Poetry
Crystal Simone Smith’s haiku is infused with a profound love for and appreciation of the natural world. As one of a growing community of Black haiku poets, Smith’s work is also that of an activist, born from her life as a Black woman and mother of two Black sons. Her words resonate as much-needed interventions »
Poetry
I wanted to ask the trees. do you remember. were you there. did you shudder. did your skin cry out against the skin of my great uncle’s skin. was the smell of bark a different smell from the smell of meat flesh. human meat flesh. beloved father husband lover friend man flesh. could the air »
Poetry
We’ve published poetry in our pages since nearly the beginning. So when our friends at the CELLAR DOOR—UNC‘s oldest undergraduate literary magazine—said their Spring 2020 Issue would be delayed due to the pandemic, we threw open our own doors and asked them to join us. We’re proud to present the work of seven Carolina undergraduates »
Poetry
If in the crinkling thin as air metallicblankets there are flashes signaling backand forth over the little bodies wrappedinside them sleeping on cage floor, gym floor, floor of a defunct warehouse, don’t think of torchfires, beacons of distress, or in the softnessany sign of soothing though they’re softas tissue, even softer yet untearable, a just »
Memoir
1. Abiding Metaphors When I was three years old, I nearly drowned in a hotel pool in Mexico. My earliest memory is of what seemed a long moment, as if I were suspended there, looking up through a ceiling of water, the high sun barely visible overhead. I do not recall being afraid as I »
Poetry
“the air smells each day of some newness” For scant weeks in spring when the ground has had time to get warmer,and all the white flowers whose forms are so hard to imagine are coming to bloom, and the air smells each day of some newness,a sweetness whose name, like the scent, flags the tip »
Poetry
Endearment Laud a bad guy, dub a gal ugly– a bad day, glub by glub. Lay by a glad day— a dab, a daub, a gaudy bud. Land ably, ladybug. Endearment Better nab a tea urn, a batter beater, a bun tub, a neater tenet. Beat a taunt, rebut a brute. An upbeat nature, an utter ebb— Tune, retune, bee tureen. Turn true, tuna beret, benter tuba, butter bean. Endearment Lover, let our love rule »
Poetry
1. On Your Deathbed The flame still arced inside your brain, a severing announcement of you to you— whatever part remained. It was the first news you missed, and as the state assembled in a room that wasn’t yours you groaned. Your mind withdrew. You lived all night, all flesh, inflamed, your voice a vent. Too long to fit the borrowed bed you limbs hung off at odd »
Poetry
I’ll tell you what, Papaw was a drunk, the sweetest man alive.Sober: A good husband; a loving father; he worked hard regardless,but I’ve never heard tell if he was able to keep a jobor if the family moved because of his drinking. On a binge, he beat Granny.He’d come home at 2am and beat her »
Poetry
Poems by Jonathan Farmer will appear in the Left/Right Issue (vol. 25, no. 3: Fall 2019). What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshedfrom time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.—Thomas Jefferson Some people have the idea »
Poetry
Drawn At dusk small brown batsfall from the eves of the porchhaving made a home for brownfur. A cloud of mosquitoesrises from the lake. With erraticwing strokes, bats sense their prey,I can only see or understandby what it is not, a small voice as guide.All these years I have resisteda home in the South. I »
Poetry
Some women suffer themselves foolstrying to hold a man who floats between them like driftwood;whose happy tongue slicks his catfish back; who constrictshis lover’s bones as if a black rat snakewhile holding out magnolia blossom & eucalyptus branch offerings—except for Annie who is strong as a water oak; evergreen as pine. Bounty Everlasting: Poetry from »