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Poetry from Cathryn Hankla, James Owens, Linda Behrend, Lee Clark Zumpe, Hilda Downer, and Andrew Lee Butler


Photo by Ben Bateson.

Hello, and welcome to the drive-through window of the Poets’ Table. May I take your order? I have imagined from the start that our poetry gatherings in Appalachian Places would take place around a table, given that poems provide so many of us a genuine kind of sustenance, and that reading our poems would feel like sharing a meal with friends, some you may not even know yet. During the year I lived in New Orleans, I learned the term lagniappe, a word and concept so lovely I can hardly believe it didn’t originate in Appalachia. It roughly means “a little something extra,” an add-on for no reason other than to show a bit of gratitude and fellowship. For instance, there was a local hamburger chain that offered a “lagniappe bar,” basically any kind of topping one could wish to put on a giant burger, set up like a salad bar and offered free of charge. In this high summer installment, we have more poets than ever. We open with work from Cathryn Hankla, Virginia native recently retired from Hollins University, with poems from her forthcoming, career-spanning, New & Selected poetry volume. We follow with a deep-memory suite by James Owens, with lovely interactions with nature and landscape from Linda Behrend and Lee Clark Zumpe. Hilda Downer’s poem engages with Robert Morgan’s landmark study of Daniel Boone and reckons with a complicated legacy. Morgan was our very first poetry contributor in Appalachian Places and elsewhere in this issue, he is also our very first fiction contributor, with his short story “Timrod Hill.” We close this summer session with Kingsport, TN native and freshly minted UT-Knoxville Ph.D. Andrew Lee Butler’s ode to East Tennessee’s greatest fast-food restaurant, Pal’s: if you know, you know.

 

—   Jesse Graves, Appalachian Places poetry editor

 

 

 

Cathryn Hankla: 'WIDOW'S TEARS'; 'A LOVE SUPREME'; 'A PASSING SONDER'; 'HOMING'

 

Cathryn Hankla is the author of multiple works in several genres and a visual artist native to Southwest Virginia. Return to a Certain Region of Consciousness: New & Selected Poems will be published by Mercer University Press in spring 2025. Recent publications include Immortal Stuff: prose poems, Not Xanadu, and the memoir Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home. A cloud-based planetarium show featuring poems from Hankla's Galaxies can be viewed at Digi-star planetariums nationwide. Hollins University professor emerita of English & creative writing, Hankla lives in Roanoke, Virginia.

 

 


WIDOW’S TEARS

 

Spring ephemerals:

                          May Apple, Dogbane, Horse

 

Nettle, Turtlehead, Flame

                  Azalea, Whorled

 

Wood Aster, Bee Balm,

                               Bloodroot, Butterfly Weed,

 

Common Rose Pink, Sweet

         Everlasting, Foxglove,

 

Meadow Rue, Nodding

              Ladies’ Tresses, Bluebell,

 

Pinesap, Trout-lily,

        Trillium, Green-headed

 

Coneflower. Hour

                         by hour, I try not

 

to weep. I commit

                              your names to memory.

 

Blooming brief moments—

                                               all of us, all of us

 



A LOVE SUPREME


My Coltrane’s a coal train,

                                  my ordained undone. 

 

Annealed scars annulled, a

                                      shadow follows me

 

everywhere.  Smoke signals.

                                      I launched fireworks, but

 

later watched them fizzle,

                                 their bright cause severed

 

from original acts,

                          the blasts that propelled

 

those streamers forgotten

                                     now: love stays when all

 

else goes. You slipped away

                                    on our bed, alone.

                                    

I’d waived my rights to all

                                    but tears washing words,

 

our letters, poems— ink

                            plots, muddles, covers.




A PASSING SONDER


What’s more vulnerable

                                      than two fleshy loops

 

plugged by steel or silver

                                       balancing your face?

 

Touch? Don’t touch? Gauged lobes flap

                                                                and tatted elbows

 

mark a place I’d never

                         think to color. Your

                       

spinning wheels pass as prayer—

                  all blessings must. Let

 

me bend your ear toward rich

                                               entanglement one

 

more time on this earth we

                                           share. What do you say?

 

Secrets aren’t safe in you

                or in me. Listen,

 

lend me those bangled ears—

                         let us swop stories.




HOMING


Starlings in the attic,

                                  vex us with screeches.

 

Speckled half-pints hatched where

                                                        bird-brained parents laid

 

a blue egg or three. I

                                  wave blankets this way,

 

this way out. Never will

                                       they—stubborn, starved—take

 

exit. Stupid, I want

        to say but stumble

 

wooden stairs with bucket,

                                   mopping chalk droppings,

 

maid to their sad homing.

                                      Striped feathers sift in

 

dusty corners. Slits of

                            sun mean more nests. They

 

neither lift nor draw breath,

                                             bundles that once flew.



 

James Owens: 'Not Long After on KY 15, Between Clayhole and Defeated Creek'; 'The Storm'; 'Caps'

 

James Owens's newest book is Family Portrait with Scythe (Bottom Dog Press, 2020). His poems appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Still: the Journal, Atlanta Review, Appalachian Review, and many times in Now & Then. Originally from Southwest Virginia, he worked on newspapers in the region, before earning an MFA at the University of Alabama. He now lives in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.                                                                                     

 

 


Not Long After Dawn on KY 15, Between Clayhole and Defeated Creek

 

The coyote is not going to yield. It staggers

in the road like the ghost of one of the old people

and bars departure. We were heading north again,

an early start, after this year's Christmas visit,

daylight breaking through fog, gifts wedged

between my son and daughter in the back seat.

After days of heavy food and talk and love,

the homeplace of my mother's loneliness,

I am relieved to go, ashamed to be relieved.

The children are growing nervous, looking to me.

The coyote is sick and is starving because sick,

ribs about to punch through skin, eyes yellow

and gluey and accusing, and it heaves out puffs

of vapor, showing how each breath hurts.

Legs stiff on cracked asphalt, it waits to eat or die.

“What now?” I guess the coyote thinks. “Fuck it,”

the coyote thinks, like one of the old people

who died in fury, their bones now weightless

knobs and splinters in their blind graves.

Which grandfather does it want me to remember,

what long family debt of money and torment

would this slavering revenant have me lay to rest?

I keep its threats secret between us, thinking

of rabies, how tender are the hands and throats

of my beginning-to-be-worried passengers,

who have left off playing with their new toys

to look up and ask again why we have stopped.

Soon, I will tap the gas and ease around the coyote,

which will not waste breath in pleading, will snap

at the tires and wait for the next holiday traveler.

We will drive toward snow and Midwest wind—

but for now, not yet gone or staying, this standoff 

beneath beautiful rags of sunlit mist that hang

from the unleafed hickories and diseased pines.




The Storm


—Sandlick Elementary, Birchleaf, Va., 1975

 

Sudden raindrops spit like pebbles against the windows.

A storm at school is a pleasure, our mood


out at the edges of us, expectant, ionized,

the loud air honed and tasting of metals.


Thunder rattles the panes in their sashes.

This time we are milling about the room,


when the lights fail, at an apocalyptic crash,

and Jeff, the rangy bully whom everyone fears,


whose father beats him, as we know

and are glad, turns in the brief dark,


leans into me, trembling, pressing thighs

and chest against mine, his animal, rough


breath, a moment of his hand at my crotch.

He is gone when the lights bring


the world back. Did he really slump into me,

like a tired lover hungering for warmth,


that hazardous surge of current through us?

Or more like a child sheltering from thunder?


He strides away and doesn't look back, ever.


Two minutes later, he is across the room,

growling, punching somebody in the eye.

 



Caps


 —Prater, Va., 1970


He likes toy guns—not really, but he doesn't like football,

so he gets toy guns, cheap plastic cap pistols

and one heavy, real-looking revolver,

with a cylinder that swings out for reloading.


(Consider the frenzy of invention to engineer a cap pistol:

the mechanism that ratchets the caps

precisely between hammer and firing plate,

the triggered spring driving the hammer


with enough force for the satisfying bang,

and the caps themselves, a long paper tape

sprocketed like film to advance

the measured pockets of explosive.


There must be a machine designed

to mold each part, workers who live

by sweating daily on that assembly line.

You can sell millions of guns for a dollar each.)


He shoots all of his cousins, and they shoot him.

He can fire fast, without mercy, until

the air swirls with sour grey smoke,

and spent paper curls around his wrist.


Would it be fair to mention that the dads

and bashful uncles who give them guns

watch soldiers die on the TV news?

That everyone loves westerns and cop shows?


If you feel celebratory and profligate,

or too full with a vague grief, you might

lay a whole roll of caps on a rock

and smash them with another rock.


This makes a boom like breaking the sky.




Linda Behrend: 'Redbud, Blue Sky'

 

Linda Behrend was born and raised in upper East Tennessee and has written about the Appalachian Region in many publications, including Now and Then and The Encyclopedia of Appalachia. Most recently, she edited Anne Wetzell Armstrong’s memoir Of Time and Knoxville, which was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2022. During 1996/97, she served as acting technical services archivist in the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University.

 

 


Redbud, Blue Sky

 

Redbud,

Blue sky,

Green grass

Mowing on an April afternoon

I want it to last forever,

Desperate to prolong this sensory overload

Even if I drown in its delicious depths.

 

In the backyard,

A carpet of bluets,

Sprung up wild

From the few I set out

In scattered corners under bushes.

The lilac, just beginning to bloom,

Joins in the chorus—

Anxious to be heard

Along with the others already on stage.

 

Redbud,

Pink dogwood,

Purple phlox—

How can I take you all in

And preserve this moment

That I want to last forever?

 

 


Lee Clark Zumpe: 'Nantahala'; 'The Same River'

 

Lee Clark Zumpe, an entertainment editor with Tampa Bay Newspapers, earned his degree in English at the University of South Florida. He began writing poetry and fiction in the early 1990s. His work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and genre magazines over the last two decades. Lee lives on the west coast of Florida with his wife and daughter. 

 

 


Nantahala

 

silent pilgrims cast into the vast wilderness,

impeded by winter, embark upon

an uncertain journey.


trailing wisps of locomotive breath,

the mortal engines deliberately trace

an unfamiliar route

as morning stretches its arms.


soon, the daystar joins their ascent,

confident and noble.


the warmth of a whisper caresses Nantahala,

dispelling the snowy veil and clearing the path.

 

 


The Same River

 

I went back to that spot in the rapids

where once I’d planted my Timberlands –

fished for smooth stones beneath the sweetgum –

listened for whispers from the lazy shadows

echoing long-dead loggers

or settlers buried in Appalachian ground.


I went back to the Nantahala,

eager to find the same resolve,

prayed for smooth dreams and long days

and the illusion of immortality.


I went back to find something I had lost,

snapshot moments now buried in silty sediment

or washed too far downstream to recover.

 

the seasons, the world, the cosmos is in flux –

you cannot step into the same river twice.


 

 

Hilda Downer: 'No Signal'

 

Hilda Downer is the author of four collections of poetry: Bandana Creek, Sky Under the Roof, a Golden Nautilus Winner for Poetry; When Light Waits For Us, and Wiley’s Last Resort. She holds an MFA from Vermont College and is a long-term member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, North Carolina Writers Conference, North Carolina Writers Network, and Appalachian Writers Workshop. A retired psychiatric nurse, she lives outside of Boone, NC.


 


No Signal


(after Robert Morgan’s, Boone: A Biography


The way wind rearranged pine needles

or smell of rain fused to boulders

revealed the exact location

to a blindfolded Boone.

Maybe he didn’t know he was lost

without today’s technology

in a time that changed the course of history.

A Fitbit would have

logged his steps more accurately

along Blue Ridge Mountains,

North Carolina to Kentucky—

so hard not to lose count

during frequent stops

to kill a bear or two,

altogether 90

at the same bend of a creek

at different times.

 

Setting a digital alarm

would have taken less steps

than scouting for a spring at night—

a full bladder to awaken him early.

A Fitbit would have proven the heart rate

increases when running a gauntlet

or that salt cured meat

is linked to high blood pressure.

He carried few provisions—

tomahawk, shot bag, powder horn, knife,

and his rifle, so precise

he nicknamed it, Old Tick-Licker.

Still, his wrist had room to fit a Fitbit,

Old Fitbitter,

but neither the sun nor compass

could have tracked an iPhone—

no satellite aligned to the time

when buffalo roamed Appalachia.

 

A Fitbit just didn’t work for Boone

who could winter the wilderness

without a blanket.

Now, the checklist for an hour’s hike

includes sunscreen, sunglasses,

granola bars, bottled water, and Off spray.

If only a 12-step or grief group had existed

when Boone’s slave, Adam, reported

teenagers sent ahead

had lost their way.

If only GPS had been available to reroute

them safely to their destination.

Stolen from his own country,

Adam had hidden deep in the driftwood

of a terrible and alien world

as James Boone cried out, Mama, Mama,

during torture by the war party

of Cherokee and Shawnee.

 

Rebecca braced at Boone’s footsteps

as she wrapped their son’s bloody body

in her best linen sheet for protection

the hands that had tried to ward off attack,

sliced like signal bars indicating full strength.

 

Though Boone never stepped

on that Warriors Path again,

he continued his family’s move to Kentucky.

He couldn’t imagine the result of settlement—

extinct fauna with no place to haunt

amid razed Lady Slippers, trillium, and mother trees

on mountains removed for coal.

He simply couldn’t pay

for the collect calls from Greed,

couldn’t listen to Genocide’s voicemail,

couldn’t answer the Caller, no ID.

 

He was Daniel Boone,

not Jesus Christ

who was part of a trinity.

Boone’s affair with loneliness

started with his name,

containing the word

one.

 

Trauma bears its own brand of loneliness,

drums through generations. 

The sins of fathers visited upon children,

a child disappears,

no bread crumbs to follow,

only prayer lost in molecules of air.

Suffer the little children

forsaken and sold into sex slavery,

war-torn in the Middle East, Sudan, and Ukraine,

or murdered because of melatonin

meant to protect precious skin

of sons and daughters

from the tyrannical sun.

No behind bars for those at fault

for missing Indigenous American women,

smoke vanished long ago.

Perhaps their spirits have stepped

off the beaten path

back in time

where they can’t reach us

and we can’t reach them—

no signal.

 



Andrew Lee Butler: 'Palinode for Pal’s Sudden Service'


Andrew Lee Butler is a writer raised in Kingsport, TN, and a graduate of East Tennessee State University. He teaches writing at the University of Tennessee, where he recently defended his creative dissertation, Christ His Grace Is Sufficient Mobile Home Service and Transporting, Inc. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Oxford American, Appalachian Review, McNeese Review, and elsewhere.




Photo by Appalachian Places staff.

Palinode for Pal’s Sudden Service

 

When I was a kid, I didn’t understand the phrase

You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

The preterite seemed eternal promise: if you had

Boston cream pie or black forest cake

for dessert, that meant you ate it. Have meant will

eat. But then we grow up, or more or less we do.

 

*

 

I had Pal’s the last time I stayed in Kingsport.

I had Pal’s the last time I drove through Kingsport.

I have Pal’s anytime I’m in Kingsport since,

in the phenomenological way of things,

Kingsport is the Pal’s drive-through line.

 

*

 

You can’t write a contrapuntal about Pal’s,

at least not the kind where the speaker’s

interior monologue skirts around

the words found in the menu. At Pal’s,

they take your order too fast.

As soon as you ask for a razzie Dr. Enuf,

 

Dr. Enuf add razzie whizzes through the mic.

That’s the other thing you need to know about Pal’s.

They are fast. Their service is sudden. They entrust you

with their words: if you say Big Chicken,

they will believe you and start slathering spicy mustard

 

before you have decided on the drink. I have seen

lines of cars stretch back to the streetlight

on Fort Henry, swell to the circle on Gilbreath,

and still pulled in line, trusting

I’ll have my chipped ham with cheese before

the lone car at the Wendy’s next door has their nuggets.

 

 

*

 

Pal’s has a burger that it calls the Big Pal.

It has sweet tea and Coca-Cola products, optionally

sweetened with raspberry and peach syrups.

 

It has vanilla and chocolate and strawberry milkshakes

and peanut butter milkshakes at walk-in locations.

It has sauceburgers and chilibuns and this thing

 

called a Toasted Cheese. It has breakfast offerings

of biscuits and gravy and biscuits and meats

and these cheese-imbued hash browns

 

called cheddar rounds, which I will find a way

to end this poem on since they’re the only way

a poem about Pal’s can possibly end.

 

*

 

I have stood in mountain clearings

and ridden along high ridges, watching the towns

that speckle the valley, overcome with a want

to inhabit the view: to walk along streets with names

 

and eavesdrop on people with stories

and read letters to the editor each morning

in a favorite nook of the local library.

But when I wind back down the mountain,

 

I can’t find the town I saw from above—

just the same streets and storefronts I left behind

that morning when I went for a drive.

What we love is the dream of what we loved.

 

*

 

A Pal’s sits across the street from my undergrad

and I would often go, but every now and again,

on self-pitying evenings where I had an hour

or two worth of reading or a poem to write,

 

I’d sit in the Wendy’s next door

and order some chili, sometimes a Frosty.

I’d do a little work but mostly watch

cars amble their way through the Pal’s line.

 

You can’t get that view from the drive-thru

anymore than a cog can see the intricate machinations

its turning begets. And if I had gone to Pal’s

for dinner, I would have ordered a hot dog

 

and a sauceburger and found somewhere

to eat them. But in the Wendy’s next door,

an hour passes and the chili’s cold,

but I still have my view of Pal’s.

 

*

 

There is no Pal’s in Fayetteville, Arkansas,

where I did my MFA. There is a Wendy’s,

though. A slow one, where the only car

in line might wait ten minutes for their fries.

 

I went there some nights for their slowness,

expecting it. I’d bring up an article about Pal’s

by a Harvard Business professor on my phone,

embarrassed by my own sentimentality, alone

and wallowing in thoughts of something far away.

 

The article is jargoned fawning,

but I want to reach through the phone

and tell those people from other places

the secret of Pal’s, the same thing I said

 

to a friend from Florida after she told me

she drove to Morristown to try the Pal’s

up there and thought it was just okay:

If you don’t like Pal’s, you don’t understand.

If you love Pal’s, you don’t understand.

 

*

 

The problem with writing a poem about Pal’s

is that the Pal’s poem must one day be abandoned:

the accentual-syllabic chipped ham with cheese

will no longer haunt my every step

 

and the tupleted lullabies of frenchie fry

and peachy tea will cease shepherding my sleep.

That I may never capture in words why

a ditch brimming with sun-fried weeds

 

behind the Stone Drive Pal’s intrudes

upon my biographical imaginings.

That the rhythm of the Pal’s menu will no longer

subordinate each bored consideration.

 

*

 

For the past two weeks, I’ve listened to Frankie Valli

anytime I’ve been alone in the car.

“Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” mostly.

Something about it begs the back button.

 

It’ll almost end, the final chorus stubborn

in the same key, only a single sustained violin

marking the outro, and I’ll catch it just before

the track changes. It’ll play five or six times over

 

before I find a parking spot on campus.

I let the last time play out, listening for what it is

that sirens this song, and realize it’s the trombone

in the chorus. Underneath Frankie Valli, underneath

 

an unrelenting tambourine, underneath the voice

in your own head humming along, a trombonist

graces their way through clipped glissandos,

each one a burst, a self-contained cadenza, a love letter

 

to anyone who closes their eyes for the best part of a song.

For the past week, I’ve thought about writing a poem titled

“Ode to the Trombonist Bringing It Home

on Frankie Valli’s ‘Can’t Take my Eyes Off You,’”

 

but when I catch myself alone in a parking garage,

leaning forward to let my ear closer to the speaker,

I’m still thinking of Pal’s. The brief flourish

blazing beneath the noise. The wait for something

 

so quick and juice-filled, a flare of the senses

found while everyone else is clapping or shopping

and you’re parked in a strip mall, biting into a Big Pal

as drips of mayonnaise gracenote your tongue.

 

*

 

And so it is: the trick of Kingsport

is that it understands perfection

is attainable. Not in life, but in segments

of life. In the choreographed efficiency of buns

 

changing hands. In the town’s best-liked teenagers

serious in their aprons before they leave for college.

In a cup full of yellow soda, sunlight

glowing through the styrofoam.

 

*

 

You can’t write a Pal’s poem and finish it, too.

But I can dream of Pal’s. Count the cars looping

around it, the brown bags poking through the window.

And if I’m to spend all night dreaming about Pal’s,

 

I’ll dream a Pal’s poem that can last

through the night, the final stanza welcoming

daybreak. And since I’m up already,

 

I’ll run over to Pal’s and order two large cheddar rounds:

one to eat in the car and the other to carry with me

and offer to anyone I happen across that morning,

as a gift.


 

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