North Carolina Miscellany
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2022 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE SEMIFINALIST BY JOANNE DURHAM
Interference I can still trace the crinkles around the wise eyes of Robert Young, the father in Father Knows Best, who never lost his temper, arrived home after work eager to settle each family crisis. Wednesday nights, late 1950s, Mom, Dad, my sister, and I watched on our black and white TV with its stiff rabbit ears. Almost every scene took place inside the home, teenage daughter flung across her bed in tears, mother aproned in the kitchen. If the camera strayed as far as the malt shop, we only saw vanilla faces, able bodies, pony-tailed girls in shirtwaist dresses. No shadow of polio or the hydrogen bomb. Jim Crow held the camera steady, not even a glimpse of Black kids playing tag on the other side of town. Those images hovered behind COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
horizontal lines called interference that would suddenly distort our view. My father fiddled with the antenna, unscrewed the pressboard back and tightened tubes, until Father and son Bud came strolling out of the garage, wiped grease off their hands, and smiled. Relieved, we all settled back on the couch. It took me years to learn to adjust the signals I received, to clear the static, the white noise, to listen with open ears.
Electrical Outlet (mixed media on collaged paper, 23x29.5) by Brandon Cordrey
JOANNE DURHAM is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl (Evening Street Press, 2022), which received the Sinclair Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, On Shifting Shoals, about the North Carolina beach town where she lives, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. She was a finalist for the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Poet Laureate Award and the NC State Poetry Contest. Her poems have or will appear in Poetry East, Flying South, Poetry in Plain Sight, Calyx, Kosmos Quarterly, among other literary magazines
Rutherford, NC, native BRANDON CORDREY is a mixed media collage artist living in Raleigh, NC. He earned his BFA in painting and drawing from East Carolina University and during his time at ECU worked at the Greenville Museum of Art. As an arts administrator, he has worked with three galleries, two museums, and multiple arts nonprofits and was most recently the Executive Director of VAE Raleigh.