Born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill has an MFA from the University of Houston. He has received fellowships and grants from Cave Canem, the Bush Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Jerome Foundation, and Stanford University where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. His […]
Silas Wright follows a fish’s wriggle In the shallows between reeds. He scribes the Line in his tablet—as much pride in that line As a man in his son. He almost giggles— Still he goes on. The next letters come easy. With this he’ll have more than a mark to bind. Rambling across the page […]
Benny’s handsome, red brown like rust on a hoe. Empty headed cows loll in the pasture ignoring the mule’s bray. Light shines as easily through a cicada’s husk clinging to a tree as through a bottle of liniment or a glass of tea on the dinner table. The hems of his overalls fray and tickle […]
That was the year Granddaddy Thomas died Left the family worse than broke Uncle John stole a ham from Mr. Ennis’s Meat Market He was seventeen Lost his taste for it locked up fourteen years Ham salt cured and earth-red sliced with the fat hanging on yellow sunshine on a white plate The hambone cut […]
McIntosh Street the sign reads like the apple red but not red delicious red but red like redeye gravy on grits at Gus’s or red like stoplights but they’re also green and yellow like apples in Allen’s Market on the corner and red like those powders and syrups kept behind the counter at Doc’s pharmacy […]
Silas, you might not be here come April. Ain’t none of us ever promised tomorrow. If you died right sudden, you’d need a will. That way you control who gets your nickel when you gone. Get your ducks in a row, Silas. You might not be here come April. Yeah, your policy’s up-to-date and we’ll […]
Beat. Beat. Beats beat here. The sound of the train on the Georgia road, the measured claps of the wheels at the gaps of the joints of the rails is the beat of the hammer on iron and anvil at the smithy, Sol’s shop, shaping shoes for mules and horses; and the sizzle of red […]
Over the clerk’s shoulder, out the window framing little old Bemidji, Minnesota, nine guys, all knees, legs, and ease, glide by on bicycles, occupying the frame two at a time, pedaling along the sidewalk on Paul Bunyan Drive. Each of them black and with me we make up almost one sixteenth (like a measure in […]