Poetry
Hale County, Alabama LEDus stand here ____ future dinosaurnear the errors of three hands clappingwhat indifferent god particle sparking,through the strong ear and out the other.perhaps forgetting some string theory dangling,out inside the dinning deafness
Essay
In the sweltering summer of 2010, as thousands of barrels of crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion that April gushed daily into the Gulf of Mexico, sixty-two-year-old Malik Rahim took an unusual course of action. He got on his bike. The New Orleans native and lifelong organizer announced his intention to cycle »
Snapshot
Miami, Florida The Tea Room is part of my FloodZone project, which looks at the subtle traces and signs of what is happening to the southern United States as it comes to terms with rising sea levels. The photograph was taken in Miami’s Vizcaya Gardens on Biscayne Bay after heavy rain. The tide is high »
Snapshot
Elliston, Virginia Musician Laney Sullivan has been a powerful, persistent advocate for environmental accountability and efforts to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) and recently cancelled Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Her band Holy River has played countless fundraisers and its members have been leaders in connecting artists with impacted communities along both routes.
Memoir
A few months ago, longing for an ancestral experience I’ve never had, I went on a bison hunt to Costco, where it is possible to buy rectangular packets of mushy ground meat. While there, I spied another shrink-wrapped package in the prepared foods section, this one containing pastrami beef ribs from a company in Austin. »
Snapshot
Black Mountain, North Carolina As I walked up the hill with my camera, the Quiet House slowly came into view. I didn’t recognize it at first. I had memorized the photographs that Hazel Larsen Archer and Robert Rauschenberg made of the stone sanctuary and imagined a scene closer to their vision. But over seventy years »
Essay
On November 1, 1952, the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb on Elugelab, a small island in a chain of coral islands in the Pacific Ocean called Enewetak Atoll. As the mushroom cloud cleared, two F-84 jets flew over the site. Their cameras documented an absence. Elugelab was gone. In its place was a crater »
Essay
“I am struck by the deeply physical and emotional engagement with landscape that these scholars, writers, and artists reveal.” Welcome to this special Human/Nature issue of Southern Cultures. We are honored to have historian Andy Horowitz as our guest editor, on the heels of his brilliant new book Katrina: A History, 1915–2015, published in 2020. »
Film
Southern trees are griots. If they could talk, they would tell of the beauty and terror of this land. Their presence is massive—they stand for decades and their beauty is majestic—but people often see them as the backdrop to our lives. One day when I was in my Granny’s backyard looking at the stump that »
Photo Essay
“Thanks for Looking” is a collection of (mostly) unpublished photographs I made just off to the side of what was supposed to be the main attraction. As a daily news stringer and freelance commercial photographer, I’m lucky to provide a livelihood for my family with my camera, but I’m also at the mercy of the »
Poetry
Do you, too, wincewhen they whisperexotic in hushed breath,fingers pointedin your direction,your inanimate bodypoised to pummelbehind the smudged glass?Has anyone ever asked youhow it feels to be slitand stuffed from the crownof head to the tip of tail,what was once majesticnow hanging from the walllike an ornamentadorning the molding?What a parody, these people,in their tiger-striped »
Essay
i. Go to Tougaloo, the meeting place of two rivers, and be quiet. Wait for the light that floats above the water where Pearl meets Mississippi and step in it. If you are too afraid to trust the light, to know yourself as more than one river, you will never know. Step in when you »