Stevie Edwards
But Nothing’s Fair after Love

Stevie Edwards - But Nothing’s Fair after Love

Poetry
Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. She is Editor-in-Chief at Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. Her first book, Good Grief (Write Bloody, 2012), received two… Read more »
Katie Knoll
Louise Bourgeois to Her Husband, on Love and Her Father’s Mistress

Katie Knoll - Louise Bourgeois to Her Husband, on Love and Her Father’s Mistress

Poetry
Katie Knoll is currently a MA student of fiction at the University of Cincinnati. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Nimrod, and Rattle, among others. Her poetry and prose have been… Read more »
Cal Freeman
Our Father, the Lost Geometer

Cal Freeman - Our Father, the Lost Geometer

Poetry
Cal Freeman was born and raised in Detroit. His poems have appeared in many journals including The Journal, Commonweal, Berfrois, Birmingham Poetry Review, RHINO, and The Drunken Boat. His first… Read more »
Adam Clay
Performance Art

Adam Clay - Performance Art

Poetry
Adam Clay is the author of A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). A third book of poems, Stranger, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions.… Read more »
Megan Grumbling
Persephone’s Blues Song

Megan Grumbling - Persephone’s Blues Song

Poetry
Megan Grumbling’s Vassar Miller Prize-winning poetry collection, Booker’s Point, is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press in spring of 2016. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Iowa… Read more »
Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer
Piedmont

Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer - Piedmont

Poetry
Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer is a poet and installation artist in St. Louis. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and her poems have appeared in… Read more »
Marlys West
Regret and Other Bodies

Marlys West - Regret and Other Bodies

Poetry
Marlys West is an award-winning writer living in Los Angeles. She has been published in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Burnside Review, Duende, Fence,… Read more »
John Sibley Williams
The House Winter Built

John Sibley Williams - The House Winter Built

Poetry
John Sibley Williams is the author of eight collections, most recently Controlled Hallucinations, and the editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies. A five-time Pushcart nominee, John serves as… Read more »

Piedmont

Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer

EF-4, Winter, 2011


There are grave doubts
about the hugeness of the land.

—Henry Adams


From the Cumberland Plateau to the coastal plain,
the forest seems nothing but pines—
loblolly, longleaf, shortleaf, and slash,
nothing but overstory.
Silhouetted, tall clear trunks,
high-branched, rough-barked, and heavy-boughed—
everything at right angles.
No dogwoods or redbuds heralding beneath
as a portent in anaphora. And the comfort is in
the uprightness of the vegetation.
But the land half-cleared in Ringgold stands as proof
some things cannot be stopped by mountains,
and the stand becomes a cemetery in stumps and needles.
That the tornado would not hit has showed itself: a myth.
That the Confederate army would afterward prevail, mercifully untrue.
I cannot see the mountain without the breach,
but I cannot cede the mountain either.
The mountain foot leaves everything oblique,
and I am oblique to the land
that I can't live without.
A bright sky intensifies the color of the soil,
which isolates the red from iron,
where once the sea came in and out and in and vanished
as the fall line, as Lookout Mountain,
as Chickamauga, as something screaming.
Read more »