HOOD of
BONE REVIEW
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A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
Dear Reader,
It is with a joyful, near disbelieving heart that I welcome you to this second issue of Hood of Bone. Disbelieving because of the aliveness propounded by the inaugural publication– I looked at this thing that is the thrill of my life to tend, and for the first time it looked back at me with well-shaped eyes and desires for me to consider. For all of its mostly navigable, scabby beauty, the thing to be lost now stands: it has legs that can buckle and break, a mouth that can go dry, a heart I might make pink and pathetic. If this is something that I should want to sustain, I have to be able to look at all of its beautiful efforts with equal gratitude and uncertainty (how easy they both are to come by!)
This sophomore issue is in the mood for anything: sour beer, tomatoes on the vine, broken necks, flower beds, rings and chains and ditches miles deep. Though if this issue were to have a central theme, that theme is death, but not darkly death. Rather the death that is everything: the terrible simile, a practical abstract, the deliciousness that makes it happen, that ancient tough tension and release. The death that is actually love, what is always returning, returning, returning. The work that Hood of Bone is privileged to publish in this issue keeps me coming back to the places I know love has lived so that it may die. But these moments, these cycles are specific, no matter the common ground that steadies and unsteadies us all. I invite you to let the evidence of life and love’s diligence in these works return you to your own.
I want to thank my editorial team for the immeasurable role they have played in the slow, continuing growth of Hood of Bone. For their enthusiasm and belief. For their gorgeous shining minds and vocational expertise— Jackson, Iva, Nola— thank you.
Yours,
Grace Ezra
Maria Canzano, "Lyndon St."
Roses and raspberries are related
is what Claudia tells me right before she clues me in
that I am standing in a row of raspberry bushes
low and picked clean of their berries
we weed and sometimes harvest
the late summer and early fall potatoes
and tomatoes and tomatillos—
I wrap my fingers around the deflated-ball leaves
that encase the fruit, it feels
like a child's origami balloon
I can never tell when tomatillos are ripe
but Claudia says they'll be ready
when they look so full they're about to split
the leaves will peel away
I can take care of myself here
in a small way
when we dig our hands to loosen carrots
and guess at which ones are ready to come out
she pulls the first one, long and wiry with fibers
and points it at my nose and says try it
I twist my face at all the dirt and bite
softer than store carrots and gritty
we sit there and share the first, slowly
with our stiff knees all ground-soaked
COMMUNITY GARDEN NIGHT
by Allie Hoback
FRAGMENT WITH TRESPASSING
by Allie Hoback
Jesus bugs skating on top of the pond,
damselflies speckle the air, landing on
bare shoulders. Bottles of Tecate and Coors
Banquet. Life stretched out on a big peach
picnic blanket. The quiet in the tree cover
of a sacred secret spot. Cellar spiders outside.
Fumbling on the ground. Kissed palms
and bit fingers. But no hurry. Fucking
in the sun, a swim then, naked. Still
no hurry. Still, I try to catch your eyes
crinkled at the corners like that day. Sometimes
I get lucky. Lucky like a heads-up penny. Lucky
like hands in the grass. A few times you looked up
over your shoulder. But I knew we were alone. We had to be.
SOMETHING ELSE
by Chelsea Harlan
The mountain wears cold, wet braids.
The seasons, like old friends or like mirrors,
run drunkenly, incidentally into one another,
exchanging, probably, old pleasantries.
Or is it inevitably? They have been passing
like this for a long time. We cannot know
how long. But when the pear tree throws its pears
against the toolshed roof, we know it's almost
the end again, What of the stories that make you feel
like you think you see it coming. That something,
that feeling. I said of the visiting poet's reading:
dang, that was something, without knowing at all
what I meant, however clearly knowing how I felt.
There is a box in the storage room at the library,
well, okay, there are many boxes, all of them small
and rectangular and organized in crooked stacks,
an one box is for felt scraps. One box is for chalk,
one for glue guns, gel pens. But it's the felt scraps
that I like the best. The box contains a color green
somewhere between forest and storm and ocean,
do you know what I mean? That deep leaf,
that seaweed, that jungle myrtle, that vernal laurel,
that forest shade, the soft felt scrap like fur
or forged fur. That color that has existed
like this for a long time. When I say like this
I want to gesture, with my arms, a great distance.
Maria Canzano, "Virginia's Two Tall Mountains"
PINK JANUARY BENT MY PERIPHERY
by Kellie Diodato
Geared with gloves, I am assigned
to the dining room table. My hands are prepared
for the tearing, the wresting
where decades of your filthy good intentions seeped
into layer upon layer of oilcloth, felt, and cotton.
Unpeeling the present divulges smells lost to the sludge of time.
It takes two hours for my fingers to discover
the mahogany surface.
It is in predictable condition— the top, caked with food,
plastic and chalky-napkin plaque; pieces of placemats
unwilling to release themselves from purgatory.
The drop leafs and aprons are broken in their bones
drooping from exhaustion and assault. My mother grieves
the once smooth and polished wood, the deterioration—
perhaps what could have been. I grieve my mother's
grieving for the wrong reasons, and the words you'd speak to me
across this very table. They were always drivel,
dripping, stinging themselves in circles
like your perpetual coffee ring. Always muddy
and maddening.
BRANDYWINE
by Dylan Harbison
In the garden the tomatoes you planted
climb the walls of their cages. Sweetness
lingers in worm-holed flesh. Inside
we are in disrepair, the hallway clock stops ticking,
instead we tick like bombs. In the garden
the tomatoes you planted, not knowing
they would outlive you, are blood-red
still clinging to the vine.
FAIRMOUNT
by Chloe Mello
Perched above the return commute blinking bloody on the slow Schuylkill
The wall of our woods and our sour beer and our linen
and leaves, bashing against the sewer water and gasoline
Feeling as animals pushed from home to turnpike, watching
Our betrayers make their ways from work
You called me dreamy, I toyed with your hand
a piece of old lace
the scraping of tires
And the relentless black treeline
MOTHER TREE
by Lesley Wheeler
Brown-barked, lichened and peeling, Acer Rubrum
probes with its taproot towards old clay pipes.
It remembers a century back when this house
was new, its pine stairs fragrant with distress.
A human mother used to lug laundry past
the window. Influenza swept her heart bare.
Once there were three big maples reaching
out underground, sending each other sugar,
shouting chemical warnings when hungry deer
stole up or caterpillars gnawed. One
went hollow and surgeons came with their hooked belts.
A second split in straight-line winds and smashed
the porch. This is the last, and ailing. Trash branches
snag among its living limbs. The great
gray trunk angles away. A tea-hued nest
is stranded in the lace woodpeckers made.
When my mother turned eighty and the whole family
gathered, February 2020,
I guessed what we risked to join at those long tables.
Not how the year would stretch and decay.
I want more seasons of bud, flower, samara,
but my mother is too sad to answer calls.
I research constricted visiting hours,
pack a bag halfway and leave it open.
Syd Greene, "Wings 2"
THE FACILITIES
by Lesley Wheeler
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Syd Greene, "Wings 1"
In the afterlife it's hard to find
a toilet. We wander
through sun-drunk mazy
hedges, happening on family
and friends sitting in clusters
of generous lawn chairs,
but the nearby house, she points out,
has too many steps
for all these old people.
She says she prefers
the second of the flowerbeds
where I sprinkled her ashes,
around those trillium, aren't they
strange, in earshot of children
roaring at the zoo, but please
stop carrying my cremains
in a tin for arthritis cream.
For heaven's sake.
It's funny, she goes on, the pitch
of her voice a meandering vine,
how your dreams dress me
in what I wore to your wedding.
I worried too much about
those arrangements. Always guessing
what other people were thinking.
As if anything matters except
the company of birds and, close by,
a cleanish bathroom. Hold my arm,
that's right. When you wear
my earrings and they chime,
that's me, looking for a place to go.
RUN AWAY!
FIVE MILE SWAMP FIRE
by Caroline Harper New
run away!
stick hands in the pond!
until fingers turn blue!
there is ice! doesn't hurt!
first to leave is dead!
meat!
run away!
find the roly poly!
blow through the pipe!
into the meat room! race
to finish first! claim
the first! fight!
fight! fight!
run away!
pick pears! from
the dirt! that rotted! suck them!
like wine! we are drunk!
like our uncle! ha ha!
Mama yells! oh
no! run away!
back to the pond!
smells like poo! we don't care!
we are wolves! we howl!
aaaaawwwwwwoooooooooooo!
they howl back!
they tell us!
to run away!
our children
wait! we gather
the berries and poo!
cook into pies! cast spells!
feed the barn cats! we have saved
them all! hurray! hurray!
run away!
disguise! Mama's gloves
on our heads! now we
spy! on the cows!
the horses! the pigs! hunt
the traitor! the chickens
are stupid! know nothing at all!
donkeys snitch! arrest
the yellow barn cat!
and lock him away!
forever!
run! run!
gather the red bugs!
the june bugs! no spiders!
in this bottle! fill it up and
smash! smash! draw maps
with their juice! this way!
this way! run! shoot
the squirrels!
shoot them dead
in the tree! shoot the tree
instead! close enough!
tell Mama they're
dead! Mama!
they're dead!
they're dead!
we've run away!
we lie in the calf field! the rye
is over our heads! we can never
escape! we dig beds!
lie down! play
dead! and
wait! for Daddy!
to find us all dead!
ha ha! he is busy
with cows and we
run! away
from our graves!
he never came! we're still
dead! ha ha!
still dead!
still dead!
EDEN
Florida Panhandle Wildfires, May 2020
by Caroline Harper New
It began in Escambia. No sign
of lightning or motive, nothing
to explain how it jumped to Musset Bayou,
Hurst Hammock. Something certainly
our fault—we backed our homes
into the tree line instead of the sky.
We should have lined the woods
with our backs braced, our breasts
to fiery beast. Should have brined our babes
in bromine. The papers assure: an inevitable
anomaly that won't repeat. See how the miles
of gulls that shape the smoke name nothing
close to numbers? They name us
forty, sixty, ninety, fifty percent contained,
but when you measure the miles of flames
Don't count out the injured or anything
not burnt to foundation, says the fire chief.
Only count the man with the cat named Bowser
who refused to leave. Who tossed Bowser
in a canoe and rowed them both to the middle
of the broil. That's how you survive, he tells the reporter,
surrounded.
BRINGING EACH OTHER SHRUBBERIES
by Sophie van Waardenberg
Out the door the Hudson continues filthily.
Surely nothing good can ever happen
can it? The light does not change
as the day goes on. Lunch is closed
on Mondays and museums and so am I.
And you are gone to play the harpsichord
plainly in a little opera. I wait on top of your bed
with eyes closed or open
forever either with you or not
and it is good in the middle of the day
to have clean feet a grotesque outlook
and a suitable love. Life will be like this.
But for some hours yesterday
the buildings hung around us large and still—
I could see the clouds swarming your face.
We are all loose-edged and troublesome
and unamused. We will remain so.
The only thing to do
is to ask too much of each other—
is it too much—no
it is not too much
because it is the only thing to do
and our dead ones are still dead
and ruining what they touch and so am I.
by Sophie van Waardenberg
At almost the beginning, I lived unshod
at the bottom of a hill. Water there
washed grey off my body in the evenings.
My legs pimpled with draught, and the sun
left her eggs everywhere for me
to burst with my toes. We ignored
our neighbors, though not out of malice.
Best, I was alone so much. I knew nothing
yet of the sublime or its opposite, or
that there was something in between:
an asphalt verge stuck with weeds
where I'd dither forever. I'd tell me,
your happiness continues there.
It's just as good, I'd tell me, as what's pretty.
Maria Canzano, "Berries in the Sun"
THREE POEMS
by Mark Jackley
LESTER YOUNG
dew-damp honeysuckle rising sweetly moonward when
the blade is
sleeping has
a secret language too
ON ATOKA ROAD
A treetop split by telephone wires,
clean in half,
like lungs.
We breathed into the phone,
our words of love
an erratic pulse,
showing
the princely wind
how humans stay alive.
A LENGTH OF MARINE ROPE MADE
OF HEMP OR JUTE
I craved one at Rick's funeral—
sharp reminder
to the palms
to every sailor in
a stabbing language here
is a shore too
ONCE THERE WAS A SINGLE PIECE OF LAND
by Ellie Parker
I
_
*
i lay precious sand along the outline of your body
coordinates invisible to the eye sun escapes
the ocean slow burning skyline
we are there again herds of cars rushing your face
washed in tail light how it feels to be
in the presence of pure magic pink silk
tied to the overpass raised at half-staff
far from here sea ice shrinks hurls thunders into
warm crevasse gurgling subglacial rivers
less less and less space to stand my love
does not accumulate
*
we are transfixed by death in life life in death
rub raw upon collision you place my hand
on an open flame a few more degrees and
snow won't stick
memory is an ocean of blood countless bodies
blanket the tide ligaments thaw in daytime
if you cut me open you will see all the yellows of
the world
one day you will have a bed of your own verdant
river rock in the backyard awake before the birds
anxious for the sun shirt slightly open
*
II
_
*
it's new years eve of course, we are up
booms rattle our windows the world adores
the sound of war we want more they say bigger
brighter the dog cowers behind a trash can
i lean too far over the sill you catch my gaze
breathless recognition look back down at
the confetti in your hands time renames us
beautiful strangers
another revolution organizing time so that time
organizes us people do anything to deceive
the body of its expiry black denim out of focus
*
my eyes track down i watch you watch the scene
of the dog's great escape digging
a ditch miles deep shrapnel falls
from the sky
nosing the sand toward softer shores
joy in passing tides there i will leap
waves shimmer pink every vowel
surrounded by silence
i make my eyes fit your eyes all i see is blue
i enter your eyes entering me all i see is blue
shutter release the world in focus
*
III
_
*
waves smash our windows nowhere else for
the water to go our bodies against the ceiling
glossy paint i love this color
flood saliva crusted bowls drowning no one heard
swamping sidewalks snakes ribbon
through gaping pools soggy hooves
you at my bedside how long will it take us
all the way to shore fish scales scintillate
bodies thrash you hold onto me as though i am
made of air
*
morning trembles cicadas cross
the equator i look out at you
sweeping up the glass
animals begin preparing for long months ahead trap
pockets of air under their wings magnetic
sensing birth in shallow water
today i know where you are looking up at me
the sun a spotlight highlights in your hair
*
IV
_
*
there is nothing i need to know about god i am
already familiar with fruit rot
silence is merciful the law of rhythm consoles
uncertain lovers
it is the end of romance fall begins
and the birds fly home
*
images linger for too long the light
burns right through bleed into
lines there is no way to track the seconds
whales flash their bellies to the sky what are we
without framerate in out in out
i am still at the end of a decade and you are still
asleep
*
V
_
*
petrified branches bury the forest floor ruptured
roots break bone attempting exact reconstruction
take turns recovering faces
once there was a single piece of land one
enormous ocean yes i know those eyes or
i can't remember no they will never move
the voices start to sound like song calling me in
to you i record them so the future
can hear how you hear
*
my feet cannot move
stay out here not in there not in you are
everywhere not in there but out again until
it is true
ground begins to shake everyone runs inside
shrieks lapse and break soundscape of footprints
*
caws pierce the air shards of opalescent glass
split skin breath condenses
i am alone soundless chairs made of snow
a beautiful world with no one in it is what you always
wanted
i turn to show you my shoes
*
VI
_
*
magma wells weakened crust fissure deposits
jagged line becomes two becomes three one after
another is the life we know
gashes spread across the screen light beams back
at us birth of the universe
the couch in winter light
*
you lean over to say you love this scene notice how no
one in the car looks at each other when they talk they
just look out the windows
i watch your belly rise out in out in out
until the day your belly stops tell me: in the end
the earth will win out in out in
i watch you watching bombs bloom in
the center of your eye
*
FORMS OF FEELING
by Tyler Barton
THREE POEMS
by Serena Devi
HEAVEN'S GATE
city edge
(no sleep)
meadow blur and seashell pink breaking ahead, you know
omens of earth
around bone or clay
found atrocities, collected,
this land
where nobody recognizes or remembers
I left a sign
where our father broke the cat's neck
I was just stranded, me and my sister
for miles
I painted her face
she said look so I looked close:
one streak out of place
vanished with my spit thumb
there frozen in reverie
we were
rubbing the wood we were
wearing the icon out
HORSE GOD
the oracle bolt upright
wrapped around the back of
his Horse God —
totemizes vegetation
the underworld
incest
precious minerals
other unknown elements
(incantation text in full untranslatable)
the first image in the series:
at the center of the world is a garden
at the center's center
a horned lover-child
on her seal
wreathed in
venous boughs,
a tree split down the middle:
out somersaults a child
(totemizes nothing specific) —
the last we see
HUSBANDRY
behold, with all the focus of a cult
the faience born from a mother body
its cold metal charms:
handmaiden on either side
six sandblasted faceless
palm fans gape and flutter
courtiers to the unloving and sun-like disk
an image older than the mind can hold
(no photos —
write it down, google it when you want to feel something)
bask sat in fluid
— indicating maybe
mirth or abundance? —
flattened composition, typical
I do not recall the word that was used here— one that leans forward
with its chest out, atrocity or atrophy
after studying her, I loved all women
and all animals
each time I'm weary, you know, god sends me a beast
each child half wanted,
spat out
its mirror-side eye, infected as mine
there will always be wounded birds
necks in need of snapping
in the middle of a road I die and go limp
so limp I can't show you
how fine it feels
Syd Greene, "Fish On"
ENOUGH
by Leatha Kendrick
PUSHING AGAINST THE BLANK
by Leatha Kendrick
"We don't communicate very well."
-- Mother, in the 3rd Shoney's
on the long road back from Texas
weeks before she died
"Weed your flower beds,
Write your poems," she'd said once
That alone could be enough.
I wrote it down.
She must have
said it.
Like thinking good thoughts—
enough for Peter Pan to fly.
Who'd have thought it could be
so hard to think something
that pure? I tried
leaping from a low roof once
while only thinking good thoughts
(good enough). I have the scar
in my right eyebrow. Gravel's hard.
Sometimes I pull the comforter
of not thinking up to muffle
the irascible patter of "you never..."
Sometime I want only
the dark I make, the dark
that makes me jerk awake.
She could as well have said
"Weed your poems. Write flower beds."
My mother wanted order,
but never could quite manage
dust or roses well enough
to suit herself.
The real thing— keeping flowers,
growing houses— lies loose as leaves
as clouds shifting through blue.
Light rolls toward us, just below
the edge. It lies just under the horizon.
Feel the hand laid on your back?
It's not the dark I want— it's rest. It's
breath that finds me. The moon
at my window draped in a fuzzy shawl.
"Come here, Fear," we'd say,
"rest a while." I'd wrap us up
in my comforter and comfort
her and me, enough.
My poplar finally almost bare,
a lone brown leaf turning at her tip,
I keep imagining it a bird
embodied and alive,
like that crow yesterday
belligerent, outsized, holding forth
atop the ravaged oak next to the cancer center
How the tree, itself, stunted, twisted, repeatedly cut back
made me see my brother's neck, the burnt skin of his jaw,
the way that treatment comes as depredation. The cost
to live.
My brother squawked back at it,
spoke of signs and portents, as I hissed, "It's just a bird."
I looked away, dragged him with me
past the fear I felt to hear a creature,
agitated past the limits of his voice
but I cannot forget the way
his screech shattered at its edge, as if
what language he possessed must break apart
to speak his heart,
as if he meant to scrape open the air with some new way
to tell what it feels like
to be himself, alive, ink feathers at odd angles,
spread wings working,
writing here here on the sky.
Syd Greene, "Absent Friend"
EXCERPTS FROM THE COMPLETE COMPENDIUM OF DOMESTIC INCIDENTS
by Joanna Ruocco
KNURR AND SPELL
The girls filch silver, hide spoons in high gutters.
Fingers in the trough, they probe something round: a
swallow's nest? They lift it out. They have found their
dear red ball! So that's where it had gone. They mean to
dry and keep it, but inhale too broad a scent—mildewed
cork and gamey leather—and let it fall, down, down,
through draping toadflax, to lie at last amid wet rocks in
the shadows of the eave.
They scramble from the ledge, sneak downstairs into
the dining room, and watch the maid with polish rags
turn circles. She is very young, with spots, and an upper
lip too short to curtain all her teeth. Really, she should be
hanged. The air is hot and still. The maid puts her head
through the open window, cranes her neck to peer up into
the branches. She will blame the crows, the girls feel
certain. Aren't crows known to make mince meat pies
provender? Don't they fill their nests with rings and chains?
Crafty baggage? The girls retreat.
Now they hide the spoons inside the gardener's shed,
behind grub hoe, mattock, rake, and trowel, in the
gardener's son's own crate. They sift his treasures. On
the dirt floor they spread zinc and terracotta, bean and
bone, twists of hair and oiled papers, blades and wax and
leather tongue. They tumble it all back in the crate. Soon
the maid will receive her flogging. They will stand her
naked on the gantry. She may lose a hand! The shed is
hotter than the house. The girls emerge with dung on
their tights. They creep to the open window. They are tall
enough to rest their elbows on the sill. All day the maid
paces between cabinet and sideboard. In a sober moment,
the girls agree she has walked at least a mile. It is most
impressive, how she contends against the shipwreck of her
virture.
FETCH
As a little girl, the sister was called two eyes, because she
had two eyes. No other name ever suited her half so well.
Yet with any word she could be summoned or sent away:
for instance, "biscuit," pronounced severely. Once her
father's friend, come calling, saw a house finch speared on
the bull's brass horn. He froze, hand on the ring, not
knocking. Instead, crying "shrike," he gained quick
admittance, the sister flying to unbolt the door, her two
eyes fixed and brimful, freshly unloaded after heavy sleep,
easy to remark upon.
WOLFSHOHLE
Any girl, no matter how ill favored, will find a bridegroom
in the Wolfshohle. If multiple girls converge at the mouth,
they draw straws to choose who crosses first into the dark.
The girl so chosen leaves her offerings in the niches of the
rockface. She trusts that the girls who wait will not eat the
apples or caraway buns, or steal the bright pfennigs to slip
into birds' nests, little tricks that result in mothers birthing
babies never quite their own. Sometimes the girls who
wait play such tricks, sometimes not. The victim of the
prank will not know until three seasons pass; until, lying
in on the doctor's leather sheet, she hears croaking fro,
between her legs. She receives the bundle upon her chest,
pushes back the swaddling to reveal the glitter of a cold,
unblinking eye.
The bridegrooms of the Wolfshohle are not alike, but
they look alike when they emerge into the open air,
covered head to foot in tar. Descending the ledges behind
their brides, they enter the pines, are guided to the sulfur
springs, and bathe there. Without the tar, their hairs show
different tints, their skins different markings, and their
odors are various, although heavily masked with the scent
of decomposing egg. Having found him once, each bride
could find her groom again anywhere.
HOLLOW STRAKES
The day the daughter dies, airing, Mother finds inside the
chest, six dressed skins. Unrolled, the first is a child
known to her. Hung on wire armature and broom , with a
cabbage head and the daughter's own hair, the child
wants speech, but that recalls the daughter, often silent.
Mother latches shutters. She closes chest and closet door.
She descends the narrow stair and takes a slice of cold
stump pie into the garden. She stands chewing near an
iron bench. Last night's fog still lingers. The damp
pansies are dull as mud, but a bright eft moves slowly
toward standing water in a broken pot.
Maria Canzano, "Clam Digger"
Maria Canzano, "Strawberry Moon"
CONTRIBUTORS
TYLER BARTON is the author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum and The Quiet Part Loud. His visual poetry, Gutters, has appeared or is forthcoming Adroit Journal, DIAGRAM, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. Learn more at tsbarton.com.
MARIA NOEL CANZANO is an artist from Detroit, Michigan. She is currently based in Athens, Georgia and received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Maria has exhibited in the US and abroad, including the Royal Watercolour Open 2022 in London, UK and her solo exhibition at the MICA Meyerhoff Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland.
SERENA DEVI is a writer from Lexington, Kentucky currently based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The Recluse, Social Text, Bruiser, Dirt Child, Forever Mag, and more.
KELLIE DIODATO recently completed her MFA in poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts, and works as a humanities educator for high school students. A 2024 Poet & Author Fellow from The Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, her writing can be found or is forthcoming in The Pinch, As It Ought to Be Magazine, Some Kind of Opening, and Lifelines: The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth Literary and Art Journal, among others.
As a descendant of a long line of blue-collar mountain folk, SYD GREENE’s mixed-media drawings are informed by her Appalachian upbringing. The landscapes, wildlife, and familial connections to the region manifest themselves through her meticulously rendered mark-making. Greene responds to the impermanence, entropy, and or man-made overdevelopment of her subject matter through the cathartic release that drawing provides. She resides in her hometown of Greenville, SC, where she is busy cultivating her studio practice, researching for her next body of work, or prying a slipper out of her dog’s mouth.
DYLAN HARBISON is a writer from Burlington, Vermont. She now lives in Western, North Carolina, where she studies creative writing at UNC Asheville, and runs Meter & Melody, a local poetry series. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Offing, Prelude Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She loves tercets and sitting on porch swings late at night.
CHELSEA HARLAN is the author of Bright Shade, winner of the 2022 American Poetry Review/ Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Jericho Brown. She holds a BA from Bennington College and an MFA from CUNY Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She lives in Appalachian Virginia, where she was born and raised, and where she works at a small public library.
ALLIE HOBACK is a poet from Southwest Virginia. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, HAD (Hobart After Dark), The Boiler, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, DC.
MARK JACKLEY's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon, Third Wednesday, Sugar House Review, and other journals. He lives in northwestern Virginia, US, with his wife, pets, and delusions.
LEATHA KENDRICK is a poet, writer, editor and teacher. She grew up in Kentucky's Pennyroyal region, raised a family in the Appalachians, and lives in Lexington's verdant Bluegrass. Her poems and essays appear widely in journals including Appalachian Journal, Passager, Still: An Online Journal, Tar River Poetry, New Madrid Review, the Southern Poetry Review, the James Dickey Review, Appalachian Review, and the Baltimore Review. Her writing has been collected in anthologies including Appalachian Women Speak (vol. 8); The Kentucky Anthology; The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume 3; I to I: Life Writing by Kentucky Feminists; and What Comes Down to Us - Twenty-Five Contemporary Kentucky Poets. Her fifth book of poetry is And Luckier (Accents Publishing, 2020).
CHLOE MELLO (they/them) currently lives in Philadelphia brewing tea for a living. They recommend you try lapsang souchong. In 2022, Chloe was a finalist for the Sophie Kerr writing prize at Washington College, where they graduated with a Studio Arts and Psychology degree. They were also a recipient of the Sophie Kerr writing scholarship throughout their undergraduate program.
CAROLINE HARPER NEW is the author of A History of Half-Birds, winner of the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. She is a poet and visual artist from the Gulf Coast with a background in anthropology, and she holds an MFA in Writing from the University of Michigan. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Palette Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, and Driftwood Press. She is winner of Palette Poetry’s 2023 Love & Eros Prize, the Malahat Review’s 2023 Open Season Award, the Cincinnati Review’s 2022 Robert and Adele Schiff Award, and Bellevue Literary Review’s 2022 John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
ELLIE PARKER (she/her) is an artist, poet, and community arts activist based in Brooklyn by way of Los Angeles. Her work is interdisciplinary by nature, harmonizing poetic text, the moving image, and photography, Passionate about communal practice, Ellie is a Teaching Artist for youth film education at BRIC Media leading art programs for public schools throughout Brooklyn. While completing her forthcoming poetry chapbook, a single take, Ellie is co-organizing a series of free education workshops at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem thanks to generous support from the Echo Park Film Center Collective.
JOANNA RUOCCO is a prize-winning American author and co-editor of the fiction journal Birkensnake. In 2013, she received the Pushcart Prize for her story "If the Man Took" and is also winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize.
SOPHIE VAN WAARDENBERG is a poet based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work has been published in Copper Nickel, Rhino, Cordite, Best New Zealand Poems, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University and currently works as an arts administrator.
LESLEY WHEELER, poetry editor of Shenandoah, is the author of the forthcoming Mycocosmic, runner-up for the Dorset Prize and her sixth poetry collection. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry's Possible Worlds and the novel Unbecoming. Wheeler's work has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writer's Workshop; her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review Online, Ecotone, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.