Poetry By Stephanie Holden

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On the way back from Appalachia we

are carsick: the mountains are a mirage 
and a miracle: my stomach is a 

bird dog in a field of burs: your stomach 
is a mason jar of moonshine: still, the 

leaves changing is just a rumor where I’m 
from: here the land is littered with its own 

death: the cicadas seem to sing a hymn 
for it: nor pain nor death can enter there:

Miss Dolly on the speaker is a pray
-er for this place: my heav’nly home is bright 

and fair: you are steeped in Smoky Mountain 
solitude: I feel like traveling on.





IN TENNESSEE, I CROSS A CREEK

Four things on earth are small, but they are exceedingly wise: 
Yellow-spotted salamanders sleep through thirty winters. Let the cool 
silvery water make me old.

Hundreds of millions of years of smooth stones and birds 
still find time to dance in the distance. Let the cool 
silvery water make me new. 

Mountain water only ankle-deep and John the Baptist 
still finds Jehovah in it. Let the cool 
silvery water make me pure. 

Hundreds of millions of years of life become 
the creek and sweet trillium still springs from the sandbank. 

Let the cool silvery water make me mud. Let it make 
me its own. Let it take me to the rainbow.

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Stephanie Holden (she/they) is a Halloween-loving queer living in New Orleans, Louisiana. She writes about love, trauma, gore, and the self. Her interests are fantasy books, body modification, and the South. Find her work at or forthcoming in Ghost City Press, Kissing Dynamite, The B’K, Dollar Store Mag, Voidspace, Bullshit Lit, The Madrigal, and elsewhere, or her narcissistic tweets at @smhxlden.