Appalachian Review

Exeunt

Summer 2019 ♦

Poetry

So now it’s winter again yet sunrise and sunset make us forget so stunning the color spraying from ridges. In the icy clear brittle blue air above, the mountain greys like a grandmother, death strolls close by—the mundane maudlin. It would be fitting to go then. But you left in…

The Mad Farmer’s Wife Learns of Forest Bathing

Rita Sims Quillen ♦

Summer 2019 ♦

Poetry

She would have loved a creek bath but didn’t dare, only chuckled at the saucy thought. That wasn’t what the term meant anyway. In Japan it’s called shinrin yoku her daughter said, forest bathing, where you go to the woods to renew to soothe, to relax, to change on the…

Just Off the Road

Jeff Hardin ♦

Summer 2019 ♦

Poetry

for James Still A man who’s old enough has earned the right to stop the car if, driving past some woods, the beauty so beguiles him he is drawn to wander under autumn’s changing leaves. And even if expected somewhere else he’ll now be late, we might do well to…

Without Ceasing

Jeff Hardin ♦

Summer 2019 ♦

Poetry

All day every day around the clock like a prayer vigil there should be poets writing poems, accounting for milkweed pods and old homesteads abandoned, poets stirring campfire ash, noting just the place along the shoreline the heron casts down, poets in shifts like monks praying grace upon the whole…

A Shared Space

Jeff Hardin ♦

Summer 2019 ♦

Poetry

in memory of Marie Melson She was already old from the first I knew her, and though I was a child, I had an oldness in me too, which neither of us saw the use in mentioning, as together we sat in a swing beneath a century-old oak. Her memories,…

Bearing Witness

Robert Erle Barham ♦

Summer 2019 ♦

Craft Essay

When I was a boy, the bayou Bonne Idee flooded. I remember because my father and I walked on water. We had driven to the edge of our farm and discovered that the flood had enveloped our fishing dock, and when my father crossed the wooden deck just below the bayou’s surface, I…

What My Father Heard

Larry Bingham ♦

Summer 2019 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

My dad was twenty-five years old when he saw a man die. He didn’t hear or see the slate roof fall, but he heard Bonsell Robinson scream. It happened in 1967 inside the Beatrice Coal Mine in Keen Mountain, Virginia, where my dad worked. He was just starting out, five years…

Interview: Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Emily Masters ♦

Issues, Spring 2019 ♦

Interview

Americans are less able than ever to tell the difference between real and fake,” memoirist Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman says. “And we are all suffering for it.” This blunt observation about our current national moment strikes at the heart of her debut memoir, Sounds Like Titanic, which tells the story of…

Driving Through

Emma Aprile ♦

Issues, Spring 2019 ♦

Poetry

safe car on safe road and highway switchbacks baby girl with those gray wristbands on plastic pellet resting between tendons keeping her stomach still or at least stiller than the black car and its sticky summer seats tight gridlines on the backs of our thighs little white house peeking up…

Crow Song

Noah Davis ♦

Issues, Spring 2019 ♦

Poetry

Wet pavement rides the ridges up to where the forest breaks like hair when the taut newness of a scar writes that desire is black feathers caught in the heads of dried goldenrod, that grief’s blue lines run over hands and between knuckles, that death, after rain, leaks its sweet…