2011 - Page 13 of 16 - Deep South Magazine

by Tammy L. Beevers I watch him each morning, this blue heron statuesque in his indigo feather suit. He crouches, legs folded precisely waiting. and watching as fish flirt with the water’s edge and death. The heron strikes, his beak instantly a skewer, his neck elongated, beautiful as an orchid stem. Startled by sound, he stretches his wings, soars, then dives and disappears into the dense green. Tammy L. Beevers hails from Seneca Falls, New York, but says she's really a born-again Texan who's called Central Texas home for over 30 years. Her poem "Aspen" has been chosen as one of 10 winning poems for San Antonio's Via Metropolitan Transit's “Poetry on the Move” contest during National Poetry Month 2011, and “Texas Panhandle Slow Drive” appears in 2011 Texas Poetry Calendar.

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Southern Voice

April 9, 2011

Erin Z. Bass

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Dust Bunnies

by Tracy Sopko Dust isn’t so hard to come by in the South. What with so many sources: The powdered sugar remnants of primordial bodies, The sun-burnt flaking paint of seven thousand and thirty two Condemned once-homes, And the equally scorched and peeling remnants of once-people, There is enough dust here to inter a culture. Under the auspices of an isolationist Mason-Dixon We would coalesce. State lines soften, Then give way entirely - weather patterns and jet streams Melding misshapen clods. Swept behind the Mexico-couch And best left forgotten. These aren’t memories in the attic to be brought down a rickety flight of stairs, and Picked through with the grandkids. These aren’t the Ill-fitted pieces of nostalgia. No, this is skin, twelve years old, with a dust bowl haircut Nothing approaching style, but with a hint of Pizzazz in the economy of it. No, This is dust like Nuclear fallout, Or triangular trade runoff. This is dust like war, Dust like war paint, This is the dust of the survivors. Tracy Sopko was born and raised in small Florida town, hovering, like the state itself, on the fringes of Southern culture. She currently lives in Jacksonville and attends the University of North Florida.

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Felling the Tree

by Hastings Hensel Each ring a year we cut into, open up, hacking back every hour the decades. We keep on, stroke after tiring stroke— wedge, push, cuss, talk about chainsaws that would show the tree’s history as cleanly as a timeline in a textbook. What makes us want to labor in camp— an afternoon through blisters, bees, heat— for a climax so brief? Half an hour in, and what? We chop through to 1998: Sosa homering, McGwire homering, James Byrd dragged through Texas by four white men in a pickup truck, and the two of us, fifteen, learning how to unclasp our girls’ padded bras in empty dugouts on a Friday night. It is concentration honed by the blade, and these damp chunks of brown wood that splay out like seconds with each chop. Tell me, friend, what hard knot keeps it up? Why does this hemlock not fall down until your last tragic swing of the axe and the quick, loud crash of a thing the same dead age as our grandfathers? Tell me again what we are left with but a stump, some kindling, the half-life of a life? We are left with our voices drifting like ash by the necessary firelight. Hastings Hensel lives in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, and his writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Shenandoah, Gray's Sporting Journal, The Hopkins Review,

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Cozy Cannon

We got a direct message earlier today from Twitter friend @KnitoriousMEG telling us about her most recent yarn bomb. For those of you not familiar with the yarn bomb (we only recently learned about them), it's the practice of knitting pieces for public spaces. You could call it graffiti knitting, but we like to think of it as graffiti with a little more class. Well, KnitoriousMEG has been yarn bombing Richmond, Virginia, for a little over a year now. She says her favorite things to tag are "something that once served a purpose but now doesn’t, like a signpost with no sign." The target of her April yarn bomb does in fact serve a historical purpose, but we think you'll agree it looks much better with some embellishment. Richmond's Monument Avenue cannon, situated between Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, now sports a cozy, colorful cover in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. To see more photos and find out what KnitoriousMEG bombs next, visit her blog, like her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter.

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Home

by Erren Geraud Kelly A place i head back to That i'll never belong to again It's growing My family accepts, if not Love me for what i am The streets are always the same Summer heat makes crepe myrtle Trees wilt And gumbo tastes good With beer on a hot night I look on the parade ground For the person I used to be I wonder about shannon sometimes, I refuse to believe she didn't love me Funny, i don't take the advice I gave to my mother To "simply let go" I see my barber Though we know I don't need him anymore The streets are still the same But not me Erren Geraud Kelly is a poet based in New York City by way of Louisiana. A graduate of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, he has been writing for 21 years and been published in Hiram Poetry Review, Mudfish and Poetry Magazine. Most recently, he was published in " In Our Own Words," a Generation X poetry anthology. "The themes in my writings vary," says Kelly, "but I have always had a soft spot for subjects and people who are not in the mainstream. I never limit myself to anything, I always try to keep an open mind."

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Southern Sneakers

Big news in the fashion world for spring is the release of Florence, Alabama, designer Billy Reid's tennis shoe design for K-Swiss. Reid put his own washed and weathered twist on the unisex shoe, which comes in navy, white and grey canvas. The shoe's function as the perfect summer sneaker isn't even the best part though. Special mailings of the sneakers arrived in a gorgeous wooden box handmade in Alabama. According to Reid's website, the shoes will be available this spring online and in shops, so keep an eye out, especially for that distinctly Southern box.

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Mimosa

by Gregory Luce "I remember the way the mimosa tree buttered the shade Outside the basement bedroom, soaked in its yellow bristles." - Charles Wright I too remember mimosas two of them in my grandparents’ yard the pink bottle-brush blossoms helicoptering down the almost-not-there scent trailing and how I had to sweep them off the driveway or scrape them when the rain glued them down to the concrete how hateful the labor and how much would I give to do it again now as my grandfather finishes mowing the lawn after dinner and starts the sprinklers and we go inside for one last iced tea cicadas burring the evening air. Gregory Luce was born in Texas and still resides below the Mason-Dixon line in Washington, D.C., where he works as production specialist for the National Geographic Society. He is the author of two chapbooks, "Signs of Small Grace" and "Drinking Weather." His poems have appeared in Kansas Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Innisfree Poetry Review, If, Northern Virginia Review, Juke Jar, Praxilla, Little Patuxent Review, Buffalo Creek Review and in the anthology, "Living in Storms." To find out more, visit his blog or follow him on Twitter @dctexpoet.

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Fear of Frying

by Diane Kimbrell Othermama’s biggest fear in life was death. Her second biggest fear was that she would be buried in potter’s field—a bleak burial ground for paupers located about a mile outside our hometown of Quicksand, North Carolina. To make sure she didn’t end up there without so much as a stick to mark her grave, Othermama, my maternal grandmother, took out an insurance policy with the Quicksand Mutual Trust Agency. She had no intention of being buried in an “ole cold, pine wood box,” as she put it. Her monthly payments to Mr. Mosely, the tall, thin insurance man, ensured that she would be laid to rest in a satin-lined coffin with a lid. Although she couldn’t bear the idea of being closed inside of anything, it was preferable to being exposed to the elements and eaten by worms—worms, which by the way, were her third biggest fear. Othermama had always lived with us. To this day, nobody in my family will admit it, but we all dreaded her death as much as she did. I never understood why she was so afraid of passing on to her final resting place. Perhaps she feared being cast into the Devil’s lake

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Folk Taxonomy

by N. A’Yara Stein Life. Domain. Kingdom. The embayment alongside the alluvial plains Is where I was born and where I grew up. It’s a trip to see some rare November cotton: Commissioned to collect, record, and describe, Identify by name each rigid principal of tribe. We get out and stand around. No one there knows me now. Extinct, I’m just going through the motions. I tell you a secret even I don’t know Showing you the succession of great-greats On tombstones that begin to begin in 1753. Phylum. Class. Order. Rank is relative, restrictive to schema. By summer’s end the boys in these towns Will molt, farmer’s tan and all, into men. Without the built-in checks to help You keep the many names straight, That rudimentary or basic knowledge Important to survival, you talk with no one. Family. Genus. Species. In the antebellum kitchen we cut onions. Developed from a common ancestral form, Monophyletic, some places we never reach. We eat in silence. You say you love the food. Everybody does. We are both crying tears we don’t mean. Hybrid. Variety. Aberration. Between me and you, a distinction is to be made; I've crunched all the numbers, culled the statistics. A tiny mass of Latin rattles in my brain; Words scribble like wasps on the water’s surface. Somewhere between this moment and forever, Somewhere between the two extremes, There is some kind of common

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Dream of Ivy

by Lyn Lifshin you know the story of the woman in a turret and how ivy puts its fingers across the moon. And besides, no one could hear. Ivy that grows like kudzu in the deepest part of Georgia swallowing up a single house in one night. I would have lowered my long hair to a lover, lured him with blood in a bottle, each drop a ruby with a poem etched on it. Or carved my initials in the grey stone around his heart. I’d have talked to the birds or waited, slept 20 years, given away my children. Only I was outside trying to get in Lyn Lifshin lives in Virginia and has written more than 120 books of poetry, including "The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffian," "Before It's Light," "Cold Comfort" and "Another Woman who Looks Like Me." Her new book, "All the Poets Who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead: All True, Especially the Lies," is receiving strong reviews. To find out more about Lyn or purchase a book, visit her website.

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Mornings at the Pond

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Dust Bunnies

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Felling the Tree

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Cozy Cannon

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Home

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Southern Sneakers

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Mimosa

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Fear of Frying

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Folk Taxonomy

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Dream of Ivy

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