HeartWood Broadside Series 2019 Finalists

(selected by 2019 judge Savannah Sipple)

Ian T. Hall
Raven, KY

Visiting the Barn the Night Before I Burn it Down for Insurance                   

In the stall, I admire the white bloom
of horse bones

sprouting through the carpet
of straw and moldered shit, piss

 stewed dirt. Briskets
thrifted clean by crows. Nothing

 here now but the raw nerves
of a housecat skulking leanly

 through haycoffin dark, pouncing
on the year-old

shadow of a rat. Cairns
of cobwebbed tack in the loft:

halters, curry combs, silver teeth
broken off the corroded spoke

 of a spur. Souvenirs
from when I was young and yet

unfucked: yearbooks rewritten
by floodwater, baby clothes

hemmed to fit
termites and earwigs, empty bottles

of Bute that made my tired pony
step high. A nail in the wall

I hammered all to hell and left
with a crooked thumb—the blood

 belched out like water
from a bad tap. Bats flap through

 their old motions in the crawlspace
of my chest. Outside, a possum

 practices its death and even tricks
the ticks off its back. The moon

is a cleaned plate. I call this place
what it’s become: kindling.

Ian T. Hall was born and reared in Eastern Kentucky. He has an MFA in poetry from the University of Tennessee, where he served as assistant poetry editor for Grist: a Journal of the Literary Arts. He has published poetry and fiction in Narrative, Kentucky Monthly Magazine, The Louisville Review, Broad River Review, Gravel, and Bluestem, among others.

Matt Hohner
Baltimore, MD

Sarah
Loch Raven Reservoir, Glenarm, Maryland

How many years, your name in red, blazoned in spray
paint on the jersey wall at Dead Man's Corner before
the county straightened the curve, widened the bridge,
replaced rust and rickets of iron trestles with concrete?
The psychic told investigators to find your name near
water and there they'd find the missing man. And so,
when a detective spotted the ghost of muffler and tire
haunting the tea-colored depths, his grey body still
seat-belted in, upside-down, just past your crimson
letters, the legend of you began. But someone who once
loved you scrawled you in the color of blood, the color
of hot heart, the color of ache on a dark country bend
where land meets reservoir, where headlights gave
you fame a few seconds at a time, where death lurked
mere feet away for the drunk, the foolish, the too-fast,
careening recklessly through the obscurity of their lives.

Matt Hohner holds an MFA from Naropa University. Hohner recently won the Doolin Writers’ Weekend Poetry Prize. An editor for Loch Raven Review, Hohner’s collection Thresholds and Other Poems was published by Apprentice House in 2018. He has new work forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. He lives in Baltimore.

Brook McClurg
Wolfforth, TX

Rapture

In the endoskeleton is a memory like rings on a tree should you split us, an engraving of
accumulated happenings. Traumas, of course, the broken bone chorus from head-to-toe; but
also, what it feels like to run. To. From. Free. You are right, joy, to say I don’t sing you like I
should, but I’m trying. All the points where minimal cartilage increases friction, the vibrating
record of flights taking off, the jostle of rollercoasters, and the abrupt thud of falling from
trees that previously cradled us. That car crash hides in us too, as does the other and the one
yet to happen. Your pockmarked and divoted femur, the screws throughout, too few it
seems, speaks volumes. Echoes. Reverberates. I read recently of an Oregonian woman who,
after death at 99, was autopsied to find that all of her internal organs—except her heart—
were in the wrong place. Situs Inversus, where everything is a mirror image. She died not
knowing how justified she was to feel that something inside was wrong, inverted, backwards,
confused. But we know, body, don’t we? This is my not cracking a joke about where her
heart was.

 

Brook McClurg received his B.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University (Fiction) and an MFA from Rutgers University-Camden (Nonfiction). Originally from Southern California, he currently lives in Lubbock, Texas where he is a second-year PhD student in the Graduate English Department at Texas Tech.