The Great Divide

by Lynn La’Shae Howard (@dahlia.lynn_)

I look upon this land and dream that you’ve turned

me loose in my own great wide open. I dream that

the iron has been pried from my feet.

Set me between these summits

—sleeping ancients blanketed in pines.

Born a thriving offspring of the tectonic collision.

Lay me down amidst the merging

A magician’s assistant

Sawed clean down the middle.

Snap your Polaroid picture, mark this day that

I stood in two places at once:

One foot in coal country, the other melted into the pavement of Route 119. 

Painted in cherry lettering against the lattice,

‘Virginia is for Lovers’  and this sickens the hick in me,

the Kentucky darling’s dirt beneath her fingernails.

The camera winks and you have forgotten to remove the flash while it’s still daylight.

You remind me that the sun won’t shine for very much longer, suggest we savor this moment we belong to. 

Janis Joplin wails from your stereo, but we’re in the dead zone; wedged between 103.9 and 93.5 FM radio

—all this static and so much vacant space. 

Enough room for the traces of a Sunday sermon to 

bleed into Me and Bobby McGee.

You’ve always said you love Virginia’s mountains best when you fondle your dirty red bandanna, sink yourself deep into oblivion. 

We sit here a long while, parked halfway

and swearing up and down that one day

we will drive a little farther. 

All for now, we remain

unknowing of the difference between

the seam of two lands and the concept of nowhere.

How content we must be in our restlessness,

split down our torsos by the state line,

thrusted into the Great Divide.

Lynn Howard is a young Appalachian based writer from Whitesburg, Kentucky. She grew up in a Holiness Pentecostal community, from which she broke free from to become a writer. Her work aims to capture the horrific essence of being forged from superficial dogma and forced faith, as well as the hardships faced by many Appalachians with dreams of seeking opportunities beyond the mountains.