Green Soup (Halloween Night 2020)
Tabitha Dial, Lexington
From a quiet keeping-space,
I promise my motherghost
to create meals and music.
Even if from
dry bones and tangled memories,
my vow as I unstem kale and spinach,
add it to the copperlined pot with green onion, cilantro,
yukon golds and snap peas.
Remember when I made your favorite soup
last year? I caramelize the onions and recall
that patient pot.
I’ve spent almost 2 hours at the stove, there’s
only a little more: the garlic and ginger
sizzle in the pan, then slide into the pot. Another 10 minutes.
I add the broth, taste. I follow the recipe,
as one day I’ll follow you. Blend in batches,
return to pot, simmer, flavor with lemon juice,
white vinegar, salt, pepper, cumin, chili powder,
and the sound of your name.
What They Want to Hear
ky li, Louisville
Mother was born where the mountains dip their toes
into the Kentucky River, where grass that is emerald
has been christened blue, vowels sound in twos & locals
preach an alloy of the Golden Rule — say unto others
as you would have them say unto you. I first learned this
when they smothered the funeral parlor in roses for Granny.
A spray of Forever Young tried to squeeze her wilted body
from the open casket; her face resembled a pale reduction
of chicken stock. One mourner said, Don’t she look nice?
to which my six-year-old mouth said, No, she looks dead!
Mother smiled through teeth kept white with salt, bent down
to my level & whispered, always tell folk what they want to hear.
I found my way through nyloned legs & polyester pants
to a back room & the almost-honest smell of formaldehyde.
Candles
Christopher McCurry, Lexington
I woke to no light.
None of the switches or knobs
worked.
They worked but had no purpose.
They could no longer create fire.
I ate at the bar at a Waffle House.
An old man tapped his cup for more
coffee.
This was a front-row seat to small
dramas:
pregnancy, addiction, old age’s
lonesome
exploitation of public dining. In the
afternoon,
a butterfly scared the shit out of me
by landing on my steering wheel
when I stopped for an Ale-8.
I could have gotten cash back
to give to a young guy holding a sign
that said he was hungry and homeless
but I forgot and thought why don’t
the signs ever say I’m thirsty.
At the Goodwill I was asked if I knew
about the rip in the neck of the shirt
I wanted. What I would give to be
a dog when my father arrives for his
birthday party. Not the dog’s birthday,
my father’s. But really either way.
It rains like only a sky
used to sacrifice can.
It storms.
Doxology
Adele Green, Lexington
I.
We are the cloudless sky.
The unadorned horizon.
We are the snow drifts. The riptides.
We are the bird and flower coupled
in fragile communion.
We are the curdled water and
leavened wind that collide to
displace a generation of memories.
We are the heaving heat that builds
an altar of ember and ash.
II.
We are birthed in our protest shroud.
Our skill cleaved. Bones brutalized.
Our organs bruised to ripe pulp.
Our spine wrested. Neck wrenched.
Grief is our marrow.
III.
Pestilence shadows us.
Immunity’s ancient mysteries flood
our swollen lungs.
Contagion pools in the stagnant
well of our chest.
Blood rejects oxygen. Fear chills us.
We cannot breathe.
IV.
Darkness seizes us and our glowing
galaxy fades.
Where is the pilgrim. The pioneer.
The preacher.
They reached the glorious mountaintop.
They crossed the bridge to freedom
and justice.
They march through our sleepless
dreams of death by gun and
disappeared children.
V.
Orphaned by a poverty of spirit
that evicts
Dignity and decency.
Locks the school door, but teaches
hate.
Hides the ballot.
Bullies the uncounted and uncovered.
VI.
Suffering is not a melody.
It is a dirge; the low, thunderous
anthem of a noble life.
A prayerful heart is the lyric.
History is our hymnal and love our
common chord.
Kneel in hope.
Stand in faith.
Copperhead
Denton Loving, Speedwell, TN
Loving has lived in Kentucky, and his family has lived in the Commonwealth since the 1780s. Loving’s work often is about Kentucky and the larger Appalachian region.
Dead: the copperhead
that slipped down the ridge
in summer’s elongated dusk
to forage small prey
and taste cool creek. And me,
racing against the sun
on its path beyond the mountains
to end my task mowing tall grass
between apples, pears and peaches.
Before the snake, I had been looking
without resentment at the day
well spent, a day devoted
to necessary labor. Later, memory
of cold blood spilled on steel blades
lingered in the night air
like honeysuckle and regret.
The Problem with Home
Kelsey Magnine, Louisville
It’s a blurry sight, gazing across rolling landscapes and admiring similar variations of grasses upon the plains.
Planes taking you into the cold night on adventures you dreamed about in your worn-in sheets, meeting warm faces you already feel like you know.
No stone unturned, no clock unwound, connecting with a more complex version of yourself as you take on the impressions of others you meet there.
Their stories illuminating the deeply rooted, cold-hard truths pinned to our hearts and immortal scars we have etched on our souls.
Soles of our feet aching for the kind of rest we only know deep within, letting go when we float into a place of true safety and peace.
Piece together little bits of this and that from here and there into a medley of nostalgia coming on like a sixth sense.
Scents of unlikely elements, bringing pleasure and stopping our heartbeats, briefly remembering who we really are.
Our memories tethered to habits and tendencies we’re trying hard to change like the garments we wear.
Where the buds that grow from those roots are undeniably, overwhelmingly irreplaceable, despite the vast array of emotions that flood in like the tide.
Tied to it forever, yes, this is the problem with home.
Antimatter
Sarah McCartt-Jackson, Louisville
If you are the sweet-stung smell of a
half-rotted walnut,
let me be the walnut leaves’ freckle as
we dissolve our cell walls into winter.
You are like eye floaters casting tiny
shadows on my retina: your face
scuttles away when I try to see you in
my memory. I have measured how far
your fibers can swim: from mudbank
to mudbank. All the way across the
river. If I try not to see you, you
static my sky.
If I look away, you sink and drown,
piece by swollen piece.
Let you and me be the sum of falcon
and talon after it rips
a fieldmouse from her furrow. The
tearing sound of fur from skin is
the same
as the sound of prey stripped from
prairie grass:
If you are the oooh that slips from a
telephone wire into space’s
troposphere, let me be the electrons
that carry you like a woman
carries a body inside her womb even
after it’s gone still: She carries
it with her one stilled heartbeat at a
time. Let her be the matter
that cannot be created or destroyed.
Burial Grounds
Katie Hughbanks, Louisville
In a capital city fraught with history
rest plots of mystery, of misery
where dead men and women lie in state
in a state
of inequity.
Up a white hill,
overlooking Kentucky River and
the white Capitol building,
Old Frankfort Cemetery glistens
with pearly golden sunlight that
gleams on polished marble.
Elaborate statues and monoliths of
seventeen governors in this hallowed
ground.
One vice president.
Neat rows of deathly elegance.
Even the birds here sing symphonically.
Two miles and a world away,
Green Hill Cemetery waits.
Grizzling cars pass by the adjacent
highway,
sputtering exhaust with thrumming
motors
that might be mistaken as cries for
the dead.
Headstones of former slaves tilt
sideways
like unsteady lines of lynched men.
A faded memorial for colored soldiers
protrudes above disheveled scrub
bushes.
How we treat the dead
bespeaks their value,
yes?
Perhaps
burial grounds are only
for the living.