“The Weeds In This Garden” by Kari Gunter-Seymour

Kari Gunter-Seymour | A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen | Sheila-Na-Gig Editions | 2020 | 64 Pages

The Weeds In This Garden 

Long ago, I built a self outside myself. 
I ate what my family ate, answered 

to my name, but when they said let us pray, 
I kept my eyes open. There is a price 

to be paid for resistance. Whatever 
you call me, I have called myself 

worse, invented words made up 
of letters from my own name.

Now the backs of my hands, all bone 
and strain, I think cannot be mine.

Who hasn’t killed herself at least once, 
only to grow into someone needier? 

Who hasn’t bent with her wounds 
to a mutinous patch, weeds

shooting up like false rhubarb, 
every wisp, stem, and sodden pith 

a testament? Who hasn’t scratched 
at the question of what it means to be here?

“The Weeds In This Garden” from A Place So Deep Inside American It Can’t Be Seen.
Copyright © 2020 by Kari Gunter-Seymour.
Reprinted with permission of Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio, a ninth generation Appalachian and the founder and executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project. She is a retired instructor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and the editor of the Women Speak anthology series as well as I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices, funded by the Academy of American Poets and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Verse Daily, World Literature Today, Poets.org, as well as on her website.