The Trouble with Apples

Kari Gunter-Seymour


We might should blame Eve,
or that rascal Newton.
But I say it was Gessler, bastard,
though who could have known
what would come of his vengeance –
Tell’s defiance, his son’s famous stance.

This perfectly delicious one,
grievously balanced, shadow shaped.
cloud guts, pithy and sweet, spewed
insides out, beyond freckled skin,
shards and debris making slick work
of that steel, that lead, spinning fast and true.

That silly boys would forever
set one to head, aim whatever,
egged on by the romance of muscle
and munitions. Killing fruit, then birds,
then animals, then each other.

 

Kari Gunter-Seymour’s newest collection A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, April 2020. Her work can be found in many fine publications including Still, Rattle, Main Street Rag, The American Journal of Poetry, and The LA Times, as well as on her website: www.karigunterseymourpoet.com. She is the founder and executive director of the “Women of Appalachia Project” (www.womenofappalachia.com); editor of the Women Speak anthology series and Essentially Athens Ohio; a retired instructor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and Athens, Ohio Poet Laureate Emeritus

 

Store Bought Biscuits

Kevin D. LeMaster


While the squad picks up
life’s remains across the street,
we thank cancer’s mercy and
curse the blessing of too soon.
While her decay slowly burns in a
lifeless chest,
we are drowning our new grief
with store bought biscuits,
big as the sun my grandson colors on
his brown paper napkin.
Baked layers, laden heavy with sausage gravy.
Eggs, like eyes stare blindly at the ceilinged sky.
Outside, the air is being choked with
cigarettes and sorrow,
while we chase our fear and remorse
with a belly full, rearranging rooms
to deal with the absence of loss,
or the creation of it.
While red lights pound us to sleep with the familiar
hum of death and electricity,
more biscuits rise in the oven,
filling the void with that familiar aroma,
making us whole, one bite at a time.

 

Kevin D. LeMaster lives in South Shore Kentucky. His poems have been found at The Lakes, Appalachian Heritage, Praxis magazine, Rockvale Review, The Rye Whiskey Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, Plainsongs and Coe Review. He has had recent work published in Dragon Poet Review, Pangolin Review, Constellations and Inkwell Journal and work forthcoming in The Bookends Review. Kevin was a finalist for the Mahogany Red Lit Prize. His work in "Rubicon: Words and art inspired by Oscar Wildes De Profundis" was nominated for a Pushcart prize.

 

Smokey Mountain Winter

Priscilla Frake

 

Sometimes it’s a ghost landscape.
Valleys in fog. Only branches
left to point to anything, abandoned

masts and broken spars. Everything
drowned or gray. Peaks faded from
gleam. Mist in my thoughts. Insinuation

of wisp & synapse, thickening
to a dull wall. Impasse of sight,
impasse of will. No direction

but up or down. Small wonder
I’ve lost my way, without distance
to aim me. What spell will call forth

an eye to help me see? Or haul me blind
through this curious colorless dawn
to find and claim what ails me?

Just to Ask

Priscilla Frake

 

Who owns the world? Who owns, let’s say,
these green tomatoes— do I?—or does
the grackle or the small horned worm,
who’s creeping up the hairy vine,
a millionaire of stems and leaves?
Who owns the yard, its fringe of green,

its trembling watercolor eye?
I pay the taxes, clean the pool
and buy the springy shoots on sale
and yet— what title do I have?
A rat lives in the Sago palm.
Doves perch along the wall and grieve.

If ownership were based on need
the mockingbird would beat me out;
his brood lives in the largest shrub.
But still, I lay my claim of love
among all other claims and needs
and shamble off to stake the vines.

 

Priscilla Frake is the author of Correspondence, a book of epistolary poems. She has work in Verse Daily, Nimrod, The Midwest Quarterly, Medical Literary Messenger, Carbon Culture Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The New Welsh Review, among others. Anthology publications include Weaving the Terrain: 100 Word Southwestern Poems, Enchantment of the Ordinary, and Women. Period. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she is a studio jeweler.

 

Appalachia Re-Visioned

Pauletta Hansel

We never knew ourselves
as they did. We didn’t know our faces
and floors should be dirt, our red
brick homes, pink geraniums in pots
along the patio walls, should be great-granny’s
mud-chinked cabin or a rusted trailer listing
by a pitted road,  either way, a row of beans
out back, one for every young’un to hoe.
We didn’t know our very names could conjure
photos, black and white in glossy magazines,
our creeks and towns strange stones
rolled against our nation’s tongue—
Elkatawa, Hardshell, Keck. 
What else did we not know?
That one man pillaring coal beneath a mountain
was no different than another
man beneath some other mountain,
that all that matters is black numbers,
row by row in someone else’s bank.
We only knew ourselves to be enough
until we weren’t
and then we saw ourselves
packed tight with all the othered ones
who surely in today’s America
only had themselves
to blame.

 

Pauletta Hansel is author of seven poetry collections, including Coal Town Photograph and Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award. Her writing has been featured in journals including Rattle, Appalachian Journal and Still: The Journal, and on The Writer's Almanac, American Life in Poetry, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Cincinnati's first Poet Laureate, 2016-2018, Pauletta is artist in residence at Thomas More University, in her home state of Kentucky, and is managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary journal of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. Her earliest poems were published while she was part of the Soupbean Poets of Antioch College/Appalachian, in Beckley West, Virginia. More about her writing, writing workshops and retreats can be found at https://paulettahansel.wordpress.com/.

 

I desire the cold. 

J. Alan Nelson

 

The bitter bite,
the freeze.
To slow the atoms to ultracool.
A slow atom is a colder atom. 
I desire a freeze to a point
which its particles no longer
have  energy to overcome the force of attraction.

I take a bus from Waco to Winnipeg.
Once I arrive, I look for a glacier.
Reachable yet remote.
I walk the ancient ice,
to scout for a blue crevasse.
Before I take the last plunge,
I wonder how long I’ll lie frozen over,
broken at the bottom like an abandoned toy.
I hope centuries.
I hope to be discovered by a rogue, sentient robot
looking for something to steal
and sell long after the extinction of my kind.
It checks my form, ignoring my ring, my phone, my keys.
It chirps “I’m excited” code
as it sees a great joy
imprinted in my frozen brain circuits.
It pries me from the ice
as it chirps to a nearby satellite
“There’ll be a bidding war.”

 

J. Alan Nelson a writer, poet and actor. He has photos, essays, stories, screenplays and poetry published or forthcoming in several journals. He also played the lead in “Gay Cake” and the verbose “Silent Al” in the Emmy-winning SXSWestworld. His IMDB link: http://m.imdb.com/name/nm6394406/

 

 

Your Green Heart

Cliff Saunders

 

Come home—you are
loved as the field falls
in love with the distance.

Open the vault of your
dreams and fly through
its fire. Tell everyone

to push blades past their
unaware friends, to sit atop
old oxygen masks, to hold

fall in their own hands
like Sunday supper, to lie
in the street, recovering from

turbulence, to pick up pieces
of your bridge to the playground,
to be autonomous as a face

you’ve seen, to think about loss
while you wait for your heart
to show off shades of green.

 

Mystery Man

Cliff Saunders



i.

Here’s to my father, the last secret in my life.
My father: the magician in a fishbowl.
My father: the travail at the door, the quarry ghost.


ii.

He sees the world as endless bells, as a nest
casting spells. He gives me a piece of his shadow,
and now it’s too late for seizing the day.


iii.

My dad lies dying. No wonder he looks distracted.
I hold his hand, but now he’s far away, and this time he’s all alone.
What manner of man is he? Why won’t he tell me?

 

Cliff Saunders is the author of several poetry chapbooks, including Mapping the Asphalt Meadows (Slipstream Publications) and This Candescent World (Runaway Spoon Press). His poems have appeared recently in Atlanta Review, Pedestal Magazine, The Aurorean, Inscape Journal, San Pedro River Review, The Main Street Rag, and Tipton Poetry Journal. He lives in Myrtle Beach, SC.

 

A Lullaby We Sing to Ourselves

Alissa Morgan

Childhood is painted in a golden hue
Like that solitary hour in a summer’s day
When the sun’s weary head droops.
In that time between the sky’s circadian sleep
And wake cycle, the grass is yellow
And the lightning bugs set fire to the fields.
You may have one or two moments of this color
In adulthood, but no more. Sundrops spilling
Onto the floor through the slats in the
Blinds to warm your toes. This is all.
If you were a child you would have no use
For blinds. The rug beneath the bay window
Would be your bed and your blanket,
That golden light. Good night. Good night.

 

Alissa Marie Morgan is a critical care nurse in Aurora, CO.  She is a member of the Lighthouse Writers community based out of Denver.

 

 

A Day Not Far From This One

Jeff Hardin

 

What’s this need to say things right, as though
a voice had power to make words absolute.  Only one
said, “It is finished.” We say, “What comes next?”

We give speeches, write books, compose symphonies,
try to stand in the silences expanding our words,
but all the while we’re only salmon leaping upstream.

Grandmother’s prayer journal goes up in a funnel.
Such loss is hard to take, but we always knew her prayers
could not be bound, would fly out over the world.

Grandfathers, grandmothers, uncles, parents, everyone
on the porch, telling the same tales as always, yet
nothing seemed predictable, nothing already known.

A day not far from this one will also come and go.
From chestnut trees, extinct, leaves continue falling.
What I’ve whispered to night wakes shining from dew.

 

A Voice Imagined as My Own

Jeff Hardin

 

I can, with little effort, produce inside me
a voice imagined—maybe my own but just as
likely someone waiting on the barn door to close.

What does it mean, though, to seek so much
meaning, rarely satisfied, seldom comforted,
always older but still just a child before elders?

Fate, destiny, one’s lot in life, what-have-you,
is a funny thing—sometimes it finds us,
and other times we have to go searching for it.

Well, I was bored one day, and that’s how I
stumbled into who I am, and now I wake up
busy, falling farther and farther behind.

I might just as easily have become a shepherd
humming a lullaby, alone with the stars, one
seeming to brighten, then beginning to move.

 

Like Snow, Like Manna

Jeff Hardin

 

Early December morning, no pasture near, 
yet still I settle into a gait first learned at
the side of a man heading out to tend cows.

Wherever I go, answers fall like snow on my tongue.
Even so, I’ve no explanation how forgiveness
climbs up out of the deep-drenched darkest of hearts.

We might have lived in a heroic age and not
known it. We might have been exiles or nomads.
Manna may have fallen we stepped wide around.

Today I’ve chosen to give up my mind, whatever
it hoped to pursue. I’ll search, instead, places
a dove alights, wandering the absence of its mate.

The mind may be little more than sage grass
moved upon—breathed upon?—each word
slendering out to the farthest length of itself.

 

Jeff Hardin is the author of six collections of poetry: Fall Sanctuary (Nicholas Roerich Prize); Notes for a Praise Book (Jacar Press Book Award); Restoring the Narrative (Donald Justice Prize); Small Revolution; No Other Kind of World (X. J. Kennedy Prize), and A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being. The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, North American Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Hotel Amerika, and Southern Poetry Review have published his poems. He teaches at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, TN.

 

Migraine

Holly Allen


Here is a head.
It’s not the kind of head you can cut
with some plastic sham-of-a knife,
thinning out ribbons of lettuce that crackle like aluminum sheets,
yearning, pouting for some crushing touch
to put the water out.

It’s not the kind of head you can get
for twenty or fifty or more dollars,
blundering bills nervously fingered through the sheet-like shadows
to some embarrassed end in a grocery store parking lot-
some asphalt for a bed.

It’s the kind of head that’s broken.
Not a lump-covered hill of white nor the porcelain-screech
of one sorry cracked skull,
but the pressured thoughts of too-bold blood raging,
an illusion of lights, an amplified mess of sounds,
a thunder clap of emptiness.

Here is a head
that my mother once had said
was like a great chest for filling
with antiquarian treasures, aged scrolls, and happy secrets.
Like a whisper wants to be a roaring declaration,
I want to fill it to the brim,
I want those over-eager twelve-year-old hands again-
pawing pale and overpacking for a weekend trip,
hungry mongoose eyes aiming
for every date, every name, every crooked smile
left in life’s little gutters.

But
here is a head that is broken.
It cannot be cut but by its own hand,
some blade of air cleaving through open ends.
It cannot be bought but by its own time-
here’s ten minutes gone
ten hours
ten days
of hanging over the bleach-bone toilet in agony
praying for some memory
of peace.

 

Holly Eva Allen is a writer currently living in California. She has a degree in linguistics and English from the University of California. Her work has been previously published in magazines such as Levee Magazine, Blue Unicorn, and The Slanted House.

 

 

I Lost God Last Week

Claire Scott

 

He was in the pocket of my favorite jeans, but must have slipped out or been
swallowed by the spin cycle. Sorry god. Sometimes it’s hard to get things right.
We talked a lot. He understood my fears, particularly of pigeons. Although he
did get upset when I poisoned an entire batch of them. But agreed not to say
prayers for the rotting winged-rats. He knew I siphoned cash from the
pawnshop, juggled the books, built a swimming pool. The problem was god
loves to swim. So he looked the other way. He knew I lowballed the treasures
people brought in. A five carat diamond ring that I said was fake, hoping the
tear-stained woman wouldn’t return. The stamp collection with a rare 1851
three-cent stamp, but the owner didn’t know and had four kids to feed. I gave
him ten dollars. God fussed a bit, but then went for a swim. I remember
afterward he looked a bit pale. I posted notices MISSING GOD. I put an ad on
Next Door South. I lost god last week. But perhaps god lost me.

 

Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.

 

Lift-Away

Cameron Morse

These are small satisfactions,
the clickety-clack of debris in the vacuum cleaner,
the way a room always feels warmer
after you’ve vacuumed but probably is just you

heating up from the heave
of the machine. Theo breaks the banana
into several sections, subtracting
a bite from each. His terrible twos started early and now

he makes me sit by patting the seat beside him. 
As a teen, I fell in love by degrees,
the way we measure burns. Hard to believe Annie
made me piggy-back her over puddles. 

At the time, I counted as blessed my donkeying
hands that sank into her thighs
who wanted only to preserve a new pair
of calfskin boots.

Now when my wife’s loose hairs spindle
the brush-roll of our Shark
Lift-Away, I bring her the triage scissors.
When I put the room back together, nothing feels the same.

Cameron Morse was diagnosed with a glioblastoma in 2014. With a 14.6 month life expectancy, he entered the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri—Kansas City and, in 2018, graduated with an M.F.A. His poems have been published in numerous magazines, including New Letters, Bridge Eight, Portland Review and South Dakota Review. His first poetry collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press's 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is Baldy (Spartan Press, 2020). He lives with his wife Lili and two children in Blue Springs, Missouri, where he serves as poetry editor for Harbor Review. For more information, check out his Facebook page or website.

 

Within the Turnip, 7/11/19

M. Daniel McCrotty

 

When Solomon and Si Crooker buried a kettle of Akalúa’s
ashes under a stone heap on Whitehouse Cliff, Si threw
a spring turnip on last as a parting sign. The two then descended
through a petrified river of scree but when both returned
to retrieve forgotten shovels they found the summit
shaded by full autumn colors, a new stand of oak flowered out
where the previous day berry bushes bloomed. Then both men
fell backwards through a hole into the core of a hollowed
turnip, its flesh their protection against spinning time,
and beyond its walls hung the tea-grey remains of Akalúa.
Si remarked If the Lord comes in fire, he’ll use folk’s ashes
to spread across new fields. Light poured through trees
grown in an afternoon, the once rock-strewn ground blackened
with aged humus; nearby sand slid gently away down the valley.

 

Sleep

M. Daniel McCrotty

 

My feet and hands began to twitch
and grow cold with the coming of sleep,
then first moments of dreams, lyrics
of Matty Groves and her father’s bugle horn,
the laying down of a pallet on the floor.
I saw moth dust below the porch light,
heard late night murmurs of neighbors
gathered around a fire then my head jerked
and I returned for a moment, could feel
the peacefulness of my chest unsteady
in the dark, and a lover’s hand stroking my forearm
soon became a flyrod on a warm afternoon alive
with a brook trout then splintered prism colors
sung across kitchen walls. It did not hurt.

 

M. Daniel McCrotty lives in Knoxville Tennessee with his wife Katherine. He received an MA from East Tennessee State University with a focus on Appalachian Poetry and his work has previously appeared in Louisiana Literature, Still: The Journal, Appalachian Heritage, and Foothill Journal among others.