Issues

Gone

L. Renée ♦

Spring 2021 ♦

Poetry

It is the week after my eldest living aunt has, with us all in proximity, buried her sister. It is the second sister, out of nine siblings, she has buried. Her youngest brother, gone too. My Aunt Rosetta, of course, did not lift her eighty-five-year-old, tiny, weathered limbs toward a…

Excerpt from ‘Even As We Breathe’, a novel by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Fiction

About the place—when I take you there or when you find it on your own, just know that what the old folks say is true. This land is ours because of what is buried in the ground, not what words appear on a paper. But also know this: what is…

Interview: Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

Silas House ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Interview

When it is published later this year, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s debut novel will mark a milestone in American and Appalachian literature. Even As We Breathe, which tells the story of a young Cherokee man struggling with the limitations of his community and the prejudice of the outside world, will be…

Excerpt from ‘Crazy House’, a novel by Annie Frazier

Annie Frazier ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Fiction

I’ll have that little man. That’s what Mama said to me the first time she caught sight of Bill, standing there in a grubby Food Lion in North Raleigh, overripe fruit smells wafting all around. I hefted a jug of laundry detergent into the cart and turned to look and…

Any City

Terrance Wedin ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Fiction

Mom came downstairs, her eyes looking like she’d been crying all morning. I was still in bed, in the unfinished basement that was now my room. The leggings under my sweatpants itched. She barely ran the heat anymore. Getting out of bed meant getting ready for work—putting on the yellow…

Far Post

Jennifer Lee ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Fiction

My lip is swollen like a bee sting. On the inside it keeps rubbing against my braces, sore. All I can think about is the salty flavor of the cut in my mouth, and I’ve been late to every class, my mind wandering down the hall, sucking on this sore.…

Scalpeen

Richard Hague ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

1 There is a racial memory by which the past is continually accumulated and preserved. —Henri Bergson, A New Philosophy Even before my father bought a remote parcel of brushy-up land in Appalachian Ohio’s Monroe County (which land and the people living around it has become a major source of…

Mystery Before Mastery

Leatha Kendrick ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Craft Essay

I really don’t know how poetry gets to be written. There’s a mystery & a surprise, and after that a great deal of hard work. —Elizabeth Bishop1 What has always interested me about Bishop’s statement is its declaration that a poem is “a surprise”—which I take to mean “an act…

Poem for a Daughter III

Leatha Kendrick ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Poetry

No snow today, no two below. No diapers waiting in the pail for bleach. No pail. No wooden house above the two-lane road, no Freewill Baptist Church next door, no cemetery on the point above our bedroom window. No jewelweed, no damp dirt road rising in shade, no poison ivy,…

At the Gate

Leatha Kendrick ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Poetry

Say you are not watching people take off their shoes, put their belongings on a conveyer, empty their pockets of change. Say you are wearing an extravagant silk scarf, oversized sunglasses, a brilliant smile. No searches stand between you and the silver jet warming its engines at the gate. But…