Poetry – Page 5 – 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,…

Driving Through

Emma Aprile ♦

Issues, Spring 2019 ♦

Poetry

safe car on safe road and highway switchbacks baby girl with those gray wristbands on plastic pellet resting between tendons keeping her stomach still or at least stiller than the black car and its sticky summer seats tight gridlines on the backs of our thighs little white house peeking up…

Crow Song

Noah Davis ♦

Issues, Spring 2019 ♦

Poetry

Wet pavement rides the ridges up to where the forest breaks like hair when the taut newness of a scar writes that desire is black feathers caught in the heads of dried goldenrod, that grief’s blue lines run over hands and between knuckles, that death, after rain, leaks its sweet…

James Brown Performs “Cold Sweat” On American Bandstand, 1968

Marianne Worthington ♦

Issues, Winter 2019 ♦

Poetry

We were practicing our splits, perfecting our slides across the basement floor on one foot, impossible to beat the hardest working man in show business even as we cheated in our sock feet. Upstairs, our grandmother hurled her wrecking-ball voice at us before we finished miming the first verse— …

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Amy Wright ♦

Issues, Winter 2019 ♦

Poetry

After Werner Herzog Four charcoal horses animate in torchlight, that flickering first projector, sans horsemen, pre-Apocalypse. Red ochre palm print by the cave mouth like a house number, or graffito, preserved by landslide— a human touch kept from human touch for 32,000 years, the terms of ingress sealed like a…

Seven-Second Meditation

Amy Wright ♦

Issues, Winter 2019 ♦

Poetry

Outside the window a red-headed house finch plucks seed down from the grass as if he is running late for the theater, rifling through the bureau drawers, tossing scarves over his shoulder, shells.

Not All That Much

Marc Harshman ♦

Fall 2018, Issues ♦

Poetry

It wasn’t all that much, you might say, nothing to write home about, just a heavy green floor of ground cedar and springy peat littered with reindeer moss and lichened stones, here and there evidence of flying squirrels, muddy punctures in the cloth of the moss, and coyotes, their ropey,…

Letters to Asylum

Crystal Wilkinson ♦

Fall 2018, Issues ♦

Poetry

1. August 17, 1960 Dear Sir: The fall rages on with no regard for grieving mothers. We are lonesome on this hill without her. Everybody cries. Soon we’ll have blood red leaves scattered across the pastures. Regarding my daughter, how is she getting along? It’s so hot the dogs’ tongues…