by Katherine Indermaur
Heavy rains open up
the earth in Appalachia.
Holes are in bloom
inside the old Blockbuster,
under the Dollar Tree.
Up the mountain,
a park ranger teaches me
to stomp & listen
for caves underground.
I want hiding to be
an everywhere possibility.
Like after the hurricane, toppled trees
make holes all over the yard,
red clay scars addled by torn
roots. I crouch to make miniature
houses in the scars, give them
yards of moss, roofs shingled
with acorn caps. Hiding them
grants me dimension just as
thoughts I can keep quiet about
make me clever, or want to be. Think
so many holes in hiding under neath.
Think sneak. Think their covers
of rhododendron & asphalt
& kudzu. I know from the old
homesteads that our fore fathers
lived in no better than burrows,
damp & unlit, everything of dirt.
Gammy covers her plaid sofa
with plastic, says we are blessed.
Doubt swirls in me like a dark drain,
glossy & tangling the roots of me.
On the porch, hummingbirds
buzz up to drink from the font
Gammy hangs & fills like sacrifice.
In the basement, I watch as
a touched centipede circles
herself. I crush her to a fetal c.
Katherine Indermaur is the author of the chapbook Pulse (Ghost City Press, 2018), winner of the Black Warrior Review 2019 Poetry Contest and the 2018 Academy of American Poets Prize, and editor for Sugar House Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Coast|NoCoast, Colorado Review, Entropy, Frontier Poetry, Ghost Proposal, the Hunger, New Delta Review, Oxidant|Engine, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA from Colorado State University. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she works for Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.