Poetry by Kimberly McElhatten

Mark Spearman CC




The Weight a Mountain Carries

On a hike up a deer path local runners call Throat Punch, the weight of my breath thumps in my chest as I take one more step, reach for a striped maple above me, pull myself to it, rest the bulk of my body on its trunk, feel my shoulders slump into its bark, and wait for my lungs and heart to resynchronize. Each September, people run this trail for fun, but I’m here with friend, retired Army Ranger, George hunting for the Cadillac an alleged meth dealer abandoned two days ago during a police chase that landed him deep in the mountain on logging roads cut in the sixties after the Air Force abandoned the Blue Knob missile defense base during the Cold War and DCNR merged half of it into a state park and an investor turned the other half into a ski resort. Earlier that day, the resort manager texted me, asking if I knew anything about Needle Trail because he was looking for a Cadillac, he wrote, but I think he meant Needle Patch. A trail race map asks runners to imagine themselves on the trail as if they are fleas racing along a dog’s back, dodging the saplings like hair. So I’m here ascending Throat Punch with George to get to Needle Patch the only way we know how, even though we’ll later find our way home following a trail of rearview mirrors, reflectors, an edge guard, a headlight, and a box of meth pipes and lollipops through the water seeps, up the switchbacks, and back to Ridge Run where my condo sits, but before that, at the top of Throat Punch at the start of Needle Patch, we find the black Cadillac with a black cherry sapling trapped between the bumper and passenger-side tire—car windows down, no keys, floss picks on the floor mats, and an empty gap around the stereo, its trim ring removed.

When I get home, a neighbor sends me the local news article, “Man who claimed to be laying on a bomb arraigned, charged with trespassing, criminal mischief,” and I read another, “Police: Blair County man in underwear hides in basement, claims to be a bomb.” Both explain what happened after the Cadillac got hung up on the sapling. The man in these articles is the man the condo board tried to evict when so much got so complicated during the pandemic. He’s also the man who broke into a local warehouse, dumped inventory into a pile, and doused it with gasoline, the man who police found and arrest before he could find a lighter, the man who a judge released on bail three weeks after,  and then the man who then found himself being chased by the police down double track and eventually Needle Patch.  

I imagine him getting the Cadi stuck in the saplings, the back-and-forth attempts to get it unstuck, his panic, his paranoia, his running through this forest and down the mountain, fleeing the weight of his clothes. This reminds me of a morning years ago and the two women I found walking on Overland Pass—how they spent a night lost on the mountain after jumping out of a pickup truck, choosing the thick fog over a drunken boyfriend. And I remember the young man I found along the state park road on a different day, unsure of his way, trying to find Altoona, and walking in the wrong direction—how he told me someone brought him up the mountain, locked him in a condo, wouldn’t let him out—how when I dropped him at the police station, the trouble he had giving directions—and how he finally asked to call home and for a ride to a gas station. I think of my brother-in-law and how he died cresting Meadow Mountain on his motorcycle—of the toxicology report that read meth, oxy, fentanyl, THC—and how life might have felt like a dark bunker before the weight of him found flight. I consider George and how, on our hike home from the Cadillac, he said he’s mostly adjusted from his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, how deployment prevented he and his wife from having kids, how loud noises don’t get to him like other vets, but how he can’t listen to taps, and how he didn’t need to say more. And I think about our mountains, these Alleghenies, about the weight they carry—how they hold the heaviness of our too muches, too hards, and not enoughs, the things we can’t or won’t, our unbearables and unthinkables—and, yet, ask nothing of us in return.





Remember Him Before

Remember him with his hair tied at the nape and it falling forward over his shoulder in dense, black waves over his hospital gown.

Remember you, just after you exhaled from the womb, held in the heft of his hay-heaving arms. Remember his wide, white-toothed smile. 

Remember him before he wrote the captions for a comic that got him fired just ahead of the plant closure, how there wasn’t a severance or another job at another plant, and how when you started kindergarten, he was there every morning to make soft-boiled eggs;  

Before the attic bedroom smelled like the dog after a good skunking, his friends making quick and frequent visits, the day a cop car turned into our driveway, and he escaped through a back window and into the woods before the police noticed; 

Before the welfare checks and the line for rice and cheese and powdered milk, the seventeen percent interest mortgage, the whiskey and beer and Anbesol on his breath, and the fury he carried in his fists and feet;

Before he stopped brushing his teeth and holding your mother’s hand and kissing you and your brother good night, and before he spent evenings and weekends in the basement smoking Marlboros in front of a twelve-inch TV watching Roseanne and Rush Limbaugh; 

Before the joke he liked to tell, the one where he said, when he found out you were a girl, he had wanted to throw you like a kitten into a sack with rocks and then toss you into French Creek, and how this joke seemed funnier to him the more he told it and how it started with throw and ended with toss and the care and carelessness of these words; 

Remember him through the memory of photographs, the way they track memories before you have memories, and remember, he had wanted you once before.

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Kimberly McElhatten is a writer and editor whose work has been published in Bridge LIT, Hard Freight, and elsewhere. She’s on the editorial teams at Brevity Magazine, Fourth River Literary Magazine, and Autumn House Press. She is also the WCoNA Book of the Year Committee Chair. Her work-in-progress, Allegheny Deep Time, documents the history of her home mountain range in Central Pennsylvania. Find her at openroads.life.



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