Poetry
If in the crinkling thin as air metallicblankets there are flashes signaling backand forth over the little bodies wrappedinside them sleeping on cage floor, gym floor, floor of a defunct warehouse, don’t think of torchfires, beacons of distress, or in the softnessany sign of soothing though they’re softas tissue, even softer yet untearable, a just »
Memoir
1. Abiding Metaphors When I was three years old, I nearly drowned in a hotel pool in Mexico. My earliest memory is of what seemed a long moment, as if I were suspended there, looking up through a ceiling of water, the high sun barely visible overhead. I do not recall being afraid as I »
Poetry
“the air smells each day of some newness” For scant weeks in spring when the ground has had time to get warmer,and all the white flowers whose forms are so hard to imagine are coming to bloom, and the air smells each day of some newness,a sweetness whose name, like the scent, flags the tip »
Poetry
Endearment Laud a bad guy, dub a gal ugly– a bad day, glub by glub. Lay by a glad day— a dab, a daub, a gaudy bud. Land ably, ladybug. Endearment Better nab a tea urn, a batter beater, a bun tub, a neater tenet. Beat a taunt, rebut a brute. An upbeat nature, an utter ebb— Tune, retune, bee tureen. Turn true, tuna beret, benter tuba, butter bean. Endearment Lover, let our love rule »
Poetry
1. On Your Deathbed The flame still arced inside your brain, a severing announcement of you to you— whatever part remained. It was the first news you missed, and as the state assembled in a room that wasn’t yours you groaned. Your mind withdrew. You lived all night, all flesh, inflamed, your voice a vent. Too long to fit the borrowed bed you limbs hung off at odd »
Poetry
I’ll tell you what, Papaw was a drunk, the sweetest man alive.Sober: A good husband; a loving father; he worked hard regardless,but I’ve never heard tell if he was able to keep a jobor if the family moved because of his drinking. On a binge, he beat Granny.He’d come home at 2am and beat her »
Poetry
Poems by Jonathan Farmer will appear in the Left/Right Issue (vol. 25, no. 3: Fall 2019). What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshedfrom time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.—Thomas Jefferson Some people have the idea »
Poetry
Drawn At dusk small brown batsfall from the eves of the porchhaving made a home for brownfur. A cloud of mosquitoesrises from the lake. With erraticwing strokes, bats sense their prey,I can only see or understandby what it is not, a small voice as guide.All these years I have resisteda home in the South. I »
Poetry
Some women suffer themselves foolstrying to hold a man who floats between them like driftwood;whose happy tongue slicks his catfish back; who constrictshis lover’s bones as if a black rat snakewhile holding out magnolia blossom & eucalyptus branch offerings—except for Annie who is strong as a water oak; evergreen as pine. Bounty Everlasting: Poetry from »
Music
Argument How a Slave Ship was driven by capitalism and racism inside the triangle of the transatlantic slave trade; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner Nina Simone came back from the dead to her own Country to stop a graduate student on the way to workshop. * * * I »
Poetry
It’s easier than you thought—leaving.Only one night spent sleeping on your ownin a motel parking lot beneath the starsof a summer Muskogee. Your long-built dreaddispersing like gas into a brilliantly blackOzark sky. For once, you are a girl unmolested. You could do this: be a girlwithout a home. Always gone. Perpetually leavingbehind Strip Mall, U.S.A »
Essay
“Cushman is always an elegist, in prose or poetry, writing about ‘the old life’ and its characters, all passing away, as she herself is.” 1. Making acute scoops of the words Several years ago, I was strolling the up-and-down downtown streets of Asheville, looking forward to a local IPA and some good grub in a »