All in by Kari Gunter-Seymour
by Kari Gunter-Seymour
I want to say it has rained for weeks.
Rain, such an easy metaphor for grief.
All those stages, storms
spinning up from distant dust—
emotional whack-a-mole.
Aren’t we all equal parts tender and not?
What about clouds of irrational hoopla
creeping unbridled up the spine,
anchoring inside the throat,
lodging countless bids to break free—
one careless slip loosing a shriek
of crazed birds skyward?
Nights, I replay footage—
time travels torn from my marrow,
mirages gone rogue and sour,
curse the wisps of nostalgia I cannot touch.
I wear my mother’s predilections,
my sister’s thirst, answer
to the hunger of being left behind,
Hard as I try, I cannot love these storms,
their beaded duplicity of air
wagging a wet finger in my face.
Death convolutes what’s ill faring,
the creek bitter cold with last year's snow.
I can’t stop holding my breath.
______________________________________________________________________
Kari Gunter-Seymour, Poet Laureate of Ohio, focuses on lifting up underrepresented voices including incarcerated adults and women in recovery. She is the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology Women Speak. Her poetry collection, Alone in the House of My Heart, received the "2023 Book of the Year Award" from American Book Fest. Find her work in Verse Daily, World Literature Today, The New York Times, and Poem-a-Day.
by Kari Gunter-Seymour
She’s lived here all her life,
a gift to know this land, its seasons,
tastes, smells, mindful of its wants—
even knowing every acre was once taken
by violence. We all have mortifications,
history’s footprints threaded among the trees.
From the porch, sunset paints the surface
of the pond, pregnant with twigs
and twitching insects, a Gaia of breeze
strums shuffled reeds.
She’s had a good cry, one that could
have left a lesser woman sharp-cornered.
Later she will wash the dishes,
her face splashed and wakened,
her life unremarkable as the house fly
balanced on her dinner plate,
rubbing its bristly bowed legs together.
______________________________________________________________________
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and a recipient of a 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship Grant. Her poetry collections include Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press, 2022) and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila Na Gig Editions, 2020), winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily, World Literature Today, The New York Times, and Poets.org.
by Kari Gunter-Seymour
Problem was, she felt too much
or not at all, a practiced yearning
that had no name. Her kids grown,
gone, forty years behind her,
fields rutted, shutters listless,
the barn propped and cock-eyed,
all those young bride prayers wasted.
Creatures like sheep, used to traveling,
know about moving on, guided by
the compass of their will, boredom
an affliction that can’t be outrun, desire
a grassy knob worth dying for. How
utterly a body is overruled by heartache.
Outside red oaks thrash, tangled
in root and bird song and whatever
might fall from the sky.
Her last undoing was to set her sassy
banties free to peck and roam,
scratch out a destiny of their own.
_____________________________________________________________
Kari Gunter-Seymour’s poetry collections include A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen, winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award, and Serving. Her poems appear in numerous journals including Verse Daily, Rattle, The New York Times, and on her website: karigunterseymourpoet.com. She is the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project (WOAP) and editor of the WOAP anthology series, Women Speak, volumes 1-6. She is Poet Laureate of Ohio.
