Starlight and Sanctuary
A.B. Coleman invites readers to see childhood not just as innocence but as the seedbed of courage, care, and uncontainable wonder. Across night skies and lively kitchens, her verses make constellations out of ordinary moments.
Kentucky poet A.B. Coleman | Appalachian poetry collection | Salvation South poems
Mamaw’s Roof at 10pm is a Sanctuary
A vestibule of hope as I climb the slant, safely buried in the hillside, just tall enough to jump and haul myself up the eaves. Feeling grit against the backs of my legs in the long dark I look up into cavernous starlight. It falls around me in blankets, buffeted and held aloft by the tops of elms and sycamores that remember me before I remember myself. I feel the still warm shingles under my fingertips, a grounding rough texture amid the smell of wet earth and concrete block yielding to the green.
The hum of the electric fence urges me on, higher still, though it is not safe, until my small body is tilted with the axis of the world. I peer over the edge to the rest of the yonder, eyes sweeping the creeks and church in the distance until I see below again. Just so many feet, but still too high. I would tumble onto the grass and break like a small bird, but my heart leaps above the horizon in my chest, not grounded but soaring.
I pull it back into my knees, sitting up in the velvet dark. No bugs bother me, and in the stillness I am an army to myself, not tensed to fight but legion in the knowing of safety. I am not centered. I am not grounded. I am an expanse as vast as the universe, though my girl-body should fear, and I taste starlight. Now is not forever. Now is a short song I sing to myself as I cry. Tomorrow is and will be this same wonder, I just have to hold it till then. Like a garden fountain, twining threads of water through my core, that it should pass but be contained. Something necessary and beautiful, let it flow.
I scrape the backs of my legs as I pour myself off the roof. Two feet, one each thumping against the hard ground. I slip, but steady myself again on the mildew-coated gutter, black and white as the night sky itself. I push away, and yield to the feeling of gravity, pulling me down once again.
Kentucky poet A.B. Coleman | Appalachian poetry collection | Salvation South poems
The Soft Edges of Her Pigtails
Their twists closed with care and precision,
tell me that she has been cared for, but
it is in that tiny flash of stars
winking in the corner of her eye
as she smiles, that tells me
she is loved, fiercely,
and carefully enough to
create the kind of mischief that shapes
small constellations and whirls
galaxies into being.
Her brown eyes still, worried
only for a moment, as her mother
looks to her for an answer
she cannot give.
“We don’t have this word in Spanish?”
My eyes skim the paper
she is translating, in her lavender puffer coat,
in her aqua-soled sneakers,
over the laughter of her small brothers and cousins,
Eight year-olds don’t know the word “gender”
it isn’t in the word search of a Highlights
magazine, or episode of Octonauts.
I tell her “To some people it means boy or girl,”
“But I don’t think that matters, do you?”
She laughs and says no, because
they are there to pick up food
and why should it matter, if Tomas is
niño or niña or Spider-Man
when they are there
for Pop Tarts and peanut butter.
Turning my smile to her mother,
younger than me, yet so like my own
earnest pride radiating in waves that cover
her daughter
for holding her hand
and the pen,
in this moment.
I take the clipboard,
I do not ask for identification.
This family is hungry,
and they will leave with love
and frozen fish sticks.
Kentucky poet A.B. Coleman | Appalachian poetry collection | Salvation South poems
A.B. Coleman is a graduate of Berea College, the University of Maryland, and a native Kentuckian. She currently lives in Berea with a beagle that doesn't bark and two cats that won't hunt. She has previously attended and was greatly influenced by the Appalachian Writer's Workshop at Hindman Settlement School.