I Come from a Place So Deep Inside America
It Can’t Be Seen
by Kari Gunter-Seymour
White oaks thrash, moonlight drifts
the ceiling, as if I’m under water.
Propane coils, warms my bones.
Gone are the magics and songs,
all the things our grandmothers buried—
piles of feathers and angel bones,
inscribed by all who came before.
When I was twelve, my cousins
called me ugly, enough to make it last.
Tonight a celebrity on Oprah
imagines a future where features
can be removed and replaced
on a whim. A moth presses wings
thin as paper against my window,
more beautiful than I could ever be.
Ryegrass raise seedy heads
beyond the bull thistle and preen.
Everything alive aches for more.
Originally Published in A Place So Deep Inside America
It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2020).
Used with permission of the author
Read this and other poems by Kari Gunter-Seymour in A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen, available for purchase online.
All through Kari Gunter-Seymour’s striking and precisely rendered poem, we feel a bone-deep desire to be known, to be touched in the midst of both geographical and perhaps some greater isolation. Most of us have weathered such times in our lives, when we have felt shunned or insulted, or when we’ve been hidden away somehow, unseen and unheard, longing to change who we are. That’s part of the ache at the heart of this piece, yet the other, more redeeming part seems a deep draw to the natural elements around her—the moth “pressing wings/thin as paper against my window,” and the blades of ryegrass, which “raise/seedy heads/beyond the bull thistle and preen,” reaching for the light that feeds them. Gunter-Seymour’s last blazingly true line—“Everything alive aches for more”—might refer to the reach of moth and ryegrass for available light, but she also seems to point toward herself, seeking the light of connection and understanding, perhaps to be found only in the writing of this poem, in the sharing of her own strong and honest voice.
Invitation for Writing & Reflection: Have you ever felt so isolated from others, so alone, that you felt you could not be seen or heard? What brings you back to yourself at such moments, and gives you a sense of greater connection to others? You might begin with the poet’s line, “Everything alive aches for more,” then look around you at the people, objects, and aspects of nature, and write about whether or not this feels true to you.
ABOUT THE POET: Kari Gunter-Seymour
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and a recipient of a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Her poetry collections include A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila Na Gig Editions, 2020), which won the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award, and the chapbook Serving (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and publications including Rattle, ONE, The LA Times and The New York Times. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily, Cultural Daily, World Literature Today, and Poem-a-Day. A ninth generation Appalachian, she is the editor of I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices and the Women of Appalachia Project’s anthology series, Women Speak. She is an artist in residence for the Wexner Center for the Arts and a 2021-22 Pillar of Prosperity Fellow for the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio. More at karigunterseymourpoet.com
POETRY SELECTION AND COMMENTARY BY JAMES CREWS
James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. James teaches at SUNY-Albany and lives with his husband in Vermont.
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