Poetry by Jake Lawson, Scott Honeycutt, Anna Laura Reeve, and Clayton Spencer

Adobe Stock image

As I write to you, I’m watching the rabbits venture into my newly planted garden, investigating the Sungold tomato starters for a possible afternoon snack. They’ve already made quick work of the jalapeño leaves, so part of me wants to shoo them away as Mr. McGregor tried to do to Peter Rabbit and his friends, but another part questions to whom the garden actually belongs. This installment of Appalachian Places is a lyrical embodiment of the month of May — earthy, muggy from recent rain, full of ferns and fields of corn, teeming with, as poet Anna Laura Reeve describes, the “music of the everyday” and “heavy breath of summer.”  

To begin, Jake Lawson, a master's in English graduate of ETSU, grounds us in thoughtful observation just as his speaker in Decline & Recovery faithfully watches for the Eastern Bluebird’s return. Many of his poems consider endangered, threatened, and extinct bird species in Appalachia, and I am thrilled to include two formal poems here, a villanelle and Shakespearean sonnet, which study the Loggerheaded Shrike and warbler. I was drawn to all the poems in this month’s selection for more than just the physical realm they conjure; they also contain what’s underneath the surface such as the complicated nature of relationships, or the realm of dreams, how they become their own type of reality the longer we spend time there.  

The other three poets do not shy away from embracing both love and disappointment, knowing how emptiness and pleasure can exist at once, and the truth that someone can feel both untethered and deeply rooted to a place. Scott Honeycutt, the Johnson City Rambler and English faculty member at ETSU, bridges the material world and otherworldly in his cluster of poems, writing “Woman of the raven, counsel bathed / dark-throated dream-dancer, who in / whispering ‘this is no dream,’ awoke / the bees and shuddered the hive.” Next, Knoxville poet Anna Laura Reeve’s experimental forms takes us to the other end of the spectrum: “Each new love loves itself up then falls toward a drain / where it runs gaily back to the sea where it was born.” Clayton Spencer of Kentucky closes out the installment, and I found his work to be a metaphorical trellis weave of tomato vines to bring the threads of this installment together. The speaker in “Oneida” expresses, “I can’t tell you what love is, not perfectly anyway, / but I know what it means to love that place / and belong to it.”  

You’ll find in this issue a conference of birds, earthworms, kudzu, and moons. Maybe, as you read, you’ll sit on your porch, as I did, and let the rabbits get their fill at least for as long as it takes to immerse yourself in the work of these four poets.  

Lacy Snapp 

Guest Poetry Editor  

Jake Lawson: 'Decline & Recovery'; 'Notes to the Loggerheaded Shrike'; 'Sky Islands'; 'Pure Water: Pressman's Home'; and 'Maturity.'

Jake Lawson is an adjunct English instructor at East Tennessee State University. He serves as board member and chair-of-programs for the Poetry Society of Tennessee. His work has appeared in Town Creek Poetry, the Tennessee Voices anthology, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and the forthcoming issue of  Appalachian Journal, among others.  

Decline & Recovery 

In those days, the window’s 

warmth pulled over pillows onto my cheek, 

casting light in beams of swaying dust.  

Drawn to the window’s lure, 

I’d spring from bed, rush outside 

with binoculars and dry mealworms 

to spread across the concrete bath 

I worked through summer to buy. 

At school, I studied  

the once-threatened Eastern Bluebird, 

and drew snugger nestboxes 

atop fences of wide ruled page lines. 

Now, in my thirties, I no longer spring 

from bed. I learn the morning, 

a marriage of youth and hours to come. 

I let my associations trigger memories: 

A teacher explained the bluebird’s decline— 

cavities of dead trees vacant, 

but the courtship of wing-waving 

would lap deep blue over rusty orange 

like morning pulling sunlight over the hills.  

I want to rush back  

and tell myself to stay put, 

keep my youth intact— 

I would return talking to birds, 

telling them to hang on, that I’m moving slower. 

“We’re not gone,” I hope they would sing. 

Notes to the Loggerheaded Shrike 

In your feathers a folded handkerchief— 

lay low and take your fill before you fly, 

a blur of white to disappear in trees, 

away in fields, in shrubs, in scattered leaves. 

Collect your insects and perch on thorns and wire. 

In your feathers, a folded handkerchief: 

a prayer cloth to pin at shouldered wings. 

Oh, look to me and wait by branches high, 

you blurring white to disappear in trees— 

where I have sometimes wished to go, to free 

myself into the woods and out of sight, 

my arms held close. A folded handkerchief, 

letters in stitching, names of families, 

and soon the ending line, to reunite 

with blurs of white, to disappear in trees, 

extinction similar to being free. 

And so I watch you, little bird of might. 

Your wings held close, you folded handkerchief, 

                     a blur of white to disappear in trees. 

Sky Islands  

With golden wings, the warbler sings its song 

while perched upon a branch of fallen oak, 

in fields of wildflower brush that rush along 

the higher grounds above the mountain slope, 

escaping fields of fire, of summer heat— 

to find the rich and fragrant air of cool 

pine—its wings alight of flutter, the bird leaves 

lonely to climb the mist in mountains full, 

to sing the song of small, endangered flock 

and study trees for air the climate hides, 

to flick across the limbs like hands of clocks, 

and preen in clouds of shadows as they glide. 

Befriend the sky and bird that holds its breath: 

follow the breeze for all that it has left. 

Pure Water: Pressman’s Home 

Three frogs on three rocks,  

I step into incantations of water— 

soaking soil where washboard muscle 

shells decorate banks washing out,  

each lobe opalescent and white  

with conchoidal ridges shimmering hints  

of purple-blue paint mixed under milk—  

a seal for breaking, rumored a value so rare  

that settlers came in hopes of prosperity. 

The clean, innocent water curves 

at my ankles, escapes in tributaries,  

lacing hills, channels of creek and stream,  

through iron-rich soil—free of pollution  

in untrained valleys—I study geometry  

of bark on crystal wet boughs.  

Discovered,  

people would pour into the region  

where Colonel James Richards  

rests, buried standing up 

in his Revolutionary War uniform  

to watch our sunrise expose the valley.  

The region’s beauty could heal,  

so America’s first swimming pools   

were made of river stones in creeks,  

and travelers came to swing   

in hammocks under ancient trees.  

Once called Sulphur Springs,   

the largest printing trade  

would build its self-sufficient town,   

a trade school, a tuberculosis sanatorium  

(the union’s attempt at providing health care).  

Now, I fill myself with haunt,  

collecting stories of lights,  

shadows like torture devices in the sanitarium— 

an entire self-contained society   

gone mad because of poison-ink  

not even healing water could reverse. 

Maturity 

“You have to cook out the poison,” 

I tell Sommer as I sluice pokeweed 

in boiling water. Three times. 

“That’s why you gotta pick ‘em small,” 

I say remembering childhood, 

my grandfather’s laugh. 

He had seen me dragging the tree-sized plant, 

Its leaves sweeping the gravel road, 

gigantic pokeweed cut down with a saw: 

Proof I didn’t understand 

what he said about poison. 

He had shown me wild weeds behind the barn 

(the barn he built by the signs, 

the one that outlasted all the others, 

the one filled with tobacco leaves). 

In fact, young pokeweed and young tree tobacco 

look very similar. One has good poison, 

and one has bad poison.  

As they mature, the differences become obvious. 

Poke will gloss green with energy and hope, 

but tobacco leaves stay blue green, weighted by wax. 

Poke leaves are soft, with smooth edges. 

If it’s taller than your knee, 

check the stem—purple will stain like wine. 

Tobacco has older skin, a series of interconnected 

wrinkles that converge, wilting in the sun, 

their leaves like a pillow for the worm. 

Scott Honeycutt: 'Dream Poem'; 'New Moon'; 'Shooting Mistletoe'; 'Pity the Poor Brakeman'; and 'My Father Texts Me from California, and I Wake to Realize He May Be Li Po'

Scott Honeycutt grew up in Virginia and Tennessee. Scott is an associate professor of English at East Tennessee State University. When Scott is not teaching, he enjoys hiking the hills of Appalachia and spending time with his daughters. 

Dream Poem

For H.B. 

Woman of the wheel,  

woman who ran her fingers   

across the cedar altar  

and told the red-cloaked vixens  

to cross the ridge and sing among oaks:  

Woman of robes, queen of the iron weed,  

who placed a cheese-knife and chocolate  

drops with care along the rotted maple  

log heavy with moss:  

Woman of the river, you who caught an  

eagle feather in your hazel eyes like ghost  

talons and you who tensed her shoulders with  

flint against the rising water's willful might:  

Woman of the new moon,  

smile of the solidago, who placed  

lavender balm under her chin and in   

the quiet quest of the morning slept  

in the first dawn:  

Woman of the raven, counsel bathed,  

dark-throated dream-dancer, who in  

whispering "this is no dream," awoke   

the bees and shuddered the hive:  

Woman of King Street alleys,  

woman of the first snow,  

here are the three stones,  

smooth as creek mounds, 

they confess:  

I found you.  

New Moon 

For H.B. 

Far in Wyoming, Mato Tipila’s  

bear-pocked stone walls stand quiet: 

Called Devils Tower  

by Americans, this big medicine lodge  

draws visitors to gape at its power.  

So it is with all sacred places:  

The waiting 

the known and hidden 

sounds beyond a door, 

a rustle of wind-hailed whispers. 

Above the New River, for example, 

there is a room lit by a window  

and one flaming sconce  

mounted on a wall. 

In low light, a wedge of smoke dances 

and then drifts into the room's skin. 

Our eyes will not drop: 

No one will tell what blessings  

are formed and what language  

is discovered there.  

Morning fog, a single breath,  

a flight, and moments before 

a fall. 

New Moon old river. 

River old moon, new. 

Shooting Mistletoe

I stood with my shotgun four miles from town 

and aimed its barrel up into the high branches  

of a hickory while wind pushed the chill 

of snow flurries all around my head. 

Straight as a reed – 

I pulled back on the hammer 

and let my heart explode 

against the will of wood and water. 

After the flash, a question 

burned out like sulfur:  

If one shell could burst it all,  

if one shell could make the flowers 

of my chest known, 

how could spring not glisten into daily-flakes 

of the coming winter? 

Now hunched as a forest stag,  

my mouth choked-over with mistletoe. 

Know This: 

I wear the crown of questions, 

like the laurel of the Holly King 

deep in his winter sleep, 

a green jacket slack over 

his viridescent heart, 

a glass of mead, half drunk 

placed upon his oaken table.  

Pity the Poor Brakeman

For H.B. 

During the early days of rail travel, 

the brakeman worked from atop a moving train. 

As he danced from car to car, his chest was exposed 

to the night howls and winds of his undoing. 

Every step promised doom. 

Yet he never faltered. 

He set the brakes, squeezed the wheel, 

and dropped pin and link couplings  

into their bridles. 

His arms flexed along the horn and pitch 

like cabled iron. 

The narrow mountain passes might collide, 

and rusted rails could bend and wrap, 

but he knew his job: 

“Always ride the rear car. Never leave a post.  

Keep a quick ear.” 

Pity the poor brakeman: 

His lantern light wheezing along canyon gusts. 

Pity the poor brakeman: 

His bloodshot eyes and his patchwork coat, 

oil and grease smudged against his leather neck. 

Pity the poor brakeman: 

His breath full of sweet, sweet furnace coals. 

My Father Texts Me from California, 

and I Wake to Realize He May Be Li Po

Just watered my little garden plots:  

14 tomatoes,  

8 cukes, 

6 hills of potatoes, 

still lots of carrots and spring onions. 

Ate the last cabbage last week.  

Fun for me, I celebrate each birth. 

I was outside all morning trimming roses  

and tying tomatoes up on bamboo sticks. 

Had a mockingbird singing to me all morning. 

He’s looking for a wife for the summer.   

Anna Laura Reeve: 'Hand of Summer'; 'What I Said about Love'; 'Low-Cost Attraction'; and 'Meadow in Ripton, Vermont'

Anna Laura Reeve is the author of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility (Belle Point Press, 2023), which was a finalist for the 2023 Weatherford Award in Poetry. She is the winner of the 2022 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry and the 2024 Emerging Writers Award from the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. Her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and others.  

Hand of Summer

Hand of summer  smoothing           all this young green 

    like I used to. 

 Early spring, so jaunty           running your flexible stick 

  down the bannisters                    making so much noise. 

Today   I put summer’s hand   in spring’s 

  an ochre mist       of pollen raining down on us.    

Music of the everyday.            Soon, the sweat sheen. 

 Soon, the blue jello pool            dark thickets oozing  

the heavy breath of summer    thick with vapor     musk 

 rot.  Clay cracking   in drought. Surprise storm and flood 

anvil falling          and  we hear it long before we see it. 

   But June, June, June.             Your pretty face, turning. 

What I Said about Love

 I said love is agony     because I remembered when it was cream       

  In the mountains        I park by the river to write 

my dirges, my laments      to run mascara across my cheekbones.  Motorists pull up beside me     to ask how to get to Townsend 

I tell them Keep going that way—   you’ll find it. They are sorry 

they asked, they say Thank you, hon      smiles twisting 

into grimaces. And another girl  who read Maugham at seventeen 

  dies a little death of human   embarrassment. 

Another woman, tired of fighting    holds her head  in her hands 

cracking it in half like a September  walnut. One half 

       is her daughter, one half       is herself as a girl, turning pages full of young wives      and husbands cupping hands 

 around their little whispered    howls of agony. 

      No warning can warn.       No gruesome scene turns us away. 

Each new love loves itself up         then falls toward a drain 

  where it runs gaily back                  to the sea where it was born.  

Low-Cost Attraction

                                     Speeding over  

                      Elm Street’s last seaserpent crest, I see 

            the Sunsphere    rising  up            a bread mold hypha 

        round ball on a skinny stalk                    glittering 

     like a disco ball left up            after a party   20 years ago. 

         Unexpectedly small.              Unexpectedly hanging above 

 your head  at the work lunch mingle           the fusty tchotchke shop  

             the neighborhood meeting                  in the fellowship hall 

& cheaper-looking than you  remember         

though you remembered it looking cheap—brassy, too soft, scratched 

old sequin       old rhinestone       old sunglasses     old penny.       

 Only the wealthy        eschew the cheap thrill. 

   Give it to us                               especially in the dark 

                   lit up                  drunk— 

          I needed  something else;                  I got this. 

                June heat makes it glitter  from a distance. 

                         All of us  imagine  it’s something  else. 

Meadow in Ripton, Vermont

The meadow is our sea.  

June winds clatter noisily in the birches 

to the west, while nearby  

it shushes, brushing  

the soft yellow and cream foam 

of buttercup and bedstraw. 

Orchard grass  

shows off delicate ankles  

and we are so turned on, we have to admit.  

They ripple like sheets on a line,  

or Rockettes in a line. They lean on the sensitive ferns,  

mouths open in laughter.  

Frothy scurf dots the meadow  

and disappears.  

Red-winged blackbirds  

call chuck softly in the surf; we hear  

their conk-la-ree and know they are satisfied,  

so we are, too, 

though most of the meadow plants are introduced 

and we’re unsure how to love them.  

The native sensitive fern supports the European  

orchard grass. They are rolling 

in the Eurasian bedstraw, entwined, 

and the blackbird calls over each of them 

without names. 

This is the future of our ancestors.  

We reached this land, we have no home 

to go back to. 

Clayton Spencer: 'Oneida'; 'Tonight, I Have to Dream About My Father’s Grave'; 'Independence Day'; 'The Whistling Moon'; and 'Build Something, You Effeminate Hillbillies'

Clayton Spencer is a poet originally from Southeastern Kentucky. He is the author of Concerning the Service, a winner of the Beyond Words Press 2024 chapbook contest, and a recipient of the 2024 ARTie Award from the Ohio Arts Council. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.  

Oneida

I never want to tell 

my whole story. 

I walked green fields of young corn 

and flood-damp dirt, 

plopped down on the low branch 

over Goose Creek, 

and then I fell 

asleep. 

Does one ever really leave home? 

It’s a boring story—  

tears and fuckups, 

a regular death 

in the living room. You know 

the story, right? Common,  

without any shame in its commonality, 

but yours— mine, I mean. 

I can’t tell you what love is, not perfectly anyway,  

but I know what it meant to love that place 

and belong to it.  

All of me held  

by those low hills. I know 

how it feels to stop going back. 

Tonight, I Have to Dream About My Father’s Grave 

I laid you under soft moss. Sunlight 

slouched through the needles 

of the cypresses. 

You were ashes in a walnut box. 

My family watched. 

I didn't cry. 

The tree beside your Celtic cross— 

broken in-half, chewed by ivy. 

The shadow of your Celtic cross 

spread across the earth. 

The air was April, 

full of bells and aftershave. 

Above, the cardinals quivered 

Acorns patted the ground. 

I dressed you up 

in questions 

and the earthworms slid on their bellies 

beneath the walnut box, 

where they will not cry, or be touched, 

or call. 

Independence Day

Tonight his mother is alive  

and he is with her. She compliments him  

on his ability to cook, she who spent countless evenings  

with a coffee mug full of cereal for supper. 

It isn’t a hospital’s television  

that hums and snickers in front of them,  

but her outdated flatscreen  

playing something he picked out.  

No fluorescent bulb 

flattens the room to a sciency white, but her desk lamp  

warms the cheeks of three small cherubs 

mounted on the wall. 

When the credits roll, she asks him something 

articulate and normal, like Now why 

do you like that one so much? He answers gladly. 

She listens and grins. 

Tonight she sleeps a sleep that she will wake from 

and go out to hear the cattle murmur 

in the fog spread out 

across the endless fields.  

The Whistling Moon  

I dreamed I’d never missed her 

because she’d never been my mom. Bad dream. 

I dreamed warm water and stars. I dreamed a moon 

that signified nothing, a moon that whistled 

to itself through the moss-covered limbs of the oaks. 

I dreamed God. I dreamed my mother standing up 

beside her hospital bed during the time my mother had ceased 

standing at all. I dreamed her language 

was whole again, golden as late-summer cornfields  

bending in a day's last light. I dreamed her  

little laugh. I dreamed I wasn’t still a strange and orphaned adult.  

Fine dream, dream that made me dream of dreaming 

more and more. I dreamed she breathed 

like this [here the poet breathes healthily for a moment or two]  

and never stopped. I dreamed her fingers fat as hogs, dreamed her 

sucking down a cornucopia of chicken dishes. 

Or no I didn’t; she would never. Dreamed her 

eating pathetic salads again. Dreamed her  

cooking something called Bisquick lasagna. Dreamed her 

salmon patties. Dreamed her 

loaves of chocolate bread. Dreamed her 

walking two miles round the track. I dreamed her  

nail polish chipped off on the Mahjong tiles, on the Rummicube tiles, 

on my lips when I was crying and she held my face. 

I dreamed her with wings that stretched for miles, 

trying not to spread them while she sat in the Wendy’s 

celebrating another anniversary with my father, 

the two of them shelling out on frosties 

and a large fry. With him there 

I knew it was a dream that I didn’t want to leave. 

I dreamed more God. I dreamed the hatless trees 

nodded at me when I walked beneath them. 

I dreamed my children— oh, my children 

who do not exist, 

I dreamed you knowing these dreams to be your own. 

I wept in my sleep. I woke and washed. 

I went to work. Again and again I went 

to work. I dreamed of work. 

I dreamed I waved the roses from her funeral 

at the largest cloud I’d ever seen 

and it moved on silently,  

never stopping.  

I dreamed the cloud did not come back.  

Build Something, You Effeminate Hillbillies 

— some dude in an Instagram comments section 

Okay. So much  

for blue hills under pink skies  

filled with the screams of hogs.  

So much for all that green 

punching the wet air.  

So much for Boogeyman  

shaking his fists at the sun, National Guard choppers  

passing overhead silhouetted against the clean white ball.  

They wrote about him in Maxim once 

sometime in the early aughts.  

It means something, 

them listening to Boogeyman's plight. 

So much for quilts.  

That dilapidated black tobacco barn will have to do.  

The kudzu's going to tear it down anyway, when I'm old, it seems.  

So much for the one mule in the barren field.  

If I knew her name you can bet you'd know it too.  

So much for the mountain dulcimer.  

And flatfooting.  

So much for tomato pie,  

herb gardens — hell,  

so much for a lot of what we know about gardening altogether I guess, 

and palms hardened from a day spent canning greasy beans. 

So much for the Wooly Worm Festival.  

This rusted hitch cart will have to do,  

this discarded scythe.  

So much for good old dogs with places to go.  

Speak your piece. 

Forget about the shotgun and the white horse  

traded for land from which two generations of one family may subsist.  

So much for Blair Mountain, 

Lost Mountain, and Bill Monroe. 

So much for pipeline disruptors. So much  

for Ale-8-One —

if you know, you know; the good stuff. 

And book women. 

And settlement schools.

So much for the circle being unbroken, right?  

Do you know about mining towns,  

and company dollars? 

  So much for those for real though. 

So much for skillet bread. 

So much for recipe cards. 

Do you know anything about Ag policy? 

What about tobacco? 

So much for shape notes.  

Harlan County USA. 

So much for Kenny Woods’ Gun Show, 

and the hardware store baby.  

So much for Sanders' Cafe. 

Have you ever seen the particular blue of sixty repurposed plastic barrels  

holding one fighting rooster each? 

So much for the homeplace,  

the idea of homeplace. 

So much for The Fair and Tender Ladies, the dreadful wind, 

the dreadful rain. 

So much for my father.  

So much for a poem being sufficient.  

I lack but yes abundance. 

He had so much left to say.