# Volume 55, Issue #1 (April 2024)
# Table of Contents
### Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies
##### (formerly Kansas Quarterly)
Volume 55, Number 1 Spring/April 2024
“Taking Care of Business”: Elvis as a Working Class Hero. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
by **Andrew Scheiber**
Three Poems (poetry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Perhaps the Dam Will Hold
Another Wet Winter, Arkansas
Lost in the Forest of Unaware
by **Tyrone Jaeger**
Southward Bound on a Mississippi Steamer, 1863 (fiction)
(excerpted from Lottie Deno: A Novel). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
by **Frank Thurmond**
Still Life in Black and White (poetry). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
by **Kelsey D. Mahaffey**
Pray (fiction). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19
by **Anton DiSclafani**
“God loves you nearly as much as I do”: Toward a Poetics of Natality in
Maureen Bronson’s Delta Pearl,
a 1989 Harlequin Historical Romance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
by **Guy Lancaster**
Four Poems (poetry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Nightfall
Our Pear Tree
Providence
Repast
by **Claude Wilkinson**
Forty Days of This (non-fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44
by **Jeffrey Utzinger**
Boy & Bayou (poetry). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48
by **Mason Joiner**
Lying in Wait (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
by **Jeannette Brown**
Two Poems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54
Halfway Down The Hill: Just Upriver From Catfish Point
White Blossoms: My Child In A Tree
by **Edward Ziegler**
The Last Cherokee (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
by **Tyler Hauth**
Book of the Dead (poetry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64
by **Virginia Archer**
Reviews. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67
McCormick, Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey, reviewed by Gregory Hansen
Wilkinson, Soon Done with the Crosses, reviewed by Joan Wylie Hall
Collins, Waking Past Midnight: Selected Poems, reviewed by Al Maginnes
Maginnes, Fellow Survivors: New and Selected Poems, reviewed by **Floyd Collins**
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79
### Contributors
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Virginia Archer is a native of Louisiana and graduated
from Louisiana State University with a degree in an
thropology, through which she discovered her passion
for folklore and story. In her writing, Virginia is inter
ested in the spaces where religious folkways, poverty
and the natural environment intersect in rural Amer
ica. She currently resides in the Pacific Northwest with
her husband, their son and golden retriever. Her writ
ing has been featured in Deep South Magazine, 225
Magazine, Country Roads Magazine, They Call Us, and
is forthcoming in Mutha Magazine, Soul Lit and Min
erva Press.
Jeannette Brown lives and writes in Knoxville, TN.
Her novel, The Illusion of Leaving, was published by
Texas Review Press. Her short fiction has been pub
lished in Bellevue Literary Review, Southwestern American
Literature, and others. Her play, Cuba Libre, is currently
in development with the Tennessee Stage Company.
Floyd Collins holds an MFA in Creative Writing and
a PhD in Twentieth-Century Literature from the Uni-
versity of Arkansas. He has authored several volumes
of poetry, including My Back Pages: The Teresa Poems
(2022). The Living Artifact, a selection of his essay-re
views, appeared in 2021. Most recently Waking Past
Midnight: Selected Poems, a career retrospective, was
published by Stephen F. Austin State UP in 2023.
Anton DiSclafani is the author of the novels The
Yonahlossee Riding Camp For Girls and The After Party.
Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Guernica,
Narrative, American Short Fiction, and the New York
Times. She lives in Auburn, AL.
Gregory Hansen is Professor of Folklore and English
at Arkansas State University, where he also teaches in
the Heritage Studies PhD Program. He is the author
of A Florida Fiddler: The Life and Times of Richard Sea
man, and his publications focus on roots music, folk
lore and language, and public folklore.
Joan Wylie Hall is a senior lecturer emerita at the Uni
versity of Mississippi, author of Shirley Jackson: A Study
of the Short Fiction (1993), and editor of Conversations
with Audre Lorde (2004) and Conversations with Natasha
Trethewey (2013). She has published scores of essays,
reference book entries, and book reviews.
Tyler Hauth writes fantasy and horror inspired by the
southern United States. His stories often invoke a
sense of dread by calling on elements of the supernat
ural or fantastic. He teaches writing at Emerson Col
lege, owns The Book Forge in Orange, MA, and is a
devoted husband / father to an incredible wife and
two young boys. Tyler has a novel releasing in late
2024 with Nef House Publishing called The Dog War.
He hopes to write many more in the coming years.
Tyrone Jaeger is the author of the novel Radio Eldo
rado, the story collection So Many True Believers and
the cross-genre novella The Runaway Note. His writing
has appeared in the Oxford American, Southern Human
ities Review, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is
the recipient of the Porter Fund Literary Prize, and he
has been a member of the faculty at Hendrix College
since 2008. Born and raised in the Catskill Moun
tains, Tyrone lives on Beaverfork Lake, AR, with his
wife and daughter. Visit his website www.tyrone
jaeger.com.
Mason Joiner is Assistant Professor of English at Del
gado Community College in New Orleans, LA. He
moved to New Orleans from Alexandria, LA, in 2010
and received a BA in Film & Theatre from the Uni
versity of New Orleans and an MA in English from
Northwestern State University.
Guy Lancaster currently is the editor of the online
Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Ar
kansas Library System (CALS) and the author of a
number of books on race and violence, including
American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching (U
of Arkansas P, 2021).
Al Maginnes is the author of fourteen collections of
poems, most recently Fellow Survivors: New and Selected
Poems (Redhawk Publications 2023). He is retired
from teaching and lives in Raleigh, NC.
Kelsey D. Mahaffey rests her head most nights in
Nashville, TN, but keeps half her heart in New Or
leans. She needs music and nature like breath and
water and walks the Earth barefoot beside a bow
legged cat. Her work can be seen (or is forthcoming)
in Pensive, The Sunlight Press, Writers Resist, Cumberland
River Review, Eunoia Review, and Minerva Rising Press.
Andrew Scheiber is Professor Emeritus of English at
the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. He has
published on a wide range of authors (Nathaniel Haw
thorne, Henry James, Rebecca Harding Davis, August
Wilson, and Toni Morrison) as well as on literary
theory, music, and film. His work has appeared in The
Henry James Review, Legacy, Modern Fiction Studies, and
New Literary History as well as in Arkansas Review.
Frank Thurmond grew up in Little Rock, AR, and
holds graduate degrees in English from Southern
Methodist University and Oxford University. His
books include the memoir Before I Sleep: A Memoir of
Travel and Reconciliation (2012, Et Alia Press), a collec
tion of short fiction titled Ring of Five: A Novella and
Four Stories (2015, Et Alia Press) and his poetry chap
book Remembrance and Other Poems (2022, Braddock
Avenue Books). In addition to writing, he is a musi
cian and filmmaker, and his script for his short film
“The Dealer’s Tale” won the Best Screenplay award at
the El Dorado Film Festival. (The film also received a
commendation from director Werner Herzog.) His
newest book is Lottie Deno: A Novel, and he has
adapted it into a screenplay for a feature film. He
teaches literature, composition, music and screenwrit
ing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Jeffrey Utzinger’s first collection of nonfiction essays,
The Risk Involved, is forthcoming with April Gloaming
Publishing (November 2024). Jeffrey has an MFA in
Creative Writing and a PhD in American Literature.
He lives in Lockhart, TX, where he keeps chickens, a
duck, and occasionally, a few thousand bees.
Claude Wilkinson has been Provost Scholar and also
John and Renée Grisham Visiting Southern Writer
in Residence at the University of Mississippi. His
poems have appeared recently in Alabama Literary Re
view, Arkansas Review, Chronicles, Poetry South, and
Southern Quarterly, and his recent poetry collections
include Marvelous Light, World without End, and Soon
Done with the Crosses.
Edward Ziegler is an author, poet, lecturer, and legal
scholar who lives and writes in the Wildcat Moun
tains near Denver He is a native Kentuckian, a former
All-American high school and Notre Dame footballer,
an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of
Denver and co-founder and past president of The
Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute. His recent po
etry and memoirs are found in literary reviews in the
United States, Canada, Italy, Russia, India, and Ma
laysia. His literary writing has been nominated for a
Pushcart Prize. www.edwardziegler.com.
# Pray
by Anton DiSclafani
Laura Stanley received the news via text mes-
sage. BREEZEWAY BAPTIST WOULD LIKE TO INFORM YOU—
And then a link, which Laura, holding John
on her hip, had tapped with her thumb.
We’re sorry to inform you that your child, John
Furlow Stanley, has not been granted admittance into
Breezeway Baptist’s Ones Class. Please call our direc-
tor, Stacey Heath, with questions.
A cold panic spread over her, starting at her
scalp; the panic no less terrifying given how fa-
miliar it had become as of late. She who had
never been an anxious person anxious all the
time, now. If Carter, her husband, was late com-
ing home from the hospital; if she turned a cor-
ner in their vast, white house and thought she
saw a shadow; if a car honked behind her.
To quell the panic she prayed. She texted
Amanda, her best friend. She called her mom.
Before John’s birth, she had been known among
family and friends for being a calm, even-keeled
person. A tether, Carter had once called her. An-
chor, she’d countered.
She was no longer that person. Before, she
had thought everything would pass, because it al-
ways did. She had trusted in the Lord. Her
church had been a sanctuary. Was still, until this
very moment.
John let out a gurgle, and Laura touched her
lips to his smooth forehead. She had, somehow,
forgotten to pray.
She’d been young, which the various doc-
tors they were sent to after John’s birth kept say-
ing, over and over again until it turned into a ter-
rible sort of manta. So young! So young!
That the mantra was true—Laura had just
turned 26 when John was born—made her feel
more like a failure, though that was not what the
doctors had intended, and Laura knew that. She
knew they were simply, if insensitively, expressing
surprise. Her eggs were young; they were sup-
posed to be perfect. But they had allowed what
the doctors called a de novo mutation, a term
Laura had been blessedly unaware of before her
own child’s entrance into the world. Welcome to
the cold, hard world Amanda had texted her, in
jest, just after John, whom they’d named after
her father, was born. Furlow was a Stanley family
name. Smiley face emojis followed, then hearts.
It was before Laura had known anything was
wrong. She had laughed, peered down at her
sleeping baby, swaddled in a silky blue blanket.
But now—well, now Laura’s world was both
cold and hard. Not John’s. She took some com-
fort in that, more or less depending on the day.
The less intelligent he turned out to be, the
better, for him at least, because he would not
know what it was he was missing. She’d been
reading so much—so many forums on which she
lurked but never contributed, so many articles,
so many pictures—and it was clear there was a
spectrum of intelligence. A spectrum of other
health issues, too, though John seemed mainly
healthy, at least so far. A healthy heart, at least.
At least.
The propensity for obesity, for early-onset de-
mentia—she tried not to think of those.
The despair she’d felt when her obstetrician,
a kind, older man named, funnily, Dr. Mann, en-
tered the room, accompanied by a taller, younger
man, whom she’d never seen before, with a
thatch of honey-colored blond hair—
“I’d like Dr. Nichols, our pediatrician on
call, to take a look at our boy, here,” he said, and
held out his arms for the baby. She had given
birth only hours before. Carter was gone, getting
her sushi and champagne.
The despair. The despair. She still could not
finish the thought. The despair was vast but un-
formed. Of what was she so despairing? She
could not say. Not exactly. Her life upended, her
son not, after all, perfect. The disappointment
threatened to swallow her whole in those early
weeks. But there was something else, too, some-
thing she could not name. Something was wrong
in the world—something rotten in the state of
Denmark, a line she remembered from the one
compulsory English class she’d taken in college—
but she did not know what.
When Dr. Mann held out his arms she
shook her head, pressed John to her chest. A lit-
tle whimper emerged from her mouth.
They’d gone ahead with most of it. The
baby photographer who came to their home and
pretended nothing was wrong, though John’s fea-
tures—the almond-shaped eyes, the flat face, the
tiny ears—were impossible to ignore (how had she
ignored them, for those few hours in the hospi-
tal?). The visits from Carter’s family, who lived
nearby, who were known in the sense that old,
wealthy families in small, Southern towns were
known. Her family, from Southaven. Their
church family, who supplied an endless rotation
of meals. Word had gotten out quickly, but Laura
was grateful for that. It seemed like a mercy, not
to have to explain John to everyone. But the
Sip’n’See, for which John had been supposed to
wear the smocked blue romper Carter and his
brothers had worn, for their own Sip’n’See’s,
which Laura’s mother-in-law, Nancy, had saved
in acid-free tissue paper for all these years (John
was the first male grandchild)—Laura had her
limits. She’d prayed one night for hours, longer
than she’d ever prayed before. Crumpled in the
rocking chair in John’s room, John himself ab-
sent, in the bassinet by her side of the bed. She
prayed and cried and at first it was about the
Sip’n’See, and how she did not want to play host
to the dozens of women who would come to her
house and circle her baby and pity her. And then
the prayer turned to something else, something
darker. She prayed about her own shame, about
how it had colonized her heart, her mind. What
kind of mother was she, to be ashamed of her
own child—
The next day she’d told Carter she was can-
celling the Sip’n’See. It’s not a compulsory event,
she’d said, trying to make light of the matter.
And Carter had tilted his head in his wry way. It
is here, he’d said.
And that much was true. She was from the
South, but Southaven was close enough to Mem-
phis, and anyway, her family had not had money,
not like the Stanleys, who owned real estate and
restaurants and car washes and other vague en-
terprises. Where Laura lived now had its own
rules, its own way of doing things, ways which
Carter understood and she was learning. Bows
the size of Christmas tree toppers on girls’ heads.
Smocked shirts with Peter Pan collars for boys.
Everyone a ma’am or a sir. The men so nice they
seemed effeminate, Carter no exception to this
rule. Everyone aligned with the Tigers or the
Tide, though they lived in between those two
towns. Everyone a member of a church family,
but that was the one way Laura felt at home here,
in this small town in Alabama, a state she’d never
managed to visit though she’d grown up barely
two hours from the northwest corner of it—Laura
had always been a member of a church family.
She’d grown up attending the First Baptist
church. Since adolescence, she’d begun her
mornings reading devotionals, journaling. It was
her therapy, she felt. Her way of feeling at home
in the world. Of finding peace.
She’d gotten her way about the Sip’n’See.
Her mother-in-law had, surprisingly, not been
astonished, the absence of which had slammed
into Laura like a tidal wave. She understood why
Laura would not want to show John to the world.
She texted Amanda, first. John didn’t get in.
Calling now.
Laura would have preferred to email—she
didn’t like confrontation—but she knew a phone
call was best in this situation. Faster, at least. She
felt a buzz against her ear, then another. Amanda,
responding. The buzz was a comfort.
“Hello,” a woman said, “Stacey Heath.” She
had a leisurely voice, which Laura instantly dis-
liked. She was one of those Southern women for
whom her mother had a phrase—butter wouldn’t
melt in her mouth.
“Hi, this is Laura Stanley. John Stanley’s
mother—”
Stacey cut her off, midsentence. Her voice,
when she spoke, was completely different.
“Oh, yes,” she said. It was not a good sign.
John’s denial of admission had not been a mis-
take, even though she and Carter and the entire
Stanley family were members of Breezeway.
Carter had attended preschool there, along with
his two brothers and one sister. They were a leg-
acy family, not like the families that started com-
ing on Sundays when they found out they were
pregnant, since attending Breezeway gave you
preference for admission to its preschool. Its pre-
school that met twice a week, for half a day, and
was staffed by women like Laura, except older,
women whose own children were grown.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Stanley, I truly am, but your
son—”
“John,” Laura supplied.
“Yes, John. Well, we just don’t have the re-
sources to serve him.”
Laura’s chest grew tight. Her breathing
quickened. She had no hands left—the left
cradled John, the right held her hot phone to her
sweaty ear—and so she leaned on the counter
with her elbow.
“I . . . ” she said. She was at a loss for words.
Stacey Heath didn’t sound sorry, did she? She
sounded . . . she sounded firm. She sounded as
if John had been the subject of much discussion
at Breezeway Baptist, and that the conclusion
they—she and the other teachers, Laura as-
sumed—had reached was final and absolute.
A buzz brought her back to reality. Amanda,
returning her text. Another buzz, another text.
“But he doesn’t need any resources,” Laura
said, finding her voice. “He’s like all the other
babies.” That wasn’t really true, even at this early
stage, but Laura did not want to explain to Stacey
Heath that John’s current deficits were mild. He
likely wouldn’t be walking or talking by the time
he entered the Ones Classroom, but what did
that matter?
“Our preschool isn’t equipped to serve spe-
cial needs children.”
Laura’s eyes glazed with tears. “He’s not!” she
cried, though he was. But not in any way that
should matter to a preschool class.
“You wrote on the form that your son has
Down Syndrome?” The fake uncertainty in her
voice made Laura want to hurl the phone across
the room. But that would hurt only herself.
“Yes,” Laura said, surprised by the iciness in
her voice.
“Well . . . ” She let the word trail off.
“But this is for socialization, right? It’s for let-
ting kids be around other kids?”
“Among other things. Other skills.”
“Calculus? Are you teaching calculus?”
A sigh. A deep, disappointed sigh. “Mrs.
Stanley, this is not a decision we take lightly. You
are very much a valued member of our church
family, but we want to make the right decision
for everyone.”
Laura’s cheeks burned. She knew who the
Stanleys were, and it hadn’t helped. Laura
searched her memory, but she couldn’t place Sta-
cey Heath. She sounded older than Laura, but
still young. She sounded thin and hard and
mean.
“It’s illegal,” Laura whispered. The thought
had just occurred to her. A flare of hope. They
couldn’t do this. They thought they could, but
they could not.
“It’s not, unfortunately,” and Laura wanted
to laugh at the unfortunately. “As a religious in-
stitution, we’re free to make our own judgement
about what we can and cannot handle. We’re
guided by God, not the state.”
Laura curled over, as if she’d been punched
in the gut. John squirmed, and when she looked
at him she was met by a wide, toothless grin. He
was so happy, her baby. So delighted by, of all
things, her.
Laura thought of her mother-in-law, of how
this conversation would surely get back to her in
some way or another. She was a mild, sweet
woman with whom Laura found conversation
difficult. She loved John. She would accept the
preschool’s decision. She would not find these
two feelings contradictory.
“Mrs. Stanley, I hope you’ll agree this is the
best decision for all of us.”
She was still looking at John, at his clear blue
eyes, which he’d inherited from Carter. At the
swoop of light brown hair that fell across his fore-
head, that she could not bring herself to cut. She
looked at her baby and thought, He is who he is.
He’s himself.
“But where is he supposed to go?” she asked.
Whaaa?????? Amanda’s text read. Must be a
mistake. Breezeway could not reject world’s cutest baby!
Not a mistake, Laura typed back. Will explain
later.
????
Then, an hour later, when Laura did not
reply: Are you okay?
Laura was not okay, but her not okayness
was larger than a preschool rejection. Her not
okayness related to lying awake at night and won-
dering if John’s future brother or sister, as yet just
an idea, a plan—would be kind, would be willing
to shoulder the burden of John after Laura and
Carter’s deaths. If John did not die first, which
was a possibility, given the host of health prob-
lems that accompanied his diagnosis.
Then she wondered, as she did tonight,
John’s rejection accepted without complaint by
Carter—they don’t know what they’re talking
about, but who cares?—if they should have three
children, as they had talked about before John
was born. Four. The better the chance that one
of them would take care of John; or, that they
could share him. He could live two months in
one house, two in another, etc.
Carter stirred. An unfairness to her future
children, to shoulder them with this responsibil-
ity before they had even been conceived, but
there was no other option. John couldn’t live in
an institution—the thought of her child, being
cared for by strangers, undid something inside
her. They hadn’t found out the sex. There are so
few surprises in life, Carter had said. Laura had
secretly wanted a girl, and now she was so, so
grateful John was a boy. He was less likely to be
abused that way. Sexually and otherwise. There
were so many stories of caretakers raping women.
They found her, when she was online paying a
bill or scrolling through Facebook.
And he would never live by himself. Carter
stirred, and Laura bit the inside of her cheek,
which had become a habit since John’s birth.
The ridge of skin, puckered, and raw, familiar be-
tween her teeth.
She hadn’t yet texted Amanda back. She’d
been disappointed by Carter’s reaction, even
though she’d expected it. His main purpose in
life, now, to soothe her. It wasn’t really about the
preschool, of course, but then again, it was. The
carpeted rooms, lined with perfectly organized,
brightly colored toys; the walls decorated with
foam cutouts of shapes and letters and numbers.
We are all God’s children here, the sign above the
entrance read. There were other preschools in
the area, but Breezeway was where everyone
Laura knew went. Where John would not go.
She probed the line of damaged cheek with
her tongue and prayed, her praying too private
to put into words, even too herself. She read the
Scriptures, did devotionals—What acts of selfless-
ness have you completed today, with an open and
forgiving heart?—or had, before John was born.
But Laura’s praying did not involve language, as
such. It was more a feeling. A connection.
A connection John’s birth had interrupted.
Right now, for instance, in the room that she had
so carefully decorated with the help of a designer
from Birmingham—pleated curtains from an-
tique French fabric; a velvet chaise lounge; a gi-
gantic sterling silver frame that held a picture of
her in her wedding dress, beaming at Carter, who
stood beyond the camera—the room felt like a
strange country, not the place she had loved,
been loved. The man beside her—also unfamiliar.
She put a hand on Carter’s cool back and
tried to summon the feeling of peace. But she
could only think of Amanda, Amanda who’d
had her second child a month after John had
been born, a little girl named Genevieve. John
and Genevieve were supposed to enter the Ones
class together.
Amanda had come to the hospital to meet
John. All of it felt like a fraud, now. The giant
floral arrangement, topped with pearlescent blue
balloons, which their night nurse, a Black
woman with a Carribean accent, had exclaimed
over, right before exclaiming over John. The ivory
baby gown, meant for a different child. His
name. She wanted it all back.
“Hey,” Amanda said, just inside the door. It
was their third full day in the hospital. John was
staying longer, for tests, and Dr. Nichols had told
her she could stay, too, which she knew was sup-
posed to be a kindness, but nothing felt kind,
right now.
Laura tried to smile. John lay beside her in
the clear bassinet. He had cried for so long and
so hard after his circumcision earlier that day
that the day nurse, a white woman with dry lips
and thinning hair, had come into the room. So
far the night nurses were all Black; the day nurses
white. “Oh,” she’d said. “You have to pick him
up, sweetie.” And then, the same thing they all
said, every nurse and doctor and relative who
had entered the room: “He’s perfect.” If he had
been perfect, they would have been discharged a
day ago she thought. But did not say.
Amanda wore yoga pants and a turtleneck,
her pregnant belly asserting itself before Amanda
had even fully entered the room. She was a small
woman, unlike Laura, whom everyone had com-
plimented on carrying her pregnancy so well. It
was a virtue, Laura understood, to look less preg-
nant than one actually was. She should not have
been surprised, but she was.
“Honey,” Amanda said, and came to Laura,
not John. Put her small, warm hand on Laura’s
forehead. She hadn’t even glanced at John for the
longest second.
Laura moaned. She felt like a monster. A
swollen, bleeding monster with thoughts so ter-
rible she knew she could never tell another soul
about them. She had been a nice, good person
because everything in the world had gone her
way. That’s all it was. It wasn’t her. It was circum-
stance.
Amanda leaned over the hospital bed and
pressed her forehead to Laura’s. Laura tried to
say something. “I . . . it’s . . .” but Amanda
shushed her.
Laura felt Amanda’s warmth. Pushing out
her grotesque imaginings. If John had been born
a century ago, for instance, or in another coun-
try—
And then Amanda was beside John, so
quickly Laura thought she felt a rush of air as
Amanda moved from one side of the bed to the
other. She stood over John’s clear bassinet for a
long moment, murmuring.
Laura did not think she could stand it, if the
word perfect left Amanda’s mouth. She watched
her friend, who watched her child, who until a
few days ago had lived inside her, whose subter-
ranean presence Laura found she missed, now.
The weight of him, pressing, ever downward,
against her hips. The movement, which was con-
stant and soothing. How foolish, to be comforted
by the very infant you carried in your womb. And
yet she had been.
“He is who he is,” Amanda said, finally, tears
in her eyes, her voice thick with emotion. She
smoothed one of John’s inky eyebrows with her
finger, then placed her palm on his tiny chest.
She looked up at Laura.
“And you’re his mother.”
She’d fallen in love with John in the weeks
that followed his birth, after the shock of him
gradually departed. Sometimes, when she prayed,
she tried to picture it that way: The shock lifting
from her in plumes of smoke.
The way he opened and closed his fists while
he slept. The sheen of fur that covered his
shoulders. Epaulettes, Carter had said. The way
he rooted around for her breast. The sighs he
made when he slept. She was delighted by all of
it, but more than that, relieved. He was like any
other child in these ways.
She tried to prepare herself for all the things
he would not do. He would crawl, and walk, and
talk, just later than everyone else. Then it became
less clear. He would kick a ball, but he would
never play soccer on a team. He would attend
school, but he would not complete the same
homework as the other children in his grade. He
would have friends, maybe, but as they grew older
they would tolerate John, not come to him for
advice. Would he fall in love? He would have
those impulses, she knew. She understood ad-
olescence to be a particularly thorny time with
special needs children. Laura did not know how
John would express those impulses. How he
would date, or spend his free time, which he
would have more and more of as he grew older.
There were so many things she did not know, so
few she did.
She tried to prepare herself for the daily dif-
ficulties as well. The double-takes people did,
then tried to hide, when she took him to a new
place. The way she’d watched some stupid sitcom
and had been brought to tears by the word “re-
tarded.” The jealousy that had nearly knocked
her from her feet when she’d seen Amanda,
Amanda who already had a perfect child at
home, nursing Genevieve in her hospital bed
only a month after John’s birth. If there had
been any note of apology in Amanda’s eyes when
she looked up Laura would have turned and fled.
But there was not.
She was accosted and then she steeled herself
for future hurt. She learned to gaze steadily at
people in restaurants or stores when they ap-
proached; she’d found this made them less likely
to do a double-take, if they knew they were being
watched. She repeated the word “retarded” to
herself, over and over again in her head, to take
away the sting of it. She told herself it was a
meaningless word, though she cringed to re-
member that she herself had gone through a
phrase of saying it, in middle school, before her
mother told her it was bathroom word, a category
that covered all manner of inappropriate lan-
guage. And Genevieve—well, she learned to love
the child, who was so blonde she looked crea-
turely. She found it was more difficult to be jeal-
ous of those whom you loved.
But the shock of a church preschool denying
admission to her child on grounds that were
utterly ridiculous—this was a surprise for which
she was not prepared. A surprise that seemed to
foretell the rest of Laura’s life.
So she was prepared now, for Amanda’s re-
jection. She would send Genevieve to Breezeway.
Why wouldn’t she? She should. Her child
shouldn’t suffer because her best friend’s child
did. It was a simple equation. You did what was
best for yours.
It was Laura against the world.
In the days following the text from Breeze-
way Baptist, while she ignored Amanda’s text
messages, she found she missed her friend. But
she missed so much, now. She was still comforted
by the routine of church, but gone was the feeling
of solace that had always blanketed her when
she’d entered its vast atrium, slid into a smooth,
blonde wood pew. Let the light of the stained-
glass windows, recently installed, bathe her in
gem tones. That would be gone now, too, for she
would never return to Breezeway Baptist, even
though Carter had told her several times that the
preschool had nothing to do with the church.
She didn’t care.
“Honey,” Carter had said, coming up behind
her at the kitchen counter, where she was stirring
milk into John’s oatmeal to cool it down—“We’ll
go somewhere else.”
Laura stiffened, then released the tension. It
wasn’t Carter’s fault.
She did the things she always did, but with-
out the pleasure of anticipation of talking or see-
ing or texting with Amanda.
Honey, her last message read. What’s going on?
Carter and Amanda the only two people in
Laura’s life who called her that, and she knew
they meant different things by it, but she also
knew that they both loved her.
She missed Amanda, but the longing she felt
for her best friend was tolerable. She missed so
much and yet so much was newly tolerable, her
thermostat for what she could and could not en-
dure having been reset with John’s birth.
She was on the floor with John, playing with
him. Giving him one toy, taking it away, teasing
him, giving it back. John laughed. Clapped his
fat hands together.
Sometimes Laura disappeared. Before John,
but more frequently since his birth. Amanda
must assume she was doing that. Going just be-
neath the surface of her life for a little while.
She’d met Amanda at her spin class.
Amanda, tiny and extremely pregnant with her
first child, leading the class, shouting into her
headset, asking them to imagine they were scaling
a mountain. Asking them to give themselves over
to the feeling of pain.
“Everybody’s gotta mountain,” she’d
shouted. Then laughed. “Everybody wants a glass
of wine and a piece of chocolate at the end of the
day, amirite?” It didn’t even make sense, not
really, but Laura liked Amanda’s latent cynicism,
the way she cut her platitudes with further
clichés. They were fast friends. They both stayed
home with children, or planned to, in Laura’s
case, as soon as she had one. They lived in the
same, brand-new, treeless subdivision. They at-
tended the same church. Amanda’s husband was
a malpractice attorney for the hospital; it seemed
too perfect that Carter was a general surgeon.
Laura had the sense that she was more religious
than Amanda, but that was fine. Laura was pri-
vate in that way. In all ways, but especially that
one.
“I don’t know why God would do this,”
she’d said in that hospital room, Amanda hold-
ing John, now, as Laura herself could not bring
herself to do. She held him, yes, but not like
Amanda did. Not with that kind of love.
Her voice was jagged. It sounded unfamiliar
even, or especially, to herself.
“Honey,” Amanda said. “It’s not God. It’s
just what happened. Random. God had nothing
to do with it.”
And for the first time in her life, Laura was
comforted by the idea of God’s absence.
The doorbell rang. John startled, sought out
Laura’s gaze, relaxed when he found it. Grinned.
She put him on her hip and went to the door,
making sure to stay hidden on the off-chance it
was someone other than the Fedex guy dropping
off a package.
She recognized the white patch of Gene-
vieve’s scalp. Then the reddish sheen of
Amanda’s thick hair, which never seemed to be
depleted by postpartum hair loss.
Laura opened the door a crack. She was so
nervous she might as well have been being chased
by a pack of wild dogs. Her breathing that quick,
her heartbeat that rapid.
“Honey,” Amanda said. Her face was wor-
ried, worried. “Let me in.”
# Book of the Dead
by Virginia Archer
1985. My mother’s fake tits nearly killed me on the way in. I came out blue as a fish and
breathless. Not enough room for the milk I would need and all that plastic beauty in one body.
When the doctors decided I’d make it, my father smoked his wooden tobacco pipe and played
Chopin on the piano. Bad sign when a newborn doesn’t cry.
1991\. We’ll fry some fish when I get back, my father said. He and the dog loaded the boat to
check the trot lines behind the cypress. He left the just opened can of Budweiser on the white
stone table where I sat making clover crowns. When he was out of eyesight, I grabbed the icy,
silver can and had my first taste. “Original sin” they call it. Astonished, I walked over to the
water’s edge and poured my fizzy, gold questions out into the bayou. Hide and seek under water
oaks. Crickets, cattails and bottle rockets. Moonlit barbeques amid the cicada and mosquito
repellent. His foul moods. The silence we kept. Poured it all out. A banishing. Did you do this?
he asked, holding the empty can. Swear to God, and say you didn’t do it. I looked squarely back
at him, swore to God and, for reasons I didn’t understand, told my first lie.
1995\. With my best friend in tow, I climbed the magnolia tree around the corner to spy on the
boy making a sugar baby for class. I wore a black corduroy jumper with large girlish pockets and
a small bouquet of jasmine tucked behind my ear. We watched through the window as the boy’s
tan hands cut the nylon stockings that his mother had gotten from the drugstore. One day, he’d
be valedictorian. He filled the peach-colored mesh with white Domino sugar like the teacher
said. Cup after cup, he made our baby. I wished I could knock on the door and help him sew on
navy blue buttons as eyes, but his mama was narcoleptic, and it embarrassed him to have
company. I hoped he knew I was in his tree and that I hid my mother too. I hoped that my
watching helped him make our baby right. I’d never been kissed. Would he want to kiss me now
that we had a baby together? It’s only a sugar baby, said my friend. Are we old enough to have
real babies?
2003\. By junior year, I knew that I needed out of that town with only one stoplight. Still, I was
nice to the over-caffeinated band guys that never knew what to say and the journalism kids that
had too much ambition. I skipped class to go to the library and liked the teachers but refused to
follow the rules. In town, my father never smiled and my mother, who was on disability, was
always stoned. She’d stand up in church during prayer requests and say things to get money.
People thought she was sad and sweet, so they gave. I remember the day I left. Behind me: the
miles and miles of cow pastures and rows of sweet potato prone to rootworm, the noxious
chemical plant that made paint emulsifier and the washed-up marines who rushed virgins to third
base. The Baptist church lock-ins, the rich kids who snuck out at night and smoked on the ninth
hole and who stole for fun, the stray trailer park kittens, the meth heads that got tried as adults at
seventeen and the Friday night tailgates at the Quickstop. The children’s home where run-aways played
table tennis and memorized the New Testament, the glowing, green fields where boys crashed
into each other for glory and sex. My father’s no-smiling face, my mother half-awake at the
wheel. All behind me. And that one stoplight slowly fading in the distance, a menacing eye
winking in the rearview mirror.
2006\. We married in the spring of 2011 because his grandmother wanted to throw a real wedding
with cake and dancing, but I’d already married him in my way back in July of ’06. We’d met in
the stairwell of a beige condominium in a gentrifying neighborhood. I was reading Mrs.
Dalloway and living out of a car after my father lost his job and then his money and then our
house. I was all freedom and words, no roots. He was training for baseball season and knew how
to play the piano. His apartment smelled like clean laundry and cold air. He did sit ups with
perfect form while I watched. He was orderly and embodied. All structure and discipline. He
liked that I was strangely innocent and always said the right thing. I googled “Love at first
sight.”
2012\. The tiny white pills that took my father. It was a long way down. Lost his eyeglasses and
was put in solitary. He forgot my name. Forgot the tiny white pills and his pain too. The soup
kitchen ladies looked after him in the June heat. Served him mercy spoon by spoon. The autopsy
report read “heart attack,” but anyone could tell you what did him in was all that mercy at once.
Grew his heart too fast and too big for any one man to handle.
2013\. See you later, Mom. Not if Jesus comes back first, my mother said, cheerful as a daisy at
rapture.
2014\. I’ll break it off with her and move us to Paris. Say the word. Prideful, no words came. I’d
googled “How to be the perfect wife,” but that was all over now. Bury your heart in New
Orleans. Like an old Western, but broken, no one pulled their gun at sundown. No duel to satisfy
justice. We kept warm on the edge of the lake by having impeccable oysters with beer and
making funny noises. We laughed at the strangeness of life, at the art of kissing, and at how
despite it all we’d known real love. A wire. Go to Paris anyway, he said.
2016\. That December, flamboyant Nativity scenes electrified front yards. Believers with candles
flocked from all over to the house on the corner with a towering, kitsch statue of the Holy
Mother said to have bled tears. Our very own suburban stigmata. It was nearly Christmas when
he called to say they were pregnant. He didn’t know if she’d keep it. But she did. They did. It
was supposed to be your baby, he said but shouldn’t have. He played me a song about the sun on
his guitar, and we said goodbye one last time. I didn’t let him hear me cry, but I should have. He
put up the biggest tree in town that Christmas. I fed my friends hot chocolate and told ghost
stories by the fire. But neither one of us forgot how we had biscuits with butter and instant coffee
after sex or how we decided time travel was possible but not nothingness.
2018\. “Gone to Glory” they call it in the South when someone dies. It was a long drive through
rolling cow pasture, speed traps and falling-down barns to see my dying mother, whose third and
most devoted husband refused to leave her side or to change his “Life is too short not to be Irish”
t-shirt. I made white beans and cornbread, which burned, and prayed to apocryphal faces of Mary
while my three aunts took shifts reading aloud from Psalms. We ignored someone’s “She’s a
Brick House” ringtone for the better part of the night and draped sleepy, overweight dachshunds
across my mother’s failing body like luxurious furs. She told me what she knew for sure. That
God is everything good. That, to her, Heaven was a baby doll house with a porch and two dogs.
And a vegetable garden in case you still need to eat in Heaven, which was endearing because
that had been her life. When she finally passed, we gathered under some pine trees and planted
daffodil bulbs to remember her by. As I drove past the last stop light on the way out of town,
through the football fields and the hypnotic whir of snowy white cotton rows, I realized her
triumph: despite it all, Mama died right.
# Three Poems
by Tyrone Jaeger
##### Perhaps the Dam Will Hold
I’m drying out like a late Raymond Carver
story but these Arkansas rains . . .
Leaks trickle in the kitchen and living room.
Drips pop in pails and tupperware. Water above,
water below. My APRN assures me the pain
and blood only internal hemorrhoids. Breached pipes.
Ruptures abound. I survey the storm
from a window and behold the sill,
carved in child scrawl it is okay.
I might rage. The child denies—and later
tosses my way a wadded paper confession
I did it. :( :( x2 please do not be madx2
I might cry but instead close my eyes and whisper
it is okay. itis okay. itisokay.
##### Another Wet Winter, Arkansas
Dock submerged in flood brown
I paddle up the lake’s narrowing roots
two creeks, Beaverfork and Pickles Gap.
The gathering of fog disperses,
ascends, a sect awaiting worshipers
and three corn-fed bucks climb the slope
and stop, peer down at the water drifter, me.
Winter-wiped trees and greenbrier lay bare
the wooded shoreline. I marvel at the awful
flotsam—basketball, bicycle helmet, lures
and bobbers, styrofoam cups and bits—tossed
from boats and cars, washed off lawns, draining
down the ditch—and one prostrate, dead forever
goose, head immersed as if in shame or prayer.
##### Lost in the Forest of Unaware
You at fourteen, a sapling with spooked brown eyes,
careful through the hallways, where the bathroom toughs
wait at the stair top, lookout bored with no teacher on
the way to bust smokers. You are fresh meat to be grabbed
and taunted. They smell your fear through the pine-scented
deodorant your mother said you should start wearing,
but she is nowhere and does not exist in this thicket
of bodies and threats. Inside that bathroom they suck
on cigarettes and you imagine murder on their minds.
I promise that someday you’ll see that they were just
fucking with you. Still, you have teary sleepless nights
and want mothering, but your parents watch St. Elsewhere
and where exactly are your words? Years later, you will
be the boy who walks in the bathroom to smoke a pinner
and will see your tweaker cousin has, miraculously unaided,
tied to the stall frame a nerdy classmate upside-down
by his shoelaces. Let ’em down, you’ll say.
Your tweaker cousin will laugh and fire his lighter.
The boy falls, head-smacked on the tile. He mutters
thanks as he exits the door, and you’ll stand at the window
uncertain why you entered in the first place.
# Forty Days of This
by Jeffrey Utzinger
She washes her face, dabs it dry with a towel
as I watch over her shoulder, attempting to shave,
both of us watching the image of how each ap-
pears to themselves, the opposite of how we ap-
pear to the world, and though she’s beautiful
there in the mirror, she applies a light base, rubs
blush on the cheek bone, the thick black mascara
to lashes, a subtle eye shadow that makes me re-
alize I wasn’t aware she wore any at all, and
though I’m transfixed by her face, I stop to rinse
the razor as she steps out of the way, and I miss
what I love the most, the pursed lips ready to re-
ceive the red waxy lipstick, catching only the tis-
sue floating to the waste basket—a kiss suspended
and falling, and then gone. I look up to see that
she’s smiling over my shoulder, our images re-
versed, and I turn to kiss, reversing the image
again, and as she puts her hands to my face to
rub the smooth skin, I touch my lips to the tip
of her mask.
We’re unusually close, sharing this space in
the mirror; we’ve been together long enough that
we’re more likely to seek our own time in the
morning, but we’re out of our element, staying
at her brother and his wife’s apartment in New
Orleans. We arrived in the city to rows of young,
Black girls bearing down, kicking spandex legs
high, adorned in silver sequins, ruffled skirts and
bright bows, their leader twirling a baton. We
joined the parade in medias res. Stepped into the
street on the heels of the glitter girl’s last swagger
and dance. Trombones and cymbal crash of the
marching band swelled, the final note of “Iko,
Iko,” talkin’ bout Hey now (hey now) blended into
an unfamiliar tune, with a hint of a Latin beat. I
stood in the middle of a blacktop street so narrow
cars would have to drive half in the ditch to pass,
beneath a canopy of oak tree branches. A tractor
with goal posts mounted to the front, painted yel-
low and blue, rolled lazily by, not at all a threat
to the twirling, cheering squad, but enough to
keep the parents and sponsors and a few ex-
hausted girls with their pom poms hanging at
their sides who were lagging behind, moving at a
reasonable pace.
I’ve moved at a reasonable pace through the
preceding nights and days. It’s been two, maybe
three; I’ve lost track of time. Late nights. Early
mornings. Heavy sleep with no dreams. We did
our own dance on Friday in Austin, kicking
drawers shut, holding paperwork at bay, and
spinning out the door early to drive like mad for
the Mardi Gras. Christa grew up in Baton Rouge,
and this celebration along the Mississippi, fit for
such a wild, muddy river, is nothing new for her.
I’ve never been however, and at first, I didn’t
want to come. I’m loath to spend a weekend away
from the country where we live in a small town,
on an acre of land, surrounded by trees near the
Colorado River. During the week we drive two
hours round trip each day to work in the city, so
the thought of driving for hours to relax,
smacked of madness, along with the sleeping in
guest beds, eating what others choose, spending
all waking hours talking with people. Travel
brings out the beast who usually sleeps, and he’s
prone to lash out. It gets ugly.
I’d also expected scorching heat, projectile
vomit, crushing crowds and overwhelming fa-
tigue, but my first glimpse of a parade was two
blocks from a university which we passed after
parking along a residential street lined with hun-
dred year old mansions that looked brand new
with immaculate lawns and gladiolas in bloom.
I hadn’t expected to get close enough to the
floats to reach out and touch the rider’s hands,
and in many ways, my first glimpse reminded me
of a small town parade. And soon after we ar-
rived, Christa spotted her brother and squeezed
my hand, laughed, and pulled me from the path
of the yellow and blue tractor, forward to the
curb into the shade among spectators yelling and
waving their arms. My sister-in-law strung beads
over our heads, and her husband handed me a
beer. Her family was lounging in a grassy median
beneath trees, waving for us to join them like we
all lived in the neighborhood and had just
walked from our house.
I had expected chaos, but found it natural to
blend into the crowd, to fall into easy conversa-
tion with strangers while men in ludicrous
rubber masks or with scarves across their mouths
hurled throws, plastic cups, and doubloons. I
hung back that first afternoon, believing the trin-
kets were for children, but each time a float
passed, the adults rushed forward, waving their
arms, so I inched forward and caught my first
strand, lightweight and green. It circled around
two fingers and I felt a lightness, an understand-
ing, almost a relief. My brother-in-law handed me
another beer as I slipped the beads around
Christa’s neck. A plastic cup hit me in the back
of the head, and I felt better than I’d felt in some
time.
I didn’t know, the first afternoon, how add-
ictive all of this would become, didn’t know I’d
want the span of time to stretch on for forty days
or more, but began to understand when six or
seven floats had passed and suddenly, the first
parade was over, and I felt the child-like disap-
pointment. We’d arrived too late for this one,
but it was only the first of many parades we’d
join. And though nobody spoke of plans or
emerged from the crowd as a leader, we began to
move as one; at first I thought towards the
parade’s mid-point, so we could revisit the march-
ing bands’ tunes or heckle the float-riders with
“hey mister,” but it was more like movement on
a raft in a river, being carried towards an uncer-
tain destination, lulled by the sounds and the
sway. A movement I slipped into with ease at that
moment, and have followed for the duration of
our stay.
We came to rest on the steps of an enormous
white stucco apartment with a narrow stairwell,
lined with a cold iron rail that spiraled to the top.
It smelled of mildew but the people ascending
and descending, drinks in hand and laughing,
made the atmosphere crackle, the hallway sparkle
and shine. I don’t remember who lived there, or
even if the one I’m remembering was the first we
visited that day—our sister-in-law has friends and
family spread all over the city.
The houses and apartments we have visited
are all tiny, but we’ve gladly squeezed inside. A
double bed with several lounging people usually
sits near the door. Mimosas and fried turkey are
crammed on narrow kitchen counters. Love seats
pushed next to tables on which sit plates of ham,
potato salad, crab dip, and tortilla chips threat-
ening to push small TVs over the edge. A narrow
hallway usually leads to other rooms full of more
people, more alcohol, more food. An ever-pre-
sent line for the bathroom whose end is never
sure circles the room, but I can fall into conver-
sation with someone at some point, and even-
tually be granted a turn. At one stop a man told
me there was beer in the bathtub, so I waited in
line, used the facilities, and grabbed a beer.
When I emerged the guy said you’d better get two.
And I did. Dionysus has moved through the day
into darkness, handing me bottle after beer after
bourbon, making me think I can drink like a
young man again. And I have.
Tonight we leave for our final parade with
the moon so high and full following over our
shoulders through the black silhouette of tree
branches and street signs as we walk through
neighborhoods that rose up beautiful and white.
Christa’s hand is as warm in mine as I imagine
the hot burning stars to be resting in the folds of
the sky so clear and midnight blue. The bourbon
and water that has replaced my blood reminds
me I’m so much in love, makes me fall back on
the sentimental phrase, makes me skip and talk
too loud. We cross railroad tracks and our group
reconvenes to merge in the crowds lining the
streets to catch a glimpse of another parade.
We catch the parade in preparation, still and
churning as though it’s been dammed. The
source of the stream that will wind its way
through the Big Easy, carrying lights and masked
men on ornate floats made of flowers, plastic and
papier-mâché. Herculean forms, smiling gypsies,
mermaids. The men aboard talk, swill beer from
silver cans, pulling handfuls of beads—purple, yel-
low, and green—from boxes and bags they discard
in the street, a casual preparation for a full night
of work. We move, our pool of relatives and
friends through this sea of people; we’ve arrived
too late, lingered too long over cocktails and light
conversation, the kind that moves through a day
so relaxed you haven’t noticed the time, the kind
possible only when strangers are mingled with
family, and nothing of import needs to be sorted.
Too late to really carve out the perfect spot on
the curb.
A family friend who’s a lawyer and collector
of cowboy boots, a man who always wears slacks
and a sports jacket, pulls cigars from his coat and
begins passing them around. I draw the flame in
as the smoke fills my mouth. My wife wanders
off with her sister-in-laws’ parents, back to view
the static floats. I watch as they admire, then
grow closer, waving to the men in masks. Christa
pulls the band from her hair, shakes her long
blond ponytail loose, and waves to the men on
the top tier. A swirl of large white beads move
heavenward and swing down around her out-
stretched arm. Her movements and laughter, rare
revelations of her coy nature, the flirtation with
strangers, moves me to the year we met and I
began falling asleep at nights with her image in
my head.
I look back down the alley of the static
parade, swarms of people milling in conversa-
tion, clinging to keep warm, and the colored
lights that have begun to flicker on floats, on
street posts, and from glow-in-the-dark charms
children are swinging on strings. The first float
begins to move. An enormous cheer erupts. I
find Christa and we move back to the group. The
crowds are like tides swelling, our hands shooting
upwards like flecks of foam, lashing out at noth-
ing really—plastic beads, Frisbees, and trinkets.
It makes sense to reach out the first after-
noon, when the first float passes by and you
stand there naked waiting to be adorned; you
want the beads to show you belong here, you’re
a part of this swell, but midway through if it’s too
hot, and you’ve had too much beer, and bodies
are pressing too close, enough to drown you, it
doesn’t make sense to roll your arms like a
drowning man—It’s not lifesavers we’re grasping;
it’s more weight. And midway through your stay,
your second or third parade, if beads hang like
mill stone around your neck which has turned
bright pink from where sweat bled a cheap set
into your skin, and hundreds, already procured,
lie in a tangled seaweed glut on the back seat,
strung around the rear view, draped across the
chair and under the bed, or a boxful sits in some-
one’s apartment, removed to ease the burden,
and forgotten in a peaceful stupor walking home,
then it seems ludicrous to cry out for more. But
when the float passes by, and there’s a lull, the
void seems insufferable. The crowd recedes to
catch its breath, the road and curbs like the beach
at low tide littered with beads that miraculously
sifted through hands and touched down. Nearly
no one stoops to pick up these treasures. There’s
something magical about snatching it mid-air. It’s
a tradition that comes from Spain, but its actions
seem so American. The thrill of the wide re-
ceiver. The hunger for more of the same.
This annual apocalyptic celebration—one
more sin before the beginning of Lent— some-
how seems out of order to me. Forty days of ab-
stinence, and self-denial should be followed by
forty days of this.
This masquerade seems more of a chance,
for an evening, to forget your failures and fears.
It’s a chance to move through an evening without
anyone questioning whether the visage you wear
is real, or if you’re only holding a mask. It’s an
evening of levity, weightless illusion, surrounded
by beauty with no time constraints. It’s a chance
for the things, real or imagined, that separate a
family to evaporate in brisk coastal air. And if it’s
just an excuse to eat and drink more, work less
for a few days, then well, that seems okay too. Re-
ligious ritual and pagan rites aside, it’s easy to get
lost in a parade.
And this one is winding down. The wind
feels a bit more brisk, our steps slowed and
speech sparse. As the crowd disperses, a discus-
sion ensues about where we should eat, and
though I’m suddenly overcome with hunger, I
think I’d rather curl up next to Christa and sleep.
We cross the street to where a line of men in or-
ange jumpsuits with white, plastic bags slung over
their shoulders have emerged from the shadows.
A man with a whistle barks a command and the
line of convicts move in methodical unison down
the sidewalk, picking up trash. Every detail per-
fectly planned.
A siren blares, and as we step out of the
street, a paddy wagon big as a city bus bears
down, red and blue flashing lights on top, and
bright neon lights inside, lighting the faces of
those who stepped out of line, faces more weary
than afraid at the prospect of a night in jail. My
brother-in-law yells go deep, and I trot back into
the street, my feet feeling for the curb, my eyes
over my shoulder. He rears back, lets the plush
football fly. I lose it in a streetlight, catching in-
stead a glimpse of a beautiful woman who’s be-
come haloed in the street cleaner’s spray. A boy
intercepts the pass and runs off. I stand and
watch, amazed at the stranger she’s become. At
the beauty of water and refracted false light. Bells
from a fool’s cap jingle, and for a moment I
pretend we are saved.
# Southward Bound on a Mississippi Steamer, 1863 excerpted from Lottie Deno: A Novel (2024)
by Frank Thurmond
I finally booked passage for myself and Mary
on a shiny new paddle wheel, triple-deck stern-
wheeler christened the New Orleans (after Robert
Fulton’s first commercial steamboat fifty years
earlier). I traveled to Pittsburgh with Mary, where
the New Orleans was docked on schedule. From
there, the paddle steamer would head south
down the Ohio River until reaching the Missis-
sippi at Cairo, Illinois, and thence downriver
through Memphis and Natchez and finally to
New Orleans after an almost three-month voyage
of over eighteen hundred miles.
One cold but sunny morning in early spring
1863, I found myself starting up the boarding
gangplank with Mary. We must have been some
sight too: a petite nineteen-year-old girl with flam-
ing red sunlit locks climbing the platform with
an ebony giant of a woman by my side. Lugging
our own respective baggage, too!
* * *
I knew our route would take us past Warsaw,
Kentucky, and that we would probably stop
there, so I would have to be careful to stay hidden
to avoid being spotted. This was made easier on
account of the women passengers being sep-
arated from the men for the most part and con-
fined to second-class “deck passage”—along with
immigrants and servants.
I had other plans, however: I had spotted an
elderly gentleman whom I recognized from the
poker club in Detroit and—in hopes of an invite
to a private saloon in the upper deck—formed a
plan to ingratiate myself to him at the first op-
portunity. Women were, of course, generally kept
as far as possible from bars, following the out-
rageous notion that ladies and liquor should
never mix company. Despite such chauvinistic
policies, my little scheme worked brilliantly, and
for the remainder of the trip, I worked the poker
table to both the delight—and the increasing dis-
may—of the gentlemen passengers as the lone
lady gambler in their midst.
Not all were gentlemen, mind you: There were
ruffians aplenty aboard our ship, too, some of
them professional gamblers who made their liv-
ings preying on affluent yet naïve passengers. It
was the professional riverboat gambler you had
to watch out for, though. They were as mean and
crude and as dirty at cards as they come, and all
they ever did was cheat. I tried my best to avoid
these, as their wary eyes could easily spot the
most subtle sleights of hand that Daddy had
taught me. (Fortunately, thanks also to Daddy, I
knew most of their tricks too.) I set my sights in-
stead on the many young and chivalrous gen-
tlemen on board. I learned to use my wiles to
charm them into a round of poker, only to fleece
those innocent pigeons for all they had.
In this way, we made our progress slowly
south, with me raking in cash at the tables while
Mary waited patiently below decks for me to re-
turn and take her along for my afternoon peram-
bulations above decks and—when docked—at the
various landings along the way. (I would never
stroll alone without Mary, especially having ob-
served more than one sinister-eyed ruffian follow
my movements with a certain lusty malice, but
one look in turn from Mary’s evil eye could in-
timidate the devil himself.) Despite our ship
being Union-controlled, Mary was forced to stay
on the lower decks unless escorted by me. But be-
tween us, she knew that—in my mind—she was
now free as a bird and that it was just a question
of biding our time until I no longer had to play
the ruse of being a Southern slave heiress. Yet,
with the palpable tension on board among fellow
passengers from both North and South, we knew
we had best play our expected roles for now.
A few days past a brief stop in Cincinnati, I
saw the familiar old landing at Warsaw. We
stayed discreetly below decks in our cabin till, at
the piercing whine of a loud whistle, we felt the
jolt of the giant paddle wheel launch our ship
again with a sudden roar of steam power. I had
watched anxiously through a porthole window to
see if anyone I recognized boarded there. Nobody
did, but what I did see were troops of soldiers in
dark blue patrolling along the dock. Clearly, War-
saw was now under Federal occupation, and I
shuddered to think what might be happening
back home on the plantation. I could only pray
for them and hope to have news from Ellie Mae
upon arrival in New Orleans.
As I learned later, this was also the reason for
our safe passage downriver. By that time, Union
forces generally patrolled the rivers, with garri-
sons at the various ports and gunboats control-
ling river traffic to protect goods being
transported North. And so our vessel trudged its
steady ten miles per hour pace downstream, a rel-
atively uneventful journey once we got past the
roaring rapids at the treacherous Falls of the
Ohio just past Louisville. There—at the same
place where Lewis and Clark had once met up in
1803 to plan that famous little expedition of
their own—the Ohio River drops twenty-six feet
in the course of a mile over a rise of limestone
bedrock. At one point, our hardy captain feared
the water might be too low to proceed. But once
he and his crew had navigated us safely through,
we continued apace until finally meeting the
mighty Mississippi where the Ohio converges
with it just south of Cairo, Illinois. At that point,
the brown, sediment-laden water of the Ohio
flows into the greenish water of the Mississippi
River. Also green were the distant riverbanks,
where luscious pine forests bounded us on both
sides. Looking out at this beautiful scenery, I
hummed an old folk ballad I had heard once in
the Appalachians.
* * *
Now darlin,’ my darlin’
Don’t tell me no lie,
Tell me, where did you stay last night?
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun never shines,
I shivered when the cold wind blowed.
* * *
There, where the landscape suddenly
opened up gloriously on both sides of the vast
river, I first felt an invigorating sense of genuine
freedom. I loved to stand in the open air of the
foredeck in the shadow of the pilot house, Mary
by my side, and inhale the perfume of flowers lin-
ing the rails—pungent gardenia and sweet azalea
blossoms. A frantic whir of tiny hummingbird
wings made a pleasant change from the accus-
tomed whine of mosquitoes and gnats. Nights
were especially magical, the way the dark roiling
water behind our ship’s paddle glinted moon-
light in its foam. In the darkness across the river,
the glow-worms big as lanterns illumined the
night. Yet nothing compared to looking up at the
night sky, where on clear nights, the stars ap-
peared like a billion pinpricks in some cosmic
blanket through which the light of Heaven bey-
ond drew enchanted constellations.
On such nights, the sultry, humid summer
air was often pierced with music when the joyful
banter of banjos and mandolins on deck would
sometimes compete for our attention with the
more sonorous melodies of the saloon piano. But
it was not always such clear sailing: Sometimes, a
summer storm would announce itself with a sud-
den clap of thunder, followed by the swift patter
of rain on the water below from which steam
would rise up as if the river were on fire. But
when lightning began to strike, and the clouds
emptied their giant buckets upon us in torrential
rain, Mary and I hightailed it below deck rather
than putting too much stock in Ben Franklin’s
lightning rods adorning the ship!
When we reached Memphis, our captain
had a new concern. This part of the Mississippi
was notoriously dangerous for steamboats such
as ours, ever since the New Madrid earthquake
of 1811 had devastated the region and raised the
many perilous snags along the banks. These
sunken trees, with their twisted branches and
roots, could lurk unseen just beneath the water
and impale passing ships with deadly con-
sequences. (Just such a fate had indeed befallen
our own ship’s namesake; a hidden snag had
sunk the very first New Orleans steamship in
1814.) However, the savvy captain carefully navi-
gated through the marked shallows whilst still
managing to dock at the Memphis port.
The Federals had occupied this highly strate-
gic river gateway—once among the South’s largest
cotton (and slave) markets—since defeating the
Confederates in the naval battle of ’62, so Mary
and I were able safely to disembark for a much-
desired respite on dry land. While there, I did
manage to join a small group of Union soldiers
I spotted playing poker outside near the ship.
One of them clearly took a shine to me, too—
until, that is, I had shone him up at cards and
emptied his wallet. The parting look he shot at
me might have warned me to watch out for him
downriver, especially after overhearing that the
men were part of a cavalry regiment heading
south to New Orleans themselves. But I still had
much to learn about sore losers (especially when
they were insecure men losing to women!). In the
meantime, our next visit to shore was very nearly
tragic.
The river seemed to grow ever wider as we
journeyed southward, often past large islands
midstream. At the point where we reached the
confluence of the Mississippi and Arkansas
rivers, there was a landing situated right on the
Arkansas Delta. The riverport town there was
called Napoleon, and it was there that we
stopped again.
I read long afterward how that same town
would soon suffer a disastrous fate. After the oc-
cupying Union troops dug a channel through the
narrow land separating the Mississippi and Ar-
kansas upriver to aid their gunboats, the town of
Napoleon would eventually be entirely sub-
merged by river floodwaters. Mark Twain later
wrote about it in one of my favorite books, his
Life on the Mississippi, where he described the
ghostly image of floating over the town he once
knew and loved:
Yes, it was an astonishing thing to see the Missis-
sippi rolling between unpeopled shores and straight
over the spot where I used to see a good big self-
complacent town twenty years ago . . . a town no
more—swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the
fishes; nothing left but a fragment of a shanty and
a crumbling brick chimney!
Yet for us that day, Napoleon was still a thriving,
bustling community, and it was also where Mary
and I both had a near-fatal fright.
The Captain informed us that our stay
would be brief—just long enough to load some
much-needed supplies and fuel for the boilers—
but that passengers could have the afternoon to
stroll about the town. I was walking along the
bank rather briskly, my colorful parasol in hand,
until I was ahead of Mary a piece despite her long
stride. Suddenly, I heard her shout from behind
in her deep voice, almost a scream even. She
yelled, “Stop, Miss Carlotta! Watch your step!”
I looked down to see a large water moccasin
snake on the bank right in front of me. I
screamed, but before I knew what hit me, I was
flung to the ground with one sweep of Mary’s
strong arm. I looked up just in time to see a long
shape with numerous dark bands attached to
Mary’s hand. It was the largest such pit viper I
had ever seen. It was sunning itself on the bank
when I nearly stepped on it, but Mary saw it first,
and—after pushing me aside—threw herself upon
the serpent right before it struck. The snake now
dangled from her hand as she tried to free herself
from the grasp of its sharp fangs. The cat-like pu-
pils seemed to glare at her hatefully, and I knew
she would now consider herself forever cursed
and under the “snake-eye” spell.
The snake finally let go after she pinned its
writhing body to the ground with her foot. She
then quickly grasped a sharp-edged rock near at
hand and smashed the diamond-shaped head be-
fore tossing the now limp, scaly body far out into
the river. Despite the pain in her hand, the first
thing Mary did was rush over to my side. At that
moment, I felt a new sense of deep devotion to-
ward Mary as a loyal friend. And I knew she had
probably just saved my life at the risk of her own.
“You all right, Miss Carlotta?”
“I’m fine, thank you Mary. But look at your
hand, you must see the ship’s doctor at once!”
* * *
For the next few days, Mary lay in her bed
below deck suffering from a high fever and hal-
lucinations. Fortunately for her, the on-board
doctor was something of an expert in treating
snake bites—particularly those of the river variety,
having seen his share as a ship’s doctor—and he
had responded to my urgent pleas by attending
to her promptly.
He said, “She’ll have to lose her little finger
to keep the venom from spreading. But if she re-
covers from the fever, she might still live.”
“Might? I don’t like the sound of that! How
long before we know, doctor?”
“She will likely be bedridden till we reach
New Orleans. But, with luck, she will make a full
recovery.”
“With luck?”
* * *
I remained, for the most part, with Mary in
our quarters for some time afterward, tending to
her wound and praying for her recovery—though
I did venture up to the deck occasionally to ob-
serve the sights. As we drifted further south, the
years of recent warfare were all the more evident.
There were many burnt and empty fields along
both sides of the river, where the cotton and
other crops had been abandoned to rot. There
were recent battlefields, such as Vicksburg, where
the muddy trenches appeared still stained with
blood, lined with hundreds upon hundreds of
temporary graves with small wooden crosses.
And sometimes, I could see empty plantation
houses in the distance. Some were still quite
beautiful, but others had been burned to the
ground, with occasional chimneys and Greek re-
vival pedestals and columns standing like ancient
ruins from some distant land. These images
brought back my worries about the situation in
Kentucky. At such times, I would grasp the rails
tightly and say a silent prayer for my mother and
sister, anxious for news from home.
At Natchez, many beautiful estates along the
river had survived. There, the Confederates sur-
rendered early in the war without a fight soon
after the fall of New Orleans, and many of the
old mansions were now occupied by Union
troops. (General Grant himself occupied the fa-
mous Rosalie Mansion as his headquarters in
## 1863.)
Soon after passing through Natchez, Mary
seemed to make a miraculous recovery and was
soon on her feet again, joining me on deck to
view the changing landscape. If her bandaged
hand troubled her, she stoically ignored it. The
only pain she showed was from within, as I could
see in her eyes when we passed numerous refugee
camps where thousands of freed slaves struggled
to survive in destitute living conditions. Pres-
ident Lincoln had first issued the Emancipation
Proclamation in ’62, and it had taken effect on
the first of January 1863. Federal troops were
now busy closing down slave markets and liber-
ating captives from the horrors of human slavery
at each city they captured; yet while the war still
raged, they were largely still confined to these sor-
did camps. Many of the freedmen eagerly joined
in the fighting against their former masters and
were organized into separate regiments of their
own. Whenever I looked at Mary now, I felt an
ever-deepening sense of guilt for having been
raised in a so-called “civilized” society that could
condone such monstrous barbarity.
As we journeyed on down into Louisiana, we
also saw occasional bands of Indians—men,
women, and children—watching us from the river
banks, their eyes filled with a depth of sadness
such as I had never seen. At night, we could
sometimes see their campfires glowing red
through the woods. The still evening air was
often punctuated with a solemn drumbeat, and
the melancholy cadence of their sacred chants
drifted across the moonlit water.
They, too, were displaced, mostly remnants
of Choctaw and Cherokee tribes forcibly re-
moved during the shameful Trail of Tears trav-
esty, perpetrated by President Andrew Jackson
and continued as hostile policy toward our native
peoples by Van Buren and subsequent pres-
idents. It was only later (after I finally reached the
Texas frontier in the midst of the Texas-Indian
wars) that I fully understood the true nature of
their struggle to keep their ancestral lands and
way of life.
* * *
Baton Rouge was our last major stop before
the long sternwheeler journey finally approached
its conclusion at New Orleans. The landscape
changed drastically as we ventured deeper south
into the swampy regions of Louisiana. One misty
morning, as Mary and I stood on the stern of the
Texas deck enjoying a cool breeze infused with
the sweet scent of wild honeysuckle and wisteria
blooming along the bank, a large dark shape sur-
faced in the water just below us. As I peered over
the railing for a closer look, I jumped back, star-
tled to see staring back at me a pair of sinister-
looking yellow eyes. Just then, a young man with
eyes even darker than my own stepped up beside
me and said in a thick Cajun drawl: “Don’t let
them gators get y’all!” He pointed toward the
bank, where we could see through the clearing
fog several more enormous alligators lying in the
sand.
“My heavens!” I smiled at the fellow and
lightly touched his arm. “I don’t recall ever seeing
such critters back home in Kentucky.”
He said, “You ain’t in Kentucky no more,
lady.” Then he winked at me before sauntering
off toward the gambling parlor, and Mary
glanced at me with a knowing smile. I had just
gained a gullible new customer for my card table.
* * *
That’s where the “sore loser” I mentioned
earlier comes in, when I learned the hard way
about the perils of playing too many of Daddy’s
old tricks at once for the sake of winning at all
costs. Our steamboat finally docked at the land-
ing in New Orleans, and we had just stepped off
the boarding ramp with our luggage when I
heard a voice behind me, this time an angry
shout.
“Hey, lady! Hold it right there, you cheatin’
little whore!”
I turned around to see the Union soldier
from Memphis who had frightened me with his
appearance. He was pointing at me while speak-
ing angrily to a group of soldiers.
I tried to remain calm while looking around
for a means of escape. There was none. We were
quickly surrounded by soldiers, and they were all
now staring at me with looks of hostile intent.
* * *
Several things now happened at once. First,
the piercing whine of our steamer’s whistle
sounded above the deck from where we had just
descended. I attempted to step backward onto
the plank and head back up in hopes of finding
safety aboard ship. But the way was shut off by a
wooden gate now that all passengers had disem-
barked. I looked frantically around for possible
help but saw naught but distant stevedores busily
unloading cargo. At that moment, the soldier
lunged forward with the most frightening look I
had ever seen.
“I finally figured out how you done it!” he
shouted as he strode toward me. “You was dealin’
dirty from the bottom of your deck. That’s how
you stole all my money. And now I aim to whip
you good for it!” He reached out to grab me, but
at that moment, Mary leapt into his way and
stood firm, towering before him like some Ama-
zonian warrior.
Mary shouted, “No you ain’t, mistah!”
She grabbed the young man with her good
hand and dragged him with her powerful arm
onto the dock. Before he even knew what had hit
him, Mary threw him out into the muddy waters
of the river, just as she had done with that snake
up in Arkansas.
I looked back with dread at the other soldiers
surrounding us, fearing their angry retribution.
But to my great relief, they were all laughing hi-
lariously. One of them shouted, “Let’s get a
drink!” At that, they all quickly departed in a
rush to the taverns of New Orleans. I sighed with
a deep breath and turned back to Mary. She was
still keeping an intent watch on the soldier as he
floundered in the river before finally stumbling
back on land sopping-wet in his blue uniform.
He took one look at us and hastened off in the
opposite direction. We never saw him again.
sts
Editor’s note: Lottie Deno: A Novel of the Civil War
& the American Southwest is now available from
Parkhurst Brothers Publishers (2024).
##### Nightfall
When as much
as a gibbous moon
slants shadows
of sweet gum
and poplar limbs
across the tool shed
out back in ways
reminiscent of
Burton Callicott paintings,
between dusk and dawn,
while I’m watching
for raccoon action,
especially for that
rare albino who
showed up foraging
two nights in a row,
the other blessing
is listening spellbound
among a host of peepers
and perpetual nighthawks
thrashing against
the velvet hours.
##### Our Pear Tree
If Eden’s tree of life wasn’t destroyed
by that mighty Flood
ages ago, there are perhaps somewhere
shifts of cherubim hovering
around its limbs in a lushly secret forest,
checking their blazing sword
now and again so that the odd,
lost and errant moth
or adventurous aborigine mightn’t bite off
another curse and be
changed into wanton gods. But not
bequeathed from on high with sentries
of angels, our pear tree, on the other hand,
was mostly used as food
for my father’s few head of half-Holsteins
and for my mother’s bounty
of preserves, although it may be as close as I’ve
come to understanding the everlasting,
as it just kept offering full branches
of cadmium-green spheres
worthy of Cézanne, even after it was getting on,
had caught fire once, and its
trunk had been gutted by at least two lightning
strikes, even after the death of our faith
in its will to bloom one more season,
though flourishing spread over
its roots and wildly about the rest of the yard
in a patchwork of periwinkles
and showy jonquils. When we moved some years
later, the tree had dwindled to what
seemed like a shell of bark, yet we were told by
the new tenants there that, summer
after summer, it was still bearing beautiful fruit.
##### Providence
Being the son of even
a jackleg preacher,
##### Ricky Anderson
should’ve known better,
yet in our boyhood lull
of late August heat
not long before
sumacs would redden,
coming upon a
passel of hogs sprawled
under their shed,
he was possessed
to strip the leaves
from a willow switch
and plow into them
for fun. Though
in their squealing escape,
two or three bumped
the rusty panel where
a globe of yellow jackets
was quietly nesting
but quickly rose in
formation to throw
their whole golden veil
over Ricky’s head and face,
and every other bit
of uncovered flesh
they found till he
must’ve looked similar
to Christ his Lord
after being scourged
and crowned with thorns.
##### Repast
As for both wake
and funeral, you go with
the best of intentions,
determined not to bring up
anything to do with feeding tubes,
or your opinion on chemo
and life-support, or clichés
about it being better
to go quickly—say,
nodding in an easy chair
after a good day on the lake—
than to suffer vampire nurses,
the indignity of bedpans.
You hope, for the moment,
not to blurt any unsurety
of closure through faith,
meaning instead to concentrate
on the recompense of casseroles,
the lavish glazes on cakes,
subduing all thoughts
of how there seemed to be
a little too much rouge
on the cheeks, how cloudlike
and eternal the casket’s taffeta
looked, when, inevitably,
over an awful pause,
and in the twinkling of an eye,
something like the insipid
“you just never know”
has slipped past your lips.
# Reviews
##### Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey. By Robert “Mack” McCormick, edited by John W. Troutman. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2023. Pp. xxx + 232, editor’s preface, introduction, afterword, notes, acknowledgments, index, photographs, maps, illustra-tions, $30, hardback)
I have literally been waiting to read this book
for two decades. Other blues fans and researchers
have anticipated its pub-
lication for twice that
time. McCormick com-
pleted a number of ver-
sions of the manuscript
in the 1970s, but several
factors delayed the
book’s publication.
They include copyright
disputes, controversy
over content, tension
over ownership of intel-
lectual property, questions about fieldwork
ethics, and McCormick’s own challenges with
mental illness. Consequently, the manuscript of
Biography of a Phantom was put on a shelf until
2015, with interest in publication an option only
after McCormick’s death. We are fortunate that
when his estate was settled, arrangements made
it possible to publish the book and also release
his massive amount of fieldwork materials to the
Smithsonian Institution. Editors and curators
with the Smithsonian have made the book’s pub-
lication possible, and they have also released dig-
itized recordings of McCormick’s intensive and
valuable field recordings. The results are a treat
both for those who have long awaited the book
and those newly acquainted with the author’s
work. The book’s contents as well as the record-
ings are also an important contribution to schol-
arship.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786454015671.png)
Robert Johnson was a phantom to McCor-
mick when he began his fieldwork in the late
1960s. He was largely unknown following his
death in 1938 near Greenwood, Mississippi. The
1961 release of King of the Delta Blues Singers by
Columbia Records was the catalyst that even-
tually literally put Johnson on the charts. A col-
orful, but highly romanticized, album cover
sparked blues revivalists to pick the record from
the bins, British blues rockers covered Johnson’s
tunes, and Frank Driggs’s highly speculative and
even more highly romanticized liner notes cast
Johnson as a legendary even Faustian figure
within blues history. Driggs cast him as a myste-
rious figure, embodying quintessential elements
of the archetypal bluesman. The legend of
Johnson’s diabolical pact has been totally de-
bunked, yet the Crossroads remains vibrant in
blues imagery, even commemorated in sculpture
in Clarksdale. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCul-
loch’s 2003 Robert Johnson Lost and Found is the
definitive critique of the Faustian association
with Johnson. The writers reveal how the imag-
ery is related to major misunderstandings of
blues as well as major presence of stereotypical
imagery within blues. They end their critique by
challenging researchers to find the real Robert
Johnson and not simply perpetuate the mythol-
ogized imagery. McCormick’s contributions help
researchers to discover what we can know about
his life history. By his book’s end, McCormick
gives us a portrait of a musician who readers rec-
ognize far more as a real man rather than a
phantom.
McCormick’s contribution is an excellent ad-
dition to other more recent biographies. Some
of his research is excluded in Biography of a Phan-
tom due to copyright disputes and challenges over
who owned the rights to the research materials.
We do have major omissions from McCormick’s
original manuscripts, and the book’s editor, John
Troutman, explains how readers can discover the
content of what had to be excised. Despite some
major editorial cuts, the resulting manuscript
provides readers with an excellent book. McCor-
mick brings readers into his own efforts to dis-
cover biographical information on Johnson, and
he writes vivid accounts of his adventures in find-
ing relatives and friends of the musician in the
decades after Johnson’s death. McCormick dis-
covered that many individuals knew Johnson well
and that they could offer vivid memories of their
interactions with the bluesman. The phantom
imagery dissipates in McCormick’s book, and we
gain a much better sense of who Johnson really
was as a musician and as an individual.
Biography of a Phantom requires that readers
engage the book’s back story. John Troutman’s
preface sets the stage for McCormick’s twelve
chapters. McCormick follows a thread that leads
him from Hazelhurst to Robinsonville, Missis-
sippi, with stop-overs at points in between. The
trope of the Odyssey works well with McCormick
emerging as a late twentieth-century Telemachus
in search of Odysseus. Throughout the narrative,
McCormick demonstrates his skill as fieldworker,
researcher, and writer. He begins with his efforts
to learn about Johnson in his hometown, but it’s
clear that the bluesman spent little time in Ha-
zelhurst. McCormick then takes readers to nu-
merous towns and cities mentioned in the lyrics
of blues songs and identified with Johnson, a
process that results in only scant information.
Through diligence coupled with serendipity,
McCormick finds his way to Robinsonville. His
careful research blends, and fortuitous, even
quirky, leads bring him right into the neighbor-
hood that served as Johnson’s home base. There
he meets a full cast of characters who provide
him with a wealth of memories and stories. The
fieldworker’s journey and his descriptions add to
the narrative. Readers also gain an excellent pres-
entation of Johnson’s life history. The book is
well worth the wait and is a major contribution
to blues history.
It also was highly edited. There are major sec-
tions that McCormick wrote about Johnson’s
parents and his own family life. Readers will find
sections that make large leaps in biography that
display obvious omissions. This information was
in numerous versions of McCormick’s original
manuscripts, but they do not appear in this vol-
ume. Reasons for the editorial deletions are thor-
oughly discussed in Troutman’s Afterword.
Some of the problems are connected to the need
to avoid republication of material that is already
in print. Other lapses of biographic detail stem
from major copyright disputes. They reveal ethi-
cal problems that resulted in major court cases.
The commoditization of photographic imagery,
interview material, and other resources became
especially rich when Columbia Records released
a box set of complete recordings in 1990. McCor-
mick had made earlier claims to the rights of the
material, but Columbia was successful in the
legal battle. When the compilation sold over a
million copies, the claims for intellectual owner-
ship obviously became even more pronounced.
The award to the Johnson estate took a decade
to be settled, with compensation awarded to
Johnson’s son, Claud Johnson. Tensions re-
mained among relatives of Robert Johnson, and
intellectual property rights resulted in other pub-
lications that played a role in preventing McCor-
mick from publishing his book. Troutman
critiques McCormick’s actions within this dis-
pute. He holds him and other researchers ac-
countable for their actions. At the same time, we
also see a sympathetic discussion of the struggles
that McCormick faced with his failing health and
mental illness. After McCormick died, his estate
placed the fieldwork, manuscripts, and collecta-
nea into the holdings of the Smithsonian’s ar-
chives. Troutman’s careful and conscientious
editorial and curatorial efforts are also an impor-
tant part of McCormick’s story, and we are for-
tunate to have this important legacy made
available for the future.
--Gregory Hansen
##### Soon Done with the Crosses. By Claude Wilkinson. (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2023. Pp. 92. $10.00, paper)
“If there is a seal on southerners that iden-
tifies them as peculiar to all other people, it’s
quite likely our spiritualness,” Claude Wilkinson
remarks in Southern Writers on Writing (ed. Susan
Cushman, Jackson: University Press of Missis-
sippi, 2018, p. 125). Citing passages from his first
poetry collection, Reading the Earth (1998), he
suggests the seal was upon him from the start,
especially in his perception of nature. “Without
the poems’ prevalent inclination toward belief,
all they might reveal is a patient way of looking”
(p. 126), he explains. In
fact, Wilkinson is a
scrupulous observer of
the natural world; and
the woodcut of a dead
bird on the cover of
Soon Done with the
Crosses, his fifth collec-
tion, anticipates the life-
less feathers, bill, crown,
“tarsi” or leg bones, and
“blind / but still bright eye” (p. 6) in his “Cock
Robin, in Memoriam”—a much darker elegy than
its nursery-rhyme counterpart, “Who Killed Cock Robin?”
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786454118112.png)
Worse than the bleak February scene in Wil-
kinson’s poem is the spiritual winter of his first-
person speaker, who “had waited, and waited, /
and waited on God” (p. 6) for three days before
spotting the bird beneath his window. Here, Wil-
kinson evokes the Bible account of Jesus’s fol-
lowers arriving at the empty tomb three days after
his death on the cross; but the closing image of
a “chalky outline / of transfiguration” (p. 6) un-
expectedly relates the bird with its nimbus of
snow to the glorified Christ. The book cover, too,
juxtaposes death with a hope that is repeated in
the gospel music of the epigraph: “We soon shall
be done with the crosses / We soon shall be done
with the troubles of the world” (p. v).
Wilkinson’s sixty free-verse poems speak of
multiple worldly crosses, including war, prostitu-
tion, the autism of a friend’s child, a saint’s mar-
tyrdom, a grandmother’s dementia, and a
mother’s “soft hymns” that could be “gorgeous
with afterlife,” even though they “always sounded
like tears” (p. 26). Readers are apt to identify the
poet as the narrator who shares his thoughts
throughout the collection, but one poem is un-
mistakably autobiographical. In “Posed beside
the Lyceum Marker Commemorating James
Meredith’s Enrollment at Ole Miss in 1962,” the
award-winning Wilkinson—honored as “a visiting
scholar” (p. 33)—is “goaded to pleasantness for
P.R. photos” on the same campus Meredith inte-
grated four decades earlier in the face of much
crueler goading. Long after his own enrollment
there in the late 1970s, Wilkinson remembers
“the tall, stunning / white girl who always
glanced / whenever we passed each other” (p.
33); but he remembers also how futile it was
“then” to dream of “waking on misty mornings
/ to share ripe figs and tea,” even in countries
“like France or Greece.”
The scene changes dramatically in the next
poem, “London Rain,” where the narrator is far
from Mississippi, “having croissants and blood
sausage / with a woman from Australia” (p. 34)
and discussing their individual travel plans in-
stead of the previous night’s riot “over yet
another black man / murdered by police.” The
breakfasting couple is glad to be away from the
“incessant summer heat” of their home coun-
tries, and the English rain parallels the dreams
of misty mornings at tea with a beautiful young
white woman in the preceding poem. But there
is no escape from crosses, as the city’s heat of ra-
cial violence and the speaker’s solitary journey to
Stonehenge imply.
Soon Done with the Crosses is not formally di-
vided into sections; yet, as the successive poems
at Ole Miss and in London hint, the new book
is not a random array. Printed on facing pages,
“Listening to Nina Simone Sing ‘To Be Young,
Gifted and Black’” and “Posed beside the Ly-
ceum Marker” are more explicitly paired, expos-
ing the terrible disparity between Black
achievement and relentless racism in a similar
four-stanza, thirty-line format. Several pages later,
Wilkinson elaborates on motifs of music, suffer-
ing, and race with a trio of blues-related poems,
ranging from the mock-epic mode of “Listening
to ‘Voodoo Child’ While Imagining Sisyphus In-
structing Jimi Hendrix for His Eternal Labor” to
the exuberant wordplay of “Bluesman” and the
poignancy of “Blueswoman,” in which a “now
frail figure / in sequined costume” sings “to low-
down men / who love to roam” (p. 46).
From sea horses to a Tennessee Walking
Horse, animals are central figures in at least half
of the poems; like “Cock Robin, in Memoriam,”
several works express a spiritual dimension
through allusions to myth, art, music, natural his-
tory, and literature. “The Parable of the Snail”
starts with the narrator’s humorous outburst on
the challenge of applying nature’s lessons: “My!
You’re a sticky wicket / of examples of how I
ought to be—” (p. 2). In contrast to the “humble”
snail’s silent and “nearly indiscernible pilgrim-
age” (p. 2), are the intrusions of creatures who
caw, peck, and buzz later in the book in a three-
parable sequence with comic religious references.
Italics emphasize nature’s urgency to convey its
wisdom as the narrator struggles to interpret a
croak of “Eureka!” (p. 63) in “The Parable of the
Crow,” a repeated “Knock, knock, knock!” (p.
64) in “The Parable of the Woodpecker,” and a
song defending “the screech of our decibels” (p.
66) in “The Parable of the Cicada.”
“Birds That Alight on Faith” introduces the
book’s most extended series: seven poems posi-
tioned about ten pages apart, each title beginning
with the same two words. The narrator prays for
a “thimbleful / of aerial surety” (p. 1) to help him
follow a bird’s example and “grasp those things
/ which never collapse / under the heft of this
life.” Despite each bird’s fragility, these poems
frequently serve as a counterweight for the vol-
ume’s “heft” of pain. In “Birds That Sing in
Winter,” chilly sparrows are sustained by
thoughts of spring and the “trusted promise” (p.
74) that they could not “fall without notice /
even in such wincing gloom”; and “Birds That
Abide No Matter” concludes the sequence by
thanking heaven for the meadowlark’s trust in
providence. Nevertheless, in the six poems that
follow, the griefs of animals, earth, and humans
seem so endless that spiritual darkness is the in-
evitable subject of “Vigil,” the collection’s final
poem. Wilkinson turns to Edward Hopper’s
most famous painting as an analogue for “our
being wake [sic] and about” (p. 89) in psychic dis-
tress at a late and lonely hour: “It’s ‘soon / I will
be done with the crosses’ // since we are
Hopper’s Nighthawks here, / snared in our own
all-night café . . . .”
In an eighteen-line sentence spread across six
short stanzas, Wilkinson explicates “our” likeness
to the only three customers in Hopper’s stark
diner: the blue-suited businessmen who “ob-
viously don’t know each other / or care to for
that matter” and the woman who is “so pale and
loveless she looks almost dead” (p. 89). Earlier in
Soon Done with the Crosses, Wilkinson imagines
how cicadas feel during their seventeen years of
“cyclic jailing” (p. 65), and in this closing poem
he keeps vigil with all who feel trapped in our
own solitary snares.
--Joan Wylie Hall
##### Waking Past Midnight: Selected Poems. By Floyd Collins. (Nacog-doches, Texas: Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2023. Pp. 120, $20.00, paperback)
When I first started reading Floyd Collins’s
magisterial book of selected poems, Waking Past
Midnight, my newsfeed was ablaze with tidings
that Louise Gluck,
America’s most recent
Nobel laureate in litera-
ture, had died. Eighty
years is a goodly span,
especially for one who
remained prolific her
entire life, and there
will soon be an update
to her most recent col-
lected, which spanned
forty years. In Waking Past Midnight, Floyd Collins
offers a half-century worth of poems, the plums
from three collections and two chapbooks that
came out years apart on small presses. Now
Stephen F. Austin State University Press has
made available this selected volume, as well as a
book of Collins’s critical essays, The Living Arti-
fact.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786454277901.png)
Floyd Collins is a native of Mississippi who
grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, where he played
high school sports and began writing poems in
his late teens. After graduating from Memphis
State, he received his MFA and PhD from the
University of Arkansas. His first two full- length
collections, Forecast and What Harvest, a book fo-
cused on the battle of the Alamo and the men
and women caught in this maelstrom, were each
separated by almost a decade, partly because Col-
lins is a deliberate writer, but also, I suspect, be-
cause Collins has been one of the most prolific
poetry critics of recent decades. Then it was more
than a decade before My Back Pages: The Teresa
Poems appeared from Stephen F. Austin State
University Press. For fans of his work or those
eager to discover a voice that has been in our
midst for a long time without getting a lot of at-
tention, Waking Past Midnight is a welcome entry
among the welter of poetry books released on a
weekly if not daily basis. Collins is no mere voice
of the moment, but a craftsman who has honed
his skills to build poems meant for the long haul.
Collins began publishing in his late teens
and early twenties. This was in the early seventies,
when many poets wrote in a hieratic, lyrical mode
that Collins mastered early. Collins read deeply
among the Spanish and Spanish-language poets
who were only then, thanks to ambitious trans-
lators, coming to wide attention in America. But
Collins, unlike some poets of the time, is always
aware of landscape, and the imagery of West Ten-
nessee, of rivers and even the Delta, and this im-
agery imbues his early poems with a gravity many
of the poets of that time lack.
Collins’s early work is impressive enough
that the reader wishes that he had avoided the
stabs at surrealism that were also an earmark of
the early 70s. Collins’s forte is precise, at times
meticulous, observation of the physical world,
which often pulls the poem into metaphor , al-
lowing something like revelation. So it’s disap-
pointing to see the first poem in the book, an
ode to the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, sporting
ornamentation like this: “night after night / I
wear a necklace bestowed by nightmare, / beads
of blue phosphor and salt.”
These lines seem the anthemic flourish a
young writer might commit, and these early
poems are very much the poems of a young man,
albeit a preternaturally gifted one. Still, the ref-
erence Collins makes to Alberti’s “elegy for a
man buried with his watch running” sticks, even
forty years after first reading this poem.
A central aspect of Collins’s poetry has al-
ways been the physicality of the world he makes.
Collins does not just see the physical world as a
series of objective correlatives, images to spark
our deepest thoughts, but for the things they are.
The poem “Forecast,” a twelve-line gem begins,
“November is the tombstone / At a wheat field’s
edge.” In a few words, Collins captures exactly
the elegiac feeling of late fall, the look of fields
broken and picked over after harvest, before the
plowing under. The tombstone also reminds us
that in the days of family farms, many people,
sometimes whole families, were buried on their
land, often in the fields that succeeding genera-
tions would work. Such plots can still be found
scattered through fields in more rural areas.
“Forecast” is Collins at his early best. Masterful
as many of these early poems are—especially,
“Piano Player,” “A Last Word,” “The Tree
House,” “Turning the Corner for Home”—one
welcomes the widened scope that comes with en-
tering the poems from What Harvest, based, as I
said earlier, on the battle of the Alamo and the
history surrounding that battle.
This section begins with the book’s first ex-
tended narrative, “James Bowie: Bexar, 1836.”
Any writer, when confronting history or any field
of specialized knowledge, is figuring out how
much the writer needs to tell the reader. For the
poet, this is especially problematic. A poem
needs to deliver its necessary background and get
on with the business of the poem without the
reader being aware of the manipulation. In this
64 line poem, Collins moves deftly between
Bowie’s final circumstances, dying of tuberculo-
sis, his namesake knife bound to his hand with
rosary beads, and Bowie’s past of gambling, bad
business deals, his marriage to the daughter of a
Mexican politician.
Collins adeptly weaves Bowie’s illness into
the tale of making the knife that still carries his
name. “Bowie’s chest labors like a ribbed bellows
/ And again the coals shift and glow white hot /
In the forge of James Black, Arkansas cutler /
and smith.” Collins nimbly handles the narra-
tive’s woven strands in graceful iambic penta-
meter that gives him room to maneuver through
the tale of Bowie’s life. The knife that made him
famous gives him “a handle / The ivory hafted
steel a slick purchase.” Yet Bowie’s purchase, his
hold on the riches of the world, does not hold,
leading to the final illness Collins writes about.
The poem ends on a note of foreboding as Bowie
waits on his bed for death that will arrive either
from illness or the attack of Mexican soldiers.
I have spoken before of the physicality of
Collins’ poems. There are in his lingering obser-
vations, even his recitation of period diction, a
respect for the well-made things of this world.
“Kentucky Long Rifles” is one of the book’s high-
lights, an elegant description of the long rifle,
then a recent innovation in the world of fire-
arms. The poem pans over the rifle, delighting
the reader with language even as it instructs: “In
the buttstock of polished maple / A hinged cavity
hid the greasy, square-cut / Linen patches that
wrapped each leaden ball.” This sort of lingering
observation is not usual in this time when most
written communication takes place in phrases
and illustrations. Collins takes his time and
trusts the reader to follow. After a dozen lines of
dense description, “Kentucky Long Rifles” un-
winds into narrative of the renowned Davy
Crockett “squeezing off round after round,” a
display of shooting that “Showed his Excellency
each morning / How Texas cut the pigeon’s
wing.”
Many poets have based extended sequences
or whole books on historical events. But these
narratives are rarely as grounded in the three di-
mensional sphere of the senses as Collins’s
poems are, and they suffer as a result. The reader
comes to trust the small observations about the
long rifle’s manufacture—“a poised / Sniper
could spill the eye of a gold braided / Zapadore
at two hundred paces”—and those small three di-
mensional images construct a world we trust and
are willing to follow the poet through. Collins
not only did an immense amount of research for
these poems, the language has been crafted like
one of Bowie’s fresh-minted knives. Those not
schooled in the Alamo’s history (from what I can
tell, it is not much studied in schools these days)
might not know some of the more obscure
names and facts here. But be assured that if you
don’t know who Norris Wright or Carlos Espal-
ier are, that Collins does. What Harvest was a
great step forward for Collins’ work as the move
into narrative torqued his already well-wrought
language to greater heights.
The last third of Waking Past Midnight is
taken up by poems for Collins’ most recent book
My Back Pages: The Teresa Poems, a volume focus-
ing on Collins’s adolescence and first love in
Memphis, Tennessee, as well as a portrait of the
changing south in 1970. Again here, we find Col-
lins using narrative and highly charged language,
but the mood here is more meditative, at times
even somber, as it relates two teenagers’ fleeting
romance and later the death of one lover far too
young and the aging of the other although these
poems never descend into self-pity or melan-
choly. As an homage to bygone love, Collins is
walking the same path as Dante in La Vita Nuova
or the painter Andrew Wyeth in his long-hidden
series of Helga paintings.
“Still in our teens,” begins “Expiation,” a
poem dedicated to Teresa Shuler, “we walk the
back paths / Of Overton Park, looking for a
place,” an opening which recounts the perma-
nent dilemma of teens too young or poor for cars
and no recourse to places away from adult eyes.
The poem’s pivot to an image of falling leaves
foretells the end of the romance. The speaker has
tried to be rid of such memories, but as the poem
ruefully notes, “It remains that brief season that
transpired in another age.” The remainder of the
collection takes us through that season as well as
following some unexpected detours.
“The Ghostly Heart” is one of several poems
that Collins bases on music and especially Mem-
phis musicians. Furry Lewis plays slide with a
“pocketknife of dimpled bone” for a group of
boys who bring him a pint of whiskey. W.C.
Handy, Robert Johnson, and Elvis Presley put in
appearances as well, but Teresa Shuler is never
far: “I wanted to make your name / A byword for
all things of beauty and grace.”
The Teresa poems require narrative, and it
can be difficult to maintain the standards of lan-
guage that Collins set for himself in “Forecast”
or “Kentucky Long Rifle.” The first two lines of
“The Machinery of Night” stumble a bit in set-
ting the scene, but the poem recovers nicely as it
progresses through a description of the poet’s
father setting type for the Memphis newspaper,
the trade he took up after being unable to com-
plete his dental studies. “While only a youth,”
the poem begins, “I visited the composing /
Room of the Memphis Commercial Appeal.” The
prosiness of these lines does not prepare us for
the description of his father’s “beautiful square
hands” loading “slugs of hot lead” into the lino-
type machine.
“Load every rift with ore,” was John Keats’s
advice to poets, and it seems to be advice Collins
has taken to heart. Over and over reading these
poems, readers will be brought up short by the
transformative powers of Collins’ imagery and
his metaphor making. In “Narcissus to the
Muse,” a description of his elaborate prepara-
tions for high school—“It was for you, Teresa, that
I put on the pleated / Oxford cloth shirt with the
button down collar”— is compared with his dress-
ing for the day now—“I shrugged on my wool car-
digan”—before launching into a memory of high
school sports and the inevitable passage from
those years. “Farewell,” a poem placed early in
the sequence, tells us that Teresa “died in the
days before the autumn equinox / Twenty-five
years after our short liason.” The speaker, un-
aware of his former love’s demise, describes him-
self as “slumbering,” but says of Teresa, “She, too,
sleeps on a little past the dream.”
Floyd Collins is an artisan of language. We
may have no one who chisels and sculpts lan-
guage as precisely as he does. In this generous,
yet carefully curated, selected poems, Collins pro-
vides example after example of what language is
capable of. Young poets would do well to look
here for guidance. Widespread attention has
eluded Collins, perhaps because his books of
poems come infrequently, and his career did not
lead him into the favor-trading world of writing
programs. Waking Past Midnight may or may not
change that, but this is a book built of poems
that will endure and long after the time of this
writing, people will discover and marvel over the
poems of Floyd Collins.
--Al Maginnes
##### Fellow Survivors: New and Selected Poems. By Al Maginnes. (Hickory, North Carolina: Redhawk Publications, 2023. Pp. 269, $16.00, paperback)
Born in Massachusetts and raised in the
southeastern United States, Al Maginnes earned
his BA from East Carolina University and his
MFA in Creative Writing from the University of
Arkansas. A prolific practitioner of the language
arts, he has published thirteen collections of po-
etry. Individual poems have appeared in presti-
gious literary journals, including The Antioch
Review, Arkansas Review, The Georgia Review, The
New England Review, Poetry, and Tar River Poetry.
He is a recipient of the John Ciardi Award from
the University of Arkansas Press and a grant from
the North Carolina
## Arts Council. Maginnes
is also an aficionado of
popular music, which is
evident in his poem for
Delta bluesman Robert
Johnson titled “Love in
Vain,” perhaps the most
poignant entry in the
selections from Sleeping
Through the Graveyard
Shift. The two hundred and sixty-two pages of the
volume presently under review, Fellow Survivors:
New and Selected Poems, clearly indicate that Ma-
ginnes has achieved T. S. Eliot’s first criteria for
literary excellence: “abundance.” When my ap-
praisal of Maginnes’s latest book is concluded I
hope it will be apparent that the poet has also at-
tained “variety” and “complete competence.”
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786454473187.png)
Perhaps the finest and most evocative of Ma-
ginnes’s earlier poems, “For a Glass of Red
Wine” conjures the gustatory and olfactory qual-
ities of a vintage that could be a premier cru such
as Chateau Lafite or a more earthy blend like
Black Cloud. The opening lines put us in mind
of a bottle broached by a corkscrew:
I want to reach over and move you
so your smoky odor of crushed grape
cannot drift around me, but
I cannot stop watching the smear
of candlelight reflected on your ruby belly,
bright as the hour glass marking
the black widow I killed in my toolshed
this summer. (p. 78)
The speaker seems to shiver with anticipation so
pure it borders on greed. Note the orotund o and
r sounds in the adjective-noun combination
“smoky odor,” as he rolls them on his tongue like
plump grapes picked from vineyard rows still wet
with dew. He seems entranced by “the smear /
of candlelight reflected on your ruby belly”
(p.78). Like a French Impressionist he depicts
with subtle brush strokes the “ruby belly” resem-
bling an “hour glass” that culminates in the spec-
tral image “black widow I killed in my toolshed.”
Thus, the speaker savors the allure of this
sweet intoxicant but also realizes its fatal poten-
tial. Moreover, he admits to thirsting for more
mundane brews in the ensuing lines: “And I
loved your earthy cousin, beer, / who bears the
brassy accent of wheatfields” (p. 78). Here Ma-
ginnes’s protagonist forsakes the delicate palate
of the wine connoisseur for the “brassy accents”
(p. 78) of one who lives by the rough braille of
his senses. Beer brewed from barley is not pearled
and awakens in the reader’s mind the neon-lit
windows of roadhouses where frosted mugs come
to a head in foam and the occasional brawl:
“‘You could have been killed,’ I’d hear / for the
next seventeen years, after / the car wrecks, bar
fights, [and] nights in jail” (p. 79). Oddly enough,
the poem that began as a paean in the vein of
Emily Dickinson’s “I taste a liquor never brewed”
culminates in a sobering dirge for the aftermath
of youthful excess: “tiny cyclone / in the clear
barrel of a syringe, swirl now / of my wine-col-
ored blood in tubes taken / to be tested or meas-
ured, to tell me / how far this new disease has
marched” (p. 79). But “For a Glass of Red Wine”
is no temperance sermon nor is it Maginnes’s in-
tention to point a moral or adorn a tale. His clo-
sure seems one of wistful remembrance:
but one scent of your dry breath
can make me thirst again
for the cup after cup I emptied,
searching, I thought, for the pearls
some kings used to hide in wine
for favorites of the court to find,
round and drowning
and, briefly, the color of blood” (p. 80)
The fifth and sixth lines quoted above capture
the full-flavored cadences of Yeats’s “Sailing to
## Byzantium.”
Maginnes embraces a Whitmanesque urge
toward cataloguing and prefers expansive narra-
tives that embrace the phenomenal world and en-
able him to name the numinous particulars that
abide in the rich marrow of day-to-day living. In
“Before Electricity,” the poet’s metrical register
lilts trippingly throughout the opening lines:
“Evenings then were music, saw-grass rasp / of
fiddle, thumb and horn-tipped fingers // frailing
a reedy banjo, or spinning forth / of words un-
spooled like thread to repair // the simple fabric
lives were clothed by” (p. 75). The sibilant s-
sounds in “saw-grass rasp” connote the amber
rosin block and bristling bow, an aural device
countered by the bass note inherent in the locu-
tion “thumb.” Even more arresting is the expres-
sion “horn-tipped fingers” that plays into the
phrase “frailing a reedy banjo.” Stylistically, Ma-
ginnes resorts to Old English kennings revived
by the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney,
which in the latter’s case was intended to evoke
the turf-fire snugness of the Gaeltacht in North-
ern Ireland. Maginnes likewise strives to convey
the creatural existence of his protagonists living
in a time before incandescent bulbs lit Trans-Ap-
palachian homesteads along the Blue Ridge
Mountains: “but more than one might have
yearned / for the forgiveness smeary oil-light
granted, / a glow built as much from shadow as
illumination” (p. 75). Perhaps he envisions a
woman weary from hours spent at a butter-churn
or cider-press shrugging off her dress of printed
flour sack fabric and letting her “stiff hair fall”
(p. 75). The last thing her husband sees when she
slips beneath the patchwork quilt of their iron
feather-bed is: “the mute instrument in the cor-
ner” (p. 75). Doubtless his hands slide along the
curve of her spine as easily as they did the pearl
inlay of the banjo’s fingerboard.
“Electricity: A Requiem,” occurs much later
in Maginnes’s oeuvre and amounts to series of
apocalyptic scenarios not intended for the more
delicate sensibilities typically drawn to poetry.
But its opening segments appear benign com-
pared to what follows: “Wanderers learned how
/ to carry fire with them, / not sensing yet that
its warmth, its gift of vision would lure us / into
building hearths / to cast our bodies beside” (p.
204). The Promethean tone promises an amelio-
rating warmth, the solace of heat and light, if not
ceremony, to ancestral tribes who seek a familiar
dwelling. But with a local habitation and a name
come the inevitable pitfalls of what passes for civ-
ilization. Maginnes relates how Mississippi and
Louisiana “elected / to buy electric chairs that
could be taken around the state rather than
house / the soon-to-be-dead in Parchman / or
Angola” (p. 204). Notice how the poet generates
a macabre homophone through his juxtaposition
of “elected” and “electric chair.” The poet offers
us sotto voce a scathing cultural critique as the
good people of the community gape like bump-
kins at a carnival: “Crowds would come to watch
the chair unloaded. The / executioner would
hire an electrician / to wire up the chair.” (p.
205). However, Maginnes initially denies us the
specter of the convicted soul crowned with elec-
trodes and banged out of his leather straps once
the switch is thrown: “In some towns there were
concerts and picnics. / Church bells would toll
/ as the hour approached” (p. 205). Meeting-
house belfries reverberate for miles around as
bronze bells tongue twelve and the state-sanc-
tioned homicides are carried out. Doubtless, the
corpses will be dumped in a potter’s field. Ma-
ginnes’s indictment of these casual slaughters is
fraught with irony as afternoon sublimes into
evening: “men and women turned from / the
mid-day execution / to walk home for quiet cop-
ulations in shade-cooled houses” (p. 208).
The new poems in Fellow Survivors are rich
and various in their subject matter. Each entry
lends deeper insight into Maginnes’s personal
concerns and ranges from actual events to anec-
dotal observations. He spent four years living in
the shadow of Fayetteville’s Mount Sequoia, but
managed to assimilate the influence of previous
University of Arkansas MFA candidates such as
Jack Butler and Frank Stanford, thus emerging
with a voice and vision undeniably his own. Ma-
ginnes’s signature style ranges from expansive
narratives to poems characterized by a searing
lyric acumen. “Light Has Two Tasks” emerges as
a salient case in point:
Moonlight only serves for shining the edges
of things already dark. Curved fender
of a fresh washed car. Crown of a gravestone.
Crescent of a knife two boys use
to open their thumbs and press the wounds
together
the pale scars insignia of a bond
they cannot explain or express. (p. 27)
He captures in the expression “Curved fender /
of a fresh washed car,” the sponge-buffed contour
of a ’53 Desoto. Genuine moonlight gleams
along the hood ornament. Then the poet shifts
to the metonymic “Crown of a gravestone” and
appears loath to concede that a monarch lies be-
neath it. The ritual nick that seals a bond be-
tween two youths implies that pain is its own
signature, fresh and blinding decades after the
fact. The cursory nod to the title poem of Frank
Stanford’s first volume titled The Singing Knives
(1971) is unmistakable but Maginnes is no devo-
tee prone to slavish imitation. His youthful pro-
tagonists lie beside pulsing embers that shift and
glow in the surrounding dark until he dispels the
enchantment with one extraordinary line: “Day-
light shrinks the world. Birds call” (p. 27). Some-
thing inchoate compels these lads to linger beside
the heap of sticks kindled by their own hands:
“The boys emerge out of night’s possibility / into
flat light, linger beside // the cooling ashes
though they are hungry / and expected in their
unpredictable homes” (p. 27).
Maginnes’s most engaging poems are confes-
sional in nature and deal with themes ranging
from social status to alcoholism. In “Blue Collar”
he contrasts his father’s desire to transcend his
class origins and the apparent indifference with
which the poet contemplates such nice distinc-
tions. He recalls his parent’s natty attire by con-
juring the “ice-blue Oxford” worn only on
Fridays when his finer apparel is at the cleaners.
Ironically, the color motif evokes the demeaner
of one who is cool and aloof rather than prone
to labor in the grease pits of service stations. Ma-
ginnes harbors no disdain for working stiffs who
wear “grease-mapped shirts” or whose hands are
callused from cracking the lugs on tires driven by
those who can afford SUVs. While his father
urges mastery of “decimals and fractions,” he
prefers “radio songs” and the social revolution
foretold in the black columns of “underground”
newspapers. But he also remembers “the frayed
shirts with company logos / and names stitched
over the pockets” (p. 148) that both confer iden-
tity and produce an ineffable fatigue in the care-
worn patriarchs of working-class households.
Maginnes recalls “friend’s fathers as they came
home / from the bottling plants or the mill with
no good words to say / who opened cans of
sweating beer and slowly / unlaced their shoes”
(p. 148). Apparently, unremitting toil produces
choler of a different hue than the poet alludes to
in his title. In a book-length poem titled Dry Glass
Blues the poet chronicles the woes of excess in
language appropriate to his subject matter. The
speaker laments his inability to drink with discre-
tion and concludes that he must either abstain
or indulge. Naturally, the youthful protagonist
opts for the latter course, and the consequences
provoke both raucous laughter and bitter regret.
Perhaps Maginnes’s greatest asset as a poet resides
in his knack for sustaining a lengthy narrative re-
plete with striking images and metaphors. Cer-
tain passages own the table-pounding cadences
of a drunken rout while others are deeply intro-
spective. Regarding a friend’s 33 rpm disc he re-
marks: “But when I heard Mississippi John Hurt
play / ‘My Creole Belle,’ I listened to it half-a
dozen times / in a row wordlessly joyed by that
simple blend / of dry voice and fingerpicked gui-
tar” (p.105). Al Maginnes’s Fellow Survivors: New
and Selected Poems is a veritable tour de force by
one of our finest poets.
--Floyd Collins