Poetry
––for Mary Oliver Ain’t no foxes here, Mary. Ain’t no grasshoppers restingin my picnic palm. Ain’t too many creatures worth a poem like yours, just mewling strays tucked under the dangerous warmthof a pickup’s hood, just poodles with painted nails clicking pink across mama’s linoleum floor—so few animals left to this chain-storesprawl, this clocked-in, bottled, »
Memoir
When I was ten, for my father’s fifty-seventh birthday, I made him an acrostic poem card. After the “B” for “Brave” and the “R” for “Really Wonderful” in his first name BORIS was the “E” for “Expert on Aldo Leopold” in our last name ZEIDE. Aldo Leopold, as in the renowned author of A Sand »
Snapshot
Thaxton, Mississippi We come from the very land and water on which we depend for our survival. As the world turns, life also revolves. Spring gives us life. Summer gives us growth. In autumn, leaves fall and plants wither, becoming food for new life as the seasons turn back to spring. We produce from the »
Photo Essay
At first, you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at: a windshield blotted like a Jackson Pollock painting; twin smokestacks squatting over pale water; a sawn tree stump, so red at its center you’d think it was bleeding; land so dry it looks like a rash. These are the images photographer Will Warasila captured in »
Snapshot
Reedville, Virginia The plastic-draped wooden structure in Fish Display welcomes you to Reedville, Virginia. Vastly out of proportion to its surroundings, it celebrates the role commercial fishing has played in “The Town Fish Built.” As the town’s unofficial symbol, it is just one of the vernacular structures that dot the region, taking pride of place »
Memoir
The sweetest mulberries in Durham, North Carolina, grow in Maplewood Cemetery, on a tree that shades the grave of Leon Jeffers. Every year, in late May, I forage my way downtown, heading north from the Lakewood neighborhood. The first tree teems with a swarm of bees so profuse that the branches seem to vibrate. The »
Snapshot
From “Tide and Time” | Salvo, North Carolina Jean Hooper, eighty-five, stands in the Pamlico Sound at the Salvo Day Use Area. She was born on Hatteras Island and has watched the sea steadily reshape the only home she’s ever known. Behind her is the Salvo Community Cemetery, which is slowly washing into the sound. »
Essay
On a steamy June afternoon in 1970, a crowd gathered outside the Sea Pines Company’s sprawling headquarters on the southern end of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Led by the Rev. I. DeQuincey Newman of the South Carolina NAACP, fifty African American protestors came to deliver a message to Charles Fraser, the head of Sea »
Snapshot
Bvlbancha: St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana Where does your water come from? How do we treat water? How is water treated? I’ll never forget, when I was about twenty, how I watched as my father made his way down the bank of the Mississippi to water’s edge, on a cold December day, to wash his face »
Photo Essay
While riding my motorcycle on Louisiana Highway 77 in 2014, I encountered a group of nearly fifty people on horseback. They commanded the narrow, two-lane road that runs along Bayou Grosse Tete, and I pulled off to the side for them to pass. As they rode by, I retrieved my camera from the saddlebag of »
Snapshot
Arlington, Tennessee Pictured here is my maternal grandfather Aaron, the man I am named after. During his entire life, he worked with his hands, a self-taught carpenter and contractor. His life started in Crawfordsville, Arkansas, then he moved on to Earle, Arkansas, where he, his father, and his brothers grew cotton and sold their harvest »
Essay
“‘I didn’t grow up with a disdain for free people of color, or for that area. But I grew up knowing that they wasn’t us.’” This is a brief reflection on water, swamps, bayous, wetlands, and Black life in the United States, and the forms of freedom and racialized unfreedom that these ecologies have facilitated. »