Elaine Fowler Palencia

Confessing to James Still

Down from Dead Mare’s Branch
To flog your poems at a book fair,
Tired and inconvenienced
You sat in a corner
At the authors’ reception
Spitting fireballs.

“Know how all these people got here?
They wrote cookbooks!”

“The Agrarians?
The Agrarians did their farming on paper!”

Mr. Still, I need to tell you:
I once ghostwrote a cookbook,
Gained five pounds testing the recipes
And thought I’d grown into a writer.

And worse,
I come from farmers who sold their farms.
My country aunt said Mother
Never taught me to work hard
And she’s right.
I farm on paper, too,
Herding dictionary animals,
Not knowing a Roma bean
From a Kentucky Wonder,
Chasing butterflies
When I should be weeding similes.

—Elaine Fowler Palencia, forthcoming in Appalachian Journal
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Elaine Fowler Palencia is author of two of the most exquisite collections of short stories ever to be written: Small Caucasian Woman and Brier Country: Stories from Blue Valley , both from the University of Missouri Press, 2000. Her two poetry chapbooks, Taking the Train and The Dailiness of It, are from Grex Press, 2002. Elaine was chosen the 2004 Passager Poet, and her poetry has received one Pushcart nomination and an Illinois Arts Council Award. She is also an awesome doo-wop backup singer with a really cool shuffle and glide.

Although Elaine lives in Illinois now, she grew up in Morehead and is very active in the Green River Writers and the Kentucky State Poetry Society, so I consider her a Kentucky poet.

Elaine Palencia and Judy Milford at the Kentucky State Poetry Society annual meeting, October 2006