Coal Camp

Coal Camp Elizabeth Pope (bio) 1 In the crook of Slaughter Hollerleans a blue house in the branch where God grew a wife. She'd dangle along banksidedamp as a mermaid pooling the gloom of creek across her knuckles, coaled as a fishstrewn stagnant on embankment. Home was never a place she thought to leave. 2 She met her husband, blackened, splintered on Fireside—skunkdrunk with sun, wet parched neck, raw, crude, radiant as a cut. She witnessed this before—tarmac motes, oil rings rainbowed at coal tipple slurry. So much night without stars. Her waterface was a stomach chewing and churning, her lust—a pot rising to boil. His was the tarnished light, catching, raining the bottom scorch. 3 Their house was built upon what her husband brought back from War—a sound dark, quiet as the mine. A silence that ruined himas it sometimes does. She supposeda shade tree flowered inside him, [End Page 121] flowered until it gnarled, roots boreclaws into his sun, and he became the dark. 4 Her haunted husband was put to surveying the vein of the gorge. She thought it fitting for him to harvest buckets of remedy—coal as the lamp to quench his silence. He didn't pick at it like the rest of men mining for blackstar, shucking away, fingering gunpowder, searching for seedlingsdumped down there to grow. He didn't pick at it like a scab. He ran it, stuck dynamite in its side, and burst Julythe way kids poured vinegar and baking soda in a sealed jar and shook it, the way it shattered. He shook them when it shot dusty clouds on the ceilingthat never rained down. 5 She gathered the chicks born every April, homeless henspecking boot-mashed yolks. Put her ear to so close to clapboard it made her body drumlike closeline rattle. The house blackened, the creek, the stone, all the linen sheets turned ash. When her husband built this house, never did she fathom the sounds of shatter.Forests twisted arthritic into muddy scarecrow, into kites, into root stools. Into anything hands folded over. [End Page 122] 6 She recalls running downstream from that haunted sink.The bright blue morning floating down to baptize, steady as a stiltwalker. 7 Abandoned old house where everything once mattered.The dog-tired,sunk porchspokethe ancient omen: abandon all hope. Words she wore as a cotton dress unraveling thread. He wore the distant sun when evening swept over his water eyes,and his spirit was drunk enough to rise a shaky boat acrosshis stormface. 8 When her heirloom lilies bloom, she thinks of death and summerwild and bright like tigers, the names she labored,thirst—this ache to travel. [End Page 123] Elizabeth Pope elizabeth pope is a poet from an Appalachian coal-town in the mountains of Southeastern Kentucky. Her honors include an Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council, and her poetry appears in Euphony Journal, Rock River Review, The Fourth River, New Madrid, Appalachian Heritage, and elsewhere. Copyright © 2023 University of North Dakota