28
2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2015 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY MARTY SILVERTHORNE
Roots in the Bible
Written in the margin near the list of stillborns are Jasper and Fred, Fredrick Simon and Sarah’s only sons and their daughters: Clara Musette, Beulah Mae, Melva (nicknamed Teeny), Evelyn (nicknamed Tiny), Maudie Isolene, Francis, and Dorothy. Scarlet fever scars the pages; some died plain out of poverty. Here the tree forks off in a new hand, a darker ink on yellowed edges of this old Bible traces my father, Gene Long, first born of Daisy Mae and Henry Jasper Leamon The branches cannot bear the weight of more names. The limbs break free, ink fades away.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Stalking through this Bible of numbers, births, deaths, land bought, sold, some lost outright in this book bound together with electrical tape, I track my roots, nobody’s safe. On the frontispiece broken away from the binding is the scribble of a historian, Aunt Clara, deaf mute, the only one who could write, captured in ink: William Robert Silverthorne married Elizabeth Avaline Ange, Fredrick Simon Silverthorne married Sarah Viola Roebuck who lived at the top of Doodle Hill.
Outcross, 2013 (maple and mulberry limb, 44x140x24) by Jim Jacobs
MARTY SILVERTHORNE earned degrees from St. Andrews Presbyterian College and East Carolina University. He has received the Bunn-McClelland Chapbook Award, the Sam Ragan Fine Arts Award, the Persephone Press Award, and a Poet Laureate award from the North Carolina Poetry Society, as well as regional art grants from the North Carolina Arts Council. He is the author of four chapbooks, and his poetry has appeared in several issues of NCLR, as well as Tar River Poetry and Pembroke Magazine, among other venues. Read another of his poems selected as a finalist for this competition in the 2016 print issue of NCLR.
JIM JACOBS is an Art Professor Emeritus at Weber State University in Ogden, UT. He received his BFA from Jacksonville University and his MFA in painting with a minor in wood design from East Carolina University. His work has been shown at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the Salt Lake Art Center, and Wellington B. Gray Gallery at ECU and is currently included in an exhibition at Rutgers University Newark. He is represented by Phillips Gallery in Salt Lake City. See more of his work on his website.