~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Kassidy Jordan

When the Mine Falls, Men Become Ghosts

Mallory No. 3 Mine Roof Fall Disaster, WV, 1920

I was nineteen when I became coal. The collapsed rafters bury

me and three other boys in this shaft; even the boss-man isn’t spared.

I look down on the wreckage, hovering over my corpse, a breeze,

specter. A silent voyeur to my own death. Lumber planks form

a spider-web cradle. Lungs crush against ribs, pestled like leaves

to dirt. Skin scrunches like tissue paper soaked in whiskey.

I imagine my mother. My father’s flag neatly folded in the living room.

The same one that’s been there since I was sixteen and he became

abandoned acorn shells behind the church. I imagine my mother’s cries

when they tell her. Will they show her my body? My busted bones

thinned to shale slivers. I think of Maggie, her pinned brown hair

and baby calf eyes. Her house across the street. Her days teaching

at the old schoolhouse, my name carved under a desk, worn wood

flaked and splintered. My father once told me to find light if the kettle

drops. That a thousand-year-old hollowed-out tree stump and collapsed wood

could one day fall like a coffin being lowered into the ground: assured collapse.

I only see coal now. The taste of chemical fire coats my tongue like a layer

of sediment-turned paste, legs pinned to stone floors under the roof,

an avalanche hole in the ceiling where mountain meets man like Jesus

met the cross. I slip into the walls’ seams, slithering into the cracks

that hold breath like roots hold earth. I know when the mine falls men

become ghost clouds, fossilized stone fused in the walls they once carved,

embedded there. If they find my corpse, they will drag me out ankles-first,

legs ripped to cartilage strings. I watch from the mine’s mouth, floating,

until they close me in, only a pickaxe blade for conversation. A dust-shroud

settles over me like a threadbare blanket. Dirt thrown into my grave to bring

me to heaven’s door. Smoke hisses out of the top like the soul leaving the body.

Hillbilly (Elegy)

The rough hands that glide alongside the smooth barrel of a .22, turkey calls in the early hours of the morning, and the smell of gunsmoke filling my nose and lungs until I am full, so full, until the squirrels that scurry along branches and hop amongst the leaves are here, with me, with us. The gas station where the attendant knows my father’s name, where cigarette butts line the entryway, where cold packs of Bud Light are purchased and taken into the woods and sat in a truckbed by that .22 with shell casings laid on top. Houses, lines and lines of them, abandoned, decrepit, people pass through here and mutter what a shame, this town that used to be small but safe is now small and getting smaller with each needle in the public school bathroom and each child torn away screaming for her mother, mothers staring listless at their children as the chemicals set into their skin and into the pavement and the brown waters of the Ohio River, the chemicals that soothe us and the chemicals that burn in the plant where our fathers work. The smell of barbeque and bonfires and the tire tracks in the dirt left by four-wheelers, my mother’s mother and going out yonder, looking on the ground and seeing our hands in the dirt. The tent in the middle of town, a preacher yelling over a sea of hats of red and white and blue, over fans over wet necks and shirts stuck to fat backs, the voice booming into the street, the call of God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit taking over our bodies as we sing, as we yelp and cry out, as the cross is nailed to the church and as the cross is taken across town and as the cross is taken into the river and thrown into that water until we can’t see it until we don’t remember what it looked like until we build a new one based on memory and we build a new tent and we yell again again again. The silver bridge leads out, into the unknown, leading to a road along the river that goes to a Steel Mill and more gas plants as the grey smoke rolls into the sky, the river there, always there, ingesting it, filling us as we drink it with the smoke until it rolls out of us too.

Kassidy Jordan is an MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University Carbondale with a concentration in Poetry. Originally from West Virginia, her poetry focuses on Appalachia, nature, home, grief, and religion. She has a deep love for elegy, narrative writing, and prose poetry. Apart from poetry, she enjoys writing creative nonfiction and reading books about life, dragons, or both.