Poetry by Amy Le Ann Richardson

Amy Le Ann Richardson is a writer, educator, and advocate based in Carter County, Kentucky, where she lives and works on her family farm. Deeply rooted in Appalachia, her writing explores place, resilience, motherhood, and our connection to the land. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks and the full-length collection Out of Places (Pine Row Press, 2025), and the editor of the forthcoming Rooted, Resilient, Rising: Women Growing Food across the Mountains(University Press of Kentucky). Her work has appeared in Still: The Journal, Appalachian Journal, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, among many others. Amy holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University and has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She leads the Bloodroot Young Writers Collective, a youth-centered literary initiative, and has been selected as one of the inaugural fellows for the National Arts Futures Fellowship, developing community-rooted creative projects that amplify voices and literary access across Appalachia.

Archive of Torn Away Places

 Our county flower

blooms in limestone dust.

It changes each season –

those early ephemerals,

spring beauties and bloodroot,

then firepink, daisies,

and black-eyed Susans,

then chicory dancing along roadsides.

Unnoticed, they still blossom

shining until our flower blooms in frost

and snow covers up the gap

where mountains stood.

 Talisman

 I make no apologies for who I am because

it took most of my life to shed

shame shoved onto me

for poor

for Appalachian

for girl

for woman

for opinionated

for too smart for her own good

for shy

for visually impaired.

I am a mother—

I won’t pass the twisted

guts of embarrassment

on to my children.

Instead, we lean into each other

and these mountains

embraced in love

through every curve and holler,

even when some folks insist on

living in the shade.

I once packed a jar of dirt

back to Oklahoma to keep home close,

packed creek rocks in my pockets

like talisman shielding me

from the sharp sword of anger

I am tender inside

but also good at knowing when

words cast in my direction

aren’t about me at all.

Hollers of Hope

I came to know our farm in the years it rested

after abuse of growing tobacco and grazing cattle,

after generations of substance farmers

then oxycodone, and then meth

when tractors sat rusting in weeds and

tulip poplars popped up in fields,

when kids grew up, parents passed away,

it was left.

I was introduced by my husband

who wasn’t my husband yet

and had only just learned how much

he loved the land and longed to be there someday

if his dad didn’t lose it like the rest of them.

He showed me barns still smelling sweet and earthy,

grown-over paths cows once trod, a gravel road

disappearing around the bend,

and hills stretching as far as I could look.

I didn’t know then I fell for them both,

he and the farm

there on the ridge beside pawpaws and sassafras,

but I let myself lean in and get to know him,

to yearn for Kentucky while we lived in Oklahoma,

to dream of gardens and farmers’ markets,

so by the time we loved back home,

the farm felt like a fairytale,

even as I plucked needles from ditches and

closets in his grandparents’ old house,

scrubbed graffiti from the walls,

and repainted everything,

even as I helped install new wiring

and plumbing to replace all the missing copper,

patched holes and sanded floors,

even as some of his relatives

expressed their entitlement with busted windows

and cherry bombs in the brand-new mailbox.

We forged our marriage there

cleaning up years of neglect

as I learned where the hog pen used to be,

where his uncle once parked a trailer,

where the road by the hayfield leads to the parcel

his dad had to sell to pay for the divorce from his mom,

where the pole barn used to be, and the cabin

where his great-great grandfather was born

as he showed me artifacts from his childhood

and as flowers his Mamaw planted bloomed—

daffodils, tulips, and irises

highlighting the yard with color,

and then lilacs and the snowball bush,

hollyhocks, and four o’clocks—

as we found more gems like the rosebush

hidden by invasive vines and a spring so clean

you can drink straight from it

and planted gardens full of tomatoes

and beans and corn and more vegetables

than we could ever eat or put up,

determined to feed everyone who came along.

The more years I spend knowing it,

learning its history and watching it

shift with the seasons, the more I fall in love

over and over, the deeper I am rooted

around its edges, hills, valleys, and ephemeral streams,

even as someone illegally logs the white oaks or

peels away elm bark killing the trees or takes tools,

equipment, and fuel from our barns,

even those seedy parts, the weeds,

the endless work of it.

Because there are also barred owls and whippoorwills,

lightning bugs, crickets, and katydids,

fires in the yard at dusk, sunsets shimmering gold

onto trees and creeks just the same as pipelines,

crystals of frost changing the landscape moving

between seasons, snowball fights, sledding,

and spring ephemerals like a long breath

lining hollers full of stories for our children.