A poem from the Summer 2019 issue.
Fieldstones covered with velvet in emerald mark the heads of graves
a deeper depression in the ground means there was a casket that deteriorated causing the
earth to cave in
shallower dents in the earth mean only linen shrouds wrapped the bodies
A poem from the Summer 2019 issue.
for Emmett Till.
The idea of the name was basically that
a 14-year-old boy should be swimming in the river,
not dying in it.
But they spelled his name wrong.
A poem from the Summer 2019 issue.
before looking out the window
A poem from the Summer 2019 issue.
and I forgot to eat
I’m banqueting on a spice
that’s not on this table
A Conversation with Ashley M. Jones
“To me, she is beauty, she is grace, she is Miss America; America would never name her that, because she had hard features and was Black and proud, but she is what America is actually made of.”
Poems from the Spring 2019 issue.
I didn’t see the line when I crossed it—
only light, making everything new;
here, they say the winters spill out,
white a boll inside my palm;
here, gold adorns the trees,
the sun sheds its effervescence through the leaves;
I touch the place where the master split my head with iron,
even that imperfection is brilliant here;
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
When it snows, the entire post
shuts down like there is no war
going on. Perhaps the higher-ups
decide to let those left behind,
for the moment, savor the chance
to shape snowmen with their children
or lie beside another warm body.
Probably it is lack of preparedness.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
It rises from dust, rakes in the populace,
feeds them fried Twinkies, fried trees if they could
put them on a stick and powder them in sugar.
Bodies bunch up: the perfumed, the balmy,
the whole way to watch the potter at his wheel,
the carver and his knife, the knee-high rope
around an old America.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
Once, I trusted a hand pointing north;
once, I called for a wolf
and a man walked out of the night.
I walked Youngsville and marked myself down on a map
I was making.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
It’s not what you think, not a back-tease aerosol of a band
head-banging to a half-cracked amp nor the flame-decal of a beater
revving the gravel lot out back, hungry for a big-tiddied girl to stumble
out cork high and bottle deep.
