Arsenic Lobster poetry journal |
Issue Thirty Winter 2012 |
| Home | Current Issue | Contributors | Review | 2012 Pushcart Nominees | Order | Archive | Submission | About Us | Misty | |
HARLAN COUNTY Rachel Danielle Peterson Home is in the vocal chords— the sound. Lost now. My own murmur slips up to my mother’s room here in Harlan County, in the same hospital, the same headboard my mother fell into florescent lights, noise. The same blood stained on the same linoleum. Coincidence in Harlan County. Black Mountain, named for coal, the thick, fern-fingered ridges that expose my first birdsong: finches, cradle-space of Harlan County. My father whistled as he threaded his white soul into veins of grim, glittering earth until the ridgepoles lay stripped like naked thighs in Harlan County. We left the rock, the redbud’s soil that stained his fingers for the glacier-flattened, fettle fields of Ohio, but kept the Word, the steep syllables of Harlan County. No—I transgress with every line. I level my mother-tongue on highways, trail every diphthong, while my father, street-maker, story-shaper, still bloodies the sun for Harlan County. |
About Rachel Danielle Peterson Previous Poem | Next Poem |
| Home | Current Issue | Contributors | Review | 2012 Pushcart Nominees | Order | Archive | Submission | About Us | Misty | |