for Big Benny A monarch’s image flitters across the honored on that glassy, black wall, floating sideways, backward, up, down, caught up in concentric wind loops across names, nearly 60,000 etched. A person with paper scratches a son with lead. She is gray, drained, rock-wrinkled. Old, fixed medals and buttonsContinue Reading
When I was about five years old (before we moved to the holler), my family and I lived in a little green house on a little paved street in Jacksboro, Tennessee. My younger brother and I often felt cramped in our small, grassy yard, so we regularly wandered—but rarely tooContinue Reading
On closer look it becomes what we most despise: something unnameably near, confounding us with its ability to make vague silhouettes of familiar landmarks or bloat the once-solid shapes of signs lending geometric certitude to all our directions. — Edward Francisco From “The Terror of Kudzu” One of myContinue Reading
He was a pariah among his own people, having been born with a club foot. His formal education ended early because boys at school taunted him. Maybe that was fate’s way of ensuring the child, who later became Sequoyah, aka Edward Guess, inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, discovered in hisContinue Reading