BROKEN
why
am I
not
heart
broken
Today I read an Appalachian
magazine from 1961. Those essays
about pollution, poverty, shit schools
summoning what miracles they can,
all the stone lungs, the hunger
and addiction, landslides and floods,
all the snake-tongued politicians,
all the red-necked mamaws throwing bricks,
those essay coulda been written today.
And my rage rolls in its waning hibernation.
Chapped and unsure,
The first tender press of lips against my own,
Chapped and unsure,
Out behind her granny’s trailer
Where we’d skip through knee deep vines,
Uncaring of what hid beneath.
The first one to trip goes down laughing,
Hard and giddy,
Til the second one inevitably follows the tumbling,
Hard and giddy.
I remember I wasn’t the first one to lean in,
Though I might’ve been the first to want to,
As tenderly and shy as a child wants.
We’d go back inside hours later,
Bloody knee’d and kiss bruised,
Pretending we ain’t know how we got so
Bloody knee’d and kiss bruised.
Hand in hand seems an innocent thing then
To two girls who ain’t got a clue
But will learn, as the church’ll teach,
A sin is still a sin,
Even when it looks like two lil girls,
A sin is still a sin.
He comes through the screen door and stomps his boots clear on the porch, washes his hands in the bathroom, bulls into the kitchen to take his seat for meat and starch and gravy and I watch him masticate my grandmother’s offering, gristle glistening in his mustache, and damn if I don’t see a particle—just a mote or two—of the crazy that’s coming decades from now, of the change from reins and iron to rants and innocence, of the ghosts he’ll share his dinners with and ask after long past their deaths, and I know it has always been there like a landmine, waiting to pop a scream of smoke into the sky and chew up my mother’s bones, that little germ of crazy that each member of the family has, like fingerprints with teeth that sometimes bite everything they touch and sometimes bide their time for a healthy vein to strike.
I split it open with my thumbs
not gently.
The skin resists then gives,
like something that’s held on too long.
Inside,
a mess of red.
Seeds clinging to each other
in tight, silent clusters.
Little hearts stacked together
Innocent, unaware
they’re about to be eaten.
My hands stain.
The juice runs
not clean, not pretty.
It stains
like a heartbreak
not all at once,
but in slow drops.
I heard the one right behind us in the treeline the moment we arrived
They quickly settled into a quiet cacophony, the overlapping hoo-HOO-hoo of two timbres
And it occurred to me, that while I had occasionally heard, or rarer yet seen, AN owl – that this was the first time I had ever experienced owls, plural
So, as I sat in the cold, still darkness, I savored the long moment for the special event that it was
Marveling at both their counterpoint, as much as how it barely carried over the noise from the cars on the road just visible on the ridge
Traffic heavier than I expected for a pre-dawn Saturday
While watching the moon reflect icy silver off the chokeberry bush
For all of the women out there
whose ideas and opinions have been
talked over, interrupted, or dismissed.
Ladies, it’s time to roar.
From The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin
By Alison Goodman
This is no time to be lady-like,
polite, correct. It’s time to be rude.
Time to roar our truth, no matter
who tells us to hush.
Time to fight for our right to control
our own bodies, to get needed health care.
Time to speak out against guns everywhere,
against military invading our neighborhoods.
Be warned. We will be loud. Obnoxious.
We will roar.
In a narrow shop,
where dust clung like devotion,
a man found a tent that smelled
of wet canvas and dreams.
Red and white – stiped like a circus,
it breathed stories before it even opened,
the kind of shelter not made for war
but for the quiet battles of fatherhood.
He brought it home—
not to conquer, but to cradle.
Pitched in the yard beneath the Utah sky,
children stared at its stripes like flags of a new country:
one where laughter ran free,
where mosquitoes sang lullabies,
where marshmallows blistered on sticks.
This tent— no cathedral,
but holy all the same.
It caught the breath of stars,
held the steam of coco sipped at dawn,
and remembered each child’s name
in the rustle of its fabric.
Years passed.
Time frayed the seams,
but not the memory.
The tent waited,
faded but faithful.
Then— a daughter, grown,
walking the thin line
between loss and light,
found herself in a room scented
with incense and fate.
A medium with eyes like still water said,
“He is here.
He reminds you ‘The tent of red and white.'”
And the daughter, at first bewildered,
felt a flutter like canvas stirred by summer wind.
She remembered: the tent.
The warmth. The man. The fireflies.
And suddenly, heaven was not sky, but memory.
Not clouds, but canvas.
Not harps, but hammocks and hiking boots.
Later, as dreams came and went
like deer at the edge of sleep,
she saw him:
not grand, but glad.
Not eternal, but near.
He spoke of pride and love— she woke full.
Now she tends to those living,
weary but willing.
Her hands carry love like lanterns,
her father’s voice a hum beneath it all.
For what is heaven, if not this?
A tent, waiting.
A daughter, remembering.
A father, forever just outside the zipper,
lighting the fire,
watching the stars.
