70
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2020 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY JANET FORD
Grace There was nothing but sin up and down that street, and in the fall of the year Daddy got his apple money and he and Ransom Meadows would stay over there a week. They’d come back drunk, tuckered as hounds from a hunt. She had pieced a quilt from a length of cotton and some old work shirts, and now a drunkard’s path of yellow roses sprawled across the room. She bent above it stitching into the late afternoon.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
The lazy tick of the clock on the mantel; a shift in the stove as the pine logs settled. More than once, Mama packed us up and took us to her folks. We’d stay a night or two, laid like cordwood over pallets on the floor, but where can you go with a string of young’uns? More than once, her mama told her, “Mary Grace, you made your bed; you’ll have to lie in it.”
Passed Down (acrylic paint, puzzle pieces, and glitter on canvas, 72x96) by Juan Logan
So she bundled our things and we walked back home, and for a while, they made wide circles around each other. She kept her head down, her hands in the biscuit bowl. He went out back and started a fire. He’d sit in his shed, rubbing the handles of his pruning shears with beeswax and turpentine. Her thimble chased the flash of the needle, running the patches like a minnow in a stream. She could cook anything he brought her – river turtles, rabbits, squirrels. We had our own wheat, our own corn, eggs and butter. We never missed a meal. The sky had been holding back all day, and with nightfall, a light rain peppered overhead. Daddy called the rain a farmer’s holiday. “It’s doing more than we can,” he always said.
Belmont, NC resident JUAN LOGAN earned his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is Conservation Manager for the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Project in Wilson, NC. He has received fellowships, from the North Carolina Arts Council and the Carolina Postdoctoral Scholars, among others. His work can be found in numerous collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. See more of his work in NCLR 2018 and 2019 and on his website.
JANET FORD lives in the Brushy Mountains of western North Carolina. In 2017, she received the Guy Owen Prize from the Southern Poetry Review. Poetry South, Great Smokies Review, and New Southerner are among the publications that have included her work.