Kathleen Driskell – Appalachian Review

Keats In Your Time of Pandemic

Summer 2020 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

You remember in Rome you stood in front of a facsimile of a remarkably narrow sleigh bed, a suggestion of the actual bed in which Keats died from consumption when he was twenty-five. What caught your attention were the ceiling carvings over the bed, and you studied them a long…

Laundry Woman

Kathleen Driskell ♦

Winter 2016 ♦

Poetry

My great-grandmother agitated Mrs. Worldly’s wash every week over the hot flash and glow of the fire in the misery shed. Hand on rough stick, grandmother pulled around the glob of tangled shirts and sheets; she stirred as if hauling the weighted laundry about an axis, sloshy seas yielding a…

What I Learned in My Mother’s Kitchen

Kathleen Driskell ♦

Winter 2016 ♦

Poetry

While my father traveled for his job during the week, my mother lived the life of a woman emancipated by TV dinners and pizza delivery. On Sundays, though, after church, my father dragged her back to the kitchen, where she worked the opener against the lip of a can of…