Almanac, and: Coker Creek

Abstract

Almanac, and: Coker Creek Summar West (bio) ALMANAC I was the child in the dusk who heard her mother's voice as it arched across the house, became a background like the sizzling of power lines or sprinklers in the heat. I kept riding my bike, jumping sidewalks and banks. Flat-out lied when I came home and said, I forgot the time. That wasn't the only lie. I wasn't a child when my grandmother said on her porch, my halting place: I was never in love with him. Matter-of-fact, words as steady as her ritual of watering the flowers in the evening. I had been the one confessing, rattling on at twenty like my childhood bike chain. To sit and talk of my friend, never uttering the word boy when all I'd ever wanted to say was the scent-skin-tense of women. An erasure of boy had not been my first failure of language, the first time I laughed and talked to hide my tears. Call it a coming out foretold by the begonias and petunias, witnessed by my grandmother. So when I asked about her marriage to a man, how else could she respond? Who knows how she loved him. I only know how she loved me enough to slant the truth. [End Page 72] COKER CREEK Calls to me along highway sixty-eight's signs for the Lost Seaand the stretch of rambling on about relatives dead and gone,the long inquiry about the kingdom of heaven. Look, up ahead on the mountain—the place my grandmothers are from— always at a distancealways a visit. Come over Unaka, come over Cataska,go back to the timber clear-cut for decadeson Cherokee land. Let the record show:Chera courses through all the rootsand veins and names. This is one more place granted to white men after the Revolutiona lineage of soldiers and squatters preachers and moonshinersSaturday nights and Sunday mornings. But it was a womanwho rode over five hundred miles by mule to fetch the deed.I go after you, Pollyanna. [End Page 73] Legend says white men found gold when a woman let the secretslip during a dance. Why is the most dangerousplace on a map a woman's mouth?So begins another obsession with extraction. Whipporwill Yellow DogHotwater Calf YokeParis UnderwoodAnnette for all the longing. Witness once told me great-great-aunt Cynwent to the mines by night panned for gold by dayto feed her family. I think about their hungeras endless as coal-black night or the shaking of silt back and forth in a pan. I think about more removal than gold. Cherokee marched from their home,how their bodies made the Trail of Tears. [End Page 74] I can point where on a map of erasures or we can takeJohn Muir trail to the falls where Legend says a Cherokee princess comes and goes. I'm nearing an end though I've only begunto dredge like Cotton does when he's in the creek besidemy parents' house. Now tell me your Coker Creek,the water where you cannot stay and the alluvium you cannot leave. [End Page 75] Summar West Summar West's poems have been published in a variety of places, including 491, Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, Ellipsis, New South, Prairie Schooner, Still, and Tar River Poetry. Born and raised in east Tennessee, she currently lives in coastal Connecticut with her partner and their two daughters. Copyright © 2019 Berea College