A poem from the Spring 2016 issue.
Two wasps copulate over your back porch—
their wings grate the air above the ochre splotch
where a hawk took down a pigeon last winter
not long after your move into the yellow house
I live five miles from where the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel tragedy unfolded, along the New River Gorge in Fayette County. Hawk’s Nest is an extreme in a class of extremes—the disaster where truly nothing seemed to survive, even in memory—and I have made a home in its catacombs. The historical record is disgracefully neglectful of the event, and only a handful of the workers’ names were ever made known. What’s more, any understanding of Hawk’s Nest involves the discomfort of the acute race divide in West Virginia, seldom acknowledged or discussed. Indeed, race is still downplayed in official accounts. Disaster binds our people, maybe. But what if you’re one of those deemed unworthy of memory?
A previously unpublished poem by Margaret Walker.
For a dozen wonderful writers:
Goodbye to all you girls and guys
who walked this weary way
who climbed these hills
and walked these miles
this rocky wooded chase.
A dozen wonderful writers
Anne Spencer’s ecosystem of art and activism
As I read, I fell in love with Anne Spencer’s fierceness and wit. In some ways, she reminded me of my own grandmother—a voluble woman, gardener, and scrawler of notes on the back of lists. Finding Spencer’s scraps, I felt the same sort of matriarchal literary presence amid the dailiness of domestic life: glimpses of how an ambitious, literary-minded woman might manage a house.
Poetry from the Fall 2019 issue.
We knew no alchemy we knew, the way it lay,
stood a chance, all the weight put on us pathe-
tic, the band we’d be
Poems from the Spring 2018 issue.
One white anemone,
the year’s first flower,
saves the world.
A poem by Phillip B. Williams from our Spring 2016 issue.
A poem from our 18th Southern Music Issue: Visions of the Blues.
Originally published in our North Carolina Music Issue.
I wanted to start with the wild weeds and the creaking wood on the front porch, walking up to Nina Simone’s childhood home in Tryon, North Carolina. I wanted to start where she started, imagining her daddy playing jazz standards on the piano, her mama cooking something good and greasy in the cramped kitchen with siblings zooming around. I envisioned myself, like Alice Walker looking for Zora Neale Hurston’s unmarked grave, shouting Nina in the derelict home, hoping somehow she would appear, gloriously phantasmagoric, and answer all of my incessant probing questions.
