Poetry – Page 9 – Appalachian Review

Laundry Woman

Winter 2016 ♦

Poetry

My great-grandmother agitated Mrs. Worldly’s wash every week over the hot flash and glow of the fire in the misery shed. Hand on rough stick, grandmother pulled around the glob of tangled shirts and sheets; she stirred as if hauling the weighted laundry about an axis, sloshy seas yielding a…

What I Learned in My Mother’s Kitchen

Kathleen Driskell ♦

Winter 2016 ♦

Poetry

While my father traveled for his job during the week, my mother lived the life of a woman emancipated by TV dinners and pizza delivery. On Sundays, though, after church, my father dragged her back to the kitchen, where she worked the opener against the lip of a can of…

Nativity Scene on the Courthouse Lawn

Ryan Harper ♦

Winter 2016 ♦

Poetry

So long since I have heard said the word oxen; what mechanics the word insists upon stable faces—

Calling Out the Dead

Pamela Murray Winters ♦

Fall 2015 ♦

Poetry

I was a sound sleeper in my teens. My mother’s voice used to break through my dreams, waking me for school with news. Hey, that funny guy from Saturday Night Live died, what’s his name, Ackroyd? Or, They shot one of the Beatles. I’m trying to hear her tone again,…

Night in the Burned House

Lucien Darjeun Meadows ♦

Fall 2015 ♦

Poetry

In my old bedroom, in this house now my Aunt A’s, walls mottle grey into black, char hiding that this room was ever painted purple in a hope that someone would guess, would know. Burning night, my hidden journals blown across the field—and my aunt, gathering boughs for wreaths, found…

Memorate

Christie Collins ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Poetry

The field. Light. Morning. Then, my father, uncle. Apples, everywhere. In boxes, in palms, in teeth. Apples, everywhere. The black mare. Wild. The black mare that dawned from the mountain. Wild. The rough sketches of my earliest memory. My father places me on the back of the beast & we…

Hateful

Pauletta Hansel ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Poetry

my Granny said, her pleated velvet cheeks aquiver as we watched the battered Fords and coal trucks splatter gravel from the road above the porch. That’s one thing I can’t abide. I don’t remember who it was or what he did that made my Granny spit his name like chaw…

Shadow

Sandra Marchetti ♦

Spring 2015 ♦

Poetry

Across clearings, an eye—Ted Hughes, “The Thought-Fox” Mushrooms on the trail indicate you haven’t roved this prairie of late; soft-sponged and pink, they’re sweet as the berries ripped in your teeth. “Foxes are opportunistic feeders,” notes a sign—I never mind the goldfinches who arc my breeze and swap big bluestem…

Refrain

Sandra Marchetti ♦

Spring 2015 ♦

Poetry

The birches dizzy me, shaking down their mint and white confetti crowns around the Scarlet Tanager, a trilling sky-high king: red come orange, come black, come green. From this forest freshed with song, a goose lay drawn, opened in a field ringed in feathers— orange come red, come black, come…

Rural Stigmata

Jen Coleman ♦

Winter 2015 ♦

Poetry

I’ve nurtured the glowing wound: peroxide, salve, bandages. I’ve done right by this one. The rawness eased, was replaced by budding infant cells. Trenches formed in the nickel-sized spot where my fate and life lines intersected the injury, two deep vertical red canals in a waxy purple-pink circle: a burnt…