TROUBLESOME RISING DIGITAL ANTHOLOGY
Red Carpet
Chelyen Davis
Lonesome Road – Doc Watson
Look up, look down, that lonesome road
Hang down your little head and cry, my love.
Hang down your little head and cry.
The woman didn’t know how to swim, feared
the water. They said she was planning a trip to Florida.
The rain drummed down in the darkness,
emergency warnings blared.
The woman called for help as the water rose.
The darkest night I ever saw
Was the day I left my home, my love
The day I left my home.
By daylight, the heart of town was a swollen brown creek that lapped
in broken windows – no Florida blue ocean, no seagulls.
A home splintered, cracked open by endless water, crumbled
like cornbread on its journey down the creek, pieces cast
upon the banks and fetched up against the bent
railings of a drowned bridge.
And I never thought when we first met
This awful day would come, my love
Such an awful day would come.
From a dry corner two women looked for their missing friend, stared
across the flooded town and said they’d never seen it so bad,
not in 60 years.
But there, the women said, pointing to the bridge – recognizing
something in the unrecognizable mass –
there is her son’s college blanket
that she kept after he died.
And there, they pointed – draped over the bridge railing like it was being aired out to dry,
ruby as a Florida sunset –
there, her red carpet.
EASTERN BOX TURTLE
Chelyen Davis
Jim and his heavy boots
stepped right into the wet pile of splinters and nails, boards, leaves, tree limbs, trash.
He bent down and picked something up and then turned back to me, his hands held out.
I’ve got a job for you he said, and when I reached out he handed me
a baby box turtle,
shell colored like mud and sunshine, its little legs squirming, ready to run.
It was washed down from God knows where, far up some other holler,
some other creek where it hatched not that long ago, expecting –
if turtles expect anything –
a safe and quiet life crawling around the creek banks
and hillsides of Eastern Kentucky.
Instead, this flood had swept it away, like it had swept so many, tumbling and turning
whether we were in the water or not.
Put it somewhere safe, Jim said,
and I cupped this tiny life as it crawled across my hand, moving
faster than any turtle I had ever known in its drive to escape, to get away
from whatever new threat now clutched it – so much drama in its short life.
I carried it up the drive and showed it around, this little survivor, and everybody cooed
about what a cute baby it was,
what a miracle it was to find alive.
Seeking a place it would be safe if the creek rose again,
I set the baby turtle in the wet brown leaves on the hillside above James Still’s grave.
It pulled its wiggling legs into its tiny shell, possibly
the only safe place it knew in the swept-away world, and it waited, hoping –
if turtles hope –
for peace.
Golden Arches
Chelyen Davis
We stopped at the McDonald’s in Pikeville, Kentucky,
five hours after we fled a flooded town, not wanting to be a burden,
driving single file down a road with one lane blocked, passing a set of wooden porch
stairs standing solitary in an intersection, severed from the house it had belonged to, before.
After we passed mud-covered people on four wheelers checking out damage,
after flooded bottoms and the tops of houses peeking out of the brown water,
after the tree branches full of drowned clothes and toys and curtains and parts of lives,
after the white plastic chair turned over in the middle of the highway,
after we didn’t know if it was going to rain more, if the water would rise again, if the roads
would become more dangerous, if the people on four-wheelers were in more trouble,
after we drove to Whitesburg and found it flooded too, no way through,
after we crept through a flooded intersection because the car in front of us made it,
after we still had to turn back from a blocked road and creep through it again,
after we called friends to say don’t come this way, there is no way out here,
after we turned back to try another road,
after we stopped in Hazard to get gas, cash only,
after we found a road out,
after cell signals worked again,
after we left all that behind,
left behind all those who could not leave,
who would spend months helping each other recover from the unrecoverable –
after that
that chicken nugget tasted like safety,
like guilt
like relief
like grief.
Chelyen Davis’ writing has previously appeared in publications such as Appalachian Review, Still: The Journal, the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, and the Bitter Southerner. A native of Southwest Virginia, she currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.
Edited by Melissa Helton
Length: 272 pages
Releases: September 2024
