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Kentucky Collection

Sweat gathers like armful of crushed flowers (9/25)

6/30/2016

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Sweat gathers like armful of crushed flowers
buffing the air with smoke and antiquity
Black gold runs feral through these sun-beaten bodies
won't anyone just give them work?
***
eKY Flood Relief Annotation 8/21/22
Herby wanted to show me something. We hopped into a car and zoomed around winding roads. We passed several signs marking mouths of hollers twisting up the slope; I read them aloud as we went. There were so many great names. He explained how there were many ways to pronounce a word. Hurricane can be hurrukin. 
We pulled up alongside a coal sorting plant and he pointed out different features of the facility. Runoff from processing coal flows downstream, pools in different bodies of water. I thought the interconnectedness of industry and nature, livelihood and neighborhood, was as poetic as the human body system. Perhaps this kind of perspective is the gift of having a filmmaker be your guide.  
I filled several pages of my journal with Herby's knowledge. Maybe sometime I'll dig it out from my stack and revisit my notes from that day. Support master storytellers like Herby who share their homes with open hearts as they recover from the late July floods: ​https://tinyurl.com/herbysmith
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You and me (8/25)

6/29/2016

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*Sometimes, I write songs instead of poems. This is one of those times.
**Wow, chords too? Yeah, buddy.

A
You and me 
Bm
were born to be here together
A
You and me
E
my friend
A
I will come back
Bm
to find you whenever
A            E         A 
you need a kind hand

A
Years have passed by 
D
wonder if they miss me
A                     E
I will be home soon
A      
When I met you
D
my heartache went and left me
A                 E           A
Right here's where I choose

A F#m G#dim A
to make a home 
G#dim F#m A
in the mountains
A F#m G#dim A G#dim
And to find kin in
         F#m A 
your friends
A  F#m G#dim A  G#dim F#m A
The road was long 'fore I got here
A                  E         A
now I find it hard to go

You and me 
could've missed this
forever
You and me 
my friend
Thankful for the blunders
that brought me
here to take your hand

​I must go on
please don't forget me
I will be home soon
Home was a place
'til God gave me today
Right now's when I choose

to make a home 
in the mountains
And to find kin in
your friends
The road was long 'fore I got here
now here I hope to rest

You and me
will get through
whatever
You and me 
my friend
I will come back
to find you
so never
let go of my hand

and I'll make a home 
in the mountains
and I'll find kin in
my friends
The road was long 'fore I got here
but I'd travel it again
***
eKY Flood Relief Annotation 8/17/22
One of my dearest experiences in Whitesburg, KY was getting to be part of the Cowan Creek Community Theater production of story-play "Roots & Branches." This intergenerational cast told the rooted-in-life story of a girl who reluctantly visits her ancestral Appalachian home and in doing so, finds community, homegrown music, shared cultural history, and good food. Behind the scenes, I was introduced to deviled eggs and venison backstrap and made cherished friends in fellow bandmates Brandon and Callie, Kevin, Alyssa, fearless director Miss Carol, and so many others. This song is for them. Support more art-makers as they restore their home after devastating floods: www.tinyurl.com/cowancreek
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it's incredible (7/25)

6/28/2016

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it's incredible 
how the dark changes things, isn't it?
All the green things that fill the air
are lipsticked thick with gorgeous stink 
of creek river, purpled by the night
The sweet stray you thought was your friend
is now howling in time with your flickering pulse
a bump in the night sends the sleeping bitch in the yard cage barking
and your skirt is getting tortured into thread
as your slippers stumble over air
There is no space for the charming town you thought you'd tamed earlier that day
the mountains
they tame you
though you thought a wild child would slip right into place with the dusky shadows

You realize with new clarity what someone told you earlier when it was safe
     the trail you are walking alone
     is the unmarked grave of a railroad
You wonder if the imperfectly glowing faces of foliage 
are ghosts watching you pass
You wonder if your ghosts are scarier
but they are already dissolved into the potion this town is fixing
they get taken out in bodybags by the haunts of this place
the windows of what you realize is county jail rattles its bars at you
bares its fangs and dares your eyes to search the dark for what might be footsteps
A lot of old history molds on your bones, you know
turns you into something hairy
***
eKY Flood Relief Annotation 8/16/22
Summertime in the mountains blurs the boundaries between truth and tale. I could never steel my nerves long enough to not run the last bend home.
In the summer of 2016, I was writing a ghost novel based in an imaginary mountain town influenced by oral stories I collected from folks I met around Letcher County. I remember meeting a fellow who professed to be a ghost hunter out on the deck behind Summit City. He showed me videos of previous expeditions with his team and regaled me with the bloody story of the Hatfield-McCoy family feud, arguing that conflicts of such magnitude leave traces behind on the grounds they play. If true, doesn't that make the triumph of a community's shared joy and trust that much more worthy? The masterwork of nighttime tellings lies in knowing that our anxieties dissipate with laughter among our friends. If there is evidence of past grief, let me point you to present evidence of grace. Support the folks creating hope in the next chapter of rebuilding after the late July floods:
https://tinyurl.com/summitcity
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and in the end, (6/25)

6/27/2016

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and in the end, it turns out
the quiet is what gets me,
wedged like the tongue of a first kiss
lower lip, dusky pink of a mountain's collarbone we scrambled up 
upper lip, sky
I feel like I should say something to chase back 
the awkwardness, but at that moment,
I forget how to speak 
The unblinking sun beats me at a staring contest
I am naked as an offering
coming here thinking that dignity was in being clothed
but there is some reductionist beauty stripping away
layers of me
until there is nothing for my bones to offer
but surrender

***
eKY Flood Relief Annotation 8/11/22
The top of Pine Mountain reminds me of the limitless first moments of falling in love; which is to say, falling upwards, toward so much possibility. Something about clambering up a steep incline, cursing the slippery underside of your sandals and feeling your fingernails fill up with soil, makes reaching the peak a surprise every time. But can a summit be a surprise if it also reminds me of all the times I've ever looked at a person and felt my heart swell? 
I remember taking this picture in the company of Lucy, Wilson, and Ian--fellow Robertson scholars in our 2016 Whitesburg cohort--and thinking that, no matter what, they were woven into the beautiful memory of this sweaty moment at Mars Rock. I remember splashing around Wiley's Last Resort with Brandon, tugging a peddleboat into the lake as our much drier friends tsk'ed at us from the dock. I remember pretending to be a goat walking nearly perpendicular to the surface I was standing on because Nathan, already far ahead of me, had chosen the toughest way up. Support good memory-making, both past and future, in a region recovering from devastating floodwaters: ​https://tinyurl.com/ekysummits
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Seven, up North, (5/25)

6/26/2016

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Seven, up North,
is a big family
Eight, if you count the dreamed up border collie
that sleeps in bed with me and never sheds
elicits not even a whisper of a sneeze from my mother
The corners
of my lips are veterans at curling
upwards in bashful, proud apology
at somebody's surprise,
     "Seven!
     Oh, I couldn't imagine seven."
What of seven, though?
Why not seventy
or twenty-one thousand
or zero?
In the mountains,
numbers are tricks of the mind,
the shapes that remain after
leaves have launched their tender bodies to the ground
and are stepped on by people who don't pay enough mind
Family is everywhere to be found
and not nearly often enough discovered
but when stumbled upon
there is bashful, proud apology
in knowing that family
is as much the fallen leaf
as it is the trees
***
eKY Flood Relief Annotation 8/9/22
I learned everything I know about leading story circles from Alexia, Marissa, Maria, and Devyn. They modeled the practice beautifully at the Cowan Creek Mountain Music School, where we gathered up a bunch of different tellings of the Headless Annie ghost story and brought a mashup version to life at the student recital. Support flood relief at the Cowan Community Center to promote future storytelling spaces: https://tinyurl.com/cowancreek
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My dear friend (4/25)

6/25/2016

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My dear friend
I woke up this morning and the sky was stifling tears
I hoped it would cry for you
I knew you had planted a whole field yesterday
tucked your hopes and good humor into tired ground
so overworked that it blew away with a breath of the noon wind
If only the day would give you a chance to
grow something to show for your sweat
I was never born a farmer
but my callused fingertips recognize the loamy feeling
of the world keeping a secret under its skin
and the shy desire to discover it
I know how to mean well
and fuck it up anyway

     If only the sky would confess
     and the seeds grow

​The clock on the nightstand begged me to close my eyes
and lose myself in sleep
but is the day still night if you call it that?
Is a stranger still friend if you call it that?

***
eKY Flood Relief Annotation 8/8/22
I want so badly for my friends to succeed. I remember discovering this skeleton of a building for the first time with a local friend, listening to their cultural vision echo within the tattooed walls. How many other dreamers sidestepped the same holes in this concrete while building hypothetical futures aloud? Could believing in the greatness of what is still yet to come be a communicable condition? I wonder if the people who would come to this place after us could hear our voices resonating... or if not our voices, our hope?
This poem is for all the folks out there who plant seeds of hope and goodness around them with no way of telling if anything will grow. I've known so many Appalachians with an artists' sensitivity and an activists' self-sacrificial instinct. Living legends. Support these precious people as they labor restlessly to hold their communities above floodwaters: 
https://tinyurl.com/ekyfriends
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I've heard hollers are called such (3/25)

6/24/2016

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I've heard hollers are called such 
because of the men that holler at your New York State license plate
as your car pants up the curves of a busty mountain
Hearsay is bourbon for bias
like my prejudice of the dark
and all the things that grin out at me in it,
imagined into existence by every fairytale I'd ever been told
and wove into my psyche

In like fashion,
it is surprising to discover
this is not half of what a holler is.

The dark gives sunshine its pretty reputation
and a time for us to quiet daylight anxieties,
for stained hands to rest their calluses,
to give stars a stage to dance on and
hoot owls an audience to sing to
Out of the shadows slide crickets dribbling gossip
from between their rubbing forewings
a community gathering
at which no one breaks bread alone
all in ways familiar to greens that rise from sweat and soil
in both cases, the dark and the soil breathe life into being

The holler is all of this and none of this
which is to say that it is
​the night, the field
from which a home springs,
forging a people who learned to hold up the sky 
     from the mountains themselves,
birthing grubby little hands that play 
     thoughtlessly among wizened trees that
     once gave their grandmothers fruit to fold 
     into the kind of foods eaten now only in song,
ushering new ways into habit
This land forgets itself into a contradiction
and I am afraid to like it as much as I do
because I know better than to
flirt with those who are broken in the same places
or
​pretend that I speak the language of the dark or the soil

The holler is not for my tongue to name
so I let ears speak instead in this place

***
eKY Flood Relief Annotation 8/7/22
Hollers are "hollows" wound richly throughout the Appalachian mountains. My cohort of University of North Carolina and Duke scholars lived in what was locally known as the "Graveyard Holler." I remember the thick, lush curtains of kudzu rising up past the rooftops, reminding all that with time, even foreign species become familiar as rain. Such things really feel possible in Letcher County. Support a neighborhood where many things are given space to grow as they recover from historic floods: https://tinyurl.com/ekyhollers
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Tell me about the railroad (2/25)

6/23/2016

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Tell me about the railroad
buried like a secret racing through the flesh of this town
black, almost blue, with daily beating of feet
headed somewhere untraceable by tires

I am once again pirate, explorer, Chosen One
armed only with laundry bag of candy and socks kids 
remember to bring when running away from home
as flirtatious beery breath of the creek chases my loose laces

Far-off into the melting sun
unnamed bird prays in tongues
the railroad corpse sleeps
No wonder the trees whisper ghost stories
***
eKY Flood Relief Annotation 8/6/22

I walked this windy path to and from the radio station every day. I remember dewy mornings, listening to the sounds of wood creatures chittering or rustling out at me. It was never a lonely walk. 
Occasionally, one of the community DJs would invite me to sit in live at their late night show. I'd walk this path again, holding the knowledge of lights awake at the station in my mind. I was deathly afraid of the dark and the dogs living in the yard that backed up to the path never failed to make me jump with the sudden nearness of their bark. 
Cemeteries used to conjure up visions of emaciated hands reaching out of the ground for my ankles. But learning that the path I walked every day was the tarred-over remains of an old railroad track reminded me of that Jackie Chan movie, the one where the woman he loves who is fated to die says that stations make her sad. They remind her of departures. This path reminded me of journeys, old, new, and yet to come.
Support the community radio station in rebuilding after the past week of floods: https://tinyurl.com/wmmt887
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Flowers burst from the abandoned toilet bowls (1/25)

6/22/2016

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Flowers burst from the abandoned toilet bowls
littering the skirts of deep trees with good posture
(the kind many other places have forgotten once stood)
In a careless way, they invited me to gawk at
their sensual queerness
I was a teenaged girl learning how to hook a bra right before these
bizarrely pretty toilets
beautiful in ways only women were
women who knew their worth and 
wore this certainty like their own skins

***
eKY Flood Relief Annotation 8/5/22
Today's feature is Valerie Ison Horn. On quiet days at the Appalshop, I'd meander down to E. Main Street and poke my head into her office. Not that I could ever really pin her down; she was shoulders-deep in what seemed like everything that made Letcher County Farmers Market run. How does she do it all? I remember wondering as I gazed at the mountains of paperwork on her desk; then again, as she explained the Farmacy produce prescription program; yet again, as she led the community walk down the old railroad path to the market.
Support her food access work as Letcher County rebuilds after days of floods: https://tinyurl.com/valhorn

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Welcome to the Kentucky Collection

6/22/2016

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Old friends will know that I'm a hoarder of words.

In April of 2016, I took up a challenge to write a poem a day (see 30/30) and share it on a public platform. Terrified is too small of a word to describe the tremors in my hand every time I hit "Post"; but somehow, thirty days passed, and I was still here. I emerged with a more thoughtful identity as a poet and a place in the CUPSI (College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational) community. I had hoped for less, but in doing so, surprised myself with the good that so often comes from doing something that scares me every day. 

This summer, the town of Whitesburg, Kentucky has been sharing its sweet dogs, dancing music, striking views, and good company with me. This will be my sixth week working with Appalshop; my fingerprints can be found on social media posts for the Seedtime Festival, across the WMMT 88.7 soundboard, and all over the tea mugs in the kitchen. I've also been seen heading to play rehearsal with the Cowan Theatre Group (last show is tonight!), tracking down local poets for a potential radio documentary, and working on a ghost story set in a region much like Appalachia. As per my Community Summer obligations with the Robertson Scholars Leadership Program, I will be exploring community - this community - for another two and a half weeks. 

This place won't let me leave, though. Recently, I switched my plane ticket such that I'll be here a voluntary extra ninth week and there's no good way to explain why to those who find it strange that a city mouse could fall so hard in love with the mountains. As an outsider, I didn't expect to find home in the places that I have. I've found that poetry does well at teaching me about inexplicable things both in and outside of myself, so, starting today, I'll let it speak instead. Follow this poemblog for a daily poem if you'd like to walk with me as I search for the words to explain why.
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    Kat

    writes too much. sleeps too little.

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  • Poetry
    • Poemblogs >
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      • National Poetry Writing Month - 2019
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      • National Poetry Writing Month - 2017
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