The popular view of Appalachia is a land where every man is willing, at the drop of a proverbial overall strap, to shoot, fight, or fuck anything on hind legs. We’re men who buy half-pints of boot-legged liquor and throw the lids away in order to finish the whiskey in one laughing, brawling night, not […]
Continue reading →Dear Ones—I was eating oatmeal in the garden that was shining in praise of last night’s quarter inch of rain, every leaf and petal lifted glistening, and the phlox’s vanilla perfume drifting in the new damp cool of morning, mixing with my latte; eating gratefully in the temple of trees at the base […]
Continue reading →The year is 1940. Germaine Russo, twenty-one years old, walks along a street in Brive, a town four hundred and eighty-two kilometers south of Paris. War had begun on the Western Front, the Germans invading the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and France. Nothing, her father said, will stop the Germans. He rented a flat in […]
Continue reading →Kenji Sitting side-by-side, facing forward atop a stone wall, Kenji fell in love with Natsuki over the course of an afternoon with a single gesture. It went from his palm resting flat against the back of her hand to their fingers locking, entwined. They didn’t look at one another, but stared straight ahead into […]
Continue reading →The rabbi was just coming out of the Mecca Mart when the woman went down in front of him. Her cane clattered away and her grocery sack tumbled with her, spilling oranges and apples and exotic green fruits across the sidewalk to the parking lot. She was an elderly Asian woman in a faded […]
Continue reading →I. Here come the vultures. One, then two, they rip the soft parts of the carcass, the bison’s eyes and ass. In the livid instant before lightning struck, the animal must have felt each follicle lifted like grass in light wind. The moments we see, or do not see. Did you wake […]
Continue reading →I woke up this morning to Spanish moss hanging from the chandelier. While I’d been asleep pepper vines had snuck in the back window headed for the library, and scarlet larkspur gathered around to mourn your old shoes in the closet. The outside became curious of the inside. What do humans do in […]
Continue reading →2012 National Book Awards on Campus program at Concordia College featuring Nikky Finney, winner of the National Book Award for Head Off & Split, and Thanhha Lai, winner of the National Book Award for Inside Out & Back Again, with Lynn Neary from National Public Radio.
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