Deni Naffziger

Deni Naffziger lives in Athens, Ohio. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Atticus Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Sheila-Na-Gig and elsewhere. Her second book of poems, Strange Bodies, will be released September 19 by Shadelandhouse Modern Press.

SELF PORTRAIT IN APPALACHIA

I was raised in Ohio’s Appalachian Steel Valley
but we never called it that. Apple-ay-sha
was a cluster of small wooden structures
with fake brick siding in Martin County, Kentucky
where President Johnson crouched down in 1964
on the rickety porch of Tom Fletcher
with a flock of boys in worn out shoes.
Apple-ay-sha was men who were taller
than they looked, hunched over, faces blacked,
squinty-eyed, coming up from the mines.
It was mud roads and women
with big bellies and skinny legs
who dropped baby after baby
like flour sacks. Apple-ay-sha was not
a dirty city filled with descendants
of Irish and Italian immigrants who lived
in mountains of industry where the sky lit up red
every time Republic Steel smelted. At night
I lay in bed and watched fire in the firmament
above Market Street. No one ever talked about
how stars sometimes ignite messages
from God to a child who never listens
in church but recognizes a miracle
when she sees one. Like Neil Armstrong
landing on the moon or flying
in a little tri-motor plane over Warren, Ohio,
thirty- six years before he traveled into space.
I drove away from home in a Plymouth Fury,
heading south into mizzle on US 77
until I reached the Hockhocking River
and learned that a town named Chauncey
is called Chance-ee, and Apple-ay-sha
is Apple-atcha and I better learn it
or betray myself as a northern girl.
It was a northern man I met by the river, a man
who had grown up in the town next to mine,
who first told me we were Appalachian.
He wore his label like a Medal of Honor.
When I had a son, he took him
on long walks along railroad tracks,
taught him about arrowheads,
which they gathered and held
in a small blue box, while a mile away
my husband and I made love
in the shade of a dogwood.
In this age of definition, the word
suits me as well as any other –
Appalachian. And I wear it
like a feather.