Jake Adam York (1972-2012) was the author of three books of poems—Murder Ballads (2005), winner of the Elixir Prize in Poetry; A Murmuration of Starlings (2008), co-winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition and winner of the Colorado Book Award; and Persons Unknown (2010), published by Southern Illinois University Press as an editor’s selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. York was an associate […]
Southwest Mississippi for Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee In what language did it mean the river, this tongue of rust that gives the forest a name? The trees can’t tell you and the forest means you are alone and a hundred years from Natchez when the light begins to fold into the leaves. […]
Lean down, lean down while the light’s abducted, its last skirts caught then torn through the trees. Keep your own eye still so no one catches you. When it’s gone, it’s everywhere, air’s a memory of light, incident turned ambient, and it never takes long for this nacre to grow over each absence or intruder […]
A blade of rust from the ocean and from the air a rumor that corrodes the earth in tongues, lichen, moss, magnolia, until each gossip’s true. Things go this way, each green repeating its fact of sun and wind and rain, its dialect, its blade, while beneath each leaf a quiet cuts between the veins. […]
for Willie Edwards, Jr., murdered January 23, 1957 outside Montgomery, Alabama If we could take them back, swinging by the Little Kitchen’s shadow on Jefferson Street and waving them in as they were, Livingston, Alexander, Britt, and York, piling together on the back bench seat of some Rambler or Packard or 56 Chevy we’ve found […]
for Dave Smith The moss never falls. However gray, it hangs like shirts left to weather and rag over the road and the dead-end rail and in all the branches from there to the shore and then as far upriver as you can see. Here it’s only open water, empty sky, two ends of road […]
Maybe on his way to Gadsden, Queen City of the Coosa, to speak with the pilots and inland sailors, to cross the fords Jackson ran with blood or meet the mayor who bought the ladies’ favors with river quartz, maybe east from some trip west to see or returning north from New Orleans or just […]
Gadsden, Alabama The finger is gone that pointed the way so the General could escape, the Confederate who would enshrine the finger and its girl and turn them into stone, and now the finger is gone from the marble hand, proving every body is mutable, however white, so the finger is just a story of […]