114
2020
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2019 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY GINA MALONE
1970
An of is is
original hobby is emerging as the birth a young village near F_____. The new town to be called Rayfordsville, and Dr. Rayford L. W_____ the owner and originator. (1959)
A minute’s worth of memory of the womanless gloom of a house that knew me no more than I knew it is all there is – my wanting to put fingers on piano keys despite the dust years-dark upon them, to hear what music might come out – my grandmother shaking her head – clinical sternness in her face – No. I was not yet five. I would be grown before I knew that it was the faded-grand home of a failed man she had worked for once as a nurse. We waited for the end of a beginning too close on the heels of my baby brother’s birth.
. . . Charges and Accusations which were as follows: 1. That your mental condition renders you unable safely to practice medicine . . .
I am glad that I have it, this sliver of then, a memory, as if it matters, to stave off oblivion. In my middle years, if I let myself be, I am beset with unknowing for a life that might have been entwined with mine. I could drive myself mad if I pined, if I manufactured mourning – belatedly – for what never was blanketed and held.
GINA MALONE is a native of South Carolina and now writes in the mountains of western North Carolina. She is pursuing her MFA in creative writing at Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative in Asheville. Her short stories and flash fiction have won awards in the Charlotte Writers’ Club’s annual competitions, most recently in 2018 with Wiley Cash as the judge. She was a winner of the Sidney Lanier Poetry Competition in 2012, and, in 2013, she won a North Carolina Press Association award for feature writing. Her poetry has been published in Poetry South, Kalliope: A Journal of Women’s Art, Anuran, and Kakalak. This is her second time as a finalist for this competition; her previous finalist poems appear in NCLR Online 2017.