This selection, chosen by guest editor Sierra Farrare, is from Alone in the House of My Heart by Kari Gunter-Seymour (Ohio University Press 2022).
Cousin
Poetry the way he entered the world,
he uncoiled casually, stumping
how deeply his roots were fixed:
Some are born a willow, some an oak,
arms overhead to demonstrate
how trees flex their bodies.
We raced motorcycles, camped hollers,
skinny-dipped quarries, spit
watermelon seeds, snitched cigarettes
and hits off his daddy’s Jim Beam bottles.
He grew to favor throaty blues,
flask in his pocket, joint behind his ear,
Oxy and Vikes, just for fun,
his laughter addictive, women
all ages loved his bad ass.
This morning brittle branches spike
jagged shadows across his neglected lawn,
the sky bruised like a drug-addled vein.
I cock my head, wait for some
perfect sound, the silence so heavy
cicadas pause their keening.
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the 2020–24 poet laureate of Ohio and the author of A Place So Deep inside America It Can’t Be Seen. A ninth-generation Appalachian, she is the editor of I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices and the founder and host of the seasonal performance series Spoken & Heard. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, New Ohio Review, One, and numerous other publications.
Sierra Farrare is a short fiction writer from Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to a limited self-published run of her collection, Friday Night Hand Grenade, you can also find her work featured in Pretty Owl Poetry and University of Baltimore’s Welter.
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