Actress

The lowly roads of grit and stone brought Actress home. She surrendered her Jeep near the highway, parked it beside a dense imbroglio of pokeweed and gutted cardboard. Daybreak percolated below a broad swath of Kwanzan cherry trees, scattering immaculate light across Cornelius Lancaster’s tobacco field. She left this place wearing river-soaked Nike knockoffs forty […]

Bobbi sits with her husband

Shoulders squared, she recalls. You must wear a calm, unremarkable smile. Unaware, her left hand rests on his calf, ring finger prominent for her half of the photograph. She wears an apricot dress, freshly pressed for Mass, and pineapple decorative ruffle sandals, flat on the floor, hair gathered in a complex construct of barrettes and […]

Pentimento

He presumes to understand the cat sanskrit writ across the front mud yard, the vigorous dialect of entrails, the still-wet scribbles collected around the jacaranda tree trunk. He takes a rake to the mess, gathers bones in a small paper sack, folds dirt over the killing ground. This has become his morning ritual, and he […]

A leaf shaped like water disguised as a leaf

1/ But first an otherworldly version of “He Leadeth Me” by Olive Sallee’s two grown boys, Ronny and Quick. That’s them, standing before God and all His corn, and also Justin Ryder’s half-blind Appaloosa, Mary-Ellen. They are pulling the notes out of their fiddles like they were chicken gizzards, all for the good of the […]

By nightfall

She knows / settled into her land she knows / the land will settle onto her she knows / she is wholly unafraid she lost her Silas twenty- seven years come September they stood through blighted mornings / stooped beneath gritty eaves / toed over ice bubbled gravel / laid hands upon evening’s shimmered lantern […]

Where we go dancing

Me and Fo’ were well-digging since 6:30 that morning — same as every day since the middle of August — at Missus Bryant’s place near the edge of the Tallahatchie, and we looked exactly as what we claimed: gritty all the way under our hats and teeth. Miss Francine, Fo’s older cousin from Chicago, said […]

The point of a circle

i. In this twice-awful summer, we’ve become seasoned to the swell of black powder and scorched cedars coming in from Dorian Bandy’s old tobacco farm. One pretty day, I’ll invite you to see for yourself the swath of red-dirt graves stretched out like a shadow across that particular valley. Joselia, it’s not just us who […]

Rhapsody

You tell me about the elasticity of mourning, and I still don’t think you know what that means. Laurel, am I supposed to shoetree this, fit it into something comfortable for you? How do you carry it, all this anger, and more; do you expect me to carry it for you? So. Here it is. […]

Brewers Mills 1974

This is the place where the story becomes unbearable if left untold, he said. This is where the tale-teller sacrifices everything that bears the weight of all that noise. I listened to him rant, again. It was always about the providence of the tale-teller, never about the other participant, the sacrificial listener. He could have […]

Madeleine is the name she has taken this time

She does not begin her song at its beginning anymore. We are still in love / with our presumed pedigree / of certain ghosts…. She sifts through each proceeding verse, the grain of her voice ascends. She sings of the construct of his skin, the obtrusiveness of bone, the scratch of thorns that precedes the […]