Jeff Hardin – Appalachian Review

Just Off the Road

Jeff Hardin ♦

Summer 2019 ♦

Poetry

for James Still A man who’s old enough has earned the right to stop the car if, driving past some woods, the beauty so beguiles him he is drawn to wander under autumn’s changing leaves. And even if expected somewhere else he’ll now be late, we might do well to…

Without Ceasing

Jeff Hardin ♦

Summer 2019 ♦

Poetry

All day every day around the clock like a prayer vigil there should be poets writing poems, accounting for milkweed pods and old homesteads abandoned, poets stirring campfire ash, noting just the place along the shoreline the heron casts down, poets in shifts like monks praying grace upon the whole…

A Shared Space

Jeff Hardin ♦

Summer 2019 ♦

Poetry

in memory of Marie Melson She was already old from the first I knew her, and though I was a child, I had an oldness in me too, which neither of us saw the use in mentioning, as together we sat in a swing beneath a century-old oak. Her memories,…

The Wrecker Lot

Jeff Hardin ♦

Summer 2018 ♦

Poetry

After the latest town wreck, my mother would drive us past the wrecker lot to see the twisted shapes of metal; bumpers and back ends deranged, sharp edges glinting; passenger doors cut away to remove the dying, the already dead—the bodies, we heard, sometimes burned beyond recognition. Evening quiet would…

Being In Your Own Mind

Jeff Hardin ♦

Summer 2018 ♦

Poetry

When you’re with, say, your own kind, those toward whom you do not feel a need to prove yourself, to explain the context out of which you speak; being in your own mind’s ease is easier then. No fiddling to find the right word to convey belief in sacramental places…