The Faith of Withered Seeds
I try and exit quick the body my lips move like moths at the center of the apple from the center of the orchard a blue diamond reflects my startled grin …
Issues
Editor’s Note
What is buried in the ground isn’t always what you think. It’s just the beginning.” With these evocative, mysterious words, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle begins to draw the reader into the world of Cowney, a nineteen-year-old Cherokee man who serves as the protagonist in her debut novel Even As We Breathe.…
Excerpt from ‘Hillbilly Hustle’, a novel by Wesley Browne
Knox Thompson first crossed paths with the man who would ruin him at a poker game above the arcade in downtown McKee, a forsaken place he had made it a point to avoid. After finding out about the game from one of his Porthos regulars, Knox couldn’t resist. It was…
Interview: Margaret Renkl
The shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin,” Margaret Renkl writes in the opening pages of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, her memoir-in-micro-essays that was released earlier this year to glowing reviews.These wise, bracing words underpin the entire book, which…
Exeunt
So now it’s winter again yet sunrise and sunset make us forget so stunning the color spraying from ridges. In the icy clear brittle blue air above, the mountain greys like a grandmother, death strolls close by—the mundane maudlin. It would be fitting to go then. But you left in…
The Mad Farmer’s Wife Learns of Forest Bathing
She would have loved a creek bath but didn’t dare, only chuckled at the saucy thought. That wasn’t what the term meant anyway. In Japan it’s called shinrin yoku her daughter said, forest bathing, where you go to the woods to renew to soothe, to relax, to change on the…
Just Off the Road
for James Still A man who’s old enough has earned the right to stop the car if, driving past some woods, the beauty so beguiles him he is drawn to wander under autumn’s changing leaves. And even if expected somewhere else he’ll now be late, we might do well to…
Without Ceasing
All day every day around the clock like a prayer vigil there should be poets writing poems, accounting for milkweed pods and old homesteads abandoned, poets stirring campfire ash, noting just the place along the shoreline the heron casts down, poets in shifts like monks praying grace upon the whole…
A Shared Space
in memory of Marie Melson She was already old from the first I knew her, and though I was a child, I had an oldness in me too, which neither of us saw the use in mentioning, as together we sat in a swing beneath a century-old oak. Her memories,…
Bearing Witness
When I was a boy, the bayou Bonne Idee flooded. I remember because my father and I walked on water. We had driven to the edge of our farm and discovered that the flood had enveloped our fishing dock, and when my father crossed the wooden deck just below the bayou’s surface, I…