There Must Be Light
The poet laureate of Ohio—a ninth-generation Appalachian—on holiness, the murmur of autumn trees, and the anticipation of honeysuckle.
Golden Hour
Her perch a ladderback rocker
creaking the front porch,
she barely manages
to breathe in morning’s scent,
latch on to the colors,
before mountain air
skyjacks that clutch of memories.
Others scurry
beneath weathered floorboards,
keep the dead company.
Oak shadows kneel
to know the dirt.
I watch her palsied hands
make a gesture, as if
letting go a bird.
Dew drops glitter the grass,
the light of her
the nearest I know to holy.
Because This Could Go Either Way
It may not matter how this moment arrived,
though truth be told, it likely involved
my big mouth—not the first time
I found myself in a quagmire,
scrambling to put both oars in the water,
paddle to some sham of a shoreline.
All I ever wanted to be was someone soft,
forehead fringed in curlicues,
my name held an extra second in the mouth,
set free like a chickadee’s chirp,
a bit of glide to my stride.
All my dead breathe inside me now,
aroused and listening, forgetting their manners,
hooting accusations from tiny air sacs.
A barn owl balances a fencepost,
who-who’s a sigh.
Ryegrass nod seedless heads.
I never wanted nostalgia, only to listen
to trees murmur in the fall. Today I caught myself
wishing, tip-toeing the muck of winter,
fingernails gnawed, bangs damp and wooly,
lips zipped—all my splendid sorrows
a string of garbled tones.
The Devil You Say
Tonight my fickle emotions
channel the language of ancestral bones,
cleaved from earth’s loamy crust,
glacial, limestone on the tongue.
May’s milk moon spills its creamery
across waking meadows,
summons spring’s drowsy seedlings to rise,
the air a honeycomb of flutter and buzz.
Clusters of yellow dock yawn into the umbra,
their sighs a secret ministry.
Next month fireflies will rouse,
distract me with their blink and flee.
Coyote will trick the bluebird,
honeysuckle will stake its claim.
I have seen the sun own this land,
sky loosing so much blue,
trying to tell a story, a persistent
cluster of clouds covering its mouth.
When a hiss of something slithers in,
I tuck my toes, turn tail,
remind myself, for every shadow,
there must be light.
As Poet Laureate of Ohio, Kari Gunter-Seymour focuses on lifting up underrepresented voices in Appalachia, including incarcerated teens and adults and women in recovery. Her poetry collections include Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press, 2022), finalist for the NIEA award; A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila Na Gig Editions, 2020), winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award; and Dirt Songs (forthcoming EastOver Press 2024). Her work has been featured on Verse Daily, World Literature Today, The New York Times, and Poem-a-Day. She is a ninth-generation Appalachian.