Poetry – Appalachian Review

Two Centos by Marianne Worthington

Winter/Spring 2024 ♦

Poetry

Elegy for Ron Houchin: A Cento Perhaps they are connected to us, the names of the dead that drift up as if we’re in a dream from this world waking like a nest in the rain. The body speaks its own language like the mumbles of streams, whispers of leaves,…

Two Poems by Kevin Nance

Kevin Nance ♦

Winter/Spring 2024 ♦

Poetry

1 I wake to the scent of grandma’s lilac hand cream wafting in the air. 2 Do the dead return? If not, whose fingers are these pulling at my sleeve? 3 The aroma shifts to lard, buttermilk, her hands moving in the flour. 4 Hot from the oven, her biscuits…

Poems by John Brooks

John Brooks ♦

Summer 2023 ♦

Poetry

Met In an orca-colored room, we glare into a jungle which is actually Paris. I tell you I loved Rousseau when I was a young man; I am a young man and love Rousseau, you say. His half-coy beast, concerned with repast and eyeing something delicious on Bonnard’s adjacent terrace,…

Persona Poem of the Shakespearean Witchnurse in A Winter’s Tale

Elizabeth Upshur ♦

Summer 2021 ♦

Poetry

I think but of Apollo, his sunned visage bright as second winter stars to gaze upon, methinks my queen was his true equal a like as like to God enthrone- ed. O even as the fair and gentle Dian beside her too as sweet maiden ness can boast was she,…

Treebeard

Andrew K. Clark ♦

Summer 2021 ♦

Poetry

It now appears that certain trees lower and raise their branches, not only at nightfall or sunrise, but also with shorter periods, such as two hours. It’s as if they have an internal heartbeat. —The Scientific and Medical Network Journal, 2018. busy as we are we feel your longing…

Joshua 7:22 in the Ruins

Jessica Jewell ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Poetry

The whole city was an ambush the summer before we met & I was disaster provisions. I lit fires up and down Meridian, breaking the law every time the moon disappointed me, tried tunneling home dirt by dew & then you were salve and I, a walking wound. I met…

Drive-In Movie During a Pandemic

Matthew Hawk ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Poetry

Midweek midsummer night at the drive-in, only one other car ahead of us in line. A gowned man in mask and gloves scans our ticket with his handheld scanner, directs us to tune our car radio and follow signs straight ahead to our screen, where we watch Jurassic Park and…

Queers on the Oregon Trail

Matt Vekakis ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Poetry

to Oregon I’m relentless: on holidays I pull at your shawl and beg you to play settler as the men down- stairs pray for our souls long before we understand what it means to be queers. even the room is magic: austere, New England white, snow-lined sill mapping the cylinder…

How to make loss real

Jamey Temple ♦

Fall 2020 ♦

Poetry

Picture someone you love. Maybe your wife, the way she smells when she steps out of the shower, her hair dripping. Imagine her scrunching those strands with a towel, then rubbing lotion onto her thirsty limbs. See her wrapping that towel around her, tucking the ends into the towel dress…

Circa 1994

Barbara Costas-Biggs ♦

Fall 2020 ♦

Poetry

after Jason Isbell’s “The Life You Choose” It wasn’t Jack and Coke, it was Southern Comfort in Taco Bell cups full with ice, no doubt on our way to another viewing of Pulp Fiction or to Hoover Reservoir to steam windows and dream of big cities and rock stars and riot…