Issues

Poems by John Brooks

Poems by John Brooks

Met In an orca-colored room, we glare into a jungle which is actually Paris. I tell you I loved Rousseau when I was a young man; I am a young man and love Rousseau, you say. His half-coy beast, concerned with repast and eyeing something delicious on Bonnard’s adjacent terrace,…
Relief, Relief

Relief, Relief

She’d heated the ham in the fellowship hall that morning. It had been that blue time of the morning, and the swamp in front of the church was still chirping with frogs. She had let herself into the side door of the church—it was a vinyl-sided building built like a…
Erin Keane talks ‘Runaway’

Erin Keane talks ‘Runaway’

At a greasy spoon in Louisville, Erin Keane dissects a phrase she holds in particular contempt: It was a different time. She spits it out over the clatter of dishes and shouted orders coming from the nearby kitchen, rolling her expressive eyes for good measure. The weaselly wording, she believes,…
In Conversation: Neema Avashia

In Conversation: Neema Avashia

“In truth, I’ve always felt uneasy in my relationship to the word ‘Appalachian’… do you not count if you are Brown, Indian, the child of immigrants who moved to a place out of necessity again thirty years later, when work disappeared?” Neema Avashia writes in Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian…