by Beth Uzwiak

Beth Uzwiak, southern ohio #4, graphite and watercolor on paper, 11 × 15 inches, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

Appalachia

Beth Uzwiak | July 2026 | Issue 53

Poetry

I.

I have not washed for days. I cannot part with the stench of you. I cannot sluice the stains. We are raw before the jar, ripe before the knife.

Rind me. Bite me against my teeth. Raise the roof of my lips. Rouse me where meadow ruts to mud. We are a barnyard.

This: sonorous immolation. Heat lightening cracks the hills to cull answering cries from circling coyotes. It is the yowl of you.

Jutting trees line each ridge and swoop to cast pine at our feet. Your body a resinous print, a relief in burnt sienna.

II.

The scorch of midday shimmers from the land long past nightfall. We flail until fireflies lift from the fields to mirror the skies and finally flicker out.

It is damp then the mist off the meadow and thick with a stew of stars. This valley a bowl turned upon itself: lathe and wood carve anew. I want you in Venusian meter, in milky luster from above, in ratio of planet to star ad infinitum.

III.

Take me to the jacked-up cab on cement blocks, with the moon-witness, with the moon sanded on one side—butter yellow slashed across the dash.

Give me the cave of your mouth. Hold a levee against age with freight train rhythm.

Confabulate where we cannot recall. Believe the lies that ferry our arched bones. It is the kick of creek against flank.

IV.

We eat duck eggs and brambles, potatoes and bread, crusty from the ashes. We eat greens like goats and drink water, hard. I climb all the trees and you, you gather them for kindling.

V.

The night comes when dusk and pond hold the same silken weight, except violet bands against which ironweed thrums. We float this lagoon, cocoon-like and stunned. I awake to my own panting. We drag to shore.

The night comes when we do not rise but watch Cassiopeia swim her sea nymph across midnight until magnetic clusters slip into dawn.

The night comes when we push a rusty golf cart, whooping, to the highest track—brake and battery lines long corroded—and with a tremendous shove hurl ourselves aboard for gravity to rattle us out. We holler, hammering hillocks—wham, wham, wham!—and careen out into the flatland, gleeful and spent.

The night comes when we build bowers inside ourselves to lodge what the land releases us from. Fever as fodder, soaked, we shuffle layers of need, one atop another. We stretch night to weigh less than the agony of everyday.

VI.

Hail arrives. It blisters the grasses. It dyes the horizon that neon grey green.

Fight me where thicket becomes gravel road of moonless pitch. Pace with me on upturned rock, on loose stone.

Dismantle my hours. Take from me my calendar and my empty penning.

Hurl me your words, I buck. In places where brambles blacken the banks, cicadas drill.

Find me a quay in all this shadow. I will rope up.

VII.

I cannot trudge your grief and you will not remember asking.

It is sandpaper against the gullies, it is the ever-dry thirst of shale. It is honeysuckle where it gives over to the gloaming.

I choose reason from the far end of my working-class flight. I chose to consider instead of to know.

She is an anchor of pain they tell me, she can only eddy. But in the sear of my pause, you are gone. I left my home and you were the first good crop.

VIII.

Here, the dark alley is not the dark creek bed.

There, the trees are felled. There, ravines open their mouths to swallow oven and tire. There, want is your boots parting wet grass.

There, here, need is a blade between my teeth, gnawed. (T)here it is a stem that becomes a twig that is then a branch.

It bends like a willow whip.

VIX.

I retrace the track that snaps taut between here and there, my path a constellation of strewn industry. In beauty remind me of spat ruin. Remind me so I can continue.

I follow sky from a dusty pick-up bed and call out to the first appearance of stars. I call out to the calculus of smog and clear-cut. I call out and come back.

X.

In the cradle of crickets, dawn comes. It steals mist from the pond for our cloaks. We dash inside its escape and arch our necks; it is day.

The whippoorwill silences her nightjar clatter. I bob to the surface of you. I breathe what evaporates, what the wrens wing through upon wakening. I am the smear of you.

Tomatoes swell with dew, the world slick. Ridgetops are scrubbed white, but night memory smolders.

You quieted me and in the space I was grown.

Beth Uzwiak is an artist and cultural anthropologist living in Philly.