Poetry by Morgan DePue

Morgan DePue is a neurodivergent poet with deep West Virginian roots. She resides in the high country of North Carolina with her partner and teaches college writing at Appalachian State University. Her work is published in anthologies and journals including As the Crow Flies, Had I A Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, and Salvation South, among others. Rambling Meditations of Bone-Weary Wandering (Seed Bed Press) is her first chapbook. Morgan will spend June 2027 in the Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida, as a writer-in-residence. When not writing or teaching, she can be found wading in rivers, wandering hills, and wrangling her small menagerie of cats.

Persistence

“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” –Mexican proverb

In wet early spring
when we were down
to the last few jars
left from the last canning season
we would have
at least
one night a week
where the family’d spend an hour
passing ‘round a jar of beans
until the ring finally loosened.

Sometimes, one of us’d saw
through the lid with a steak knife.
We’ve never been a patient clan.

We have so many moments like these
which now I reflect on reverently
seeing so clearly
how they taught us
what persistence means.

Sittin’ Up with the Dead

The alarm on Easter Sund’y
wailed in a dialect of devastation
my nine-year-old heart’d never heard
the night momma’s momma died

The whole herd grumbled with stuttering
hands packing backpacks and grocery bags
full of clothes to hit the road to West Virginia
and we weren’t convinced she was gone

‘til we pulled up to a somber farmhouse
on a hill where everyone we knew held
hugs longer than ever and emotionless men
suddenly let go the leash on their tears

I cried because momma cried
because I couldn’t go with her
to the funeral home to dress
Grammaw in something pretty

‘Cause when all the siblings took shifts,
two-at-a-time, sometimes with friends
or relatives we’d never even met to go sit
with Grammaw ever’ night so she’d have
mortal company, I was left behind

They couldn’t explain how she needed familial guides
into the afterlife, phantasms of the familiar to gentle the passing
from one place to the next with simple spellwork
of protection, muttered prayers, secreted apologies,
mournful promises of forgiveness