Poems from the Summer 2018 issue.
How convenient when the brain
starts to glow. You can help
an injured peacock out of the road
without being pecked to death.
A Points South story from the Summer 2018 issue
In our collective memory, this land made it possible to take from so many. Now, I want it to give something back.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
“Point d’eau” gives viewers an unusual vantage on the difficult and improvisational lives of these migrants by focusing closely, respectfully, on one specific issue, water. A court ruling in June 2017 obliged the city of Calais to provide them with public water access, but there are still approximately “1,300 to 1,500 exiles in northern France who are being denied access to safe drinking water and sanitation services—basic human rights,” says Kantorowicz Torres.
A Southern Journey from the Summer 2018 issue.
I am again driving through the moon-flecked summer night, the hot dead bugs against my windshield summer night, the benzene-sulfur-streaked chemical stacks streaming into the gleaming Gulf summer night. It is so damn hot down here, so sultry, but I don’t want to turn the air-conditioning on in my little red fuel-efficient rental vehicle; I want to breathe in the heat, bathe in the heat, dance with it! And I happen to find a watering hole where I can do just that, in the belly of the belly of the belly of the beast. The Neon Moon Saloon, a cement-floor biker bar in industrial Houston. There’s a lively game at the billiard table, rough red-faced men at the wooden bar, a glowing neon cabinet of booze. It is an end-of-the-world type of place, and this is the end of the world.
A short story from the Summer 2018 issue.
What could you make of a world where two things were true at the same time? For instance: Ronnie was dead. But also, Ronnie was alive, and striding very quickly through the Atlanta airport.
Dawn Landes is one of the most fearlessly innovative musicians working today, but the songwriter has made potentially her boldest turn yet with Meet Me At The River (August 10 / Yep Roc Records).
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
My father was not so different than Gerty. He was a King Ranch man through and through. He spoke English and Spanish as one language, making one body of words from the branchy rivers of South Texas.
The photographs in Bryan Tarnowski’s The Wishbone aim to excavate the “fertile current of optimism” beneath the more obvious portrait of poverty in the Delta.
A Southern Journey from the Summer 2018 issue.
Even though I knew it was only temporary, I found riding the Tornado a profoundly lonely experience. For many of those around me, the journey was more permanent, one after which they would emerge into a future of perpetual outsider status, in communities where they would likely be subject to wage theft, housing discrimination, dirty looks for speaking their own language, and racial profiling by police regardless of whether they were documented or not. If they weren’t, they could be uprooted again at a moment’s notice.
A short story from the Summer 2018 issue.
Instead of coming to my birthday party, Shelby decided to become a Mormon. Every year since I turned nine it was me, my Nan, and Shelby eating meringue and lighting off snakes and spinners. Then her new church threw her a potluck, and she picked deviled eggs and dip over me. I got so mad I wanted to tell her what I really thought. That she was only getting saved—converted, dunked, brought into the light, whatever—because her dad said he’d pay for BYU. She knew her tips would never cover West Virginia, so she was going along with the God stuff.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Going to a gay bar was an expedient, in that presumably most patrons would be available. I hoped that meeting someone would be easier there. I managed two solo voyages to the same gay bar in town, a slick, modern dive where I mostly sat and swiped messages on my phone apps while flirting with the straight bartenders, two ringers planted because of their willingness to be ogled and their very legible masculinity.
In Ponce City Market: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Atlanta’s Largest Building, Blake Burton documents the transformation of the Sears, Roebuck & Company building in Atlanta into the newly restored Ponce City Market. Burton presents “behind-the-scenes views of one of the largest adaptive reuse projects in the country.” What began as “casual exploration soon morphed into a passionate desire to document the historic transformation of an architectural treasure.”
