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1074 Marcia Road

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Coal River Road, family, imagery, Kathy Ackerman, Livingston Press, nature photography, poetry, Southern writing on July 11, 2025| 6 Comments »

Albert Mountain Sunrise

[with 3 poems by Kathy Ackerman]

Heritage Lost

Hills are keening,

yellowed voices of serious photos

call me home to “precious memories,

how they linger,

how they ever flood my soul.”

How in a displaced caravan

we went to lay her down

in shining soil,

flecks of coal on shovels

in the hills of familiar gravestones.

It had to be that church,

that pastor’s family name,

Rock of Ages, Beulah Land.

How odd to call it home and feel it so

without a waiting bed of down

to follow the wake,

all of us gone north for good,

except for this.

How we walked between

the railroad and the shallow ditch

collecting tadpoles in a pail

we’d flush in the motel’s aqua bathroom

because I would not understand.

Death, a newborn slippery thing.

How the stone had to be a heart

to bear the name of Mother,

how the heart had to be a stone

to be left behind

in its rightful place

in the hills near the church

near the home place bought by strangers.

We packed the memories once again

in bursting overnight bags,

left the motel beds unmade,

because we could

and settled into our procession.

CB radios, Thermoses, Styrofoam,

we headed back up north

to our factories, unions, high schools,

without looking backward.

Kathy Ackerman

❦ ❦ ❦

Where is home? Is it a house number, 1074 Marcia Road, a side yard, fence, and oak tree I can still see as clearly as when I was 10? I could walk right through the carport sixty years later and show you exactly where we buried my hamster. Or is home a garage full of cardboard boxes and bric-a-brac from four other homes of parents and grandparents, houses you only spent a few dozens of nights in altogether? Is home the towns those houses occupied? The states? Whose home is your home? Whose place is yours?

I was barely four when we moved from Niagara Falls to Memphis. Not until years later was I able to piece together the stories of my parents’ migration, how they drifted together across those red clay counties of piedmont North Carolina, then pinballed via Atlanta to New York before birthing me. All my solid early childhood memories abide in those eight years in Shelby County, Tennessee, that little four-square subdivision on the outskirts of Memphis.

Then we moved. And moved again. The sixth graders in Delaware mimicked my accent and immediately nicknamed me “Memphis.” It doesn’t take long for a 12-year old to figure out how important it is to fit in. For the next couple decades I can now see that I lived as if the place I was staying would never be the place I stayed.

Here in the rural South, when you meet someone new question number one is not, “What do you do?” but, “Where are you from?” One longs to fit in; one doesn’t want to whack the conversation with an axe by replying, “New York.” I invented my stock answer right quick: “Both of my parents are from North Carolina.” Subtext: “I want to be from North Carolina. I want you to let me be.”

I have now lived exactly 70% of my entire lifespan in North Carolina. NC driver’s license, NC property taxes, kids born in NC, grandkids too. Maybe being almost from here is an advantage. Every new state park we visit, every historical factoid, every endemic flower species I learn, every third generation progeny of a friend I greet while out walking – I tally them all securely in my calculus of belonging. Way back when Linda and I arrived in Durham a week after we’d married, a month before I started med school at Duke, we just assumed that in four years we’d be moving back to Ohio to be closer to her huge family. Now it’s been fifty-one years in The Old North State, forty-four of those in rural Elkin in rural Surry County. Lately we’ve started talking about downsizing, moving somewhere we can age in place through to the end of our allotted spans. Linda says, “You know where I’d really like to live?” Oh my God, is Ohio still calling her? Is the place we’ve been staying never to be the place we stay? She looks at me level, no joking here. “Winston-Salem.”

Well, I guess we are from North Carolina. It’s nice to be home.

❦ ❦ ❦

Cul-de-sac

From Coal River Road to White Mist Lane

is more than forty years,

several hundred miles

as the crow truly flies, one point to another,

and sometimes back,

no straighter than a crooked river

wrecked by mines.

Here the landscapers claw in stony earth

to sow some seed

while wings of straw fly it away.

My lawn’s a futile thing

where rocks and trees should be.

I stoop to gather stubborn stones,

pretend I do it for the grass,

but in their quartz and granite peaks

admittedly ground to bits by time

I find the mountain of my blood

and hear the ancient syllables spilled,

silenced now by cul-de-sac

and swaying Mylar storks,

a neighborhood of strangers

increasing overnight.

Kathy Ackerman

❦ ❦ ❦

Linda spots the book on top of my pile, next in queue for reading, and its title speaks right up and makes its demands known. “We need to save this one for Jodi.” Who was born in Ohio but lives in coal country, and whose career has been to tell its stories as naturalist and interpreter in the New River Gorge near Beckley, WV. Indeed, I’ll share it with Jodi, this book I bought from a friend whose poetry I’ve admired for many years, whom I’ve come to know better through the North Carolina Poetry Society Board, and whose more recent book I featured here three years ago. Now I open the book, though, and out spill the connections and intersections. Kathy, just up the road there at Isothermal Community College, I never realized we’ve come from the same place!

Kathy Ackerman grew up in Ohio (like me, at least from 8th grade on) far from her birthplace and her family’s heritage. In later years she has mainly visited the old home state for funerals, but the landscapes, place names, family memories, and fortunes (or lack thereof) of West Virginia are the palette from which she paints these poems of Coal River Road. This collection is yearning for home, but home is something slippery and out of reach. A bright fleck in a stone might remind her of the mountain in her blood, but returning to stand on the that mountain she discovers a hint of strangeness and regret. Perhaps the yearning itself is home, the uprooted and cast adrift feeling that keeps a person looking for something solid, for something that means.

I identify with these poems. Kathy uses imagery and memory not just to disclose the past but to define the present. She can only be the person she is because she’s traveled the twisting roadways through old hollers and coves as well as the West Virginia Turnpike straight up to Ohio’s new sown lawns. And finally I-77 South. Although Kathy Ackerman didn’t settle in this state until a full ten years after I did, I can assure you that she is from North Carolina.

❦

Coal River Road by Kathy Ackerman is available from Livingston Press. Her more recent book is Repeat After Me from Redhawk Publications (2022).

❦ ❦ ❦

Whitesville, WV

Because we never had the conversation

I am following a hearse that winds

down Coal River Road toward Whitesville.

How to say irrational to bury you here

in the only land we own outright,

owned for generations

though none of us can visit your grave

in less than a day.

These plots foreshadow the ending

no matter the story you wanted to tel.

you never wanted to return, like this or not.

You’d cringe to see this dingy place,

smelling of rot as if what remains

of the Big Coal River

seeps in each night while the corpses await

their faraway bereaved.

For once, I’m relieved to by unromantic.

That body is merely a souvenir

a keepsake – you wore it every day.

Symbol. Skin. Form.

I am relieved to know you’re not really here

though there’s nowhere else for us to go

to pay our respects. It is not respect

that brought you here, but silence,

the failure to make a better plan

because you never learned to say goodbye.

Kathy Ackerman

❦ ❦ ❦

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Speaking with the Dead

Posted in family, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, family, imagery, Joan Barasovska, Main Steet Rag, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing, Unblessed Unsung on June 27, 2025| 10 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Joan Barasovska]

The Box

They are quiet in their photographs,

my mother’s dead.

They speak to me, entreat me to explain.

A magnifying glass held to their fading faces

proves scant help.

To listen, I must listen to myself,

to memory.

Joan Barasovska

❦ ❦ ❦

To speak with the dead, one must listen to oneself.

Before my mother died we talked about dying. Her dying. When I helped her fill out the living will forms. Before the first visit from the palliative care nurse. As her health took yet another sudden stepwise decline. I asked her, not at all for the first time, “Do you want to go to the doctor? To the hospital?” “No. No.” And then we didn’t talk about it any more.

Instead we talked with the dead. Some people approaching the end of their life close themselves off. They draw the veil about their diminishment and turn inward. My mother, though, turned outward, like a great flower that slowly pivots throughout the day to face the sun. Like one of those giant radio telescopes that can hear the earliest whispers of creation, she became a passive receptor who welcomed anything anyone desired to bring her. I brought her the dead.

Photographs of the dead. Some were in antique frames, some dropping from ancient scrapbooks, most of them loose in envelopes or the bottom of cartons. She and I collected them all into a grand new album and along the way we told each other stories. “Isn’t that Lucy and Ted just married? Linda and I met them at Nana’s reunion 50 years ago. And there’s you with Lucy, both teenagers. Now here’s Carlyle in the little car Grandpop built for him. I guess it was already obvious he’d be crazy for cars the rest of his life.”

Some stories she told me; some I imagined while she fingered the photos and nodded in silence. At the moment of shutterclick, each photo was created within its world of vast significance. Those worlds dissipate, decrescendo in brilliance like photons that have traveled light-years to reach our eyes, red-shifted with distance in an expanding universe. But during those moments together my mother could enter their world and hear them, the dead, their voices.

Next month it will have been a year since my mother exhaled her last breath. Her living essence has joined the whispers of the cosmos. Her essence still lives in me and all who knew her and who have not yet joined the dead. Yesterday I found a photo Grandpop took of Mom at age 10 surrounded by her wonderful collection of dolls. There it is, that hint of a smile on her lips, in her eyes, the joyful teasing hint I have seen in person a million times. But looking at that photo is not when I miss her most. The pang of absence strikes me most sharply when a random question pops into my head: “Did you have boy friends before Dad? What was it like to be living 500 miles from Nana and Grandpop when I was born? Who is that standing behind you in this photo?”

Some of the questions I may once have asked but don’t recall her answers. Most are questions it never occurred to me to ask while we were together on the earth. Now when I pull that grand album off the shelf, her picture will also be among those gone mute. But not completely so. Memory tangles and untangles itself to create new stories. I will listen to my heart. I am now the one who must speak with the dead.

❦ ❦ ❦

In Shul on Rosh Hashonah

Elizabeth is home with the baby; Ben sits beside his sons

on the hard bench. All three wear yarmulkes, Ben is draped

in his tallis – Reuben and Joseph are too young. The black

straps of tefillin tightly encircle his left hand and arm;

the boxes press into his forehead and bicep.

The drone of men praying, the vibrato of the old rebbe raised

above their voices, the distant murmur and rustle of women

and girls in the balcony above, and Ben’s own chanted Hebrew,

eyes closed, davening deeply – all are as necessary and familiar

as his heart’s beats and his quiet breaths.

His boys can barely wait for the blowing of the shofar,

the twisted, ridged ram’s horn the see near the ark.

Ben hears Joe whisper to Rube, “When?” and Rube’s loud

“Shush!” Ben is clean-shaven, unlike the older men. He goes

daily to Boris Adelman, the barber on 21st Street, who keeps

a chin mug painted with his name, Benjamin Nax, on a shelf.

His disc of soap, his ivory brush. Boris strops the razor on a

lng leather strap It’s sinful to let his mind wander like this

on a Day of Awe. He gives thanks for his children: Rube,

a little man; Joseph, their angel. now Elsie.

He was once a boy sitting with is father and grandfathers

in shul. His chest hollows around their absence. They could easily

be dead, and his uncles and mother, lined up to be shot on the

edge of a ditch. No wisdom from grandfathers for his boys.

The cantor raised the shofar to his lips and fills his lungs.

Joe has fallen asleep leaning against him, and starts awake at the

first blast. Intervals of blast and chant: Tekia! Sevarim! T’ruah!

Renew our days! Mercy is aroused! Judgement is removed!

Reverberating in the small chilly building, this uncanny sound

of the desert, the First Temple, the shtetl, and the ninety-nine

synagogues of Minsk.

Ben takes his boys’ hands, and the three are surrounded

on the sidewalk by greetings: L’shonah tovah! Gut yontif!

A gut gebentsht yor! It isn’t his name, Benjamin Nax.

It was changed at Ellis Island, from Binyomin Nakhimovsky.

What is there to believe, in America?

Joan Barasovska

❦ ❦ ❦

. . . . .

Love flares in the sleeper’s dream,

blue as a Sabbath candle flame, warm as

the kitchen of her grandmother’s house.

from Elizabeth’s Travels

Her story begins in cruelty concealed and unspoken. It wends its way through hardship and regret, between guilt and resentment. It ends as it started, in death. But that is not all. That is only one harsh thread of the story. The story feeds itself with family love and devotion. It clings to hope in darkness. The story opens its pages because of the expansive heart of the one who desires to be its guardian, its intrepid explorer, its teller. Thus the journey of Unblessed, Unsung by Joan Barasovska.

There is a bit of mountain trail that winds across a mile or two of bald slopes at Bluff Ridge along the Blue Ridge Parkway. If the summer grass has grown waist high and the cows have not been pastured there this season, the trail is obscured, untraceable except for this: in the 1930’s, the Civilian Conservation Corps placed concrete markers, posts two feet tall, to guide the hiker along the path. Joan has found her own waypoints to reveal her own path into her past: a few fading sepia photographs; recollections written down by cousins; conversations with a last survivor. To these she has applied the poet’s toolkit, observation and imagination, to render this book and bring it to life.

Some of the questions Joan must ask about her grandparents have discernable answers. Where did they grow up? What year did they arrive in America? But many answers are as intangible as smoke from an extinguished candle and as difficult to clasp. Joan uses what clues she can amass – a facial expression in an old photo; a fragment of tale from a distant cousin – to build an enlarging picture. If we don’t always know exactly how this man and that woman felt, at least we know that they did feel and we can hope to project their circumstances into our own dilemmas and responses. Considering another person’s memories is a fruitful impetus to reliving our own memories. At the beginning of Unblessed, Unsung Joan quotes Zora Neale Hurston: There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. Here is a story borne and bared. May these poems now weave and tangle more stories, a never-completed tapestry.

❦

Joan Barasovska lives in Orange County, North Carolina, USA, and has authored three previous poetry collections. Unblessed, Unsung is available from MAIN STREET RAG.

❦ ❦ ❦

Listen

If I told you I hear their voices

in the apartment on Christian Street,

would you visit there with me?

At the table where they take their meals,

or by the stove, where Elizabeth stands,

adding potatoes to stretch a soup?

Between husband and wife,

what heat, what chill, what

balance of force and yield?

The rooms are scrubbed raw-clean,

it’s crowded, voices are raised,

the three children witness everything.

It’s a time before parents learned

to safeguard childhood. If I told you I hear

cruelty, in word if not in deed, trust me.

Joan Barasovska

❦ ❦ ❦

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Pocket Knife

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged Because I Did Not Drown, Bill Griffin, imagery, Main Street Rag Publishing, nature photography, NC Poets, Pat Riviere-Seel, poetry, Southern writing on June 13, 2025| 10 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Pat Riviere-Seel]

Wander Until You Find the Trail Back

How insistent the world wakes you,

Daylight pushes through dense blinds.

A one-note bird insists on an answer.

Always the same pulsing – waking – wanting

to know what next? How to parse a life

caught in mid-flight, the light a web woven

in the night. All the things we never talk about.

We let the stories we tell ourselves define us.

What would we be without the myths?

Desire contains ire. De- as in deconstruct,

dismantle the dire. Desire nothing. Construct

your own lifeline. Getting lost may be the last

best thing that ever happens.

Pat Riviere-Seel

❦ ❦ ❦

I think I know where I’ve been and I imagine I know where I’m going. But do I really know anything? I certainly don’t know where this narrative is going. Josh and I are sitting beside a rutted gravel track eating lunch. It’s the last meal of our last day on the trail. Sometime this afternoon a banged up old van will arrive to carry us all back to base camp. While the boys joke around and my co-leaders snooze, I gather some of the trash left by previous loungers and eaters. I lift a sandwich wrapper and discover a pocket knife.

The summer of 1969 Linda and I started going together. About a week after we held hands for the first ime – had we even kissed yet? – I got on a bus in Akron at 5 AM with three fellow Boy Scouts to spend two weeks at Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. Now it’s the summer of 1983 and our own two kids are teenagers. Josh, our eldest, and I have just finished ten days of hiking Philmont together with his troop – desert plateau and Ponderosa pine forests, rushing gorges and a 12,000 foot peak. Our big adventure is ending. I stuff refuse into my sandwich bag and discover that pocket knife.

In the summer of 2025 I rummage my desk to return that knife to my pocket. I can’t find it. Turn out the pockets of all my pants, upend my day pack, creep beneath the desk and out to the car under all the seats – not there. I have often pictured the Boy Scout who lost that fine, top-of-the-line Swiss Army Scout’s knife. He had sat there on the ground eating lunch the day before I did. The knife stealthily squeezed its way out of his pocket. He littered his garbage on the knife and never missed it until that night. Too late. Karma. He violated the ethic of Leave No Trace and relinquished his knife to me, diligent trash picker. And such a knife – lock-blade, screw driver & awl, little tweezers and trademark Victorinox toothpick. I will carry it for over forty years, sharpen it and oil it, admire it every time I pull it out and wonder at my worthiness.

Now I’m imagining someone else finding my knife, excuse me, our knife. Beside a hiking trail where I had squatted to identify a flower? In a parking lot stuck to tar? Appreciate it. Or don’t. I held it for a good long time. This is letting go.

❦ ❦ ❦

How to Rebuild Community

Coming out of the pandemic

+++ I’m having trouble

knowing how to act.

+++ This new landscape

more hardscrabble than highway,

+++ a tightrope walk

not a garden promenade.

When I offer my outstretched hand

+++ to a woman

I’ve just met, she fixes me

+++ with a chilly stare, says,

I don’t shake hands anymore.

+++ And suddenly I’m ashamed

of my bacteria-filled palm, its brazen

+++ need for connection.

Is it also infected with The Virus? I’m tempted

+++ to rush away, down the hall

and lather that offending hand

+++ with hot sudsy water, the way

we scrubbed our vegetables not so long ago.

How do I move from cautious

+++ to community?

The knitters know. When they notice

+++ the chaos in the coffee shop,

the customers shouting out orders,

+++ the din around them rising like bread,

impossible to ignore,

+++ Jane stitches herself

to the cash register,

+++ Linda begins bagging cookies

Cathy slices strawberry cake. Their hands

+++ smooth the angry air

grown thick with impatience

+++ and want.

The knitters’ hands fly like needles –

+++ knit one, purl two,

opening, closing, shaping. Each palm

+++ holds a single need to serve.

Pat Riviere-Seel

❦ ❦ ❦

Pat Riviere-Seel writes and writes and writes. Has written, is writing, will write. A solid lifetime of essays, poetry, technical pieces, editing, teaching – her life has been creating with words. Because I Did Not Drown is a portmanteau of Pat’s life, her writing life, her life in writing. A memoir fits pieces into a whole – dates and sequences, family and relationships, loves and desires. A good memoir colors them all with the deeper hues of the soul – fear and disappointment, aspirations and joy. This memoir achieves all that plus one more thing: the crystalline beauty awakened by poetry. Each memory in prose is accompanied by one or two poems. Poems touch and reveal the soul of these moments in Pat’s life.

I discover myself in these poems, not as outward subject but inward seeker. I often find that I more fully inhabit and participate in the lines of a poem that in a paragraph of prose. The distilled essence of poetry is like volatile spirit that shoots straight from tongue to consciousness. Wonderfully intoxicating. A draught that frees and connects. Next time we meet, Pat and I, we shall surely dance.

❦

I can still see that knife. I thought to replace it but the model is no longer manufactured and someone wants eighty bucks on Ebay for one like it. Plus it wouldn’t be the object found, the discovery, the reward. Nevertheless, I can still see that knife because this week I found it shoved in the back of a drawer. Where is this narrative going? Is nothing ever truly lost that once occupied a space in one’s heart? Bosh! Or perhaps the finding is the thing rather than the thing that’s found. Tomorrow I will sit to eat a sandwich with my son and I won’t be able to keep myself from peaking beneath the napkin.

❦

Because I Did Not Drown by Pat Riviere-Seel, a memoir in prose and verse, is available from Main Street Rag Enterprises.

Selected poems from previous books by Pat Riviere-Seel:

The Serial-Killer’s Daughter (2009)

Nothing Below But Air (2014)

When There Were Horses (2021)