Issues

Interview: David Joy

David Joy is only thirty-one, but come March, this North Carolina writer will see his first novel, Where All the Light Tends to Go, published by Putnam. The book, a gritty tale of “a young man seeking redemption,” is highly anticipated and has garnered advance praise from the likes of…

Rural Stigmata

I’ve nurtured the glowing wound: peroxide, salve, bandages. I’ve done right by this one. The rawness eased, was replaced by budding infant cells. Trenches formed in the nickel-sized spot where my fate and life lines intersected the injury, two deep vertical red canals in a waxy purple-pink circle: a burnt…

Still Life in Townsend

1. Stevie Gibson never did like the picture, but she never did take it down. A dead pheasant still fully feathered, a bowl of oranges, a green glass goblet of wine, and an hourglass were arranged upon a pale tablecloth of folds and wrinkles, all against a shadowed background. She…

Sling Shot

Chalk dust. Is returning really so simple? From the hallway, he can see through the open door of the abandoned classroom, through its far window, and out into the hay fields that lay beyond. There is a single bale rotting against the fence. They would stack them, he remembered, build forts…

The Apple

People drank the apples          John “Appleseed” Chapman planted       during his Ohio migration to Marietta by catamaran          his scattered orchards slated to be hatcheted in the name of            Prohibition before the Women’s           Christian Temperance Union repositioned the Hard Cider            …

Fall 2014 Editor’s Note

In his poem “Digging,” the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney depicts a writer at his desk, a pen resting “Between my finger and my thumb,” ready to begin his day’s work. But the narrator becomes distracted by the sound of a spade striking gravel, and he looks out to find his father’s “straining rump among the…

Waiting for the Invasion

In other years I watched the sky for birds flying south in formation. This year they pass in unbroken lines through my sleep, driven down on machine wings. I know the voice you use for telling children not to fear every droning sound that scatters their play like shrapnel or…