This is Day three for me.

I Was Just a Country Girl

Truth echoes like yells in the holler
telling you, you’re not that girl
not anymore, not for a long time.

It’s been a couple years since I dreamed
of West Virginia, nightmares almost
of progress, houses, so many people

in SUVs taking over my land, my meadows
making suburbia of my place, my country
a dream, not mine anymore.

Some days, I think I’ll go back
check out the stream where I splashed
the lane where I walked

the last coherent moments with my Daddy
before his heart gave out, his breathing
my sister thought was a mountain lion’s yowl.

Were there ever any stars as bright?
Mist as fine and pure, the air through screened windows
thistles and goldfinches, and crayfish and watersnakes.

I can still hear the rain sweeping through the pine grove
how you could mistake it for wind, if you didn’t know
how cloudbursts came from nowhere, how dreams did too.

I lost a friend last year who’d moved away from the city,
told me I didn’t understand rural life after posting an offensive picture of death
I didn’t contradict. There’s no talking to walls—they don’t listen or understand.

I thought I’d be that girl, the one dancing in the meadow of Queen Anne’s lace
swatting sweatbees, singing “Rose Garden” loving a country boy, a nice dream,
making me wonder, what if the crossroads had been different?

I’m smiling, not sad, what memories I have of that place, sticky watermelon juice,
new born barn kittens, riding ponies, being in the Hardy County fair,
lying in the sunshine hearing Loretta Lynn while cows moo in the background.

Sometimes I think that is all a dream
but a good one, of golden afternoons, warm sunshine,
love, wilderness, kindness, joy.

I was a country girl, sometimes still am, in my heart.