Priests don’t tell you that Eve
is from Eastern Kentucky,
land of harvest-gold hills
and homemade apple pie shine.
That if you’re not baptized in it,
or born of the land
where the trees bear the fruit,
you’ll wake after your first taste
with a tattoo not on your shoulder,
as planned, but over your heart
where your mother will see
because the artist said Apply lotion
and your chest was easiest
for a drunk hand to reach.

          Catechism teachers don’t say
          that the Spirit will finally find you
          where the world is greenest,
          that you will fall in love with the quiet way
          of horses put up for the night,
          with Pikeville boys and bourbon, neat,
          with New Circle Road where even you,
          with your wayward sense of direction,
          can drive for hours and never get lost.

Nuns never mention
an Appalachian father-in-law
will call you Colette
for the three years you wear
his name and his son’s ring,
that when you correct him
he’ll say his hearing is fine,
I know what your name is,
Yankee girl.

          Your mother’s only maps
          were of Long Island,
          so you have to learn on your own:
          church can be a maroon two-door Saturn
          crossing the Tennessee state line
          at eighty-six miles an hour.
          With a tithe of two twenties for gas
          and one guardian angel named June,
          you don’t need permission
          to get three hundred miles away
          any time you want.

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Colleen S. Harris serves as a university library dean, and holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University. Author of four poetry books and four chapbooks, her most recent collections include The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, 2025), The Girl and the Gifts (Bottlecap, 2025), and These Terrible Sacraments (Doubleback 2019). Her poems appear in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, and more than 80 others. Follow her as @warmaiden on Bluesky/Instagram and at https://colleensharris.com