Poet Elizabeth Gordon
Looking for Home
The place where I was born no longer exists.
The town where I grew up
Spat out its teeth.
I call my shoes home
And take my place beside the missing man
Who waits for his lost family
To catch up.
Down in the coal mine
The bones of my grandfather crawl through the rock.
My dead grandmother
Kneels in mud at the bottom of a flooded field.
In a moment I will forget
Every name I ever knew.
I will call to you with a gesture of my two hands,
Asking you to guide me
To the place
Where every place has gone.
About the Poet: As the daughter of a West Virginia GI and a South Vietnamese national, Saigon-born Elizabeth Gordon often uses her writing to explore her dual ethnic identity as an "Asian-Appalachian." The two sides of her ancestry help her recognize interesting and sometimes disturbing parallels between her physical home of Southern Appalachia and her birth home of South Vietnam - both of which share, among other things, a history of beautiful landscapes too often pillaged for their natural resources, and a culturally rich/materially poor native people who are too often misunderstood.
Gordon is the recipient of a 2006 Individual Artist Fellowship of $5,000 from the Tennessee Arts Commission. She has been awarded residencies at writers retreats and also received a grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund supporting individual feminist women in the arts. Gordon's poems and stories have been published in numerous literary magazines and college textbooks, as well as in anthologies. She holds a Bachelor's degree in English from East Tennessee State University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Brown University. She has taught at Providence College and the Rhode Island School of Design, and from 2000-2004 was Assistant Professor of English at Tusculum College, Greeneville, Tenn.
