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I spy my love   along the ridge,   a silhouette   in shadows of black. I stand with my heart   a breakin’   ‘fore I fear   he’s not coming back. We were to be married   this autumn   but the war broke out   in June. With brothers at odds   in the fighting,   I fearContinue Reading

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They waited for me before they took him. I closed the car door, slogged past family, noted the numbed, distant faces and swollen, zoned eyes; passed the old country roses, sweet and sundry; passed his hand-crafted shed that smelled of fresh cedar, heard the bustle of birds all around, aflutter.Continue Reading

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With trepidation; I approached my childhood Appalachian home, a shack really, high above the railroad tracks.  The sole remaining object was the toilet, standing forlorn among the broken shards of rotten wood. A toilet, ironically, that we were never allowed to use, when there was a perfectly good leaf availableContinue Reading

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In: Nonfiction, Way Back When
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Sometimes situations interrupt what a person has planned. Repercussions are felt in several areas, like a faceted, imperfect jewel. As Chief Editor of Appalachia Bare, I have planned so many things this year, and, hopefully, they will all work out just fine. But a recent event occurred that put aContinue Reading

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Losing him at the instant of diagnosis, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind but hers, his grandmother watched You wink from view until no more than a grainy dot on the horizon’s last glorious performance of the Great Withdrawal. The picture of a small girl insisting on her way thisContinue Reading

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Christmas Eve 2018 A clock tick away from thirty my grandson lowers onto a chair beside me where we stare at the curious chiaroscuro of Christmas lights blinking in a pattern as undetectable as the reasons for his diagnosis. He sips air with the feeblest exertion of swamp-diseased lungs. SomeContinue Reading

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He was pale. Wrapped in a stark white blanket, cold and blind. The mother lay, one leg uncovered on top of the sheet, sweat dried along her forehead, resting from some sixteen hours. The child un-held. There was a father, outside in the desert cold, smoking. A witness to whatContinue Reading

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My grandson, Joshua Bathe, passed away last April after being diagnosed with an aggressive cancer five months earlier. The following is my poetic tribute to him.             Elegy to a Grandson           Grief undulates           like an inchworm           and just as slowly.           It forces one to use           the conditional tense:             HeContinue Reading