Fall 2015

Calling Out the Dead

I was a sound sleeper in my teens. My mother’s voice used to break through my dreams, waking me for school with news. Hey, that funny guy from Saturday Night Live died, what’s his name, Ackroyd? Or, They shot one of the Beatles. I’m trying to hear her tone again,…

Mary Yoder, Walking

I think of Mary Yoder standing just outside the kitchen door, one foot holding it open, swatting mosquitos in the white flood light. She smoked a cigarette like it was delicious. Her waist-length hair was tied back in a tight ponytail and then braided—she hadn’t figured that part out yet.…

Fall 2015 Editor’s Note

In her memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, bell hooks writes of growing up in small town Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in the 1950s—of a girl “young, gifted, and black” who finds refuge in books, who creates a secret world, who notices the roles women and men play in her culture. It’s…

Night in the Burned House

In my old bedroom, in this house now my Aunt A’s, walls mottle grey into black, char hiding that this room was ever painted purple in a hope that someone would guess, would know. Burning night, my hidden journals blown across the field—and my aunt, gathering boughs for wreaths, found…