Poetry by Zoë Fay-Stindt, Carson Colenbaugh, Amy Wright, Angie Kinman, and Robert Brickhouse

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When I wrote my first letter from the editor to you in January, I spoke of spring’s upcoming arrival, and the ever lengthening of light. It’s fitting that for this final installment for 2025, we’re falling instead into shortening days as our pocket of Appalachia becomes cloaked with the enchanting, fiery colors of fall, but the ever loss of sunshine and heat. Before I introduce the poets of this November issue, let me first say thank you for the honor of curating poems to accompany us through this year’s four seasons. During this process, I’ve considered what makes Appalachia so mythic and influential, ancient yet constantly evolving. It’s a culture, yes, made up of music, foodways, labor, community, tradition, generosity, folklore, and poetry. But, as you’ve seen in my letters, these mountains, which are some of the oldest on Earth, feel like the spine that holds up the rest of those dimensions. After reading the first poet in our installment, Zoë Fay-Stindt of eastern Carolina and southern France, I considered how the natural world raises us, maybe just as much as our human ancestors do.

Fay-Stindt writes, “The river / brings me my swamps, the storms / who swole them: the ones whose / bellies I was raised inside” and I think of the storms, seasons, forests, fields each of us were raised inside. In this region, we define ourselves through our sense of place until we consider ourselves to be stewards of our environments. We grow within a natural world that is constantly changing, sometimes in unfathomable ways. In their second poem, Fay-Stindt writes of Helene’s aftermath, braiding sludge, acts of service, hazmat zones, humility, and, ultimately, kindness—both between humans and the more-than-human world as “the jays bless the baths we filled for them.”

Connecting the poets in this installment, I found threads of change, as well as reclamation. The question arose: although we tend and belong to the land, can it ever truly belong to us? Carson Colenbaugh, a forest ecologist from Georgia, writes “you could try making it to Pine Mountain, / but you needn’t come. It’s here and isn’t yours. / It’s swelling & receding, rippling, already gone.” While this installment considers our human position, it, too, sees the changes of life through the eyes of our more-than-human neighbors. The crows, barred owls, calves, bullfrogs, red foxes, and goldfinches punctuate these poems as fellow witnesses.

Amy Wright, a Virginia native and tenured nonfiction professor at ETSU, has two prose poems in the installment, third-person narrative pieces about the Wright homestead and farmhouse. The second piece, “The Part that Can Talk a Blue Streak,” recreates a world of rural nostalgia of her family living as a close community located “through a valley of the Blue Ridge.” It echoes how generations both tend the land and are raised in it, and build personal traditions using those natural elements, such as how Wright brought her grandmother bouquets of handpicked violets when they were in season.

East Tennessee native Angie Kinman writes of history, both collective and familial. Her poem “Watauga” describes the intentional flooding of the town of Old Butler, writing, “My grandmother / wept as her folks, / their homes, and belongings / departed on wheels.” But the poem exends past that family history to the Overhill Cherokee who witnessed a lost homeland before Old Butler appeared, and even the “red fox” being present for all of those waves of change. To close the installment, Robert Brickhouse’s poem “Leaving Back Road” says a farewell to Wallace Peak. It sees the place as containing both the human routines and the “sinkholes, hidden caves.” Ever present are the coyotes and birds along the way, and it ends with a poetic return of the place to the “nesting barn swallows” as, “They own it now.”

I hope you enjoy these poems of things evolving and remaining, how this land raises us and our families, and what acts of service we can do in return. I’ve found this year that poems, too, raise us. They shape our sense of self, our understanding of the world. They raise us by lifting us up when all else feels dark, untranslatable, remembering, “Every day, this world / births itself again. Comes out / yelling. Comes out plenty” (Fay-Stindt). 

Lacy Snapp

                                                                                                            Co-Editor, Poetry

Zoë Fay-Stindt: 'My River Visits Me'; 'After Helene, Crows'; 'Plenty'

Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, land-based poet and essayist. Raised by both the swamps of eastern Carolina and the Hérault river of Languedoc, France, they are a sixth generation settler currently residing on unceded Cherokee lands (colonially known as Asheville, North Carolina). Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, VIDA, Muzzle, Terrain, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. They are a student of belonging and embodied relationship to land who believes in slowness, reciprocal relationship with place and people, and queer, decolonized, kincentric futures.   

My River Visits Me 

when I sleep. For a year,   

moisture-curled, each dream  

lapped by a wet rising. The river  

brings me my swamps, the storms  

who swole them: the ones whose   

bellies I was raised inside, tracing  

the circumference of each eye  

as I mapped the trails of debris,  

collected river-spat saints:   

styrofoam cluster-clot, bullet shell’s  

plastic red, driftwood sanded   

into a knotted heart. In the house   

she lipped, my family candle-lit.   

The downed trees like sentinels   

blocking our way out: stay.  

In the dream, the waves lift   

higher. A single streetlamp   

swallowed by tide. Over  

and over, my river: I wake  

tangled, afloat. Covered  

in wrack lines, mud marks  

she left as she crept out.  

My river floods the borders   

we built; my river rises.   

Sings me a tune I know already,   

touching the pale of my grief  

-bloat cheek. Every night, my river   

holds the funeral. 

After Helene, Crows 

in their regular dawn, and beloveds sending bright blurs of aurora  

across sparse service. Pixelated blessings. All our waterways declared   

hazmat zones: yesterday an unconfirmed rumor of someone’s boot corroding   

from the sludge. You can smell it, say the folks a few hollers over.   

The way the earth that was left behind oozes something sick — I won’t   

lay it all down here. There’s ongoing, and plenty: hot pink crop top   

doing handstands in the parking lot where we meet at two to share   

what we know, what we have, what we need, howling   

alongside Jasper the husky for the kind of healing you only find in packs.   

COLOR RUN 10/4 on the church sign out front and the hearts of so many trees   

double, triple my age. Birthday carrot cake. My dad’s legs stiffening   

by the day, his love grown bedrock-strong. Truckloads of gray water   

for newly flushed toilets. Magnolia split at the elbow. And right   

as dusk settles, three bears just out back, loping this tired hill.   

Like you said, J. There’s little else but this: the carrying, the carrying   

on we do. What else is there to believe in? M delivering   

three world kitchen packs of barbecue, not our Carolina kind but it’ll do,   

pig, it’ll do, and water, water, then more, hauled fresh from the creeks   

spiked with our own toxic run. The dam they knew was bad a decade ago.   

The mother breastfeeding her newborn during the resource share, who burbles   

new additions to our catalogue while Hot Pink pretends   

to write her gurgle-contributions down as we all laugh and laugh.   

Laughter. Again. The heart that breaks open can contain the whole   

universe, Joanna said. And ain’t it the whole damn cosmos we got right here?   

Buckets, too. With lids, even, and Dad handling the shit now, overflowing,   

with G on the phone when the connection holds, laughing at the humbling   

of it all — oh, the goddamn humility of it. Nothing like it. Nothing   

like this keep-on-caring we go on sweating our big-hope hearts   

into, every day, again, every overflown, mulish day, if it’s the last   

thing we do. Grilling potatoes out back while the freeze hovers   

and the jays bless the baths we filled for them. 

Plenty 

On the back deck, woodpeckers  

break dead pine open for what goods   

can still be tongued out while   

the squirrels go on screaming,   

fisting acorns from the mast year.   

They’ve been yelling since   

I came out — glee or worry  

I can’t tell. Oak branches doused   

in sunup orange. Goldenrod steaming   

off their night dew. I unclench   

my heart, seized around its finite   

resource. Every day, this world   

births itself again. Comes out   

yelling. Comes out plenty.

Carson Colenbaugh: 'Approaching Pine Mountain'; 'A Ball Game'

Carson Colenbaugh is a poet and forest ecologist from Kennesaw, Georgia. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, Terrain.org, Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Approaching Pine Mountain 

There’s that humpback knoll I’ve been praising: flanks haunted, 

coves hollowed. There’s the concrete wall its footing holds 

and the bioaccumulated lake it braces. 

Today the rain kept-off, remained skeptical 

among clouds, said nothing. Today goldenrod, yellow 

in this filibustered winter and warm under sun 

by roadside rock, looked like the century. I can’t say 

if it was called anything of note before 

we captioned it ‘Pine Mountain.’ Were the river left 

unflooded it might look taller, not curtailed, 

truncated at best, but there have been countless fishing 

licenses sold since anyone with legs & lungs 

fed themselves to that valley. And though at times the climb 

is steep, and a stout wood staff might do you good, 

age & ages-past have worn it low. And next year 

it’ll grow odder. And though I’m getting-on, two hikers 

have parked at its jaded base. So if you read this 

let me say: you could try making it to Pine Mountain, 

but you needn’t come. It’s here and isn’t yours. 

It’s swelling & receding, rippling, already gone. 

A Ball Game 

Our little world persists at least this day, chants 

young customs into becoming. Gorgeous warriors 

gallop manicured turf, feuding while the sky itself 

turns down toward darkness, as bare hills begin their sleep, 

as again the rain fails to fall. In my cul-de-sac 

silver drips slip from the moon, bright streetlights shading 

what’s left of stars. Two barred owls dressed in muted suits 

come too, soon enough, trolling more unanswerable 

twilight questions. Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? 

Listening out the propped kitchen window in this 

my twenty-second year, the night speaks its language, 

that lurking silence approximating response.

Amy Wright: 'Nike'; The Part that Can Talk a Blue Streak'

Amy Wright has authored three poetry books, six chapbooks, and a book of nonfiction, Paper Concert (Sarabande Books), which received a Nautilus Gold Award for Lyric Prose. Her work has also been recognized with two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, an Individual Artist Grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 2024, she joined East Tennessee State University’s tenured faculty after serving as their 2022 Wayne G. Basler Chair of Excellence for the Integration of the Arts, Rhetoric, and Science.  

Nike 

Even when their walk isn’t much more than a wobble, calves refuse to be held. They draw back from hugs or pettings, and if you try to rub their bellies, they will kick you, Amy gleaned from rearing livestock. Still, when she met the pretty black calf with the white victory symbol on her forehead, she sought to bond, stroking her neck when she brought a bottle, while she suckled and butted for more. For weeks of cold, dark winter mornings, she talked to her, belly warming with milk, repeating her name to teach Nike her voice, calling across the barn as she approached the stall. When Nike graduated to a bucket of milk, then sweet grain, Amy gave her handfuls, respecting her aversion to caress. “You’ll be with the others soon.” Nike’s swoosh made her easy to mark in the herd when Dad rejoined them. She raced her fellow calves across the field, tossing her head, bucking the wind off her back, kicking space into the world beyond the pen. Amy watched her grow up faster. Soon Nike had a calf of her own and was a protective mama despite her mother’s abandonment. It was the old bottle bringer she shunned. Cattle weren’t horses, but the optimist extended a hand over the fence to sniff when Nike neared to scratch her back. “Remember me?” Amy asked, tilting her head, lowering her nose, to communicate friendliness, but Nike would just stare, eyelashes long as her finger, black eyes unreachable. 

The Part that Can Talk a Blue Streak 

The Wrights lived in a brick ranch on a dirt road that ribboned through a valley of the Blue Ridge, nestled between the mountains just so that — if you spun in a circle in their front yard — the only other houses you could see belonged to Granny & Grandaddy. The panorama could have been on a calendar, which Amy felt, even before she was given to memorize the Lord’s prayer, gave her a mission from God to bear witness to its beauty & the community who lived there of chickadees, honeybees, wild turkeys, bullfrogs, and myriad other neighbors — including great aunts of the Kincer girls. The elder sisters lived at the bottom of the hill just before the bridge crossed Cove Creek, but you never saw them even if you stood on the bridge & tried to spot a bluegill in the current, which was good to wade in unless there’d been a rainstorm.  If you rounded the bend at Bill Johnstone Hill — which was not named after Grandaddy but a senior ancestor — you would find a string of mailboxes for families who lived deeper in the mountains than the mail delivered. Between their house and the farmhouse was a pasture scattered with buttercups, which Grandaddy didn’t want b/c the cows wouldn’t eat them and red clover, which he favored b/c they did. Every evening, like clockwork, dozens of Holsteins returned to the dairy barn to be milked by him and Walt, his lifelong farmhand, who drank Old Milwaukee in silver cans he dropped by the roadside, but you didn’t mention. If lonesome, you could stand in the driveway & shout to Granny, who would wave to you when she was out watering flowers, or call on the phone if she couldn’t hear you. She was interested in everything, and her favorite flowers were violets, which Amy walked bouquets of to her when they were in season. One time, which her family still finds funny, three-year-old Amy had so much to say Mom took the phone away from her, saying she had talked Granny’s ear off, which made her cry like a baby and not stop crying until they took her  to see for herself that her ear was still on, which hadn’t worried her as much as why all that joy had been wrong.

Angie Kinman: 'Watauga'; 'Appalachian Sabbath'; 'Mountain Song'

Angie Kinman is a writer and a retired teacher living in Nashville, Tennessee. Having taught elementary school for 34 years, she continues to work as a reading interventionist, using poetry in creative ways to instill a love of reading. As a wife and mother of three children, reading and writing poetry became a daily ritual and important source of healing after the death of her oldest child. She grew up on her grandfather’s farm in East Tennessee, graduating from Johnson County High School in 1984. This rich experience of being surrounded by mountains and beauty in nature is the soul of her work. 

Watauga  

Watauga means ‘freshwater’  

in the Cherokee language.    

Under the lake 

the town of Old Butler 

sat by the Watauga River.  

Floods were a constant  

risk, so the land sold 

to the TVA. My grandmother 

wept as her folks,  

their homes, and belongings 

departed on wheels 

to create  

the township  

of New Butler. 

Red fox  

felt the rumbling  

of the river 

and escaped to higher ground 

to watch the lake fill–     

never to return. 

Sycamore trees still  

tell this story  

of freshwater today  

and they tell of the Overhill  

Cherokee who left tears 

by the river long before. 

Appalachian Sabbath 

Sunday afternoons 

on the front porch  

of a cottage 

at the foot of Forge Mountain, 

we keep time 

to rain on the tin roof 

and Bill Monroe. 

Papaw strums his dulcimer  

while little pink suns  

of the mimosa tree 

fold up in the rain. 

The scent of cut hay 

and sweet primrose makes 

a thick cloud. Time  

stretches out like molasses 

and keeps the Sabbath holy. 

Mountain Song 

I sing of Saturdays 

in the summer —  

strawberry picking  

on grassy hillsides  

in Rainbow Holler 

until bellies and buckets are full. 

A melody of Mamaw spreading  

handmade quilts on the ground  

for the children to cap strawberries  

while she shapes perfect pies  

and pours jams and jellies  

into Kerr jars 

for her household’s delight 

during the long winter to come. 

A mountain psalm of simple  

summer days, enjoying fruits  

of the earth and family — 

my pastoral song. 

Robert Brickhouse: 'Leaving Back Road'

Robert Brickhouse has contributed poems and stories to many magazines and journals, among them the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Southern Poetry Review, the American Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, Louisiana Literature, Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta Review, and Pleiades. His poetry also has appeared in The Southern Poetry Anthology series published by Texas Review Press and in Artemis: Artists and Writers from the Blue Ridge. Now retired, he worked for many years as a reporter for Virginia newspapers and as a writer and editor for publications at the University of Virginia. 

Leaving Back Road  

Adiós, Wallace Peak, 

Bullpasture Mountain. 

The redwing blackbirds, 

the tanagers, orioles, goldfinches. 

Amanda’s goats, always  

escaping into ravines. 

The little red cottage, the mice. 

The coyotes, the deer, the owls. 

The bear cubs. The stars. 

The 7:30 school bus and the 4 o’clock school bus 

tearing down the road. 

The Tower Hill fire trail 

we walked for miles. 

The sinkholes, the hidden caves. 

Whippoorwills calling all night —  

poor sleep for us, but lovely. 

Another limb down on the dying maple. 

Bushwhacked Jack Mountain to Hupman Valley, 

find loggers have bulldozed a superhighway. 

The Stanley place has been sold, old house demolished. 

New moon in a blue sky, woodpecker hammering. 

Chased out of the woodshed 

by nesting barn swallows. 

They own it now.