ISSUES | fall 2021
44.3 (Fall 2021): “How Did I Get Here?”
Inside: Poetry by Jessica Garratt, Rebecca Lehmann, Maggie Queeney, and Joe Wilkins. Stories and essays by Jason Brown, Morris E. Hartstein MD, Kristen Iskandrian, Judith Claire Mitchell, Devin Murphy, Clare Needham, and David M. Sheridan, with features on Barbette and Duchamp, and a review of new and recent Southern writing from Sam Pickering.
CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE
Foreword
Jan 07 2022
Foreword: How Did I Get Here?
“How did I get here?” is a recurring question in one of my favorite songs, “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads. It is an anthem to the uncertainty… read more
Fiction
Jan 07 2022
Pineland
PinelandJason Brown 1966 Dear Lemuel, For me, all the consequential decisions are in the past, except, as you will see, the decision to write this letter. You may rest assured… read more
Poetry
Jan 07 2022
6 Poems by Rebecca Lehmann
Specter What specter? This baby’s love? An extinct animal? Keats’s ghastly prismatic ghost-hand reaching beyond the grave? My stepmother’s grandmother, now blind, head throbbingas she labors to breathe, mouths commands… read more
Fiction
Jan 07 2022
Reclamation
ReclamationDevin Murphy My whole life I’ve had this feeling at my core that people wouldn’t remember me from one meeting to the next and was surprised, even touched, if they… read more
Poetry
Jan 07 2022
4 Poems by Maggie Queeney
The Nature of the Body of the Patient Was it a pet gifted to her at birth, or the wild animalbroken to bear and carry the load of her, drag… read more
Nonfiction
Jan 07 2022
Cover Up
Cover Up I did not begin my time in Jerusalem with the desire to be dangerous. I arrived in that most intoxicating, infuriating, enervating, derelict, and sad of cities with… read more
Poetry
Jan 06 2022
4 Poems by Joe Wilkins
Limp A slash pile always looks like it hurts.Torn limbs & uprooted stumps.The land about dozer-rutted tractor-gouged.Trees all gone a raw face a black boil it hurts.I wish we didn’t… read more
Fiction
Jan 06 2022
The Last Reported Sighting of the European Goldfinch
The Last Reported Sighting of the European Goldfinch in MichiganDavid M. Sheridan When my friend Essa said, some years ago, that she had become a “birder,” I couldn’t place the… read more
Poetry
Jan 06 2022
4 Poems by Jessica Garratt
EARLY MORNING, GALWAY, 1998 I’d walk downhill, bayward, down to the French café where I worked in a country that wasn’t mine. The air had the chill clarity of the… read more
Nonfiction
Jan 06 2022
Of Sound Mind and Memory
Of Sound Mind and MemoryOn Wills and Language and Lawyers and Loveby Judith Claire Mitchell PreambleI, _____________, being of sound and disposing mind and memory, hereby declare this to be… read more
Nonfiction
Jan 05 2022
Terrorist Doc
Terrorist DocUsing a scalpel, I made incision across the length of the baseball-sized mass in the patient’s upper eyelid. Within seconds, like walking in a dense fog, I was struggling… read more
Art
Jan 05 2022
The Art of Indifference: Duchamp and the Legacy of Readymades
The Art of Indifference: Duchamp and the Legacy of Readymades I believe art is the only form of activity in which man shows himself to be a true individual. —… read more
Curio Cabinet
Jan 05 2022
Strange Beauty: Barbette and the Art of Transformation
Strange Beauty: Barbette and the Art of Transformation In 1912, at twenty-three, French writer Jean Cocteau collaborated with some of the most talented artists in Europe when he wrote the… read more
Features
Dec 19 2021
New and Recent Southern Writing
New and Recent Southern WritingBy Samuel Pickering Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2020. 312 pp., $26.95 (hardcover). Kudzu Telegraph by John Lane. Hub City Press, 2008.… read more