Poetry by Robert Morgan, Suzette Clark Bradshaw, Victor Depta, Edwina Pendarvis, Louis Gallo, and Michael McFee
- 4 days ago
- 13 min read
High Summer hello, my friends, this is Jesse Graves with a gathering of poems even better than a platter of sweet, buttered corn on the Poet’s Table. We are celebrating five years of publishing here at Appalachian Places, and for months now I have been thinking about the generosity of the poets who have offered their words to us. I think of their poems like the rolling waters in William Wordsworth’s timeless “Tintern Abbey” meditation:
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.
What is Appalachian poetry if not that soft inland murmur, those songs of mountain-springs that take us in time to the places we love and long to be?
Our very first featured poet in 2021 was Robert Morgan, and it only felt fitting that we should circle back to our source with new work from one of Appalachia’s quintessential writers. He was kind enough to share two new poems with us, and they are classic Morgan, engaging with the deep history of the region, back to its Native American roots, and with his magical way of observing nature in motion. When we were expanding our reach, Morgan gave us the first fiction we ever published as well. Click to read Morgan's four poems ‘Harmonica’ ‘Pangaea,’ ‘New Dust’ and ‘Squirrel Hill’, and read his short story ‘Timrod Hill.’
Morgan has published more than 25 books, and he continues to write some of the finest work of any living American poet. As his vision continues to enlarge our experience, we celebrate his new volume, To Honor the Imagined Whole, due from LSU Press this month.
We follow Morgan with poems of remembrance and fortitude from Suzette Clark Bradshaw of North Carolina, one of the most thrilling new voices to arrive in our region’s poetry. We have three renowned poets, Kentucky’s Victor Depta, West Virginia’s Edwina Pendarvis, and Virginia’s Louis Gallo, all justly celebrated for their decades of work building up the literature of our region.
Their poems will take you through childhood memories and a rich variety of natural phenomena. We close with a set of new poems from one of our giants, Michael McFee, born and raised in Asheville, and recently retired as a full professor of English from UNC-Chapel Hill. McFee’s poems delight and enliven, giving us “characters” among both family and friends, with the stately quatrains of “For Peter Fritzell,” and plenty of zest in the form of alliterative staves of “Chestnut logs.”
‘Memories, they can’t be boughten’
Finally, we bow in mourning for the passing of beloved and acclaimed poet Don Johnson, past contributor to both Appalachian Places and Now & Then Magazine. Don was an ETSU legend, chair of the Department of English, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, and our first Poet-in-Residence. He published eight books, including four poetry collections: The Importance of Visible Scars, 1984; Watauga Drawdown, 1990; Here and Gone: New & Selected Poems; 2010; and More than Heavy Rain, 2014. He published a novel, Blue-Winged Olive, in 2016, which merged two of his great passions, detective stories and fly fishing.
Don passed on July 12, just five days after his 84th birthday, and while we are planning a fuller tribute to him for a later installment, it felt important to remember him here and now. Don loved the music of John Prine, and more than once I heard him playing the guitar and singing “Souvenirs” and “Angel from Montgomery,” among others. One of my very favorite Prine songs is a later one, “Summer’s End,” which captures where we are headed as July has turned over to August and the green in the trees has taken on just a hint of yellowing wear. If ever there was a case for someone being an honorary Appalachian, it would surely be John Prine. As he says in “Summer’s End”: “Come on home,/ come on home./ No, you don’t have to be alone.” Join us instead for these fine poems, and browse back through some of the “soft inland murmur” of voices we have been able to share over the past five years.
We invite you to enjoy Don Johnson's previously published work in Appalachian Places. Click here to read Don's poem ‘reezing Fog,’ and click here to read Don’s remembrance of his favorite poet, Seamus Heaney.
Jesse Graves
Co-Editor, Poetry
Robert Morgan: ‘Chief Logan’ and ‘Untouched’
Robert Morgan is the author of several books of poems, including Terroir (2011) and Dark Energy (2015). To Honor the Imagined Whole: New Poems appeared in 2026. He has published 12 books of fiction, among them the New York Times bestseller Gap Creek, and, more recently, Chasing the North Star (2016), In the Snowbird Mountains and Other Stories (2023). His works of nonfiction include Lions of the West (2011), the national bestseller Boone: A Biography (2007). The Dead Alive and Busy: Selected Essays was published in 2026. Recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is Kappa Alpha Professor of English (Emeritus) at Cornell University.
Chief Logan
I am Logan, Chief of Mingos.
It was never my intent
to make war, but always live
in peace beside the stream where corn
grows taller than a man and deer
come nightly to the licks. I am
Tahgahjute and it is not
the Indians who are mad, just me.
It was at Yellow Creek beside
the beautiful Ohio that
foul Cresap sent an invite to
the Mingos to come talk of peace
with all the whites. My brother and
his pregnant wife attended in
my place when I was sick and weak.
The hosts there gave them whiskey from
a barrel till they were silly and
confused, then shot them one by one.
The baby in my sister’s womb
was torn out and impaled for all
to see. They were my only kin
and I am old. The Mingos have
lost many to the white man’s pox
and breathing curse. Soon we will be
no more. It is not Indians
but me was filled with hatred’s fire.
I have attacked the forts along
the Holston and Watauga and
the Clinch, and Nolichucky too.
It was their Governor Dunmore who
declared a war on us, but it
was only me who made a war
on white invaders of our land.
I took two bearskin blacks caught in
the fields and dared the men behind
the walls to come out, fight like braves.
Without big guns I could not blow
a fort apart. My only choice
was send a few young warriors to
the front to draw them to attack.
When many ran outside to drive
them back and fired their guns we rushed
and struck them down with tomahawks
before they could reload. We killed
and scalped a dozen whites before
retreating to the woods. When all
was quiet, calm, I sent a note
to Dunmore who made war upon
our people, burned many towns,
to say that Cresap in the spring
had lured my kin into a trap
and murdered all when I was ill.
There is no drop of Logan’s blood
in any other vein. By laws
of animals or men or gods
I must achieve revenge. Now I
have killed and satisfied my thirst
for blood and am content. But do
not think I’m pleased with peace because
I am afraid, for Logan’s not
a coward and never was, nor turned
his heel away to save himself.
Now who is there to mourn, to sing
a chant for Logan when he dies,
no voice to grieve, when I’m a ghost,
no weeping eye when I am dust.
Untouched
Have you ever seen a mother quail
with tiny chicklets foraging
in grass and leaves, and unaware
she’s watched? She strikes this way
and that, intent on teaching them
her methods of discovery
and precise pecks. She speaks to them
in barely audible chirps,
so focused on instruction and
consuming seeds and other bits
she’s in another realm or state.
But when she sees or hears a step
she clucks a low alarm and all
the thumb-sized biddies spurt away
and disappear into the leaves
or blades, become invisible,
as if they’re beamed afar,
had never been, and you might think
they were a memory from a dream.
She thrashes as with wounded wing,
inviting you to catch her,
then detonates away untouched.
Suzette Clark Bradshaw: ‘Between Want and Desire’; ‘Conjured’; ‘The Weight of Memory’; and ‘Homing’
Suzette Clark Bradshaw is a self-taught poet whose work often focuses on the beauty and resiliency of Appalachian people and place. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills of North Carolina and recently retired from a career in local government and non-profit community service. The 2026 recipient of Salvation South’s New Poet’s Prize, her poetry has appeared in Cutleaf Journal, Shelia-Na-Gig online, Kakalak, Dead Mule, Women Speak, and more.
Between Want and Desire
She pays six dollars for a hot rotisserie chicken,
instead of getting a day-old cold one —
one she knows would be free with her EBT.
She tucks the bird under her coat for the ride home,
warmth pre-heating a lonesome stomach.
What could the cash have bought her anyway —
a gallon of gas and a tube of Dollar Tree toothpaste,
twenty more miles down a crooked mountain road,
and a movie star smile for an everyday face?
In her kitchen, she unwraps the chicken,
the overhead fluorescent blinking,
a drippy spigot asking, what...what…what?
She pulls back tender golden skin, exposes
hallowed white meat, feasts —
the first few bites taken slow,
a humble tongue savoring momentary wealth.
Afterwards, with piranha-like fingers,
she strips the carcass of remaining flesh,
boils down what’s left for broth,
fishes out the little wishbone
unbroken, saves it for hard times.
Conjured
Two months and still no rain
in sight for the fevered mountains—
hayfields, brown as pine bark,
farm ponds, empty hands of beggars.
In eastern Kentucky,
a granny woman takes the wheel.
She clubs a blacksnake, long as she is tall,
hangs it belly-side up around a fence post,
sprinkles it with clean water
from a mica-flecked spring.
Hours later, the tv weatherman
updates his local forecast:
An unexpected disturbance
is winding its way from the west.
An inch or more of rain is likely.
Heavy at times.
The Weight of Memory
My mother’s memories weigh almost nothing.
They float like dandelion fluff,
drift, to faraway places, where no maps,
landmarks, or ribbon-tied trees,
will ever guide them home.
For her, there are no sounds of yesterday,
last evening, or today’s early morning,
when the small wren sang so sweetly—
only empty-bellied wails of newborn moments,
resonating down hallways without echo.
Long gone are remembrances
of things beloved—a quiet walk in the woods;
trout lily, trillium, flame azalea;
the acrid smell of autumn leaves.
A daughter.
Here in her small room, the wall clock,
unwilling to abandon obligation,
continues to tick, while tufts of remaining
thoughts hover, pray for an open window,
and strong night wind.
Homing
My uncle hitchhiked home from WWII
unwilling to wait three days for a discharge
bus to return him to the Blue Ridge.
He said catching a ride was easy.
When he got the first good glimpse of a mountain
he asked the driver to just let him out there
and he walked the last seventeen miles
so nobody could see the tears roll.
At the county line he kissed the ground.
From that day in 1945
he never set foot outside the county again.
He didn’t talk a lot about those years
in the South Pacific
but did say he earned the right
to be called a shellback
for crossing the equator again and again
with nothing on the horizon
except more ocean,
or more islands to blow up
where he expected to die
or lose another buddy
beneath the Southern Cross.
He once told me he laid on the beach for two days
in a shallow hole of wallowed sand,
no food or water, bullets zinging inches above his head.
During that time, he dreamed he was home,
wading barefoot in the creek,
eating chicken and dumplings,
listening to Plott hounds bay at night,
mourning doves call by day—
church bells ringing,
not far away.
Victor Depta: ‘The Remembrance’ and ‘The Boy at Thanksgiving’
Victor Depta is the publisher of Blair Mountain Press, focused on environmental issues. Recent publications include Coal: A Poetry Anthology, edited by Chris Green. He has published in several genres, including over 200 poems in magazines and journals. He has degrees from Ohio University, San Francisco State University, and Marshall University. After reaching 40 years, he lives in Frankfort, Kentucky.
The Remembrance
the weight of all those years
as if they were a knapsack of stones
when they’re ephemeral as thought
no more than a dream is
adrift in the daylight
those memories
and yet they do survive
beside the headstones in the grass
as we visit
the chickweeds and bittercress
those tiny flowers
as if welcoming those of us
gone far too long
from home
The Boy at Thanksgiving
forgetful as the aged get
the stove with a control knob on for half a day
the forgotten shower head rinsing the tub
a missing noun in a sentence, a verb mis-construed
and events as a catch in the throat
a sorrowing like beech leaves adrift on a creek
in some faraway hollow
where his youth was, bored with Thanksgiving
his sitting on the creekbank
irritated at all the boring people
until, in his empty-headed, stuporous blank
the rippling, turning of the speckled, yellowed leaves
in the stream
was all there was
Edwina Pendarvis: ‘Phrenology’ and ‘Cascade’
Edwina “Eddy” Pendarvis, professor emeritus, Marshall University, was born in Weeksbury, Kentucky, and lives in Huntington, West Virginia. She writes poems and essays mostly centered on Appalachian life and literature. Author of four poetry collections (most recently, Ghost Dance Poems) and five nonfiction books (most recently Another World: Ballet Lessons from Appalachia), she has contributed work to regional and national periodicals. Among her proudest accomplishments is to have served as reviews editor for Now and Then: The Appalachian Magazine more than a few years ago.
Phrenology
Feel my head, she said phrenetically —
wishbone divining rod cockscomb posy
rising yellow storms red seas blue suns
blazing branches of jelly wire string cheese
memory pods star wheels; feel my head
how it hums like steel rails like a wasp’s vibrato;
trace the bumps, even the atavistic ears, trace its shape,
summer lightning behind the hills.
Cascade
Under the mountains and fossil stars,
icy currents plunge over cliffs
and through night’s canyons.
Monoliths of water,
rivulets of stone,
the only light
the white
noise of water-
falls.
Droplets of sound
splash the dark
walls.
Subterranean
birds reflect
the surface
of the
water
the angle
of the
rock.
Louis Gallo: ‘Witness’ and ‘Mulberries’
Published volumes of poetry by Louis Gallo include: Archaeology; Scherzo Furiant; Crash; Clearing the Attic; and Ghostly Demarcation: New Poems & The Pandemic Papers. His work appears in Best Short Fiction 2020. National Public Radio aired a reading and discussion of his poetry on its “With Good Reason” series (December 2020). He is now professor emeritus at Radford University in Radford, Virginia. He is a native of New Orleans.
Witness
I watch an old horse take a step
then abruptly collapse in the field.
That last step is what interests me,
not the before or eternal thereafter.
What energy it must have consumed,
what hope, what a leap of faith.
It killed him outright
yet the alternative, to stand still,
to go nowhere, was unthinkable.
I watch him turn to bones, then ashes,
and finally nothing at all,
and I remember only a field
where something courageous
once happened, beyond all odds,
as darkness assembles
like a regiment of soft pickets.
Mulberries
Each day, as they bloom, I pluck a mulberry
from our tree and chew it up. A modest berry,
lacking distinction and taste, but faithful, profuse.
I have done this every summer for a decade,
turned it into a kind of sacrament. They don’t last long.
I’m devouring July, I tell the tree, which listens.
I’m eating time, bit by bit.
The tree thrives in a swirl of lanky pines
near the back driveway. Once the berries go,
it almost seems to disappear. No one, I think,
notices but me and the birds that feast on its fruit
and deposit purple splotches on our windshields.
But I know when the searing cold returns
and long dark days enshroud the mind
I will stand again beside the garbage cans
and tally not only the seasons, but the life,
yearning again for the mulberries’ inauspicious return.
This is no feast for pleasure, no picnic
or burst of gustatory delight. This is prayer.
I eat prayers, I tell the tree as its unglamorous leaves
flutter with gusts sweeping in from the mountains.
The tree consents, tolerates me in a way
that I, with almost nothing in my hands,
vaguely understand.
Michael McFee: ‘Martha A. Rice McFee’; ‘Jug’; ‘Pumpknot’; ‘For Peter Fritzell’; and ‘Chestnut logs’
A native of Asheville, North Carolina, Michael McFee is the author or editor of 17 books, most recently A Long Time to Be Gone: Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022) and Appointed Rounds: Essays (Mercer University Press, 2018). Among his honors are the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award from the Western North Carolina Historical Association in 2006, the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2009, and the North Carolina Award for Literature from Gov. Roy Cooper in November 2018. He taught in the Creative Writing Program at UNC-Chapel Hill for 35 years.
Martha A. Rice McFee
One Sunday afternoon, a visitor to the house
of my great-great grandmother out in Leicester,
up the road from where Windyville used to be,
asked: “What do you think is the unpardonable sin?”
Mattie mouthed her snuff a while, and pondered,
then answered him: “I can’t be sure, but I do believe
that it’s either sinning against the Holy Ghost
or being a Republican!” Then she leaned forward
and spat a dark line of amber into the fireplace
from a considerable distance, across the room,
and (it was said) nary a drop touched the floor.
Jug
Thirst emptied it
over many nights, long pulls
draining the glazed clay
of high-octane popskull
till all the world looked little,
till that dry day
when a man lifted it to blow
across the hole just so,
numb lips buzzing bass notes
over its parched vacancy:
his up and down
choo-choo-choo of breaths
soon became the pulse
of a jug band’s breakdown,
gone spirits converted to song.
Pumpknot
I was a big-headed kid, my forehead
an unmissable irresistible target
for the pop-up climbing into blinding sun
at a Fourth of July family tournament
then plunging earthward past my glove
now lifted less to catch than to protect,
smacking me between hairline and brow.
I heard an uncle shout We need some ice
and granny say Get me a tater and a knife
as I lay there feeling the pumpknot
swell, its bump a tight hot dome rising
above my brain, a volcanic third eye—
would it collapse, or possibly explode?
Nobody staring at me seemed to know.
For Peter Fritzell
I wish I’d said Yes when you invited me
to come ice fishing on Lake Winnebago—
“It’ll be great, Michael! We’ll drink vodka
and declaim Whitman into the wind!”—
but I was spooked by the idea of driving
your Jeep onto a few feet of frozen water
then hunkering in a tiny heated shanty,
waiting for walleyes to rise, or us to fall,
so I said No thanks, a nervous Appalachian-
in-exile in Appleton in 40-below February,
shivering across a snowy campus to teach,
shivering between tall drifts to get home,
shivering every night at the weather report
(another Siberian Express headed our way)
and at the local news about lucky ice fishers,
caught sturgeon bigger than their catchers:
I hope you’re fishing in heaven now, Peter,
bellowing I am large, I contain multitudes
then leaning over a deep hole neatly drilled
into icy darkness below, knowing that soon
something will come bite the end of your line
and you’ll deftly lift it up and out, laughing,
a living hunger writhing at your feet, there
at the bulls-eye of an endless dazzling prairie.
Chestnut logs
were bad to make a racket
when burning in ma’s fireplace:
our backslid Uncle Ham stood
before the stone hearth warming
his backside, grunted, coughed, said:
Make my coffin of this wood
so I can sail straight through hell
a-hissin’ and a-poppin’!