honey boy, honey boy
you’re a demigod, honey boy: a refrain of affirmation though dulcet still you’re just human learn not to rely on sight because it’s only clear too late, looking back follow the scent…
Self-Portrait as Fly Fisherman
He stands still and the creek does not— a waist-deep shortcut to nowhere. An arm, bare to the elbow, nudges the morning fog. A thread of water- shine tongues the air. The impossible reach, his expectant watch. O to hold in your careful grip this perilous truth and finesse its…
The Race Bone
That old man proclaims, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” But where in the body does the race bone lie? Can we find it on an X-ray? Is it locked inside the spine? Does it make its home among the vertebral bones? Or is it hidden in…
Elephant in the Burning Dress
There is no god for the gay unfortunates The abomination stuffed in the black dress, chosen because the frills hug everything a father could not or chose not to Fathers burdened with being the talk of the holiday party Blessed with the son carrying a lisp To be the hollow…
Orchard
to the man who told me he was tired of hearing about Strange Fruit watch them hang // blood oranges // ripened from the inside out // swollen from the intake of rain // juicy // best picked when dead // sliced from the tree // cut open //watch…
Market Forces
She drove down on a glorious May morning, and had she not already known she was leaving God’s country she would have suspected she was entering it. Kathryn Banks had woke in an angle of light, the early sun falling through the bedroom window of her Loudon County estate and, for…
Keats In Your Time of Pandemic
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…
In Conversation: Karen Salyer McElmurray & Elaine Neil Orr
Karen Salyer McElmurray grew up in both Eastern and Central Kentucky and her work in fiction and nonfiction is haunted by that between world of mountains and flatlands. Wanting Radiance, McElmurray’s third novel, addresses this space between as its protagonist seeks history and love and an authentic self. McElmurray’s debut novel, Strange Birds in…
Pandemic & Protest Poems by Frank X Walker
On Mother’s Day I’m going to pretend that mine ain’t dead, that she just got Corona. Because she was a nurse I know she’d be very serious about social distancing, hand washing, and the wearing of masks. So me and my siblings would probably plant ourselves six feet apart in…
Pile of Feathers
The pile of feathers was right in the middle of the dirt side-path, leading to the ruins of a tobacco shed. The feathers were clean, June noticed that first: as if freshly plucked, no hint of parasites or smell of decay. “Get away, Elvis.” The hound dog abandoned his tentative…