Poems by H.E. Fisher
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The Official State Flower of West Virginia
by H.E. Fisher
H.E. grew up on an island in the cradle of the Atlantic Ocean. Now she lives in upstate New York, growing medicinal plants on her deck in the shadow of the river valley's Palisades.
In the bar, two on tap, my husband regales me
with stories from the Nineteen-seventies—
steel, backwash, tributaries, and barges,
quotes the state motto: Mountains Are Always Free,
and clocks me in to his pap’s midnight shifts
at the chemical plant when Middle Island Creek
suckled the fouled Ohio, the source, he says
from which he drank, bathed, waded in, and fished
as sewage floated by, and how the rhododendron
bloomed along the bank red as Mercurochrome.
© H.E. Fisher