Tag: Tennessee

Three Poems by Steve Paulson

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State Route 116, Tennessee

1.
A friend played tour guide for me
when I visited from Montana,
took me on a drive
through the hollers of east Tennessee,
those close Appalachian hills,
those grim, pinched valleys.

From the bottom of the hollers, we couldn’t see
the coal mine above,
tearing up, blowing apart,
trucking away the top of the mountain.
My friend pointed out the drainage
where the mine above had bulldozed its waste rock.
He showed me the creek
that was poisoned and would stay poisoned.

2.
We took the state route through Fraterville,
where 216 coal miners – men and teenagers – died
in a mine explosion over a century before.
My guide described a note
scribbled by one miner
on a small piece of paper:
We are all praying for air,
Raise the children the best you can.
Bury me and Elbert in the same grave by little Eddy.
Oh God for one more breath.

Close to a thousand children lost their fathers
that day. I tried to comprehend the struggles
of those suffocating in the mine,
the pierced hearts of families above.

The road here is a black line on the map,
a dark road indeed.

3.
Back among the hollers,
invisible but for my friend’s knowledge –
an unmarked graveyard
discovered years after the last burial,
filled with the bodies of mostly black prisoners
leased out for profit by state prisons
to coal companies that also profited
by working these men to death,
keeping the deaths secret,
burying those men
in graves they thought would remain
undiscovered forever.

These dark roads and these dark valleys;
It’s a wonder (I reckoned
but didn’t say to my friend),
It’s a wonder
that the sun ever shines in this place.

* 

The Grave in Tyree Basin

Twin brothers born in 1916
to a family of homesteaders
in the Badlands.
One died within hours,
the other lived 91 years.

The family tried to scratch out a living, but
there was too little water, too little grass.
They left the baby’s grave behind
when they moved on.

Years later, someone
who never knew the family
walked the three miles in
from the road, carried
a small concrete marker there.

Now, someone else returns
from time to time, re-paints
four posts around the grave, maintains
a wire fence outside the posts.

A little sun-powered lamp there
creates a tiny light
on an empty plain.

These visitors are scarce,
but not the buffalo, coyote and
meadowlark. Sunshine is
abundant, wind is unimpeded.
Night is dark
and brilliant
and sings to the lonely.

*

Evening in the Sandhills

Two sweethearts lie atop
a haystack in the meadow
of a dry Nebraska ranch
and watch the round moon rise
in a dusty summer sky.

*

Steve Paulson lives in eastern Montana and reconnected with poetry after a career of environmental activism with Montana’s Northern Plains Resource Council. He has studied under Bernard Quetchenbach, Tami Haaland, and Cara Chamberlain; his essays have appeared in High Country News, Earth Island Journal, and various newspapers. He authored a non-fiction book – Environmentalists: An Eyewitness Account from the Heart of America.

Three Poems by Danielle Lemay

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I Dream of Meeting My Family at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, 1982
—after Geffrey Davis

Easy to spot: three of the four of us wearing matching tube socks,
pulled to the knee, white, with three blue stripes at the top,
and our sockless mother’s tan legs. How dearly
I want to press a wad of money into my mother’s palm.
Back home a cupboard of canned corn and tomatoes mimics
a full pantry. The silverware pretends to be silver.
It must have taken every last coin to hobble
to the fair, only to be knee-capped by the price
of each buttered corn on the cob, each bumper car, each ease
of thirst. I know my nine-year-old self yearns to catapult
the rubber frogs into the floating lily pads, but does not ask.
By nightfall, mom has starved herself all day, steered us to
every last free exhibit, then surprises us with four tickets
to the ferris wheel. My younger self cannot
see the top of the monster wheel, cannot bear dangling
in sky. The wheel looms larger than a skyscraper,
as if it could fall from its axle, roll through Tennessee
and Kentucky. How much weight can an axis take?
In the dream, I realize why I’m there:
to hold that little girl’s hand, to ensure
for once in my mother’s too-short life,
she’s 165 feet high, floating like Lois Lane
with Superman, wind in her face, marveling
in the dark at the kaleidoscope of light.

Notes: In 1982, The Giant Wheel at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, was the largest ferris wheel operating in the world at that time. It was 165 feet high and had the capacity of 240 passengers in 40 6-person gondolas.

*

Where the Flowers Have No Names

In my hometown, the highway billboard reads
If You Can’t Read, We Can Help

Maybe. It feels out of reach, doesn’t it?
Like if you know the right someone.

My grandmother kept her native words
tucked in her bra like folded cash.

Which is to say I was not taught the names
of things. No matter the color,

a flower was simply flou-wah,
anything reptilian with legs was liz-ahd,

and any passing vehicle was a cah.
The compartment of her brain for specificity

lay paralyzed in the black basement of her childhood,
the door sealed so tightly that when the cashier

asked for the name of girl-me in the shopping cart,
my grandmother said I call her dee-yah.

She swaddled me, fleshy arms to pillowy bosom,
kissed a bushel and a peck of kisses.

Does it matter that I still don’t know the names
of the purple flowers on the vines outside that 2-bed,

1-bath cinderblock in which we all lived?
If You Need A Hug, I Can Help.

*

Not Another Poem About Flowers

Poor college student, I bussed to a bridal shower
of Harvard girls who brought gifts like a coffee-table

Book of Flowers. My blue-collar special stood alone:
a cakepan, spatulas, decorating tubes and tips

wrapped together inside a Rubbermaid cake-keeper.
My mother didn’t like flowers either. Bouquet

of Brief Beauty Before Wilt-Death. Allergy
Bouquet. Bouquet of Pet Killers. Bouquet

of You-Could-Have-Fed-the-Children. I’d rather
a bouquet of cash or a fresh bunch of rainbow

chard, or a bowl of arugula.
In our cash-strapped 20s, my lover greeted

me with a napkin surprise—leftover bits
of her last meal. I was never that hungry

but appreciated pressing against her jeans—
her rough car keys, tube of Chapstick, pocket knife,

and her wallet-ass. We’re upscale now.
When I arrive at baggage claim after COVID-fasting

across the country, roll my luggage past
the greeters with red roses and pink carnations

and step into the passenger seat of her car,
she places two steel bowls in my lap—

blanched organic broccoli, plump orange slices—
with a bouquet of utensils to unwrap.

*

Danielle Lemay is a poet and a scientist. She was Boulevard’s Emerging Poets Contest Winner and a Patricia Cleary Miller Award Finalist at New Letters. Her poetry has appeared in Boulevard, Poetry South, On the Seawall, ONE ART, and many other journals. More at DanielleLemay.com