The History of Amputation

Katlin Brock


a history of amputation
time began when the first man laid eyes on
Appalachia’s soft peaks and said in his soul,
I am home.

when the mountain ate him whole
and his bones became dust to
later be mined by other men.

when they took up the maddock and the shovel
to dig coal from the belly before they
learned to remove the skull. 

 


Katlin Brock lives on the county line between Harlan and Bell, Kentucky. She attends Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, TN and is currently working towards a degree in Creative Writing. She has previously been named the James Still fellow at the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival held at LMU and received a scholarship to the Tennessee Mountain Writers Conference held in Oak Ridge, TN. Katlin shares her life with three dogs, many horses, and several chickens. When she’s not writing, her time is spent on horseback, gardening, or with her family.

 

Beautiful

Amber D. Tran

A sky without clouds, that tissue paper blue
above a field of paperwhite and gold, the first day we met.

Poplars whispered to me your name, word of porcelain
on a breath of pine, and the mountains hummed with me
as I said it over and over again,
“Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca.”

From the peak of the Allegheny, I lifted
a charred sliver of bark and found our first kiss there,
among roots and larvae, tiny white bodies
filled with butter and salt. The taste all the same.

You promised to come back after your search for blackberries.
I watched the hills embrace you, your body swallowed
by more than just moonshine and music, the tang
of the bucket on your knees as you walked away.
The Appalachia had you.

I call for you every morning, hopeful of your return,
my voice an aid to the mountains that often forget your name.

 


Amber D. Tran graduated from West Virginia University in 2012, where she specialized in lyrical non-fiction and contemporary poetry. She is the Editor-in-Chief for the Cold Creek Review literary journal. Her first novel, Moon River, was released in September. Her work has been featured in Calliope, Sonic Boom Journal, Spry Literary Journal, Cheat River Review, and more. She currently lives in Alabama with her husband and miniature dachshund.

 

Off Season

Karla Van Vliet


When your hands hesitated, circled the fields
   but never landed, stopped their tracing to winter
in the safety of know regions, silence filled
my mouth, a burning cold. My body was left land, 
                                  the birds flown northward. 

A season has its own torn threads. Mine are rushes
woven by wind, your hand in my hair, now empty nest. 

I pray for rain; rain, for that touch on my skin. Oh, 
let your fingers turn wing, let the urgency of instinct
                                            direct you back, let you remember. 

And be it that my lands warm, again, to you. That the
spring has not been too long in coming. 

 

 


Karla Van Vliet is the author of two collections of poems, From the Book of Remembrance and The River From My Mouth. She is an Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize 2016 finalist and was nominated for a 2015 Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Blue Heron Review, The Tishman Review, Green Mountains Review, Cronnog Magazine and others.  Van Vliet is a co-founder and editor of deLuge Journal, a literary and arts journal.

 

Leaving the Geneticist’s Office

Kayla Pearce

after Yvonne Bobo’s sculpture Murmuration


In the cancer center’s
atrium, starlings flock 

toward an open sky, 
gliding on streams 

of steel. Up close, they’re
aluminum boomerangs, 

warning me: everything
you release will come back. 




Kayla Pearce is an MFA candidate at Oregon State University where she teaches Poetry Writing and English Composition and reads for 45th Parallel. She earned her BA and MA in English from Mississippi State University where she worked as Poetry Editor for Jabberwock Review. Her poems can be found in Spry, Red Mud Review, and elsewhere.

 

Offering

Susan Moorhead


In the front yard, the pond folded
into itself, a mouth closing. Small
fish, gasping, strewn like a pocketful
of silver across the scrubbed lawn. 

I held the edges of the yard in each
fist, shook it hard, lifting and letting
it fall like a sheet, my ribs cracking
under the sod weight of it. Water

spread, fingering among jutting
rocks, turning serpentine, seeking
travel. In the cool clasp of water,
reborn in the river, the pleasure

of breath gasps, the glass- domed
sky. Houses tilted and sank in, plates
floating as the tea cups sank. A turtle
in murk water, watching, waiting,

and I studied that kind of acceptance
among the ferns and cracked flowerpots. 
The mosaic of dirt and roots entering
as the sky bled, I saw the waves 

returning to the shore, saw how to
breathe in the slice of moment under
each wave. I thought how much I loved
the paper of your skin as the sun
burned through, set us on fire.

 


Susan Moorhead's poetry and stories have appeared in print and online journals and anthologies including JMWW, Lowestoft Chronicle, Anderbo, and Crab Creek Review. Nominated three times for a Pushcart prize, recent work includes a short story in Breadcrumbs, and a poetry chapbook, The Night Ghost, with Finishing Line Press.

 

Night, Now I’ve Come to Know You

J P Dancing Bear


Even before we get to our boat, let's review the moon
with Venus riding bareback, and how the clouds conspire so
to make it the only visible light. This is because the sky
remembers how we used to be, long after we have forgotten
our early shimmerings. And the lap-lap of the ocean
is a lullaby of currents that pull us in our rudderlessness.
Each pitch, roll and yaw are substitutes for our raw caress—
a memory of our hairs swaying with each touch like sea grass.
                 •
We ignored or took for granted all the birds with their white sky
bellies until they passed out of existence. Mist swirled around us, 
became our auras and we kept silence within ourselves, till only
the creak of wood and droplets of rain were our language. 
Now I cannot remember a single song.
Now we can discuss the boat of ourselves.

 

 

J. P. Dancing Bear is co-editor of Verse Daily and Dream Horse Press. He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently, Cephalopodic (Glass Lyre Press, 2015), and Love is a Burning Building (FutureCycle Press, 2014). His work has appeared in American Literary Review, Quarterly West, Crazyhorse, the DIAGRAM and many others.

 

Construction Sites

Meaghan Quinn


boys chomped on scythed wild flowers
     twirled stems with their tongues

& lounged on old mattresses 

dragged out to the far end
of the dandelion field

a catcher's mitt tossed to the side / grass stains blessed their shins

                they were lost boys / boys whose elegies 

were already innumerable
                whose eyes were sliced
                from sawdust shavings
        
    all day I wanted them to notice me / to pin me down / to beast me into something I wasn’t
                & so I stepped on a nail
                poking straight out of a stray beam
                I screamed & I screamed 

    for I had always been the girl who cried wolf / only one lost boy came to me
        
& carried me like a slain wolf
into one of the unfinished houses 

laid me on a slab of marble
making snow angels
in sheets of sawdust

I could smell my foot
dripping with tetanus & blood

 


Meaghan Quinn teaches and lives in Northampton, MA. She is an Assistant Poetry Editor for The Tishman Review and holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. Her poems have been published in 2River Review, Adrienne, Free State Review, Triggerfish, and others. Aaron Graham

 

Blind Senses

Madeline Forwerck


This day holds little different
from the others, memory fading
into memory;
but you go into the kitchen and your hands
start to slice tangerines,
toast rye, spread butter on it
and you can’t stop them. You note
how beautiful it all looks
assembled on the plate,
and you don’t remember
how difficult this was
yesterday; tomorrow

you will wake up half-drunk and warm and full,
remembering flashes of the stove light on your hands,
juice on your lips, crumbs bouncing
across the countertops.

 

 

Madeline Forwerck studies literature and creative writing at Western Carolina University, where she serves as assistant editor of literary and art journal The Nomad. Her poetry has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review.

 

Matins

Nan Macmillan


I see myself through windows,
stained glass in the church at my funeral, 
through the photographs, scrapbooked
on an altar. I am my mother, 
flipping through the pages of my
fourth grade diary where I first
wrote the word Amen.
Dear Lord, I see myself through the window
of my first bedroom, as the robin
on the maple branch. I never thought
to ask if she was lonely. 
God, I was so small then, so in love
with the frayed corner
of my blue striped baby blanket,
in love with the orchards I painted
and wandered when the house was quiet enough.
I see myself through the milky windows
of my black dog’s eyes as he died –
no, as we let him die – on the kitchen floor.
He loved me so much. I know
because his breathing would slow
to match mine when I rested my head
on his ribcage. I’m telling you, 
I see myself in frames
of the film someone made about me,
in loving memory of,
on the back of a horse named Rancher, 
when my hair was sun and dust,
my palms leather-calloused.
O Father, I can’t stop seeing myself through windows.
I’m so afraid of dying, of being pulled from
the red dirt in which I take root,
of becoming the small white bodies
below the orange tree that blooms
beyond my windowpane.

 

 

 

Nan Macmillan is a student at the University of Virginia, graduating in May 2017. She studies in the undergraduate Area Program in Poetry Writing, and has written under the advisement of esteemed poets and professors Lisa Russ Spaar, Rita Dove, Gregory Orr, and Paul Guest. "Matins" is her first publication. She is from Beverly, Massachusetts but her family now resides in Charlottesville, Virginia. Also a songwriter, she plans to continue writing both poetry and songs in her post-graduate career.

 

Our First Southern Winter

Jeremy Reed


Unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, we freeze.
All we’ve known until now shifts, slips, turns,
makes evident its sense of change, its tendencies.
We should have seen all coming. Even the birds
packed in their nests with our ragged fleece.
Crystal covers grass, pin pricked into burn,

what we feel, only now, as winter by turning
unexpectedly in the middle of the night, freezing
without sheets. Tomorrow we will wake in morn,
in sunlight, in open lawn – we’ll feel all seize
in crystal-covered grass. Pin-pricked into burn,
our feet will slide forward into quick-melt sleeves

of plant life, of breaking cells, of changing season.
We now live inland but I remember arctic terns,
unexpectedly, in the middle of the night. They freeze
in crystal covered grass. Pin pricked into burn
by northerly gales, temperature chasing, they head overseas,
creating ancient patterns, flying southward.

I look for how to recognize winter here. Ferns
cast sideways in morning light, no sound of bees
in crystal covered grass. Pin pricked into burn,
unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, dry eyes freeze.
Awake, cold lends a clarity we never really learn
to expect every year. We think we know yet still the trees

never quite foretell the slight shift, never appease.
In crystal covered grass, pin pricked into burn,
for the first time this year, here, in Tennessee,
this place appears as what we’ve known before. Returned,
unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, as if it freezes,
we encounter a kind of past, intact, interred.

The crystal covered grass, the pin-pricked burn,
melts before morning sun makes its appearance.
Last night’s recognition turns into not-familiar.
Instead of yearning, I make coffee, listen for singing,
leave lights off longer to learn to hear new birds as,
unexpectedly, what was the middle of the night unfreezes.



Jeremy Michael Reed is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee. He lives in Knoxville, where he's the incoming editor for Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts and co-directs The Only Tenn-I-See Reading Series. His poems have appeared in Public Pool, Still, Stirring, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. More of his work can be found at jeremymichaelreed.com and you can follow him @jreed1490.

 

What Light Can Do

Caroline Malone


Here is what light can do.
It travels the distance we agree
equals a sum we cannot conceive
without the aid of something far more abstract,
and in it, we see a rainbow or a god
or a sign or a predictor of mood;
we see plants drink in particles of rays
sometimes nurturing sometimes destroying
the delicate organ of the tree, the grasses
the fruits, the ornamentals

and it illuminates a temple of cut block
the gradual brilliance of time
the stone body of a feathered snake
tail to head its linear journey down
the pyramid stairs, jaws open
for the blood and smoke that fills the night.

 

 

Caroline Malone is a poet and musician who lives in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee.

 

At Anne Frank’s House

Brian Koester


Even seven decades later
I need to dissolve the walls
right now and burst
into flight like flushed quail
even as I'm staying to understand.

A man as strong as a seawall
is nearly overcome
and his woman holds his hand
to get him through.

Yesterday in the Sistine Chapel
Cesare our guide spoke
of Noah's ark making landfall:
and the first thing Noah did
was plant a vine and get drunk.

The church bells just outside
chime a Lenten hymn.

I finally understand
we are sublime,
like angels and night --
which is not the same as good.

 

 

Brian Koester has recently earned his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. His work has appeared in Louisiana Literature Journal and on The Ghazal Page. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts and has been a freelance cellist.

 

Named

LeighAnna Schesser


What claw and talon beast of wonder
hunts in the hills of my heart now?
A star for a face, lion-maned,
hawk-tailed, a runner's feet and
archer's bow--a body expansive
as billows blown between suns.

Rough wind, weather me down!
Long-fingered hands, be water! Waves,
carve a gully through my rock shoulders,    
sandstone belly, make me cavernous and
cathedral-grand, hollow-holy.

The long pant of noon. Twilight
star-tremolo. Join them, far-spread
hands coming together, and that
is the sky I've swallowed. 

I am heavy, transparent, light-borne,
wind-drifted. A lashed raft of desires        
and memories of places to call home.        
Bunches of perfect peach-halves,
sweet summer hemispheres, 
curled about a hard, tooth-cracking
hope for a warm-dirt banked, 
fresh-rooted, ivy-trellised spring.

 

 

LeighAnna Schesser is the author of Heartland (Anchor & Plume Press, 2016.) Her poems are forthcoming in Virga and have appeared in Peacock Journal, Whale Road Review, Mothers Always Write, Ekphrastic, Rose Red Review, Kindred, Synaesthesia Magazine, Verse-Virtual, and Transcendence Magazine. LeighAnna earned her M.F.A. at North Carolina State University. She lives in Kansas with her family and blogs at leighannaschesser.wordpress.com.

 

Holler Rats

Adam McGraw


We shine shotgun barrels.
We toast iced milk.

And we are negated by the keep-on-coming
roll of rat-damning lips, stiff as crawdad shells.

The crawdads of my youth were revered,
orange-shelled fathers knowing only the toil
of digging holes, of draining the creek.

I drank from the creek, and the water was sweet.

And the water was polluted with deer piss
and beaver piss and the piss of blackbirds
swelling the clouds.

And I know a man whose eyes swelled
after a spider bit them shut.

He worried about blindness and blind Milton
feeding poems to his daughters, and the daughters
missing a caesura.  And blind, he strides
into the gymnasium and says:

“Should we build houses of animal skins?

Should we mainline coal dust
and moonshine, our fathers’ aqua vitae?”

For that blind man, the mountains ache
for drills and mines and songs, and I believe
one day he shall stand beneath
and say:

“My pockets weigh me down,
but I once bought a whore in Hanover
for less than the cost of sixty feet of PVC.
I have felt the lash of ages,
and I will gladly bear his whip.”

 

 

Adam McGraw is a writer born in McGraws, West Virginia.  He received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing: Poetry from Georgia College and State University.  His work has been published in a number of journals, including Poet Lore, Skidrow Penthouse, Bayou Magazine, and Green Mountains Review.

 

All Day Rain

Janice Hornburg

Clouds stroke hills’ pregnant bellies, 
sure sign of more rain to come—
rain that sets in before first light, falls quietly
from afternoon’s polished pewter sky.

Water pools in furrows beside dripping cornstalks.
Earth sucks at my feet. 
Caverns under zucchini’s umbrella leaves
conceal a thousand darknesses.

Vermiculate roots unclasp waterlogged earth, 
trailing a deeper dark—always there, 
never noticed in sunlight; shadows
hiding under beds, in cellars, and closets.

Dusk quenches black pines. 
In the gloaming, woods crowd closer, 
houses fade into fog—
I flail the mist like someone struck blind.

 

 

Janice Hornburg is a native Texan transplanted to East Tennessee. Her chapbook, Perspectives, was released by Finishing Line Press in May 2013. Her work is published in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Gretchen Moran Laskas Volume V and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. VI: Tennessee. Other poems have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Chapter 16, Town Creek Poetry, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Cold Mountain Review, and Still: The Journal.