Jessica Cory
Jessica Cory is the editor of Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review, published since 1972 at Appalachian State University. She holds a PhD in Native American, African American, and environmental literatures from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is the editor of Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (WVU Press, 2019) and the co-editor (with Laura Wright) of Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place (UGA Press, 2023). Her creative and scholarly writings have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Northern Appalachia Review, and other fine publications.
My Father Loves Joni Mitchell
Her “weird jazz chords” he tried to replicate in vain;
Song to a Seagull, one of his favorite vinyls.
Now, we feel blue, so blue as the nurse
in blue vinyl gloves asks him to name
as many words as possible that begin
with the letter b & instead of blurting
big yellow taxi, he gapes at my mother,
who bears no resemblance to Joni save their
shared high cheekbones, the same protrusions
etching my lined face. She shakes her short grey
bob—slow, nothing like Joni’s long locks that sway
as she sings my old man, he’s a singer in the park.
There is a park across the street from the cancer
center, not the born with the moon in Cancer
Joni croons of her daughter but the type comprised
of cells & replications, like the reprises that arrive
at song-end. My father receives radiation again & again,
the beats pulse through his skull like the fiddle & the drum,
rhythms meant to beat back the black dots on the doctor’s
grey screen. Their cadence, a song to aging children come. I hum
a few bars, the b sounds begin blubbering my lips
at the grim clip, some come dark & strange like dying. I am crying
now in my car that is not a big yellow taxi but still makes known
that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
