The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded by Molly McCullly Brown is out today from Persea Books.
Three poems from our Kentucky Music Issue.
His lidless eyes are open targets—
Where sudden night flings in her quiet spear.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
It’s not what you think, not a back-tease aerosol of a band
head-banging to a half-cracked amp nor the flame-decal of a beater
revving the gravel lot out back, hungry for a big-tiddied girl to stumble
out cork high and bottle deep.
A poem from the Georgia Music Issue.
So shout hallelujah! as they douse the boy in river water.
So bring him up to find his eyes laced in silt—
Michael Shewmaker’s exceptional debut hinges on the need not to resolve form but to further open it, a puzzle, a question, as though the very act of questioning keeps him in balance.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
Once, I trusted a hand pointing north;
once, I called for a wolf
and a man walked out of the night.
I walked Youngsville and marked myself down on a map
I was making.
A poem from the Georgia Music issue.
The summer that I turned nineteen
And felt grown-up in love,
I took a job as an archivist
Sifting through a trove
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
It rises from dust, rakes in the populace,
feeds them fried Twinkies, fried trees if they could
put them on a stick and powder them in sugar.
Bodies bunch up: the perfumed, the balmy,
the whole way to watch the potter at his wheel,
the carver and his knife, the knee-high rope
around an old America.
A poem from our Georgia Music Issue.
In his call to the marketplace
the griot urges the skin clasps
the first beat
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
When it snows, the entire post
shuts down like there is no war
going on. Perhaps the higher-ups
decide to let those left behind,
for the moment, savor the chance
to shape snowmen with their children
or lie beside another warm body.
Probably it is lack of preparedness.
