Issues

Yoke

Fall 2017 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

“And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years. She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment…And immediately the ﬂow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was…

An Iron Ring Fastened to a Rail in the Barn

Maurice Manning ♦

Fall 2017 ♦

Poetry

I’ve got a banjo six feet long and a red-handled Barlow knife, so I’ve got the credentials, Mister, to do the things I do. It takes a lot of ﬁguring and time to do it. The barn is just an empty church, a solemn spirit is inside it. Something was…

Walking into Winter

Emily Hancock ♦

Fall 2017 ♦

Poetry

Death is opening the paper hearts of the milkweed, unclasping hands that held their secret all summer. Coated and mittened against November-cold, I ease along a hillside path and listen to the rustle and sift, the small talk of tall stalks in the wind: they are shaking out their…

A Natural American

Micah McCrary ♦

Spring 2017 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

My very first car had a manual transmission: it was a red ‘91 Jeep Cherokee, which my father and I purchased together when I was twenty. It took a couple of weeks for me to get used to driving a stick shift, for me not to stall at an intersection or…

Book Review: One Man’s Dark (Manning)

John Lang ♦

Spring 2017 ♦

Book Reviews

Maurice Manning. One Man’s Dark. Port Townsend, Wa.: Copper Canyon Press, 2016. 110 pages. Hardcover. $23.00. On the cover of One Man’s Dark, Maurice Manning’s superb new collection of poems, appears a sepia photograph of the interior of an empty tobacco barn, sunlight visible on and through the spaced boards…

Spring 2017 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Spring 2017 ♦

Editor's Note

Earlier this spring, we were invaded by squirrels—a gang of wily creatures that leapt their way to our gutter from a towering walnut tree. But their play didn’t stop there. They found a small hole just beneath the overhang of the metal roof and enlarged it with their sharp little…

Book Review: A Million Fragile Bones (Fowler)

Katherine Scott Crawford ♦

Spring 2017 ♦

Book Reviews

Connie May Fowler. A Million Fragile Bones. Tallahassee, Fl.: Twisted Road Publications, 2017. 320 pages. Softcover. $15.95. Connie May Fowler’s environmental memoir A Million Fragile Bones does not promise to make you fall in love, and then break your heart—but it does both. Set on Alligator Point, a tiny sandbar on Florida’s northern…

Murmuration

T.M. Williams ♦

Spring 2017 ♦

Fiction

She left a little at a time. The way the starlings do, lifting from a line off into nowhere, one by one until they’re gone completely. First was the index finger on her right hand. She was numb from sugar, so she didn’t notice when it started to cook. That smell that…

Snake Cane

Annie Woodford ♦

Spring 2017 ♦

Poetry

Norman Amos Sometimes Virginia Creeper, a tendril of honeysuckle or wild grape, will wind around the limb of a young hickory and, as both grow, squeeze its spiral into the wick. Old women who tap the ground before they walk, ready to rap danger on its head, tobacco farmers well-versed…

Glassworks Hot Room as Pentecostal Church

William Kelley Woolfitt ♦

Spring 2017 ♦

Poetry

Wheeling, West Virginia In the hot room, while the finishing men shape glass with pucellas and shears, the snapper boy tongs the gathers—jars, jugs, flasks, and bottles— into the glory hole, that they may reheat, soften, be carried by him to the sweat-slick finishers, their necks and lips to be…