A poem from the Spring 2018 issue.

I know we are happy

To hold them in our arms

     Watching 

Them squizzle

A Points South essay from our North Carolina Music Issue.

“Reina de mis . . . Reina de mis . . .” And it struck me suddenly, as I stared down at my notebook at my messy handwriting, how without having given it any thought, I’d automatically jotted down Spanish lyrics in English words. “Queen of my . . . Queen of my . . .” A force of habit in a country where I am sometimes discouraged from speaking in my native tongue. 

An interview with Les McCann from the Kentucky Music Issue. 

All through high school the band teacher and I were very good friends. He received tickets to all the bands and brought me to concerts. I was in perfect heaven. I never said no to anything. And my mother was a fake opera singer. She’d listen to the opera every Sunday while she cleaned house and wooooo, oh my God, it was great! Everybody was into something. Right across the street from our house was the Elk’s Club, so every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night you’d hear a beautiful organ trio playing. 

A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.

Blood’s Harmolodics puts “the cry” front and center. The cry is the aural exposition of the paradoxical mode of existence that forced the musical innovations made by Africans in America. Born of forced migration, it harkens to an Africa that exists only in the minds of its long-exiled American children.

The panties disappeared in mid-February, much to my disappointment. For almost a year, I’d been renting an inexpensive office on the second floor of an old 1950s commercial building outside of town, and I entered next to the storefront of a defunct lingerie shop. The owners were trying to sell the whole business, so the stock remained on display, untouched, frozen in time behind the big plate glass windows like an aquarium full of colorful, exotic fish.

Some thirty or forty linear feet of my poetry library played a minor role in the movie The Portrait, starring Lauren Bacall and Gregory Peck. A minor role in a minor movie.

First, anticipate it. In fact, anticipate disappearances, jail time, lawsuits, death threats, broken things, cocaine, young wives, younger girlfriends, children. Don’t be fooled by the pauses. They will be full of bluegrass, money, convertibles, grand homes in foreign countries, pet orangutans, and infinite promise. Also cocaine, young wives, younger girlfriends, children. Get away from him. Do it young. 

Shelley and Chief burst through the trees across the pasture. It was the end of a hot day of riding at the stables near our home in Tampa. My sister had gone out there with a friend and, as usual, she was one of the last to return. Shelley would turn fifteen that summer. She never took to softball or cheerleading; she was deeply in love with horses. Our divorced parents recognized this, and Chief—a deceivingly handsome bay with some quarter horse in him—was her prize.

A poem from the Fall 2016 issue. 

Landlocked in a neighborhood of warehouses, all-night convenience stores and urban decay, where FedEx planes come in close on their approach to the country’s busiest cargo airport, Chris Rooke has sold and hitched sailboats from coast to coast for forty-three years.