The Barefooted Radicalism of Planted by the Signs

Misty Skaggs' 2019 collection of poems is an ode to Appalachian Kentucky's keepers and the kept.

Most Appalachian Kentuckians know Misty Skaggs as a community-builder and hand-in-hand helper: the kind of person you can turn to in a tight spot who believes, wholeheartedly, in the power of neighbors across hills and hollers coming together for one another.

As the fearless leader of Eastern Kentucky Mutual Aid, Skaggs is a walking, talking embodiment of radical compassion, and whether she’s stuffing a blessing box in Olive Hill before another winter storm blows through or encouraging members of the almost 4,000-person-strong EKY Mutual Aid Facebook group to “give a little if you got a little” Skaggs knows that we are all entwined out here—and responsible for keeping each other safe during these trying times.

Skaggs’ remarkable 2019 collection of poems, Planted by the Signs, similarly reflects her commitment to family, friends and everyone in-between as both keepers and the kept—caregivers and care-takers—webbed together in a rural tangle of tradition, memory and the day-to-day struggles that bind us all.

Below are four poems from Planted by the Signs that see so cloudlessly how the walls between the living and the dead; a sink full of soapy dishes and a Sunday morning hymn; the whippoorwill and you, the reader, are paper-thin, and the seams holding us all together are stronger than we might realize.

Breaking Beans

We are an agricultural assembly line.
Weathered human machinery
tucked away under a rusty tin roof.
Sweating and solar powered,
lost in the task at hand.
The front porch hums with
the rhythmic sound
of breaking beans.
Plump, green pods
snap and pop
under the pressure of steady fingers.
Female voices rise and fall
punctuated by a scattered thump,
a handful of Kentucky Wonder
bouncing in the bottom
of a five-gallon bucket.

The sun is sliding down to meet the hills.
We swim in damp evening air.
When it beads and condenses
into fat drops on my upper lip,
I can smell the garden it came from.
And men come up from the garden.
Broad hats and broad backs
wind up a long dirt path
to pause at the front porch.
Delivering pails labeled “Fischer’s Lard”
loaded with a tender pick bounty
that spills out around our feet—

Greasy beans and half runners,
bush beans
and turkey beans
and pole beans
and greensleeves.

Crying Mad

Lord, I love to watch a woman get mad,
temper rising in her cheeks like rouge.
It’s a beautiful sight to behold,
womankind flushed and furious
when she’s had enough
and she’s about to tell you so.
Maybe she’s scowling,
Brows furrowed like plowed ground,
pink tongue scythe sharp
and fixing to mow you down.
Maybe she’s happy to be snarling,

with the slightest tremble in her lips,
anticipating pouncing
and the act of eating you alive.
Or maybe she’s like me
and there are tears in her eyes
trying in vain
to drown out the flashing wildfire
already blazing far beyond her control.

Small Talk

Nobody wants to hear
about my new holler life.
Even though I listen courteously
to classist swill spilled
over organic dinners with vegan options.
My small talk is not spicy
like an authentic curry recipe.
It is mostly salt and pepper.

My anecdotes don’t unfold
in smoky bars or seedy truck stops
or one-bedroom flops for misguided,
horny, hillbilly youth.
At least not anymore.

Nobody wants to hear
about bowel movements.
Black and hard.
Lumps of sick coal staining the bowl.

Nobody wants to hear
about caring for a dying woman
who will never be ready
to die.

Or about how her arm hurts
and aches until she screams.
About how I stay up all night
and heat towels to wrap her tired limbs.
About her heart failing,
congestively.
Everybody wants to hear

about how we sit around
and talk smack on Herbert Hoover.
About how she refers to Johnny and June
like family.

Everybody wants to hear
about how she loves to read
the raunchy romances.
The ones with shirtless pirates
or lusty-eyed cowboys on the cover.
But nobody wants to hear

about how sometimes I sit straight up
as I’m drifting off.
And it’s my heart.

It stops.

And I could swear I can hear her soul
leaving her body
through the baby monitor.

Giveaway

We stopped at a yard sale
in Sandy Hook, in the empty lot
where Clete’s grocery store used to be.
The brash secondhand saleswoman
started going on to her cousin
in the hot pink tube top
about how she won
one of them big umbrellas
from WSAZ Newschannel 3.

My head whipped around
like I heard the faint whisper
of a recent haint.
Great Mamaw
there in the backwoods banality
floating in the air.
Sure as the world she was there
and that two-tiered, big-ass,
blue-and-white umbrella was a sign,

sure as the world.
She always wanted to win it
and hear her name
pronounced on air
across the tri-state viewing area.

Reprinted with permission of Ohio University Press.

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One more time! Planted by the Signs by Misty Skaggs is for sale right this way, if you’re inclined to read on (which you absolutely should be). I can’t imagine a better Valentine’s Day gift than this love letter to Appalachian Kentucky—but maybe that’s just me.