THE WILLS WILL OUTLIVE YOU

We don’t need an elegy, although death paces through 
the holler, we are alive and fighting;
Although kudzu has smothered out lush landscape and 
narrowed down the paw paw clusters 
so small that flies ain’t even seduced by the flower stink. 

As a girl, I slid quick down slow carved banks where 
tiger lilies grow in the summer and pawpaws in autumn.
I longed to rip the flesh with my tiny hands 
so that the sweet mush trickled down my chin into the creek below 

I bet if you stood barefoot down here, you’d get sick. 
These hills will poison you like underdone Poke Sallet
White-tailed deer and black bears will call truce 
to eat your soft stinking body like 
hillbilly girls eat pawpaws in low September creeks.

Emily R. Noe is a nonbinary Appalachian poet, born and raised in Harlan County, Kentucky. She works with any medium she can get her hands on, with a particular fondness for fiber and writing. They’re a current MFA candidate in poetry at West Virginia University with pieces published in Glass Mountain Magazine and The Allegheny Review.