Adam Houle
Hearing about the Wreck

Adam Houle - Hearing about the Wreck

Poetry
Adam Houle is the author of Stray (Lithic Press, 2017), a finalist for the 2018 Colorado Book Award. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, and elsewhere. He lives in Darlington,… Read more »
Chelsea Dingman
Memento Mori

Chelsea Dingman - Memento Mori

Poetry
Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). She is also the author of the chapbook What Bodies Have I… Read more »
Michelle Turner
The Trails in New Jersey

Michelle Turner - The Trails in New Jersey

Poetry
Michelle Turner’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The Carolina Quarterly, Slice, Southern Humanities Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Typo Magazine, and elsewhere. She… Read more »
Hannah VanderHart
Tractors

Hannah VanderHart - Tractors

Poetry
Hannah VanderHart lives in Durham, NC, where she co-runs the Little Corner Poetry Reading Series at Duke University. She has her MFA from George Mason University and is currently at Duke writing her… Read more »

The Trails in New Jersey

Michelle Turner

The cliffs whole tribes
have abandoned
are yours.

– Larry Levis

This one bent its woods above a highway,
the muffled hum of traffic

mingling with music of towhees,
tanagers, chips and trills of warblers,

our state suddenly lush: Interstate
80 to Exit 1, Jurassic bluffs

over the drowsy Delaware.
The muscles in my mother’s legs

pulsed as she pushed on—I was sixteen,
about to forget how to love her.

~

The road from that place cuts through
ten more states, all the way to California.

My mother drove it once with me,
but not completely and never again, and here

I am returning in my insufficient way
to moss-slick rocks where we paused

for lunch, to the crisscross of hemlocks
where I crouched at dusk,

the sun signing off, the one
scrap of cloud arched like an eyebrow.

~

I hike alone now, scramble banks
in short boots, my ankles strong.

I know the names of creeks and ridges,
what they are, what they used to be.

My mother flies now when she visits.
We sit in restaurants, avoid more

than we talk about. She asks about
the mountains I’ve come to call my mothers.

She sees the farms, asks about the earth,
parched and yellow.

I am her Wild West; I am her gone, gone.
Read more »