My great-great grandfather was a minister.
I think about him sometimes,
living a small life in a town bordered with darkness.
I try to imagine what his reaction was
to a daughter who was round at seventeen,
how he must have wept over the frozen ground
she was buried in not long after.
I wonder if she sat on hard wooden benches
as a child, listening to him preach about the right ways to be afraid.
It seems to me that most children
back then
already knew how to be afraid.

Home never means the same thing twice.
For the ones who came before us,
there was dusty ground, empty bellies,
frozen toes and wet wool.
My line sprung from Ohio
and Eastern Kentucky,
roots meeting at an intersection
in coal country. We survived,
we withstood,
we seasoned the pans
and weathered the storms.
Where the pines burst through
I can trace my blood like the rings inside a tree.