Telling by Linda Taylor Kane

It comes to me sometimes,

what happened,

but when summer haze

wraps around these mountains

making them reflections

of the ones behind them, you can't tell

if they're fibbing about themselves,

or if they're really there.

They drape like drowsy shadows,

as though you could see right through them

if you just stared hard enough.

That's when I start to question:

Did it happen that way?

But the next morning when I wake up,

the day will be clear and cool.

Each one of these hills will be

right where it has always been,

its crisp blues and greens reaching up,

claiming its own named place.

Just so you know, when I'm telling you,

it's all in how the light plays.

--Linda Taylor Kane

Previously published in

LIGHTS IN THE MOUNTAINS

THREE POEMS BY MAREN O.MITCHELL

The Southern Appalachian Mountain Region is full of poets, or so it seems. I've met many of them in my work with N.C. Writers Network West. So many I cannot keep count.

Maren O. Mitchell is one of those poets who found her way to the mountains, made a home here and began writing and publishing her poems in literary magazies. I am happy to bring you three poems by Maren O. Mitchell.

Maren O. Mitchell’s poems have appeared in the Red Clay Reader, “The Richmond Broom,” “The Arts Journal,” “Appalachian Journal” and “Journal of Kentucky Studies.” She has taught poetry at Blue Ridge Community College, Flat Rock, NC, and catalogued at the Carl Sandburg Home NHS. With her husband and cats, she lives in Young Harris, GA.

HARVEST MOON

Tonight,

light on this earth’s moon,

I want to slip you down

to my house tonight, moon

and take out of your

booming beacon tangerine section

an everlasting sweet toothshattering bite,

tonight moon, and when

I’m through, I’ll slip you up

(before our benefactor shines)

and no one, early morning moon

will ever know, juicy morning moon

until tomorrow, early night moon moon.

by Maren O. Mitchell

(Published in “The Arts Journal”)

NOT THE POEM

This isn’t the poem I want to be writing.

Unwritten, that poem hovers startlingly close:

the flying saucer whose origin,

motion,

change of direction,

are less than imaginable

and I, not in the time and the space

from which sighting is imaginable.

I’d much rather be writing of the stench

of marigolds on my fingertips pulling

me, nose first, into marigold heart.

Of breathing: a dangerous profession. In.

Out. And the insolence to do it again.

Of smiles exchanged. Instead,

I write of a cat-bitten grasshopper,

still grass hopping, entrails trailing

or of the Möbius strip of living

within sight of suicide. Maybe

it’s that every other lifetime

I write of waking after sleep

and this lifetime is the other.

by Maren O. Mitchell

(Published in “The Arts Journal”)

WESTERNESS

Fifty years ago Cat’s Ankle could have been

where you always wanted to live…ever since

you wanted to live some place.

Store fronts posture

to keep up with each other;

store purposes as constant as the Western illusion.

Hitching posts wait patiently beside parking meters

for dog food horses. Daytime walkers

become nighttime contenders for mutual fear.

Side streets take years off the town.

The woman raising her window

to let in her nightly purple sage

recognizes a friend in the plain midnight mirror,

the one who will be around as long as she.

And she is content. Although she’s read

that only six skins separate one body from another.

Further out, splotched by cottonwood groves,

headstones go back to Cole Younger and starlight.

But you must return to town—

the one shadow you fear, following.

The showdown with the sun,

the walk up Main Street’s canyon, await.

Always. And you always shoot yourself.

by Maren O. Mitchell

(Published in “The Richmond Broom”)