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 poem from the summer 2014 issue.
I turn on the porchlight
so the insects will come,
so my skin that drank of you
can marvel at how
quickly it becomes enraged,
a luscious feast. I'm waiting
As we send our thoughts to the community of Charleston, South Carolina, we remember Marcus Wicker’s tribute to Trayvon Martin—this poem from our Spring 2015 issue.
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 poem from the Fall 2018 issue.
of a copper-colored river
returns, prefers her wrists
cuffed
by swift currents
rather than caution-stilled
by the many sister-gazes.
A poem from the Summer 2019 issue.
before looking out the window
A poem from the summer 2014 issue.
Peace on this planet
Or guns glowing hot,
We lay there together
As if we were getting
Something done. It
Felt like planting
A garden or planning
A meal for a people
Who still need feeding,
A poem from our spring 2015 issue, read by the author.
Days of kalmia, azalea, Blue Ridge. Nights
of steak on the grill, canvas chairs with cupholders,
cans of Stag and Blatz, Schlitz we lift from ice.
The fork in the firepit, stainless steel gone ember orange.
A feature essay from the North Carolina Music Issue.
I wanted to start with the wild weeds and the creaking wood on the front porch, walking up to Nina Simone’s childhood home in Tryon, North Carolina. I wanted to start where she started, imagining her daddy playing jazz standards on the piano, her mama cooking something good and greasy in the cramped kitchen with siblings zooming around. I envisioned myself, like Alice Walker looking for Zora Neale Hurston’s unmarked grave, shouting Nina in the derelict home, hoping somehow she would appear, gloriously phantasmagoric, and answer all of my incessant probing questions.
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.
