decade’s seal over my heart— 

in which time I learned how to hear 

by asking for nothing but the river 

of a larger will than mine that makes 

the waters of the earth the same 

as the iron within this blood, 

the same spirit Beethoven heard when 

he could not hear a thing—  

there in New Haven, I asked, 

can I kiss you goodnight? 

6. 

The sweetest-symmetry of our first kiss, 

a symphony inside a cathedral 

stained-glass streaming over water 

breath to breath in a harbor town,  

I’ll be singing Monday to Sunday 

sunlight to moonlight to kingdom come.  

7. 

This is not just a reverie. 

If Tennessee sings, 

it’s also from the pine-shivers 

of our histories   

whatever troubles we’ve carried, 

rolled like a piano up a creek bed 

by way of an old homesteading- 

wagon. 

Take this scar on my hand, 

the one that resides inside thumb 

and forefinger, runs all the way back 

to when I wanted to touch everything 

I could not see for the dark. 

Give me your sorrows,  

your ancestors, too, 

and from the outtakes we’ll make 

a soul-scorcher.  

From a basement 

rumbling to the gospel-tongued 

piano moving up and down the  

clefs of light. 

We’ll care too much  

for each note, each page 

of the past that tunes 

the present to praise. 

8. 

This is not just a midsummer night’s dream  

about lips, jawline, earlobe, neck, clavicle, 

sternum, breast-to-breast, long-length 

of stomach to hip bone on down to the 

o-me-o-my until the tips of toes.  

This is the alchemy of awakening.  

9.  

One day— 

wherever we are 

when our breath is spent  

and we are drying ourselves  

by river bank or seashore— 

I’ll remind you of that night— 

 your poetry confession 

and our first kiss— 

and how later at home 

when I couldn’t sleep  

I found that old poet— 

tangled as he may be—  

and it is to his words  

I owe a debt of gratitude 

for reminding me:  

Poetry is not meant to be read 

but to touch and be touched.  

It is the mind married  

to body’s electric beating, 

the mouth, tongue, lips, 

the aching breath and hands, 

the legs exhausted along  

the journey from loss to loss  

to cleaving one to another 

while the soul lifts itself to sing. 

James Bodenstedt: ‘Picking Stones’; ‘Black-wing Stillness’

James Bodenstedt holds an undergraduate degree from Ohio University, where he spent time running the Appalachian hills, and a Master of Arts in English from the State University of New York Brockport. He is pursuing a Master of Arts in religious studies at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School. Much of his writing emerges from sustained attention to weather, water, and land. He is a retired collegiate rowing coach. 

Picking Stones 

We don’t take these —  

the stones on the edge of farm fields, 

piled just inside the wood line. 

We want the ones half-buried in soil 

touching corn roots, 

the last row of dry stalks 

where farmers can’t see us 

borrow the fieldstones —  

our fingers dig an edge, lift 

its fitted shape, its home 

along a fence line 

repurposed — settling. 

Saved from the shale-choked rockpile —  

we have been pulled under here before, 

silty loam drawing us down, 

our private thoughts blunt 

as the stones we seek. 

We say what we don’t dare say 

deep from within brittle husks, 

we hurt each other 

and then must leave 

to pick our own stones —  

weathered, rough, 

frost-jacking heat 

heaved out like egos 

caught in a rip tide 

neither of us knows 

to swim parallel to shore. 

We both stand alone in a field, 

in the calm cove between corn 

and woods — 

the ground rushing out to sea. 

Carrying our stones to the car, 

each one a muddied mirror 

held with open hands 

sinking. 

Black-wing Stillness 

A taut river-wind stirs the snow 

whitening air 

sycamores sway 

shedding bark plates onto frozen ground; 

the crows lean in. 

Evening’s light thins, coppered 

below the tree line, along the riverbank 

locked in ice. Roots hold firm. 

Now the wind —  

turns, a brutal twist 

betraying stillness, scattering the crows. Splintered feathers fall, 

even small stones shift their weight 

under the snow. 

Rivers will fracture soon. 

The crows carry their silent 

iron hold into the nights. 

Daniela Summerlin: ‘Taxonomy of Tennessee Pit Vipers’; ‘Biography of Janis Joplin with Acknowledgements’

Daniela Summerlin is an Appalachian visual artist and poet from East Tennessee. Summerlin holds a Bachelor or Arts in English from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and she’s an MFA candidate at the University of Kentucky. Much of Summerlin’s work concerns womanhood, regional flora/fauna, and religion in Southern Appalachia.

Taxonomy of Tennessee Pit Vipers

            After Ron Rash

  I.           Agkistrodon contortrix

When the warm stomps in, so do the Copperheads

in footless pursuit. The theologians of snakes that

kill—if it put you in the dirt, sum’ins already

wrong wit’ you. Freezers rather than fleers, they

coil beneath the blue side of the brush — stretched

under leaves too heavy with sediment and years for

old hands to rake. Papa would take his spade

and crack the mouths offa any copperhead he came

across, planting their severed heads in the Kudzu,

the three leaves, a final damp cross to look up at.

             II.            Crotalus horridus

Copperheads are often killed in vain, mistaken for

the fork-tongued, belly-laughing lady of the forest,

the death rattler, the malignant angel. Timber

Rattlesnakes — Don’t move if you hear that tail.

Look all over for her eyes, then run like hell. She’s

hemorrhagic and neurotoxic; She’s the only time a

creature so vindictive would warn you, shivering

herself in the threat of you. The most evil things are

often named women. The most evil women are

often provoked.

III. Agkistrodon piscivorus

We had Santa, the devil, and Water Moccasins to

myth us children into being good. The

Cottonmouth never really touched our mountain,

but our neighbor was once bit by a snake

upswimming the creek. With no scar, He tells us of

his hand fizzling and falling off in chunks — how he

was sick for months, and the grace of God alone

retrieved him from his ailment. He’d kill snakes

that dared to drink from flowerpots or bask in the

shed puddle. He’d pry its jaw open and bring its

oval head to us. Caught another Cottonmouth. The

gluey throat of the mistaken dripped out like sin; it

made us believe ourselves just killers, the true

afflicted.

Biography of Janis Joplin with Acknowledgements

Jimmy Johnson      head coach of  “America's team”

was mercilessly cruel to her

she struggled socially — wudn’t much to look at

they will tell you this, but,

what you won’t learn is             she had no taste for boys

who played any kinda sports

and this wouldn’t stand in Port Arthur       so she headed to Baton Rouge

she appreciated a man of faith       or maybe one

who was kind to wounded animals and  hideous things

I suppose       famously            that was Bobby McGee

and even he would leave        punching the mezzo rasp

fu-ther down her throat

sources won’t claim that once

she stretched her thin lips into a smile

squinted her small eyes and

decided                  she would ask Philip to the prom

like a girl and not an ugly girl

like someone    who could ask those types of questions

before she was singing at Woodstock and      skinny

before she was twenty-seven and then dead

Philip    who couldn’t throw a football as far as he could shit

would not be the one man who was good to her one woman

he would find another bohemian lady

and have three boys        who’d never root for the Cowboys

he’d settle in a small cabin between the hairs of the signal forest  

his only granddaughter                the second coming of ugly girls

with fat tufts of brown hair and bucked teeth

would ask       what did he say to the Janis Joplin?

“I told her I’d rather get lost in the woods,”

Mercedes Hawks: ‘Braless Back’; ‘Horse Girl Winter’; ‘How Girls Fight’

Mercedes Hawks is a poet from North Carolina. She attended Lees-McRae College earning her Bachelor of Arts in English with minors in creative writing and appalachian studies. She will attend Virginia Tech in August 2026 to pursue her MFA in creative writing. Her poetry focuses on the body and its animality, Appalachia, and its forgiveness. She weaves the suffering into beauty, reeling in the sun to carry her back and forth between mouth and limb. 

Braless Back

I unclasp my bra

hook by hook––

North Carolina,

Virginia,

West Virginia,

Tennessee––

lineage caught

between band

like clothespins

of white linen

that fall

below one

slab of wood,

and when

my straps slip

from region,

blades of shoulder

become tent graves

over the dead

while my upright

being slouches

towards cellar

ground like some

broken mine shaft,

and the bra falls

to dirt; like magic,

I shed.

Horse Girl Winter

I dress myself

strangely on all

fours like a horse

in autumn and

the field has frost

for the first time,

I try to warn myself

that winter is coming

my mane wet, cold

but out here

whole things

are passing

like berry on

limb dried out

begging for sun

but what you see

is that I am dying

my clothes do not

fit properly and I am

a wild girl trying

to behave

in wind that makes

me buckle my hooves

to kneel – all hope

is happening

between berry

and horse and girl

and forthcoming

winter but sometimes

there is a hand on

my muzzle like

a small sun that

tells me everything

must die to come back

again, and I am

the waning winter

mare bending under

a fence for God.

How Girls Fight

–– a piece written for Hurricane Helene

Huh-LEEN

or

HELL-een

you are still a baby

in my speaking mouth

and I do not know

your shape or

mammoth eye

who lives with

sea before

bass trout

but you swell

in, to never recede,

and you lay

power lines

down with

your y-shaped

tongue

who curves

the valley

with pan

looking for

gold beneath

quilts and

dug cellars

only to

find the gold

rush died before

your time and in

my jaws

I cannot kill

you because

we want in

the same

ways

I close you down

you open me up

and we are

girls

in the same

fighting

stream.

Sean Kyte: ‘Home Leads All Roads’; ‘Cradled in a Sunlit Appalachian Allée’; ‘Growing Up Where Dreams Always Remain’

Sean Kyte holds a bachelor’s degree in literature with a creative writing minor from East Tennessee State University, and a creative writing MFA, with a focus in fiction, from Eastern Washington University. They were awarded the McClellan Award for their writing from East Tennessee State University in 2013. Their writing focus is to blend beautiful landscapes with a variety of complex personal struggles including identity, relationships, community, and our place in the natural world.

Home Leads All Roads

To reach the void where I grew up,

You have to get lost or lose yourself.

Along the way, heat curls at the wind.

Eyes move through the glass,

Assuming light, holding prisms

In the corners, a missed turn,

A place once comfortable, now

Empty, to be filled with spinning

Wheels, roadmaps. We laugh

In diners but don’t eat because

We’ve lived too long, too careless.

From Disneyland to Coney Island,

Where smiles, two lanes wide,

Bloom and disappear, denied.

As soon as you think you’re there,

You’ve missed it. As soon as you think

You know, it’s gone, passed up, worn out.

We take corners too fast, mistake memory

For truth, as leaves whistle under tire,

Like sirens, so loud they put colors

In our ears. We scavenge forgotten roads,

And upon reaching recognize the stubborn

Ignorance that defiles what once was home,

Where sins went unpunished, and dreams

Became tears punched into pillows, forever

Wishing for a road where love does not mean loss.

Cradled in a Sunlit Appalachian Allée

I know I’ve been down this road,

But that was lifetimes ago,

When I was having the time of my life

And didn’t even know it because

I wasn’t thinking about it like that.

I was too busy living it to stop, consider,

Assess the damage or wonder, as I do now:

Whatever happened to picking up walnuts on Watauga?

This sojourn more than nostalgia,

A backwards straight dive off waterfalls

Cascading the days into reservoir, poured,

Indulgent, accessing nature’s time travel.

I look back to Watauga, Maple, Chestnut,

Broken and hilly roads lined with trees and vines, lush

With the seasons between then and now.

I'd buy that house just to settle beneath that tree again.

I ventured the world looking for a reason to return,

And now, picking the walnuts, cracking them open

With only my ghosts, I surface to decide: the reason’s sowed.

Growing Up Where Dreams Always Remain

I woke today thinking you were still alive, but the empty space

Between your frosty sheets said otherwise. The lack of flowers,

Winter too harsh for Spring's timid gander this far from home,

The missing static buzz of a tube television permitted to whisper,

The unbeaten drum and unplucked strings, leaving me alone

In morning's breeze. It must have been a dream to hold such grace,

Which convinced my return to Nolichucky, river sweeps and rocks

So smooth, where we lazed and poised near cinder blocks infested

With moss, under clouds holding rain like truth stuck in a smock,

Echoes of truths implied, scars disguised, and the lines guessed.

Growing up where dreams always remain meant the truth hurt most.

Back then, I was always looking at the map too fast or too slow

For good directions: past the dinosaur, sign-less motel pocked

Full of gazes that entail one relative or another had a syndrome

Series of affairs, then the run-down railway diner deadlocked,

Bacon so stale it smells like dog treats, and the coffee wastes

Each drip from broken brewer, into the back alley full of larkspur,

Until the archaic church, crowned with your smile, crooked,

Widened the slight divide between truth and fact and the year

Since we last saw each other, as all the hemlock died ahead.

Remember how I bent the branch, and how you felt backing away.