The colors have been glorious in Appalachia this fall, and so are the poems. It’s time to take a break from leaf-peeping and drink in some beautifully crafted words — I’ll have mine in the “cup of sun” Jim Minick shares with us. If you enjoy Minick’s poems that follow, please also see his interview with poet and scholar, Jake Lawson, conducted ahead Minick’s visit to East Tennessee State University’s campus on November 15, 2023. Another of Appalachia’s finest writers, Darnell Arnoult, offers four poems that delve deep into the spirit’s interactions with nature and the body at work. Bart Sides joins us, a southern Appalachia native living in central New England, with a lovely snapshot of 1963; and Kevin LeMaster follows from the hills of Kentucky with a pair of mesmerizing poems on the trials and tragedies of the world around us. The final poems in this installment are very close to my heart: four unpublished pieces by the late, much-missed Arthur Smith. As professor of English at The University of Tennessee, he guided a generation of young poets into the art and craft of poetry with the same vision and care with which he composed his own celebrated poems. Art died in November of 2018, and his absence grows ever larger for so many of us to whom he was an irreplaceable friend and mentor.
— Jesse Graves, Appalachian Places poetry editor
Jim Minick: 'Wrestling the Dead'; 'Cup of Sun'; 'Mort for Short'; 'The Oldest Spoon'
Jim Minick is the author or editor of eight books, including Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas (nonfiction), The Intimacy of Spoons (poetry, forthcoming), Fire Is Your Water (novel), and The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Oxford American, Orion, Shenandoah, Appalachian Journal, Wind, and The Sun. He serves as coeditor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel.
Wrestling the Dead
For Brian Ott (1963-2022)
In art class, Mrs. Cooper made us
preppies & stoners work side by side,
together, like staves in a barrel
learning difference disappears for a while.
And every day, Brian Ott walked in late,
red-eyed & smiling, to sit beside me,
shoving a little shoulder shove, taking little
seriously as he settled on the bench,
spilling supplies over the table,
saying, Excuse me, in a mocking voice.
Then he’d ask what I was listening to
which led to Led Zeppelin & trading LPs—
Edgar Winter free-riding to Frampton,
Aerosmith’s sweet emotions raining on
Uriah Heep & Pink Floyd comfortably
numbing us back to Zeppelin in through the out door.
On the long bus rides to away matches,
those green seats cold & slick, we traded
punches, not the flat-fisted kind that don’t hurt
much, but the one-knuckle-elevated
kind aimed at bicep sure to bruise. Before
each punch, Brian blew on his fist, rubbed it
on his chest like polishing a brass knuckle
for its special task. I was always first
to flinch, so he always won. Forty years
after graduation sundered us staves,
we wrestled again last night & despite
him being forty pounds lighter, he had
me on my back in an illegal hold
& he laughed in his devilment as I
thrashed & hit & kicked until I woke.
How can a ghost still throw a punch so full of love?
Cup of Sun
In the cup of sun-
flower’s back, water puddles
and wren takes her bath.
Mort for Short
Mortality: The Disease.
Mortality: The Cure.
Mortality, the name
of my next dog
who will lick my face
and greet me at the door.
The Oldest Spoon
The hoot owl lifts up the dark for all to taste.
Your twitching hand
keeps me awake.
My body’s heat
scootches you away.
To spoon
is seldom easy.
In that hoot-owl dark, the Big Dipper is nothing but
Once I glanced into
where your parents slept
on a narrow bed
spooning for over fifty years.
Their ashes now fill
a single grave.
the oldest spoon pointing us home.
Darnell Arnoult: 'DAYLIGHT'; 'BAPTISM'; 'SACRAMENT'; 'WORK'
Darnell Arnoult is the author of the poetry collections Galaxie Wagon and What Travels with Us (LSU Press) and the novel Sufficient Grace (Simon & Schuster), with shorter works in literary journals and anthologies. She has received the Weatherford Award, SIBA Poetry Book of the Year Award, the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award, and the Mary Frances Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For 10 years she was writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University, where she directed the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, the Appalachian Young Writers Workshop, and summer writing workshops and retreats through Arts in the Gap. Originally from Henry County, Virginia, Arnoult now lives with family in Mebane, North Carolina, where she teaches private writing workshops and is a faculty member of Table Rock Writers Workshop and John C. Campbell Folk School.
DAYLIGHT
Withdrawing
moonlight bends the world toward a resurrection
of birds.
Sun and song calling other tongues to cry away
the shadows.
Fish pack the glassy river as it curves and hears an engine
louder and
righter than any long-haul spiral of mankind’s building or striking.
BAPTISM
We can sit still. Keep silent. Ease our breath to stopping.
Let the phoebe, the sycamore, the rushing river, the sandstone
call themselves in their own sounds and their own silences,
and for a moment the neatness of the world may abide,
its heathen vastness and its vast variety, far and near,
which only a world without us knows. And then we must
call all things by name out of the silence to be with us again,
in our minds and in our books, or suffocate from our own namelessness.
SACRAMENT
How is it you take the Lord into your body?
How is it you take love and mercy and grace
into your mouth, onto your tongue to taste
like a nutritious meal. Only it tastes like a quarter
size of cardboard. The secret: don’t be literal,
and yet be literal. Taste the blessing
itself. Like this. Lower the kneeler, careful
not to let it fall. Kneel. Bless yourself with the sign
of the cross. Close your eyes. Press them to the seam
of your folded hands. Taste the bread of life. Here
is where it gets literal. Otherwise, you might
as well be Methodist or some other sect
that thinks bread stands for something.
As the papery wafer melts into your tongue
and across your heart, your psyche, let the taste
of Christ in, along with His mercy, all the pain,
all the light. His beneficence. There is an aftertaste.
If you don’t eat breakfast or a late lunch, it will echo
around molars and incisors, tonsils, cling to the ribbed roof,
keep you mindful of sacrifice, of what it takes to love.
WORK
Moonlight freely wants its glory,
holy howling eyes singing
heaven’s blues. Heaped-up songs
break thrones. Understand sound.
Hidden glory lightly consumes
the double-dog coming. Ankles creek
weighted tears. All mouths touch
my own. An original voice masters its living
tongue. Its giving tongue. Its burning tongue.
Walk it home. Believe in the tree,
in the owl, in the light. Believe and move
from the crouching dark. Cross
grief and master fierce wanting. Walk
your own soul’s endless entrance.
Bart Sides: 'HERB GATHERER, 1963'
Bart Sides is a teacher, poet, fly fisherman and fly tie-er, bluegrass banjo picker, and barbecue pitmaster (though not always in that order). Reared in Southern Appalachia, he lives in the mountains of Central New England with his wife of 49 years and four cats.
HERB GATHERER, 1963
A wise woman walks through
The woods north of Grandfather’s
Chin, old beyond knowing,
Looking…searching…seeing…cutting
With razor sharp knife, twine-tied, to
Her wrist—
Ginseng, coltsfoot, amanita,
More, dropped into the
Croker sack hanging from
Her elbow.
Wisdom passed beyond
Time beyond
Place from
Grandmother to
Mother to
Daughter to
Daughter?
Cell towers and
Satellites stream content—
Wisdom-less. Do daughters hear
Anymore?
Do wise women walk through
The woods?
Kevin LeMaster: 'To Dust'; 'The Low Hum of Strange Music'
Kevin LeMaster’s poems have been found at SheilaNaGig online, Flying Island Literary Review, West Trade Review, Main Street Rag and others, and he has work forthcoming in Gyroscope Review, Hive Avenue Literary Journal, and BarelySouth Review. Kevin is the co-editor of the upcoming anthology Poetry by Chance and the judge of the Golden Die Contest that supplied the poems for the anthology. He has been nominated for a Pushcart twice and once for a Best of Net.
To Dust
the weeds have overtaken
its block walls, dragging
the bones down
through tendrils of grass; thousands
of tiny fingers reaching higher
until all that is left is its dark
green wake. its insides smell
of black mold and musty
cigarettes, dingy walls
evidenced by the smokers
who lived there; three packs a day
cradled in the hand, sporting
the long yellow nail.
its walls run with rainstorms,
trickling down the dated paneling
and onto the concrete floor
and I am a belly full of stones, river worn
and waterlogged, full of hurt and longing.
a house well lived with all its secrets
is soon to be buried with its memories,
underneath the garden with the dogs
and the hamster, mummified and wrapped
in a white cheese cloth that emerged
from the rich earth during planting
season, the bleached bones white
as stars on a warm summer night.
The Low Hum of Strange Music
the gas pumps behind my house
simultaneously bellow
like the closing prayer during Sunday’s
service, young me squirming for an end
that seems to go on forever. yet I go
inside anyway, mesmerized, top off
my tank and buy a coffee. the local
newspaper tells of another overdose
just in back of the Speedway across
the river and I am unable to react
anymore. welcome to new small town
America, just a place to live and die,
with nothing in between. still, the pumps hum,
fill us with false hopes of prosperity,
of commerce, of feelings of something
you can't buy here.
Arthur Smith: 'Haywire'; 'Never, Again'; 'Purse'; 'Yesterday's News'
Arthur Smith was born in central California. He received degrees from San Francisco State University (B.A., M.A.) and from the University of Houston (Ph.D.). He passed away on Nov. 9, 2018. His first book of poems, Elegy on Independence Day, was awarded the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1985. That same year, the book was selected by the Poetry Society of American to receive the Norma Farber First Book Award. His second book of poems, Orders of Affection, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 1996, and his third book, The Late World, was published in 2002, also by Carnegie Mellon University Press. His most recent book of poems is The Fortunate Era (2013). His work has been honored with a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and his poems appeared in numerous journals including The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, and North American Review. He was professor of English at the University of Tennessee.
HAYWIRE
Wouldn't you know it'd go haywire in a Chevy,
mid-winter, 1986, somewhere
in the southern snow-coated hills
of West Virginia, thirty or so miles north of where
the Hatfields and McCoys
were still at it, my mother, 62, along
with her younger sister Doris, sweet Doris, the last
living two of eight, not counting the one boy
still-born,
both of them wrapped
around
the steel re-enforced concrete bridge abutments
over a small creek frozen fast. Both lived,
my mother, Iris, with crushed ribs
and a bruised heart, literal, in addition to the one
she lived with most of her life.
Never, Again
All my life I’ve been in love with bamboo
And its hundreds of uses, from floorboards
To food, beautiful to look at, and beautiful
To hear in the wind its leaf-blades slicing,
Its tall stalks chattering among themselves,
In love with its one-mindedness. Same
With Bermuda grass scheming on nothing
But desert air and grit. Kudzu, too, you can
Lie down beside it and watch the beast unfurl,
And what’s inside it never
Grows old. Never. Star-ships, ova, each light
In the cosmos nothing but ash.
Tonight a huge wolf spider
Jumped to the kitchen floor
From the garage, and I tried to bluff it back
Out with my shoe but stepped on it. Dozens
Of the tiniest spiders I had ever seen
Rolled off its body in all directions,
Like soldiers, like brown sound waves.
Purse
I was drying and sorting
silverware back into
The plastic slotted bins where
everything but the knives
Lay spooned like children,
and there it was,
From years ago, my mother’s
father’s coin purse
She pushed on me
before my flight, so insistent
The force of her hand.
A key-ring divorced
From keys, a key with no lock,
a key to what
Once was. She likely
made it for him— Christmas,
Birthday? She never said,
the leather damp-brown, creased
Like a palm, but I can tell you someone
had to kill whatever
Lived inside that skin,
and then someone—sometimes
The same— had to cure
and cut and fold
And hand-stitch the leather, and
close it with a small snap
In southwestern
West Virginia
Where my mother’s family lived
without locks but with guns.
Yesterday’s News
I’m hurrying back in with yesterday’s news—
The headlines like crepe paper, words
The weather had gotten to.
Every morning it’s late spring,
A miracle, like Easter without clergy
Or living past your actuarial age—
Like the hundreds of thousands of years
From before the last ice age—for light
From the sun’s core to rouse the muted
Marigolds this morning in my neighbor’s yard.
When the rains ended, the blossoms looked
Bewildered, but only because they didn’t
Wish everything in the world more like them,
And they had forgotten, once again, who
Or what they were, just as I had.
This is the spirit that seeps
Into the field and makes the honeydew
Sweeter than anyone can remember.