They Asked Me What I Missed About My Hometown
by Karla Linn Merrifield

Fairmont
county seat Marion County
Marion as in Francis Marion
the Swamp Fox of Revolutionary
War fame         memorialized
on a plaque in front
of the courthouse in
Fairmont
                   
Fairmont
Fairmont State College town
intelligentsia    country club set      white
coalmines twenty        thirty
clean miles away from suburban
Fairmont
                                                       
Fairmont on the Monongahela
mother river
five-syllable river of place
of my birth
the river too arises in
Fairmont
                                           
Fairmont’s
West Fork/East Fork
a confluencing—Mama Monongahela
I forget hometown Fairmont
           
I remember Monongahela
Ohio
Mississippi                  Gulf of Mexico
                                            Atlantic Ocean
I was born by a river   a river
fated to take me on the gyre out to sea
 

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