VOLUME 67.2
JANA-LEE GERMAINE
JEFF MEYERS
REBECCA BAGGETT
LAURA GILL
ALICIA MOUNTAIN
SCOTT BRENNAN
SEAN GILL
TERRY R. POOVEY
CLAUDIA BUCKHOLTS SARAH GORDON
KELLY R. SAMUELS
JONATHAN GREENHAUSE ALEXANDRINE VO
JANE CRAVEN
PETER GRIMES
AMANDA RACHELLE WARREN
BRIAN CRONWALL
DON HOGLE
JAMES K. ZIMMERMAN
MARISSA DAVIS
JINNY KOH
EDWARD DERBY
MICHAEL LYLE
ERNEST J. FINNEY
LIZ MARLOW
LAURIE FRANKEL
JESSICA MELILLI-HAND
Spring/Summer 2018
DEBORAH CASILLAS
Vo l u m e 6 7 . 2
JEFFREY ALFIER
SPRING/SUMMER 2018
Founded in 1948 P U B L I S H E D AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O RT H C A R O L I N A – C H A P E L H I L L
Spring/Summer 2018 V O L U M E 6 7. 2
E DI TO R- I N - C H I E F
Sarah George-Waterfield F I C T I O N E DI TO RS
Paul Blom Matthew Duncan Laura Broom P O E T RY E DI TO R
Calvin Olsen N O N - F I C T I O N E D ITO R
Travis Alexander RE V I E WS E DI TO R
Ben Murphy C OV E R DE SI G N
Sarah George-Waterfield
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ON THE COVER
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547 and 548
per year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
SCOTT BRENNAN
Hill. Subscription rates and payment information can be found on our website: thecarolinaquaterly.com.
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READERS Layne Bolden Laura Devine Nelson Disla Katie Leonard Ben Penley Sydney Ponthier
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The Carolina Quarterly welcomes submissions of
Sarah White
unpublished fiction, poetry, non-fiction, book reviews, and visual art. Manuscripts and editorial or business
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INDEXING The Carolina Quarterly is indexed in the Book Review Index, Poem Finder, Index to Periodical Fiction, American Humanities Index, and the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. Member Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. ISSN 0008-6797. Library of Congress catalogue card number 52019435.
Caroline Ervin Evan Miles Kasey Rigby Sarah White
Contents
S p r i n g /S u m m e r 2 0 1 8 | V O LU M E 6 7. 2
FICTION JINNY KOH Close to Home 14 ERNEST J. FINNEY The Trumpet Incident 56 JEFF MEYERS The Museum of Broken Relationships 128 SEAN GILL You Can’t Superglue Your Way Out of This One 153
POETRY ALEXANDRINE VO
Dasein 9 A Game 10 Monsoon 12
TERRY POOVEY
Vanishing Country 13
JAMES K. ZIMMERMAN
La Carrera de Santo Santiago 27
JANE CRAVEN
Artifact 47
Balaclava 48
DON HOGLE
Radical Phenology 50
Tinnitus 51 MARISSA DAVIS
Reverse Recipe for Near-Impossible Feats
(Or, How to Grow Lavender in the Kentucky
Wetlands) 52
JESSICA MELILLI-HAND
Jane’s Hole in the Wall Diner 71
DEBORAH CASILLAS
Enigma of Stone and Line 72
Mesa of Wind and Unceasing Light 73
The Undefined 74
MICHAEL LYLE
Reston Town Center 75
REBECCA BAGGET T
Demographics 76
JEFFREY ALFIER
Overwintering North of Bucharest 78
EDWARD DERBY
Eighth Winter in Kraków 79
New Birds 80
JANA-LEE GERMAINE
The Magician’s Assistant 97
Early Frost, Deep Freeze 98
AMANDA RACHELLE WARREN
Dear Mother of Weakness, 114
Ridgerunner 115
SARAH GORDON
A Dark and Feathered Thing 117
On the Death of a Moth 118
BRIAN CRONWALL
Obsession 120
Eating Lunch at Rappa’s Restaurant 121
JONATHAN GREENHAUSE
The Thrall of Animals 144
CLAUDIA BUCKHOLTS
Particles 146 Lunch 147
ALICIA MOUNTAIN
Glaring Pattern Baldness 148
Haymaker Barnburner 149
LIZ MARLOW
Elegy for a Barracuda 150
KELLY R. SAMUELS
Catalpa speciosa 164
NONFICTION
PETER GRIMES 1993: The Album (A Revisionary Retrospective) 28
LAURA GILL How to Be Seen 99
LAURIE FRANKEL Hodeng-Hodenger 122
ART
SCOT T BRENNAN
Artist’s Statement 82
Parking Garage Ramp 83
Moon Over Miami 84
L2 86
141 and 142 87
Level 2E 88
Parking Garage Ramp (Outside) 89
104 and 103 90
354 91
Level 6E 92
ADA Ramp 93
547 and 548 94
REVIEWS
JACKSON HALL Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith 167
HEATHER MENEFEE Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes by Anne Elizabeth Moore 171
EMILIO TAIVEAHO The Islands by William Wall 175
ALEXANDRINE VO
Dasein Slowly she dances in the fields aglow with goldenwheated rhythm. Flows of fabric down her knees as she sways and is one with what the earth makes grow. Far off, passersby— sighting the fleck flushed with aurous stalks—gaze out inquiringly hands shading eyes to glimpse the form, to follow in its weightlessness. How she moves through a trail snaking past uneven squares of rationed land whose earth now bare, now hooved dimples where lately a trio of oxen have left impressions of their bovine weight, followed by human tracks trudging along a dim trajectory. Plough-injured soil, sweetscented, cooled by night’s falling as one red pail bobs homeward, tins clinking clean of rice, smelt, chopsticks, and tea. She moves as though there were no land division. No borders, no countries. She moves as leaves are moved by the wind’s gentle soughing, days urged toward evening, leaving something there in the manner of her shape. ALEXANDRINE VO
9
A Game I was standing by the bamboo hedges at the gate at sundown watching them play the game called U. I slid into the thicket, careful not to be noticed. Letting the bony patchwork of slim leaves shadow me. A pair on each side, they challenged the other to hold their breaths and run. From a well at the gate’s end far afield from the front yard, passing grandfather’s coconut trees and lush rows of cassava. They ran and ran While the box-kite rooms of their lungs rose and rose in the air. Steady and low so the sound would hold, they carried the U unbroken, kept it from falling, to the other side despite long strides of space, the dull spent air rarer in their throats.
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The objects of the game being freedom and restraint against what they sensed could be their own undoing. These rehearsals the rituals of their days. Sneaking in breaths when it became too much. Each breath promising more, a jolt of thrill, a secret triumph. Steeling the body against the doom as though it were possible to fool in the other game, to pull the wool down the reaper’s little eyes.
ALEXANDRINE VO
11
Monsoon We folded paper boats and sailed them down a flood stream beside which wet toads congregated in bored colonies, flexing their lips, waiting for rain to pass under taro leaves that seemed more colossal by the way to them the storm remained feeble, each singing sphere falling clear and discreet along the spine of veiny blades; no sign of wreck or ruin but some trees deposed in the clearing, spring’s efflorescence still too far.
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SCOT T BRENNAN
Statement by the Artist It goes without saying that automobiles, so ubiquitous in the modern world, require places in which they can be parked when not in use. Where land has become scarce as a result of urban development and suburban sprawl, multi-level parking garages have quite simply become a necessity. Despite their architectural blandness and intentional anonymity, parking garages are fascinating structures to consider. Indeed, they can be dull places—mildly depressing given their stark utilitarianism. Aside from minimally painted walls and columns, little effort is devoted to making parking garages aesthetically pleasing. Nevertheless, they often possess a haunting, crypt-like atmosphere full of soft light and shadows, distant cousins, I like to imagine, of the grand European cathedrals of old. Indeed, are not parking garages—with their robust columns, defused light, and solemn echoes—our new cathedrals? Over a period of two years, 2016 to 2017, sometimes late at night when few people were around, I visited parking garages and took many photographs. I tried to capture the vehicles, particularly those covered by protective shrouds, and also took note of the colors and the textures of the concrete, the oil stains on the asphalt, the layers of detritus accumulated over time. I noted the orderliness of the stenciled numbers and of course the ventilation ducts, drain pipes, and electrical conduits no doubt essential if the parking garage is to fulfill its essential purpose.The result of the photographic project is this series, New Cathedrals.
Parking Garage Ramp
SCOT T BRENNAN
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L2
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141 and 142
SCOT T BRENNAN
87
Level 2E
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LAURA GILL
How to Be Seen “What do you like about the WWE?” I asked. “It’s a story,” he said, “it’s real, live fiction.” Why did you want to know about the WWE in the first place? When I was young, my stomach churned the first time I watched Jake the Snake’s python glide over his opponent’s body. I became nauseous moments before, too, when his body slammed into another’s and when he climbed the ropes and flew down with his elbow out, slamming into another wrestler’s collar bone. I knew it was fake, and yet the experience gathered within me—it made me feel. You were curious about a feeling? Darren Aronosky’s film The Wrestler opens with a nearly washedup wrestler, Randy “The Ram” Robinson, sitting in the back of a classroom in his yellow spandex, coughing. His back is turned toward the camera, and his body is framed with walls covered in various pieces of children’s art and a blackboard. His promoter brings him a wad of cash, saying he thought it would be a better turn out, and then the camera follows him out, to the gymnasium, where the fight just took place. The folding chairs are being put away, and the guys are pulling off the ropes, one-by-one. After signing the autographs, “The Ram” continues through the gym, his hair pulled into a ponytail, matted in sweat. He leaves the shiny floors and padded walls and moves with his head down. Watching, you get that feeling—the one you feel when you’ve done the bit that everyone was waiting for and you have nothing more to give. That doesn’t quite explain it—
LAURA GILL
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I felt something when Jake the Snake’s snake made its way over the shiny tights of his opponent’s legs. That’s a segment of it—I wanted to know how performance can create a response, how it ends up in a physical body as a feeling one can still experience. I also wanted to know how it ends up in the body of the performer themselves, how so many wrestlers end up like Randy “the Ram” Robertson, performing in high school gyms, knowing that the turn out will never get better. Here’s another thing: Jake the Snake is afraid of snakes. When I found that out, it didn’t just make me wonder what fears were part of my performance but what fears could be. “The only way to understand a character is to force yourself to ask just how it is that you could end up in his or her position,” my acting teacher said. He had us draft a list of statements: “if x happened, I would y.” We had to write the statements until we found it quite possible that we could end up as, say, a cocaine addict in an abusive relationship. Once I discovered I could be anybody, I had a hard time deciding not to try. If x happened. If x happened. If x happened. Y. Y. Y. I suppose I thought I could be anybody before I discovered just how to become somebody because, when I was five, I decided to propose to a boy even though I didn’t yet know what love was. I asked him to meet me under the sink in the bathroom downstairs, I had a flower in my hand. A red rose. I gave it to him as I asked him to marry me. I do not remember his face. All I remember is how the words arrived in my mouth, and how I then carried them over to him, not at all attached to their meaning, not at all connected to their definitions. The moment was so much about my performance that I cannot even remember his reaction, except that it must have been painful or, at least not rehearsed, because I remember that I needed to move quickly, and that it was challenging to do under a sink, in a dress, sitting with my legs crossed over one another.
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AMANDA RACHELLE WARREN
Dear Mother of Weakness, A boy who never begs, a boy like a siren, a boy like a tree, a boy mudhungry and riverwashed, a boy unafraid, a boy whose hum is the sound of retreat, a boy who calls the bones in the earth to rise, a boy who licks salt from rocks he places on his bright tongue like the names of saints in litany, Selah, a boy whose mouth is a blur and a sneer and a honeycomb of psalms, a boy who is always the dark against the dark in the distance, a boy whose stationary body blocks the spilled yellow light of all windows, a boy with fingers juicestained and nails dark with dirt, a boy who forges charms to send rain, a boy who plucks cicadas from the air and sings them from their shells --let him not come for me. Let him not arrive in the night. Let him not haunt me, this brown-eyed boy. X
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Ridgerunner There is a grove of sweet grasses, nothing wrong lingers there. There is a house of ghosts who kiss tenderly so as not to wake you. There is a river which sings about the dark of stones. There is the smell of woodsmoke, or there is the murmur in the hall— bitter coffee in the evening hours. There is the green hollow like a cradle of stained glass, and there is the soft dry fall, and there are eyes like storms and skin like stained maple and curses that read like promises of blood and water embedded in the viscera of all of us stirring under the moon’s insistence and there are dagger teeth beneath the fallen branches, and riots and sorrows and rains that smother and swell and sweep everything cruel into your yard, where you stand flecked to the knees with what is stirred from silt, or there is the world. Leave, and your stomach will churn with longing. Stay, and we will stay forever on the verge. Nothing in the dead of night will promise anything. What pins us to the earth we can’t yet name.
AMANDA RACHELLE WARREN
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LAURIE FRANKEL
Hodeng-Hodenger “Peux-tu le voir?” Jean-Jacques asks, pointing through the window past the barbed wire that separates their yard from the neighbor’s, to the pasture beyond. I lean in and focus, trying to see through the thick fog. Behind the branches of a young tree a white horse, a pony, comes in and out of the mist. The odd light flattens perspective and, with no landmarks for comparison, the pony looks larger than it is, mythical. I trick myself into thinking it is a unicorn, as if its horn, temporarily hidden by the mist, will appear at any moment with a turn of the head. Jean-Jacques and Thérèse, a Parisian couple in their sixties, have invited me to spend the weekend in their country home, a converted farmhouse from the 19th century in the tiny town of Hodeng-Hodenger (population: 283) in the Normandy region of France, an hour outside Rouen. I’m on a year-long sabbatical hiding out in Paris and, after eight months, am finally making friends. They pick me up at the train station. The cold, dense fog that has settled over the region this weekend does not lift and becomes a topic of conversation. Details that sunshine brings are rubbed out. As we walk around, everything is veiled, imbued with a romantic longing as if we are characters from Wuthering Heights wandering the moors. After a couple of hours of sightseeing we drive to get lunch. While JJ feeds the meter Thérèse tells me he recently lost his cat, the one he found as a kitten eight years ago in the woods out here, the one that followed him home. It was an embolism out of nowhere, apparently a defect since birth. When JJ comes back I tell him I am sorry. “Ouais,” he says, and shrugs his shoulders. It’s no fun being sad. Their renovated house is in the shape of an “L”, original living quarters in one wing, animals in the other. JJ explains that back when the Normans invaded there wasn’t much rock to quarry so they used the abundant wood instead which explains the region’s preponderance of half-timber construction. The house’s original thatched roof,
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expensive to maintain, was replaced with overlapping slate. When we arrive everyone sets to chores. JJ, a bright, short, handsome man with a lopsided grin, loads a wheelbarrow of wood to start a fire while Thérèse and I fill the five bird feeders, clear wind-strewn branches from the yard and re-cover bushes to protect them from the cold. A light-hearted woman with a penchant for the macabre, Thérèse sports a dark blond pageboy and artsy glasses that draw attention. Back inside Thérèse tells me a story about Claire, a country neighbor we will see later. She bows her head and speaks in a low voice that draws me in till we are like two school girls sharing secrets, a true tête-à-tête. I am not prepared for such intimacy but follow her lead and move in closer. Years ago, she tells me, Claire’s daughter, Nathalie threw herself out of a window. I stare into Thérèse’s face, trying to focus. “Elle s’est suicidée?” Thérèse nods. I think of the play Night Mother, hear the gun go off in my head. “Quand?” I ask. Eighteen years ago in front of her mother, Claire’s daughter jumped from her apartment window. Like a bad cut in a movie—here one second, gone the next. “How many stories?” I ask, expressing my morbid need for detail. Thérèse sketches in the story. Something about a broken heart, a priest—Thornbirds, I think—then adds, maybe drugs, mental illness. As for the floor of the apartment, apparently not high enough as the young woman spent a year in a coma before she died. And since then, everyday, for the past eighteen years, Claire has visited her daughter’s grave to water plants, replace flowers. “Always busy,” Thérèse says, referring to Claire. “Always moving, walking, walking.” Thank God for two legs, I think, for locomotion, the ability to get away if only for a moment. There is an image at the end of Ida, a Polish film where one of the characters jumps to her death. She enters the scene, back to the audience and strides across the living room’s wooden floor—such alacrity, such purpose. Like a choreographed dance, she sails through the douLAURIE FRANKEL
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CLAUDIA BUCKHOLTS
Particles Rice grains stick together in the pan. Answer with the Lord’s name, a bell rings for the angelus, hours of tierce and prime combat daylight with their locutions. Finding the world too various to describe, I started with small things: a coin of moonlight, a mosaic piece on a threshing floor in Pompei. I learned concentration, selecting a baker’s single loaf from a whole wall of fresco, and from the loaf a single slice, and then a crumb. A single hair encapsulates dimension, a line’s extension forms an endless rank of solid figures, a retinue. I abstract from the twilight a single color leaving copious light alone. I clutch my piece of the jigsaw against my chest, as others clutch their own. Only in tandem do we form a portion of the sky, and no one knows what the completed puzzle made from a multitude of jagged pieces might become.
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Lunch As glossy menus arrive, she asks questions, her subtext always the same: Justify your life. I think of a fish struggling, in thrall, on a hook, the turbulent beauty of its rainbow body. Rancor floods her eyes, and I feel an outworn fear. In the dark den, in the feral night, a bear rolls over her shrinking albino cub, an unrecognizing mother. She bats out intrusive questions, and I bristle like an invaded country. Some call this love, this extrusion of words. On the lattice screen, a pattern of bright flowers embraces an emptiness. I imagine myself elsewhere: white birches gleam opalescent beside the unfrozen river, wild ducks pause in their southward migration to accept bread from my hands.
C L A U D I A B U C K H O LT S
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SEAN GILL
You Can’t Superglue Your Way Out
of This One
There was a tapping on the hardwood floor around the corner and down the hall. It was timid but deliberate, like a Boy Scout’s first attempt at Morse code. I leaned back in my seat between bites of sweet potato and peered in the direction of the sound but saw nothing. Ramona was talking about a customer at work who had slapped her hand at the register and I was trying my best to pay attention, but the tap, tap, tapping drew my focus. There was a change in the timbre of the noise, and a plastic sort of click, click, click on the linoleum. Whatever it was, it had left the hallway and had entered the kitchen. I looked at the other members of the dinner party, but no one shared my apprehension. “He actually touched you?” asked Lynn. She looked to her man for a chivalrous reaction, but Steve chewed blankly, his eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare. “Yeah, he does it all the time, to everybody,” Ramona explained. “He lays down the bills and tries to count out the change with his finger, sliding one coin at a time. It doesn’t matter how long the line is behind him, if you try and take his money before he’s good and ready, he’ll swat your hand.” Unnerved, Lynn set down her fork, dinner briefly forgotten. She wove her fingers together, nearly into a gesture of prayer, her hands pressed gently against the breast of her faux-angora sweater. “He... taps your hand?” “No, he swats you good. Bastard scratched me today, look.” Ramona outstretched her arm, revealing the faint red lines of the scratch. She took real pride in the toughening aspect of these workplace miseries. Whenever I’d tell her to get another job, she’d say, “No, the bellyaching is what keeps me ‘on.’ The day I come home from the Y-Mart without any stories, that’s when you should worry...” Lynn inspected Ramona’s hand and patted it gently, as if that SEAN GILL
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might do some good. “That’s messed up! Why doesn’t the manager back you up? Is Ed still there?” “Yeah, he’s talked to him a few times, but they’ll never ban him from the store. He keeps coming back and spending his money.” Two leathery stumps emerged from behind the kitchen counter, followed by a probing reptilian head. “Is that a turtle?” I asked, a little too loud. I hadn’t said anything for so long, it was difficult to control the volume of my voice. “It’s a tortoise,” said Lynn. “Come here, baby boy!” The tortoise craned its neck and gingerly took a step forward. “I thought we agreed to put that fucking thing away,” sighed Steve. “At least while we’re eating.” Lynn was an old pal of my girlfriend Ramona, but I’d never had to interact with her until she invited us to dinner. My first impression was that of a delicate bird with auburn hair, possibly anemic: the living, breathing version of the ivory lady from an antique cameo brooch. I couldn’t believe she’d ever worked at the Y-Mart––it seemed to me the customers would’ve eaten her alive. Perhaps that was the nature of their friendship, that Lynn was drawn to Ramona’s strength, all those years ago. Lynn quit the Y-Mart and had worked from home ever since, earning a modest income buying and re-selling vintage dolls on the internet. She and Ramona both became involved in serious relationships about a year ago and consequently fell off each other’s social maps, having shifted their priorities to spending time with their significant others––Steve and myself, respectively. Steve was two or three years younger than Lynn and, in flannel and a crew cut, had the look of a cornfed, all-American boy. Supposedly he was the youngest of five brothers and had a sweet mother who kowtowed to his every whim. This was how Ramona described it, though it’s difficult for her to reliably strike a balance between objective truth and amateur psychoanalysis. Having outlasted the Honeymoon Phase, Steve and Lynn now hungered for “couple” friends and double dates and dinner parties and
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Contributors
Spring/Summer 2018 V O L U M E 6 7. 2
J E F F R E Y A L F I E R ’ S recent books include Fugue for a Desert Mountain, An-
them for Pacific Avenue and The Red Stag at Carrbridge: Scotland Poems. His publication credits include Copper Nickel, Meridian, Poetry Ireland Review, and The McNeese Review. He is founder and co-editor of Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review. R E B E C C A B A G G E T T ’ S poems have received four Pushcart nominations and appear in numerous journals and anthologies. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Miramar, New Ohio Review, and Tar River Poetry. She is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent of which are God Puts on the Body of a Deer (Main Street Rag) and Thalassa (Finishing Line Press). A native of North Carolina, she has lived for most of her adult life in Athens, GA. S C O T T B R E N N A N lives in Miami, Florida, where he is a resident artist at the Bakehouse Art Complex. His work has been exhibited in a number of venues, including the Audrey Love Gallery, the Swenson Gallery, Diana Lowenstein Fine Art, Luna Star, and the Sol Taplin Gallery. A past contributor to The Carolina Quarterly, his writing has also appeared in Smithsonian, Harvard Review, The Gettysburg Review, Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. His most recent photo essay, “Dead Pay Phones within the Context of the Urban Landscape,” is in the current issue of the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. C L A U D I A B U C K H O L T S received fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts and Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the Grolier Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Harvard Magazine, Indiana Review, Minnesota Review, New American Writing, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other journals; and in two books, Bitterwater and Traveling Through the Body. D E B O R A H C A S I L L A S , originally from California, is a longtime resident of Santa Fe. She holds a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MA in Spanish Language and Literature from UNAM in Mexico City. She has studied with various local poets and in workshops at Squaw Valley, Tomales Bay, Taos, and Tepoztlán. Her poems have been published in various journals, among them Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Whitefish Review, and the anthology Under the Volcano/Bajo el Volcán, published in Mexico.
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J A N E C R A V E N lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, graduated from UNC-Chapel
Hill, and has worked in systems development and as the director of a contemporary art museum. She is an MFA-Poetry candidate at North Carolina State University and her work has appeared in The Columbia Review, Tar River Poetry, The Texas Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Atlanta Review. B R I A N C R O N W A L L is a retired English professor living on Kaua`i in Hawai`i. His work has been published in journals and anthologies in Hawai`i, Guam, the Continental United States, Australia, Japan, France, and the United Kingdom.
Originally from Paducah, Kentucky, M A R I S S A D A V I S is a recent graduate of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, currently living in France. Her poems and creative nonfiction prose have been published in Teen Ink, The Vanderbilt Review, Kindred Magazine, and The Magnolia Review, and are forthcoming in Duende. Besides having a borderline unhealthy obsession with poetry, Marissa is a lover of foreign languages, a self-professed travel junkie, and a sporadic yogini. E D W A R D D E R B Y has poems forthcoming in The William & Mary Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and The Atlanta Review. He’s previously published in Rattle, American Chordata, Pacifica Literary Review, and others. His short film Wishbone (wishboneshort.com) was awarded Best Comedic Short and Best Actress in a Short Film by the Oregon Independent Film Festival in 2017. He publishes poetry reviews on TheRumpus.net. E R N E S T J . F I N N E Y ’ S short fiction has earned a number of awards, among them an O. Henry Awards first prize for “Peacocks.” His books include four novels, Winterchill, Lady With the Alligator Purse, Words of My Roaring, and California Time, and three story collections: Birds Landing, Flights in the Heavenlies, and Sequoia Gardens: California Stories. His novella Elevation: 6040, published by Texas Review Press, won the California Book Award for Fiction, 2016. He lives and writes in Sierra County, CA. L A U R I E F R A N K E L is the winner of the Walker Percy Prize for Short Fiction and a Bridport Prize finalist. Her work has appeared in Shenandoah, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, North American Review and The Literary Review among others. Her feature-length screenplay, The Way Station placed top 10 in the Scriptapalooza contest and she is working on a novel titled, Medievalia. Contact her at: FrankelyMyDear.com
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L A U R A G I L L is a writer and photographer living in Washington, D.C. She earned her MFA from Bennington College, and her essays are forthcoming in Agni and Swamp Ape Review and have been published in Electric Literature, Entropy, Windmill, and The Blue Mesa Review. S E A N G I L L is a writer and filmmaker who studied with Werner Herzog, documented public defenders for National Geographic, and was a writer-in-residence at the Bowery Poetry Club from 2011-2012. He won the 2016 Sonora Review Fiction Prize, the 2017 River Styx Micro-Fiction Contest, and The Cincinnati Review’s 2018 Robert and Adele Schiff Award in Prose. Other recent work has been published or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s, and Fiction Southeast. S A R A H G O R D O N is the author of Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination (UGA Press 2000) and A Literary Guide to Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia (UGA Press 2008). Her poetry has been published widely, most recently in Sewanee Review, The Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Shenandoah, and is forthcoming in Miramar, Shenandoah, and The Asheville Poetry Review. She lives in Athens, Georgia.
Winner of Aesthetica Magazine’s 2018 Creative Writing Award in Poetry, the 2017 Ledbury Poetry Competition, and the 2017 Prism Review Poetry Contest, J O N A T H A N G R E E N H A U S E ’ S poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in december, The Fiddlehead, LitMag, The Rialto, The South Carolina Review, and Subtropics, among others. His 2nd chapbook, “Secret Traits of Everyday Things,” was published by Encircle Publications in September. P E T E R G R I M E S is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina—Pembroke, where he teaches creative writing. He also serves as the editor of Pembroke Magazine <www.pembrokemagazine.com>, an annual journal of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry since 1969. Peter’s other creative nonfiction appears or is forthcoming such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, Slice, and Nashville Review. Visit his website at www.peterjgrimes.com. D O N H O G L E ’ S poetry has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Apalachee Review, Chautauqua, Hartskill Review, The Inquisitive Eater (The New School), Jenny (Youngstown State University), Stone Canoe, South Florida Poetry Journal, Third Wednesday and A3 Review and Shooter in the U.K. Among other awards, he won the 2016 Hayden’s Ferry Review poetry contest, as selected by Alberto Rios. He lives in Manhattan. www.donhoglepoet.com
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J I N N Y K O H is the author of The Gods Will Hear Us Eventually (Ethos Books,
forthcoming 2018), and was recently shortlisted for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in Kyoto Journal, Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume 2 (Epigram Books), Columbia Journal, and Litro, among others. She graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a Master of Professional Writing from the University of Southern California, where she was the Fiction Editor for The Southern California Review. M I C H A E L L Y L E ’ S poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Canary, Dappled Things, Euphony, The Hollins Critic, Hummingbird, Saint Katherine Review, Pinyon and other journals. Two of his essays were winners of the Buechner Narrative Writing Project and published in The Christian Century. Michael lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and his first chapbook will come out in 2018 from Plan B Press. http://www.michaellylewriter.com L I Z M A R L O W holds an MFA from Western Michigan University and an MBA from The University of Memphis. Her poems have appeared in The Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition, Deep South Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. J E S S I C A M E L I L L I - H A N D is most recently published in CALYX and Redactions:
Poetry & Poetics and also appears in Hunger Mountain, Painted Bride Quarterly, Barrow Street, and the minnesota review, among others. She won first place in the Agnes Scott Poetry Competition in 2014, judged by Terrance Hayes, in 2011, judged by Arda Collins, and in 2008, judged by Martín Espada. She is an assistant professor of English at the College of Coastal Georgia. J E F F M E Y E R S is a writer, filmmaker and award-winning critic. His collection
of poetry, Hereafter, was a finalist for the 2000 Oregon Book Awards. He has a M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from University of California-Riverside. His short stories can be found in Confrontation, Canyon Voices, and Dark Lane Anthology VI. A L I C I A M O U N T A I N ’ S first collection, High Ground Coward, won the Iowa Poetry
Prize and will be published by the University of Iowa in 2018. She is also the author of the chapbook Thin Fire, forthcoming from BOAAT Press. Mountain is a queer poet, a PhD candidate at the University of Denver, and an assistant editor of The Denver Quarterly. She earned her MFA in poetry at the University of Montana. Keep up with her at aliciamountain.com.
CONTRIBUTORS
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T E R R Y R . P O O V E Y was born in 1950, more or less in the country in Catawba
County, North Carolina. His family lived a semi-agrarian existence, growing much of their own food and heating their house with wood- and coal-burning stoves. The city of Hickory annexed their property when he was in high school, and the urbanization began. Terry holds a BA in English from Appalachian State University and has worked at Wake Forest University for twenty-one years. This is his first professional publication. K E L L Y R . S A M U E L S lives and works as an adjunct English instructor in the upper Midwest. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net, and has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals including apt, Burningword, The Summerset Review, Kestrel, Chiron Review and Common Ground Review. A L E X A N D R I N E V O grew up in Quang Nam Province, Vietnam, and is currently
living and working in New York City. A Gates Scholar, she earned BA degrees in literature and philosophy from Baylor University, and an MFA from Boston University where she was a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow and a George Starbuck Fellow. She has completed a first full-length collection, As Though We Are One, which was named Finalist for the 2015 Kundiman Poetry Prize, and is currently at work on her second collection, The Gallant South. A M A N D A R A C H E L L E W A R R E N ’ S work has appeared most recently in Appa-
lachian Heritage, The Pinch, Roar, South 85, Anderbo, and Beloit Poetry Journal as well as other journals. Her chapbook Ritual no.3: For the Exorcism of Ghosts, was published by Stepping Stone Press in 2011. She is the 2017 recipient of the Nickens Poetry Fellowship from the South Carolina Academy of Authors and currently works as a freelance writer, part-time teacher, and full-time poetry pusher. She lives in Aiken, South Carolina with fellow poet Roy Seeger. J A M E S K . Z I M M E R M A N is an award-winning poet and Pushcart Prize nominee.
His work appears or is forthcoming in Miramar, Pleiades, Chautauqua, American Life in Poetry, Nimrod, The Cape Rock, and Peregrine, among others. He is the author of “Little Miracles” (Passager, 2015) and “Family Cookout” (Comstock, 2016), winner of the 2015 Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Prize.
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VOLUME 67.2
JANA-LEE GERMAINE
JEFF MEYERS
REBECCA BAGGETT
LAURA GILL
ALICIA MOUNTAIN
SCOTT BRENNAN
SEAN GILL
TERRY R. POOVEY
CLAUDIA BUCKHOLTS SARAH GORDON
KELLY R. SAMUELS
JONATHAN GREENHAUSE ALEXANDRINE VO
JANE CRAVEN
PETER GRIMES
AMANDA RACHELLE WARREN
BRIAN CRONWALL
DON HOGLE
JAMES K. ZIMMERMAN
MARISSA DAVIS
JINNY KOH
EDWARD DERBY
MICHAEL LYLE
ERNEST J. FINNEY
LIZ MARLOW
LAURIE FRANKEL
JESSICA MELILLI-HAND
Spring/Summer 2018
DEBORAH CASILLAS
Vo l u m e 6 7 . 2
JEFFREY ALFIER
SPRING/SUMMER 2018