Poetry by Narya Rose Deckard, Tammy Iralu, Caleb Johnson, Grace Buckner, Michele Salin, and Suzie Taylor
Hello, dear readers. It’s Lacy Snapp here, back at my poetic correspondence desk to introduce the latest installment of Appalachian Places.
In the last letter from the editor from Jesse Graves, he signed off with song lyrics from John Prine, who would have turned 80 last month. When sitting to write my letter today to introduce the magazine’s next batch of poems, I suppose those words were still echoing in my head, but I kept returning instead to these lines:
The moon and stars hang out in bars just talking.
I still love that picture of us walking.
Just like that old house we thought was haunted.
Summer’s end came faster than we wanted.
Come on home. Come on home. No, you don’t have to be alone.
Ironically, this season’s poetry installment concludes with a poem of the same name as Prine’s song. But before we get there, let’s stall fall’s true arrival with these six poets, and savor instead the hunger of summer, days haunted and hotter “than history has ever seen.”
We begin with a homecoming and “a story about the world” in “A History of Place” from Narya Rose Deckard of North Carolina. That opening poem describes “the old ones still here / who can speak more than one truth —” and that truth appears in the images announcing the arrival of autumn: “a tawny doe’s last exhaled breath,” “flower skeletons / and carcass stench,” and “worms / where a vixen swallows her up.” I found Deckard’s four poems to be visceral, both of the animal body and the materiality of the land, as well as deeply speculative. They navigated the worlds of dreams, phantoms, and imagining as a way of searching “for answers [the speaker] knew / would disturb placated sediment.”
Our second poet, Tammy Iralu of New Mexico, gives us both a prose poem as well as her own version of “Where I’m From” to add to the timeless Appalachian poetic cannon started by George Ella Lyon’s creation of the same name. Iralu’s maps out her own list of “groundhog tunnels and railroad tracks” and “sleeping under the stars.” Next, Caleb Johnson of Alabama has four poems which transcend time and space as they take us from creek beds to singlewides, and span touchstones and generations of a human life with narratives of a young child, father, and grandmother. We learn that “time sneaks wolf-like” in one poem and witness this truth two poems later as the speaker confesses “I don’t remember much. / My mind is quick / and cruel.”
We shift into the final three poets with Grace Buckner of North Carolina whose piece starts to steer us into October light with family memories of conversations on a river’s edge about laurel thickets and an admission to heaven that cannot be bought. Michele Salin of Tennessee combines the present with history through her poem “The Resting Tree.” She includes a photo of a local old growth tree on the former Preston Plantation in Bristol, Virginia, that is a grave marker for enslaved and free Black people. Also known as “witness trees,” they are a place of shade, pause, and remembering. Her poem facilitates physical and spiritual meditation for the speaker and reader. Both, in this moment, are witnesses to history and nature, toggling between what is “yours” or “mine” as the speaker comes to understand what was given to the land, and what has been given back.
As promised, this installment is brought home by North Carolina poet Suzie Taylor’s piece, “Summer’s End.” Summer in the poem is personified and prepares for fall, “sweeping up her” “hummingbirds” and “wildflowers” as she “shushes the frogs screaming.” I hope that you will pause with that final poem, as I did, and savor for a little longer the last hot middays before the true autumn chill arrives. We will end here as we did in the last letter with John Prine’s words,
“Come on home. No, you don’t have to be alone” and, no matter where you are viewing this latest poetry installment, for however long it takes you to read these poems, you aren’t alone. We are kept company by the fine words of these six poets, their river currents and ancestral stories, spiderwebs and trillium, heartwood and Queen Anne’s lace blooms, and the ever vibrant poetic community here in Appalachia that is one metaphorical hearth through the coldest months.
Lacy Snapp
Co-Editor, Poetry
Narya Rose Deckard: ‘A History of Place’; 'Reckoning'; 'Stone Soldiers and Birdstones'; and 'Pluviophile'
Narya Rose Deckard, an Appalachian poet, is the author of Wolfcraft, which won Broken Tribe Press’s MFA Graduate Award, and the winner of the Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship Award. She has poems curated in journals such as The Dead Mule School, Eternal Haunted Summer, Kakalak, and the Weatherford Award winning anthology Had I a Dove. She received her MFA in poetry from Lenoir-Rhyne University, where she now teaches English and Creative Writing. She lives in Western North Carolina with her husband, cats, dog, and chickens. Visit her website at naryawithwings.com
A History of Place
the ivy knew the way, oh the knowing ivy – W.S. Merwin
When he came home and told me a story about the world,
I imagined a place where waters
rise and fall and rearrange artifacts of history,
where stories become distorted
by eidolons and myth.
Of this place we could read names and dates,
study lists of wars
and battle tactics, or we could believe
the land was something virgin,
freshly discovered, as lovely as a red, red rose,
and repeat the words of those who say
This was when history began.
But if we attend to the ones who persist,
the old ones still here
who can speak more than one truth —
the cold clamor of water upon stone, the first cries of a fox,
a tawny doe’s last exhaled breath
caught in autumn wind and carried
to the meadow that murmurs flower skeletons
and carcass stench, the doe sags
into the meadow’s edge and crawls with worms
where a vixen swallows her up, carries the meal in her belly
to her den, heaves the guts up for her cub
— and we look to the north
where the great rock towers
out of the mountains a god
of earth and storm.
Reckoning
Imagine the Blue Ridge Mountains west
and north beyond the tree line who conjure
storms and stone me with rain.
Mountains beyond
the neighbor’s hill whose bamboo thicket
threatens daily to crack
through pavement on Pineburr Avenue,
mountains whose oldest bodies rise
and groan into hollows
with the weight of winter.
These hollows still bear the blood
of Cherokees and Catawbans, and the blood
of settlers who cut
through the old ones’ bodies and stripped
the forests into ghosts.
When I seek answers from the mountains
shadows crawl from corners,
mouths open, they cleave till I’m stone.
A reckoning is at hand
as a murky past thickens like a bog
dense with peat, sphagnum moss,
and mummified dead. Mountains
remember their stories
in drought and rain, in heave
of hoarfrost, in rivers and mist
while I cower sheltered from wrath of revenants,
a book of stories clutched in my hands.
I search for answers I knew
would disturb placated sediment.
But I cannot stop
and I do not heed
the label on the bottle
of Appalachian apple cider
that warns:
Tip gently before opening.
Stone Soldiers and Birdstones
The woman dreaming watches a boy drown
and his friend suck him out
of the river’s mouth.
A scrawled scorpion bites the dreamer’s thigh.
Mountain above the river a distant Silurian blue.
Up close, it’s the color
of granite and blood.
Gray of dusk descends: bellum
statues erected
as a mendicant for paramnesia.
Remember the clouds in prayer over North Carolina
dogged gray
and gathering ghosts long
after spilled blood
soured and blackened.
Carved shrines wreathed in yellow
crowned with dead
goldfinches.
Mountains of chattel haunt
the roots of Appalachian poverty —
raise trade sell breed abuse
conserve
whiteness
but not the indigent kind.
Hate boils blood
libels the woman who dreams
swallows her wine of privilege,
fights hard not to look away,
bound by the safety
of her skin.
Bark, its skin
the tree’s phantom
of heartwood
always there
circling.
Pluviophile
for Sarah
She explained to me the sound
frequency of rain on leaves
as we pressed deeper into the storm,
how it’s a kind of green noise
that relaxes the mind.
We hiked on a mountain thick
with cloud and thunder.
Our skin slicked with rain drops,
we didn’t turn back. We freed
ourselves to feel,
stand among it
as all the mountain does
each time it rains.
Leaves shook, showered us with cold drops
as our animality crept back
the way a turtle is slow to poke her head
out of her shell after being startled.
Falsity of functionalism sloughed off
like snake’s skin that never fit right,
made her appear monstrous.
We were as alder and trillium,
lion's mane and stone
who find shelter
in the beauty and bitter onslaught
of thunder, wind, and rain.
Tammy Iralu: ‘Where I'm From’ and ‘Electrostatic Attraction’
Tammy Iralu lives in New Mexico with her husband and daughter. She writes about radical wonder. Her work is published or forthcoming in A Year of New Mexico Poetry, Split Rock, MacQueen’s Quarterly, Odd Pocket Press, Amethyst Review, and elsewhere.
Where I'm From
--after George Ella Lyon
I come from steamer trunks and oceans
groundhog tunnels and railroad tracks
I come from patchwork and Daniel Boone hats
Monopoly and hard Scrabble for a living
I come from there and back again
from lost keys to life in a minor key
from lightning bugs and constellations
to sleeping under the stars
one more night with you.
Electrostatic Attraction
Sunday walk in Louisville, Kentucky, glitzy enamel bracelet jangles my wrist. Mood ring blooms blue on my finger. On this family outing, a forest canopy shades us from sun but not from thirst. Then, I spy a white oval basin, incongruous against branches of evergreen, that gleams like an old school pedestal sink. A hand lever flashes chrome, promises to quench thirst. I approach, but as I reach to press the lever, freeze.
Jewels shine in a spiderweb slung like a hammock over bowl’s rim. Water droplets strung like pearls weigh down silk thread. Dewdrops, faceted like diamonds, sparkle in a vintage beaded hairnet. Beneath the web, a brown leaf cloaks the keeper of this lair, the orb spider. Cocked under a leaf, she keeps silent vigil. I step back. So much mystery creeps under my skin — how can I take it all in?
Now I know that when a fly approaches a web, the beating of his wings in air stirs a positive charge that triggers the negatively charged strands of silk. The silk strands bend and reach to grab him. When a fly touches silk, the silk absorbs waxy chemicals from his carapace. The silk, once it absorbs the wax, becomes rigid and traps the fly, the fly ambushed by his own armor. The shock of touch, surrender.
When I was 11, what did I know of hunger’s drive, of appetite?
I turn to go. My thirst can wait.
Caleb Johnson: ‘Bare-Chested'; ‘On Our Son's Fourth Birthday’; 'What Is Pleasure Worth'; and 'My Mind Is Quick and Cruel'
Caleb Johnson is the author of the novels Telegraph Road (Hub City Press, Fall 2027) and Treeborne (Picador), which was named an honorable mention for the Southern Book Prize. His poetry has been published in Appalachian Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, Salvation South, and is forthcoming elsewhere. His nonfiction appears widely in magazines and newspapers, and has been cited in The Best American Essays. He teaches creative writing at Appalachian State University.
Bare-Chested
On a hotter day than history has ever seen
our son and I hiked to the creek.
I’d overdressed him, thinking seasons
still knew their place.
He galloped down trail, wishing
long sleeves were short.
I told him when I was little I played
in the woods without a shirt.
He wanted to take off his, but wouldn’t
unless I did the same.
I bared my chest to the warmth of the sun
and the cool breeze.
Still he was nervous as I pulled the shirt
over his sweaty head.
Guy Clark sang about seeing the David,
the Mona Lisa too. I’ve seen our son,
skin spangled by the light of a false spring day,
climbing into a laurel slick.
A painterly speck of mud aside his nose,
the slant of his avicular shoulders
a geometrical abstrusity, much like the angles
Michelangelo discovered
hidden in a six-ton block of marble, or the notes
Doc Watson found in a fleeting gap.
On Our Son’s Fourth Birthday
Time sneaks wolf-like.
We collect claw marks,
bits of fur, broken teeth.
The years, they say, are short
and the days quite long.
Since his birth I’ve wrestled
the unsayable. Once I searched
for a sudden way out.
Our doors have seen a century
They groan when opened
in the blue hour. Now I want
to begin each day greeting
sour breath, a scalp in need
of itching. With me he says
he sleeps like a stone. Alone
like a stone rolling downhill.
What Is Pleasure Worth
To hold life beating wetly
in hand, caught at the end
of a six-pound test line,
the hatchery-raised brookie
hooked through its jaw,
to tear its delicate lip,
to deprive its gills of breath
while I snap a picture to prove —
what? That I’m nearer
nature standing calf-deep in water
than deep down in cells I share
with the sycamore and birch,
that I’m worthy of my species,
fooling ourselves into believing
nature is a garden in need of tending
less it become unruly on its own.
My Mind Is Quick and Cruel
She asks what I recall
of her grandmother.
I don’t remember much.
My mind is quick
and cruel. Savage inheritance.
I bluster about proteins
misfolding between cells, the fate
of neurons unseen, my brain
shrinking. Inside a singlewide
living room, a hospital bed
reclined to forty-five degrees,
the caruncle of a woman
shouts nonsense, calls me
my uncle’s nickname,
beckons Peanut closer
for a smooch. Mustache tickle,
mothball stink, snakeskin
in a closet, softened floor
by the commode, trembling
hands liver-spotted as the cows
lowing beyond a holler while
dusk waits outside the door.
Grace Buckner: ‘Folks Call Them Hells’
Grace Buckner is a writer, public librarian and whitewater raft guide from Madison County, North Carolina. Her work has been published in Salvation South, Reckon Review, and Southlands Magazine.
Folks Call Them Hells
Up on the mountain
Carrying my family name
October light is dappling leaves
Like current swirling
On the river I love-
Familiar and known
All bound up in constant change.
My daddy says quietly
As we edge along
A rattlesnake crook,
“Girl, I do love them
laurel thickets.
That’s why I’d go bird hunting.
Just to be out in the middle
Of something like heaven.
Can’t buy your way in.”
Michele Salin: ‘The Resting Tree’
Michele Salin lives in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of northeast Tennessee. Her poetry explores themes of nature, motherhood, and yoga. She earned her M.S. in Biology at East Tennessee State University and teaches Biology, Human Anatomy & Physiology, and Environmental Science at Northeast State Community College.
Note: Evidence of plantations and enslavement is a part of Tri-cities Regional history in East Tennessee. Sugar Hollow Park in Bristol, Virginia, offers one such reminder. Sitting along Resting Tree Drive is an old-growth oak tree that shades a few rough headstones marking the graves of several enslaved and free Black people on what was formerly the Preston Plantation. It was common for people to leave a tree in a clearing to provide shade. These large plantation trees are often referred to as witness trees. They can be recognized by their large diameter trunks and a wide-spreading canopy. This tree is also a reminder of how large our Southern Appalachian trees were before the forests were logged for timber.
The Resting Tree
Aniyunwiya land; Bristol, Virginia
Your roots, vast & incomprehensible
as galaxies, push through the dark
loamy earth wrapping around innominate
bones of people kidnapped & enslaved
on land stolen.
Their flesh now yours.
I arrive a pilgrim to lay flowers
beside each rough stone marker,
beside the base of your trunk.
I sink down hugging my knees
to my chest, feeling my pelvis pressing
into the earth. My bones rest
against your striated bark
tired from carrying my worries.
To you, my body is like a feather.
Branches thick as middle-aged trees,
your canopy grew wide instead of tall
a far-reaching circle left alone
for centuries, refuge
from heat and hard work.
You stood witness as your forest
fell for cattle and corn.
Their sunlight now yours.
My skin warms,
from above I hear
pew, pew, pew.
Smiling, I imagine my husband,
a little cowboy, playing
in his Mamaw’s woods.
Opening my eyes, I look up
to see the crimson bird, blue sky,
white cumulus clouds,
your verdant leaves,
newly unfurled from their buds
tender and tiny, gathering light.
Your perspective now mine.
Suzie Taylor: ‘Summer’s End’
Suzie formerly wrangled the words of engineers to support her two kiddos, critters + herself. In this season, she finds joy in her words. Participating in Joseph Bathanti’s poetry workshop Story Kitchen on Tuesday nights at FARM CAFÉ in downtown Boone nudges her to notice — and capture — the beauty of the Appalachian region she calls home.
Summer’s End
Like a scorned lover,
Summer sweeps up her pretty things:
hummingbirds on purple joe pye weed,
riotous wildflowers exploding color
on roadside, streamside, and field.
She shushes the frogs screaming,
dims the lightning bugs' iridescent glow, and
takes with her all the glorious green —
leaving red, orange, and gold in her wake.
Long fingers trailing by her side,
she lightly touches the tops of
delicate white Queen Anne’s lace blooms,
closing them into brown, seeded fists.
Tall, golden grasses part
as she passes in pastures like the wind,
collecting the fawns’ spots
as she goes.
She warns us each year
she will not stay
but we quickly forget —
skin basking in her warmth,
shading our eyes against
her bright light.
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