Edited by Shelly Taylor & Abraham Smith

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Edited by Shelly Taylor & Abraham Smith

An Anthology of Contemporary Rural American Poetry

Edited by Shelly Taylor & Abraham SmithAssistant Editor: Meg Wade

Lost Roads Press | 2015

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CONTENTS

Introductions by the Editors Shelly Taylor Abraham Smith

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Glitter Green

Greg Alan Brownderville Walkin’ in Memphis After a Sunday Morning Visit Song for a Kiss

Ashley Capps Able Hymn for Two Choirs Jewelweed Kindly Shane Says

Lisa D. Chavez The Alchemist’s Assistant Dead Horse Point Mastering the Hunt Vixens

Allison Hedge Coke Percheron Nambe Morning Taxonomy Sudden Where Then Omens Dreaming After Winter Macaroni

Gillian Conoley I am writing an article: Johnny Cash My Mother Moved My Architect

Michael Earl Craig More Like a Handskae In the Januaried Mountains Poem The Sorensen Effect Today, for Example Quick Sketch of a Bullet Advice for Horsemen

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Tim Earley Rusty Poem Dialect Poem howard nemerov & I Country Poem #23 From Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery

Forrest Gander Her Awareness of Something Field Guide to Southern Virginia

Merrill Gilfillan Days a Year Ute Note Song: Forks of the Smoky Hill December 16, 1989

Gabriel Gudding Statement about Animals in Countrysides Wish [We think a car just drives there] There can be no pastoral as long as there is a slaughterhouse. [Rivers for Animals] [And Not For Us]

Jim Harrison Poem Fair/Boy Christian Takes a Break After the Anonymous Swedish (17th century) Awake 8 10 23 Small Poem L’envoi Late Spring Bird’s-Eye View Horses Desert Snow Wood and War

Nathan Hauke Like a handsaw with a piece of black rag tied to the handle Tinder is a hatchet job Leftovers Crab apple’s gnarled branches Red glass eye After Lucretius Pastoral (years later)

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Carolyn Hembree Pig Pastoral Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine & Other Ways to Escape a Plague Fable From His Forebears What Is It That Breathes Fire into the Equation and Makes a Universe to Destroy?

Matthew Henriksen Copse In the Meadow at the Parting of the Ways Everything Is About to Be Better Than It Has Ever Been

Juan Felipe Herrera Del Pueblo [Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way] To Sing Pour Out Your Kindness, Now In the Green Army Barracks of Lowell Elementary a Couple of Years After We Came Down Ramona Mountain in Search of “The Best Weather In the World,” That is What Papá Said to Mamá, 1956 Walking Together (again) You & I Belong in This Kitchen Tomorrow I leave to El Paso, Texas

Bob Hicok Why We Must Support PBS New Neighbors Amputation: a love story Forms of salvation The sinuous Prayer of the agnostic

Joan Naviyuk Kane Nunaqtigiit The Orphan Girl Field Notes The Mother of All Catalytic Human Heart Toponymic At Bay

Adrian Kien And Now I’ve Walked from here to There The Pseudo Suite Is a Sad Suit So & So Goes Geologic The Mountain A Prayer to Joe Smith Junior The Least Space Inhabited

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Adrian Kien cont. A Patch and Its Stitch Seed

Yusef Komunyakaa The Blue Hour Night Tree Ghost Night Song Night of the Armadillo Night Gigging Skulking Across the Snow Dialing Up Thornton

Ada Limón Sharks in the Rivers Territory Ways to Ease Your Animal Mind During the Impossible Age of Everyone What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use Field Bling

Maurice Manning Greetings from South-Central Kentucky Symbolism Culture Coming Down Through the Woods After a Rain A Dream With Old Men Inside It Modernity Patch of Light in Deep Woods The Watching Tree

Kristi Maxwell Hickness is a Preposition One Name Would Be Enough to Exorcise This Astonishment To Keeping We Did Not Forget & We Take as from Marrow Chip—Chip / Waxy / Kit…

Aaron McCollough International Harvester?: Hicks beyond region Rank Notes: Sulfur Jesus is a Dying Bedmaker The Third Poem of Jan Vandermeer Lefthanded of Blooming Late The Twenty-third Psalm

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Ander Monson KNOW YOUR LAKE EFFECT Rich World Before Vandalism Slow Dance with Icarus Elegy for Beotch Retrun to Landscape X

Collier Nogues Stories I Hear A Book of Patriotic Movements The Helmet A Small Hot Town

Linnea Ogden Company Long Weekend Starlings Powderhorn Park

Danielle Pafunda Dilettante Hick Beshrew That Tale Beshrew Upon The Fence Dear Mom and Dad, / In the culvert Dear Mom and Dad, / When they ship us The Dead Girls Speak in Unison, / I felt a funeral The Dead Girls Speak in Unison, / Supine Lump of Coal

D.A. Powell [a long line of bohunks and hunyaks: we settled in podunk. thirteen consonants] [my father and me making dresses: together] [not the treats of quince blossoms. in this rainy cycle the yards] [splat in the oatmeal: granddaddy facedown] [I was a priapic boy: the prow of a galleon] early havoc Cherry Blossoms in Spring Landscape with Combine Lessons in Woodworking

Michael Sikkema How to Understand Evolution from Big Love Rodeo / If you were a kind of tree from May Apple Deep / Snow engine from Penned In Perennial / anyone acrobatic enough from Code Over Code / Approaching from three sides from “Saying Things as an Engine Would” / placing the made lakes

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giovanni singleton Day 20 Day 21 Day 41 8th movement: mahogany 9th movement: brown still life as ladybug mu-cow Alice Coltrane Mesostic exodus

Juliana Spahr Would it help if I romanticized it? gathering / palolo stream

TC Tolbert How do say and when you see end? May she show herself by what she loosens with her teeth.

Jen Tynes Between times Objects Left On Nota Bene Church of Stopping by the Woods from Trick Rider / The bone animals from AXE / Finding a plant What doesn’t give us cancer is covered

Mara Vahratian Remembers sleeping through backroads Is learn-to-wear-hair-up Slim highway across Navajo land I’m Pa to your Loretta Day arc of the sun In this great wide country By a watershed I don’t know how Your vestigials twitch

Connie Voisine “Hick Dictionary” Rosary We Are Crossing Soon Testament Once Ambidextrous

G.C. Waldrep Pharisee’s Lament What Begins Bitterly Becomes Another Love Poem Jeanette Cemetery What Is an Arpeggio

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G.C. Waldrep cont. And As They Waited in Their Baskets on the Hillsides It Began To Rain Shirley Plantation Forage Psalm

Dara Wier Two Branches

Crystal Wilkinson bloodroot The Visit O Tobacco Terrain The Water Witch on Salvation The Water Witch on Invasion The Water Witch on Reading witness (for ron davis)

Mark Wunderlich All Flesh is Grass Driftless Elegy Raccoon in a Trap Lent White Fur

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Many of the poems here come from an in-progress collection entitled Night Animals. I have always been excited by the night. Even when nighttime may have been seen as a time of reckoning or a cauldron of brutal surprises, for me, it was still a time and place of reflection and sober resolve. I knew the physical landscape intimately, I also felt as if I knew the night’s psychological depth even long before I read Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night,” though his poem does underscore my feelings concerning night’s mystery.

Yusef Komunyakaa

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The Blue Hour

A procession begins in the blue- black gratitude between worlds,& The Rebirth Jazz Band marches out of what little lightis left among the magnolia blooms. Step here, & one steps offthe edge of the world. Step there, & one enters the unholy hourwhere one face bleeds into another as a horse-drawn buggyrolls out of the last century, & the red-eyed seventeen-year locustgrows deeper into the old hushed soil. Lean this way, a blue insinuationtakes over the body. Step here, & one’s shadow stops digging its graveto gaze up at the evening star. Or,

at this moment, less than a half stepbetween day & night, birdhousesstand like totems against the sky.

A flicker of wings & eyes,mockingbirds arrive with stolen songs& cries, their unspeakable lies & omensas if they are some minor god’sonly true instrument & broken wayon stage in the indigo air.

They come with uh huh & yeah,a few human words, to ghost-white boxeson twelve-foot poles, to where each round door-holeis a way in& a way out of oblivion.

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The Country Alchemical: A Poetics Statement

Dilation. Aperture and the co-mingling of “wood” and “would” as if possible could be in the by and by when the morning comes. Down the country for what a mind thinks and a hand writes. Highway 64 West. Manakin-Sabat near to Short Pump, Goochland County, Virginia.

All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun. . .~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Jerusalem Baptist Church. Hallelujah on high.

Grandma Lois Rosa Belle Uncle Wesley Sunday’s house would fill. Some cousins.

We sitting on wooden benches and the wooden floor creaking beneath the feet and bottoms of country folk wanting to go up to yonder when time came. An empty sheet of paper I want to fill. You don’t know what’s out there. The “Good Book.” Willows weeping. Pods of magnolia on the ground unable to open, to let loose the scent.

Things had always begun in silence and prayer. Children in their place learning not to eat anything you have not grown yourself. What jars contain to last across seasons. The odor of pig waiting its time to pork chop and bacon.

Poetics of preservation, of serving. Originally organic. Write the writing stuffed with expanse of sky, of air. Some trees please? But no, it’s about the field. Field hockey player. My cleats to steep an open field. Form up for grabs. Projective. Voicing. Objectivist. The picking of ripe fruits and vegetables. Weeding. Backyard garden in the city. Some bit of country.

And Mom on the subway in the nation’s capital says, “Hello. And how are you?” to perfect strangers like they neighbors across the way. Some bit of Southern. I would do a “hybrid” and douse pinstriped overalls with blue velvet jacket, thinking Thoreau-ian thoughts.

Then the mirror reflects: Ms. Mavis Cooley from North Carolina way crocheted and sewed and dipped her snuff. And North Carolina Granddad chewed tobacco inside chipmunk cheek. So composition thusly a road the city could not impede.

giovanni singleton

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Wherever I go, I meet “dust tracks,” for example, in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s long-lined poems discovered in the pages of Conjunctions. They pushed at the margins. Let me kick up dirt. Sometimes the writing events want to intricate themselves so follow hair’s braided rows of corn. Weaving by design. Sign and signature.

Freight trains and crickets whistle nighttime lullaby. How now it is that country, that land I stand in writing the frame of the closed door open. Backwards but forwards. Stick and pen. Barefoot in the grass, telling it like the wind.

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“We don’t change the word, the word changes us.” —sign in front of North Chattanooga Church of God, Hixson, Tennessee

“James’s open space may be full of potential predators, but in Freud’s open space a person may turn into a predator.” —Adam Phillips in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored

“For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.” —1 Corinthians 12:8-10

I grew up believing in possession. I spent my Sundays at North Chattanooga Church of God watching demons be cast out of people—good seeming people. The Devil had gotten a hold of them and made them do and say things. Made them kill or rape or drink alcohol or sass their elders or have unclean thoughts or masturbate or drive too fast or be queer. These people needed hands laid down on them (someone, somewhere, please touch me). They needed to be filled with the Holy Spirit, a kind of counter-spell to the horrible inside.

The Holy Spirit would sometimes send people running up and down the aisles (unclear if they were pursuing or being chased), it might make their bodies convulse, a kind of inspired and terrifying celebration that undulated between laughter, pleading, weeping, and cheers. But those most filled with God could be identified by how they were filled with language. To speak in tongues was to be spoken through – a language both intensely private and necessarily shared – glossolalia – a kind of benevolent wildfire on the tongue – to receive the most excruciating, exquisite untranslatable articulations as a gift.

In Queer Space, Aaron Betsky says,“we make and are made by our spaces.” In the South I was made by, we had secrets and we had stories. We put our hands on each other. We talked with our mouths full. We wandered. We were disowned and, then, we were smothered. We were women. We spoke in tongues. We paid for things with our good looks. We hit one another. We hit hard. We healed the people we loved. When we needed to, we would dance and we would sing.

The cadence of a good Pentecostal preacher denies contradiction. There is a surety there, a solidity that exists in absolute tension with the logical

TC Tolbert

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ambivalence of so much in the Bible. The uncertainty of a miraculously confounding world is resisted primarily through the rhythm—a driving—where the full bore of language becomes a comfort, producing what Saul Williams refers to in hip hop as the “affirmative nod,” where we will inadvertently agree with any kind of bullshit because it sounds so damn good.

My family used to (and some still do) call me Missy Moe. Missy because it’s short for Melissa, my birth name, but also it sounds like, and is a bit, prissy. And an admonishment, maybe, for a certain brand of sass. A Southern woman should never be too proud. Moe comes from The Three Stooges. Think: bowl cut, mischievous naiveté, round eyes, always a little bit surprised. In “Low Culture,” Dodie Bellamy says, “If I were to write the story of my life with emotional honesty, my relationship to my body would be the most important thing.” My _____ body. My demure, accommodating, apologetic female body. My ashamed, glorious, bewildering trans and queer body. My proud, traditional, judgmental southern body. My authoritative, serendipitous, entitled white body. My sweaty body obliged to be humiliated, domineering, scandalous coming straight from the working class. I’m curious about names and how bodies show up in private, in public, on the page. What textual bodies exclude and what they make room for. What did a name like Missy Moe allow?

I suppose I write to speak my body out of and into existence. I write to speak in tongues and to prophesy. To know something I can’t know. To surrender. To be a good-bad body written into. To be read. To be a good-bad body gone bad-good.

my body my word my horror my healing my home my leaving my god my (w)hole my south

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bloodroot

it was only yesterdaywhen we three cinnamon dipped girlssquatted behind the smokehouseand peed yellow streams into dead leaves and dustwe built leaf hutsgossiped in grass kitchensour hands placedwhere hips would growcardboard living rooms chattered where pretend menfolkwaited on blackberry mud piesimaginary husbands came home smelling of tobacco, hay and sweatand were served sweet iced teaplucked from the airour mamas called to usout screen doorswhile we played against the shady sideof a poplar treewe daydreamedin purple Indian Creek skieshoping that motherhoodwould swoop downriding on the backs of a blue jays& horizon-kissed feathers would float newbornsinto the fleshy round of our belliespraying that spiraling pine needlescaught in the windwould somehow land between our legsand make us bleed