G. Frink's

Xerophyllum asphodeloides (turkey beard)

© 2004 Claude W. Rankin and Southern Connections Inc.

Turkey Beard sans gobble, this one bloomed sweet-smelling almost three decades ago in a burned-over Cumberland County, N.C., glade.

Claude W. Rankin.com, named for the late photographer who made the image, explains:

The eastern turkey beard's dense clusters of creamy, starlike flowers bloom from May to July.

Flowering on stalks two to three feet high, they are tough, elegant lilies. Their lovely flowers have a sweet nectar that attracts insects and hummingbirds.

The plant is sometimes called beargrass, because in spring bears seek out and eat the roots and tender young leaves.

...

Fire-control practices have helped make them hard to find in some areas. In the absence of a fire, relatively few turkey beard plants produce flowers each year.

The Naional Geographic reports that after a fire, however, they need only a year to recover before blooming.

NatureServe, a non-profit conservation organization, reports that they are ranked "vulnerable" in North Carolina and Tennessee. They are ranked as critically imperiled in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and West Virginia. They are believed to have disappeared from Delaware and perhaps from Kentucky.

Native to North Carolina, they are also found in the pine barrens of New Jersey, and the Appalachian woods of Virginia to Georgia and Alabama. The photograph on this page was taken in Cumberland County, N.C.

Pat Riviere-Seel's volume of poetry entitled "The Serial Killer's Daughter" is now available for pre-order on Main Street Rag's "Coming Soon" page.

The series of poems was inspired by the life and 1984 execution of Velma Barfield.

Velma Barfield murdered at least four people, among them her mother.

By Emöke Zsuzsánna B'Racz

For Townie New

The storm came at night
with a strength that brought us
outside
to view its largeness, its force.

You, shivering from dampness
I, exhilarated from the energy.

I held my breath
watched as light traveled
across
indigo blue sky.

It is in such moments all is said
without interruption of words.

The light
The moment
traveled
within one drop of water.

Such sadness within joy is what
the experience of love affords me.

• Everbearing by Pat Riviere-Seel.
• Use Your Inside Voice by Glenis Redmond.
• Pear Moonshine by Cathy Smith Bowers.

Back to Four poems from the North Carolina mountains

By Cathy Smith Bowers

For Sue Campbell and Candy Butler

One night, the darkest winter of my life,
my husband not three cycles dead, I
opened the kitchen door to a quiet knock

and there in the starless gloom
of my back porch, two women bearing
gifts. In Candy's outstretched hands

a pot of homemade soup, in Sue's,
fat jar of swollen pears embalmed
in liquid fire. When I reached

to fetch three tumblers down, the two began
to laugh, removed the offending vessels
from my startled hands and returned

them to their rightful place again. Sue
led me to the living room by the hearth
as Candy spun the gold corona

of its lid, drank deep and passed
the jar to Sue then on to me, the ghostly
triage of our lips leaving their own

soft crescents along the rim. Outside
no star had yet to show, no other
moon to light the snow that all day

long had kept me weeping close
to the sputtering flames. We drank
and passed the waning jar and drank

again until the glacier of my pain
began to break, a thousand icy floes
drifting down the river of my grief

and then we ate the soup.

• Everbearing by Pat Riviere-Seel.
• Use Your Inside Voice by Glenis Redmond.
• The Storm by Emöke Zsuzsánna B'Racz.

Back to Four poems from the North Carolina mountains

By Pat Riviere-Seel

The garden demands constant care.
I grow sweet corn, pole beans, and carrots.
Garlic I plant on the coldest day,
harvest on the hottest.
I obey the moon.

In spring my footprints sink
into newly ploughed ground.
Mud clings to my soles.
Cool mornings and late afternoons
I hoe weeds. Every day, more appear.

I harvest the bounty, blanch and freeze
for the season when rows lie fallow.
Winter, the garden remains
in my hands.
Seed catalogues arrive:
I know if I do not work this patch
the brambles, thistle, and grass
will claim what I can not contain.

• Pear Moonshine by Cathy Smith Bowers.
• Use Your Inside Voice by Glenis Redmond.
• The Storm by Emöke Zsuzsánna B'Racz.

Back to Four poems from the North Carolina mountains

By Glenis Redmond

Down the dark tunnel of throat
in the threaded jungle of larynx

what if what is waiting is not humble
like a lark in a darkened cubicle?

what if what is waiting is perched
on the breath like the ragged bark

of a crow? Not with a small cry
but a crimson caw bleeding into the horizon

like a terrific song filling the hush
with lungs, flared in full wing.

• Everbearing by Pat Riviere-Seel.
• Pear Moonshine by Cathy Smith Bowers.
• The Storm by Emöke Zsuzsánna B'Racz.

Back to Four poems from the North Carolina mountains

Four of Western North Carolina's best poets: (left-right) Emoke B'Racz, Cathy Smith Bowers, Glenis Redmond, Pat Riviere-Seel.

Photographed by Rimas Zailskas.

Read a poem by each of the four poets pictured on the cover of the current issue of Verve, a western North Carolina magazine for women, and who are featured in the article Poetic Justice.

Fayetteville Observer photo editor and well-known amateur astronomer Johnny Horn set the professional standard for images of extraterrestrials. Although he isn't responsible for any of the grainy, out-of-focus stills and footage you may have seen, he knows what good photojournalism requires: "Get the names of the aliens. They've come a long way, and we owe it to them to get their names right."

Denver resident Jeff Peckman failed to meet that standard last week, and thus far has permitted only a select few dozen people to view his video of the alleged visitation by an identified star traveler.

Second-hand accounts are available, however. A Rocky Mountain News blogger who viewed the video on Friday wrote that it showed:

A classic E.T.-like creature, about 4 feet tall, with a narrow chin, a broad forehead and almond eyes. ... Audience members wanted to know why the creature traveled all those light years just to peep in a window.

Peckman said he had a public purpose for his showing. As ABC news reported:

Jeff Peckman, a Denver resident and believer in alien life, has begun the work of putting a ballot initiative to the city's voters that would, if passed, establish an "extraterrestrial affairs commission" made up of 18 members appointed by the mayor to ensure public safety in the event that aliens -- or their vehicles, according to the ballot language -- were to arrive in the Mile High City.

All of this to promote formation of another commission of distinguished personages? Convinced? For those of us who after that explanation are still puzzled by Peckman's no-live-transmissions, no-recordings, by-invitation-only showing of his video, Peckman expained that "the general public will have to wait to see it because it's being included in a documentary by Stan Romanek."

We are invited to believe, then, that unimaginably obsessive voyeurs of extrasolar origin are lending themselves to the creation of yet another profitable if inconclusive "the extraterrestrials have come" documentary, and in our earth-bound rudeness we still have not bestirred ourselves to properly identify them. Or him/her.

Of our bad manners, I am so ashamed.

Insomnia sent me jogging through downtown Raleigh alone after midnight, past dark windows and young men fighting over money one had purloined from the other.

Just a few miles quieted my heart and I was walking softly toward home when I saw him sleeping, nestled into the recessed doorway of the Christian Church next door.

I mistook him for tools and drop cloths left by painters planning a fast start at sunrise, until I saw the teddy bear.

So white I'm sure he was freshly laundered, the big, curly furred teddy bear was held close to his face by one hand which sleep had relaxed.

I crept past only a few dozen feet away, and could see the gentle rise and fall of his covers as he slept, silent and otherwise unmoving.

He was neither an old man nor a child and while the bear was clean, all its seams intact, it was worn with much handling.

From where I stood, that teddy bear seemed to have no eyes.

They were, I think, loved out long ago.

Without reason other than the gentle intimacy with which he held it, I was certain that teddy bear had been with him since he was much younger and lived somewhere with the family into which he was born.

Then, I think, he was not homeless and now the bear seems to be all he has of home.

Earlier I had seen a lissome woman in expensive jeans and an embroidered blouse run, face wet, from a tony, eight-story condominium, seeking to call back someone who was bent on leaving.

There were no harsh words, yet after only a moment at the closing car door she ran back sobbing uncontrollably.

My mother burned my teddy bear when I was in my second year at North Carolina State University, and took obvious pleasure in telling me she had done so.

This is not the first night I would have back that big, brown-furred old friend, if only to offer his comfort to some distraught friend or stranger, so they could have more home than sorrow.