RK Fauth
Image by Daniel McCullough from Unsplash
RK Fauth is the author of A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees, winner of the Walt MacDonald First Book Prize in Poetry (TTU Press, 2024). She earned a Master's degree in English from Georgetown University, where she also served as a Lannan Poetry Fellow. Fauth's writing has appeared in POETRY Magazine, Poem-a-Day, The Screen Door Review, The Decadent Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Blue Unicorn, the LGBTQ+ anthology, Dream of the River, and elsewhere. Fauth has held fellowships and writing awards from The Academy of American Poets, The Fulbright Program, The American Boccaccio Association, The Lannan Foundation for Poetics and Social Practice. She currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
Upon Arriving at Great-Aunt Dorothy's Funeral
You took me to the spot where your mother buried her
Barbies. Where the Tug Fork let himself in twice and rushed
at Williamson County. You told me how your aunt sang with
Dolly, how the flood robbed generations blind and drowned
birds and coal miners in their own hills, how dirty water churned
into moonshine. Wild onion grass, orphan microwaves, and lop-
sided school buses sprouted from the damp curb. We arrived
at the church. It was full of relatives who left. They still call you
your deadname. In their accent, we barely recognize it—like Lorn, e.g.,
this is forlorn. Well. Dorothy’s funeral was your most handsome
day. Hair slicked back, clear frames, your kimono-style jacket,
and Yves Saint Laurent shoes. Mud seeped up from the
parking lot. Every Christmas, your fifty-year-old mother
asks for a Holiday Barbie, and Williamson County asks for
the return of Virginia bluebells. Your whole family was there.
You know, the way rain gathers in a footprint.
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