118
2018
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2017 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY NICOLE STOCKBURGER
Portrait: Wesley and Elvina Settling, 1901
Before one of our speckled hens died and before we dug a small grave, before buzzards sunned their rain-heavy wings in the barn rafters, before the barn and before its broken interior, before tomato vines shifted towards the sun, before I cried in the downy tops of carrots, before we made pickles, before the farmhouse was a white smear of paint in a gauzy landscape, before memories of this place were filched as run-down houses on a highway, before power lines severed a view of the hills, before soybeans and corn, before the logging roads grew up in briers, before oak groves fell to farmland,
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
a man with a mustache covering his cleft palate held his young wife’s cotton dress where it met her waist. He cleared trees, scattered tobacco, while she hung linens across windows and smoked meat on a slab of quartz. Nights, they settled into love on a springy cot, her blonde braids unwinding over her freckled back, feral cats purring into the milky sky.
being there (mixed media on canvas, 36x36) by Sallie White
As the child of a military family, artist SALLIE WHITE lived all over the world before her family settled in Savannah, GA. For the past twenty-five years, she has lived and worked in Greensboro, NC. She graduated with an art degree from the University of Georgia and worked in many artrelated fields before founding Whitehouse & Co., an interior design and consulting firm, in 2007. In recent years, she has focused mainly on her painting career. Her work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, NC, and Light, Art + Design in Chapel Hill, NC. She is represented by Mason Fine Art in Atlanta and Vision Gallery in Atlantic Beach, NC. See more of her work on her website.
NICOLE STOCKBURGER earned an MFA in Creative Writing from UNC Greensboro. Her poems appear, or are for thcoming, in Appalachian Heritage, Comestible, About Place Journal, the Louisville Review, Chattahoochee Review, the Carolina Quarterly, and Indiana Review. Winner of the 2017 Kakalak Poetry Award, she lives in Beulah, NC, where she and her partner farm two acres of organic produce.