Poetry by Connor Beeman

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church song

my church had green carpets with water stains / as a child / after my mother’s 
practice / I played handbells / with women who laughed / even then they knew 
what it meant / when a boy wanted / to hold small and lovely things / to hear 
their sounds / I never wanted much more than a place in a hymnal / or for the weight 
of the book / to feel like compassion / I’ve always loved / stained glass but insist 
he has little to do with it / I don’t remember my siblings’ baptisms / but I know 
they were saved / and I stood there / because we had parents invested in saving 
our souls / something to be said about / the shirtless frame of the savoir / and 
wandering eyes / a beautiful youth pastor / telling me exactly how I’d burn
I don’t know / I kept my head down / stared at the water 
stains / green carpet / I’ve always been good
at making myself / into the smallest survivor





​hollow song

in the bed / another man / drawing me a map 
of watersheds / the hollow of his family / where water breaks
one creek flows south / the other north / both eventually
return to the Ohio / a sense of inevitability / it’s not that
one runs from family / but the nature of a gorge / allows
only one easy exit / a maw where the sun comes in / alternatively, a valley 
opening to a basin / to a state route / a highway / when they blasted 
through the mountainside / do you think they stopped to speak 
to the shale? / to look for fossils? / what does your mother love most
in her garden? / I’m imagining marigolds / goldrush / crouching 
in the dirt / to make something beautiful / with hands tender
in tending / yes, it will always be / about the house of your mother 
but also the creek that runs behind it / the walls of sandstone 
the moss that’s left to climb them





extraction song 

from the turnpike / glimpse / the rounded peaks of ancient mountains
the highway stitches itself / up the range / even roads can learn to climb 
with enough patience or time / the billboards reassert this is coal country / again
I remind a friend to say it with a latch / twice the turnpike has bore through 
the range / tunnel into the heart of it / and maybe then it will make sense 
more times than that / I’ve left a mountain and come back / to nothing / a body 
perhaps / an entire removal / clean cut 
                               clear top / point out 
the now-exposed layers / compacted bands of shale / strata / or eons
in mining they call what’s above the coal the overburden / geography 
or the question / does a body drown / in a quarry lake sink faster 
or merely deeper / I’m trying to think myself out / of an extraction 
economy / my mother calls and says / the drilling goes on all night 
so loud you can’t sleep / she’s thinking about selling / but then what?
what comes after that? / you can’t touch anything from the road 
you know that, right? / you have to get out and touch it

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Connor Beeman (he/they) is a Midwest poet and an MFA candidate at Ohio State University who writes about place, queerness, & violence. They are the winner of the 2022 Ritzenhein Emerging Poet Award and the 2023 “My Secret Lansing” Poetry Contest. They are the author of the chapbook concrete, rust, marrow (Finishing Line Press, 2023). and previous work has appeared in Dunes Review, The Fourth River and elsewhere.