Celebrating 25 Years of the North Carolina Literary Review
N C L R ONLINE
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FINALIST, 2015 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY L. TERESA CHURCH
Tooth Rejected by the Tooth Fairy COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
There aren’t dimes or nickels enough, toy cars as prizes to muffle wails from a six-year-old trembling, open-mouthed before a liquor-crazed father who, tired of whines about “a loose tooth,” decides his son’s lament will not ruin the family vacation this down-home summer. Readying for pulling, the father numbs himself, guzzles a whole pint, mint gin, pretends he only wants a look, which turns into a nudge that becomes an unrelenting grip. Screams pierce the front room. Father tightens one broad hand
around his son’s slender arm, lets go only for harder slaps. Each time he barks: “Shut up! Shut up! You can’t feel nothing. It don’t hurt.” Forever-minutes, slippery with snot, tears, saliva, blood, intermingle, drip down the once-white T-shirt’s front. Like a crimson-stained corn kernel, filaments of damp flesh still attached, wrapped in toilet paper, a milk tooth slipped beneath a cased pillow
Totem One Red, 2010 (oxidation painting with oil and wax medium on panel, 30x72x3) by Willie Little
L. TERESA CHURCH is a member (as well as archivist and membership chair) of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective, which she has written about for the 2016 NCLR print issue. Her writings have appeared in a variety of publications, including NCLR 2004, as well as Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry, African American Review, and Pembroke Magazine, among others. Church has earned degrees in English and English/Creative Writing from Radford College and Brown University, respectively. In addition, she holds an MS in Library Science and a PhD in Information and Library Science from UNC Chapel Hill.
on a bed fairies won’t touch as they wing night into dawn.
Multimedia installation artist and storyteller WILLIE LITTLE was born in Washington, NC, and currently resides in northern California. He received a BA from UNC Chapel Hill. He has had solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, and the African American Museums in Philadelphia, Detroit, and California. His work Juke Joint, an interactive traveling multimedia installation, was juried into the Smithsonian’s permanent collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, opening in 2016. He has received numerous grants, including two from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and awards, including the Cultural Heritage Artist of the Year Award. See more of his work on his website.