Sherry Chandler

Crystal Wilkinson

Terrain

the map of me can�t be all hills and mountains even though i�ve
been geographically rural and country all my life. the twang in my
voice has moved downhill to the flat land a time or two. my taste
buds have exiled themselves from fried green tomatoes and rhubarb
for goats� milk and pine nuts. still i am haunted by home. i return
to old ground time and again, a homing black bird destined to
always return. i am plain brown bag, oak and twig, mud pies and gut
wrenching gospel in the throats of old tobacco brown men. when my
spine crooks even further toward my mother�s i will continue to crave
the bulbous twang of wild shallots, the gamey familiarity of oxtails
and kraut boiling in a cast iron pot. i toe-dive in all the rivers seeking
the whole of me, scout virtual african terrain trying to sift through
ancestral memories, but still i�m called back home through hymns
sung by stout black women in large hats and flowered dresses. i can�t
say the landscape of me is all honeysuckle and clover cause there have
always been mines in these lily-covered valleys. you have to risk the
briar bush to reach the sweet dark fruit, and ain�t no country woman
all church and piney woods. there is pluck and cayenne pepper. there
is juke joint gyrations in the youngun-bearing girth of this belly and
these supple hips. all roads lead me back across the waters of blood
and breast milk, from ocean, to river, to the lake, to the creek, to
branch and stream, back to the sweet rain, to the cold water in the
glass i drink when i thirst to know where i belong.

— Crystal Wilkinson, originally published in Appalachian Heritage
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Crystal Wilkinson is the author of two short story collections, Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street, both from The Toby Press. She won Morehead State University’s The Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature in 2002. Crystal is also a member of the Affrilachian Poets. She is currently at work on a novel, and if the reading she gave at the Holler Poets reading in March is any indication, it will be a blockbuster.

Crystal is a great writer and a great mentor. She was assistant director of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, where she served as writing mentor and taught creative writing classes, and chair of the creative writing department for the Kentucky Governor School for the Arts. She has served on the faculty of MFA programs at Spalding University and Indiana University and is currently Writer-in-Residence at Morehead State University. Crystal currently offers workshop sessions in both fiction and poetry in the Midway Writers Workshops.

“Terrain” won the 2008 Denny C. Plattner Award in Poetry from Appalachian Heritage. I apologize to Crystal and the poem that I can’t get the poem right justified. You can see it in its proper form at this link (pdf file).

Train I ride is 16 coaches long…

This photograph was taken looking westward with my house creeping up behind, though I can still outrun it. The train you see in the distance is traveling northward. Once it gets to Cynthiana, it follows the Licking River through Harrison, Pendleton, and Kenton Counties over the Ohio River to Cincinnati. It�s a freight train. The last passenger train, other than expedition railroads, ran through this part of Kentucky in about 1972. I was in graduate school at the time at the University of Kentucky. I cut classes to ride the last train to Morehead State for a Richie Havens concert.