Heather Cadenhead – Five Poems

Appalachian Alterations

I come from a long line of women with nimble fingers,
born in the Cumberland’s shadow. Vadie flipped babies
to check if they were liver-growed. To this day, no one
knows what that means. I’m told I passed the test.

My grandfather stuck his thumb in the rotary dial
like Little Jack Horner—Vadie’s daughter answered,
my cells threaded through the needle of 1952. She cut
patterns out of catalogs to make paper dolls for me.
For hours, I sat at her feet and listened to the scissor-snip
of paper, ephemeral silhouettes floating down. I clawed
the air for brunettes and left the blondes for my sister.

My grandmother kept a sewing machine in a room
just off the kitchen, ready for any job: a yarn-hair
transplant for my sister’s rag doll, a broken seam
in the shirt pocket where my grandfather kept
cigarettes. The day I married, an ink-black cape.

My mother painted Christmas-village figures: a newsboy,
his papers rolled like telescopes, a woman selling flowers.
A caroler, his mouth a mute oval. She brushed each statue
with color and set it in my palm. I closed a fist around it.

Mind for Sale: One Owner, Fair Condition

To you, I was an alarmist.
I watched you wad up your brain like newsprint.

I was next, my head in a jar like a specimen—
Dr. Jekyll at first so careful with it, his slender fingers
never touching the glass. I didn’t see the change coming:
broken shards and blood at the feet of Mr. Hyde.
I held my own skull like a child holding a porcelain doll
with a shattered face. Someone broke my dolly, Daddy.

Remind me the price of a mind.
Disclosure: Some bruising to the limbic system.
Please tell me it is worth something.

Poinsettia Glow

The northern lights were far too blinding,
their castled glow too distant—each length
of incandescence like a magic trick, taunting.

I escaped their cruel fluorescence by way
of tunnels crowned in fox tracks. Just shy
of coils of tree root—a table set for one.

There, I set my kettle singing. What if
I loved this place, made its passageways
silver with tinsel? The clatter of cups

is good enough company. A stretch
of lace over limestone tricks the mind.
What if all I have to give is silence?

What if the bloom in my cheeks
is enough to sound the solstice
or fill the manger in my ribcage?

How to Cross-Stitch the Coyote’s Howl

Months stretch like taut wire
between tin cans, spoken words
like echoes that come back cold.

Coyote skin thickens. Creatures
annex caves. I barter for needles
and spools of carmine thread.

Basement windows betray
barren ground as windsong
beats operatic against glass.

Unskilled hands stitch blood
red letters, curving crooked
over cloth: all I left unsaid,

sewn slanted into blasts
of white—needle passing
through whatever resists.

A Writer Invites You to Dinner

It’s dangerous to have dinner
with a writer—her table set
with stoneware and silence,
calla lilies and curiosity.

It’s dangerous to speak
in her presence—your words
like songbirds at her window,
her chest a recording device.

She pulls the tape through her teeth
later, reams of black unspooling.
She lays each strip flat, decides
what’s there and what isn’t.

It’s dangerous, too, to leave her alone—
your careless comment in storage,
taking on the scent of moth balls.
She’ll make sure you don’t recognize it.

A native Tennessean, Heather Cadenhead holds a degree in creative writing from Union University. Her poems and essays are published or forthcoming in Ad Fontes, Inkwell, and Saint Katherine Review. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can read more of her writing in her Substack newsletter, Firelight.