Lucy Zhang writes, codes and watches anime. Her work has appeared in New Orleans Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Chestnut Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere, and was selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and Best Small Fictions 2021. She is losing sleep over a novel. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.
I pass the farmhouse and fields of cotton
anchored in drought-stricken soil.
Across the road in front of a small barn
they stand in the middle of the pond,
a small herd of cows, some chest deep
with big ears and soft dark eyes staring
toward a field of sunflowers with heads
drooped on dead stalks, seeds now dropped
into a cracked row of dirt.
I stop to photograph, inch through
brittle grass to avoid the sting of red ants.
The cows turn and look toward me
shifting their weight, ears twitching.
A white egret lands on one black cow
and when she begins her slow move
it flaps and dances, digs deep
into her hide and holds on.
She turns away and begins her plod
out of water and up a knoll, calf right behind,
to a stand of trees, the two of them lugging
their hot bodies single file, heads nodding
with each forward lunge, her udder slung low.
They reach the shade, pause, and only then
does she turn and look at me,
too far away now for a decent photo
yet the picture I see, which I’ll always remember,
is the silhouette of a calf and his mother
and the white bird roosting regal and splendid
like a fine feathered hat atop her broad back.
Author’s Note: This poem was triggered by an image I saw while driving through the countryside in rural Alabama. The summer day was hot and humid, and several black cows were standing in a pond next to a large field. On the far side another cow was lumbering up the hill with a calf following behind toward a stand of trees. Earlier I had seen a white egret on top of a cow in another pond, so I combined the two images.
Wendy Cleveland’s poems have appeared in Persimmon Tree, Yankee, Red Rock Review, and others. Her collection Blue Ford was published in 2017. She is a member of the Alabama Writers’ Forum and attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
Addison Griffis is a Mississippi writer and finance manager at a car dealership. His poetry is forthcoming in Appalachian Review. Addison is currently querying his literary Western manuscript for representation/publication and working on various recording projects in his barn/studio. Instagram is @addisongriffis
from some sound harmony refrains
from some darkness no light escapes
of this not many thats
for many there are fewer than none
from one kiss endless heartache
for the few there are too many
from the mouths of babes nothing
out of the corner of an eye a myopic mote
nearer the center no magnet pretends
from one path a lifetime lost
with a single breath the end begins
from some fools orange braying abounds
The author hopes to one day once again volunteer with the Maryland Book Bank, CityLit, and return as writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Other pubs include: Loch Raven Review, Dead Mule, Free State Review, Little Patuxent Review, Connections, Mad Swirl, and Spank the Carp. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992). Recently, his 160th prose poem was published under a checker-board cone of silence. He remains a founder and former Poetry Editor of the Black Warrior Review.
Unless something is perfect I don't give a damn.
But perfection includes the kitten my daughter
found yesterday morning after a powerful storm,
hanging by its front leg one foot off the ground
pinched between shrub limbs with an eye
so infected we thought the eye was dead,
wished the kitten dead, immature maggots
crawling the skin she scrubbed in the sink,
scraped thick chunks of matter from the eye
with Q-Tips duly sucked before using
then took to the vet who set the leg,
gave medicines for eye, maggots and dehydration
and is now the purring ball of blue-eyed fur
she carried to her grandmother's funeral
the day after I dreamed she and I were flying
a very small plane, she piloting until I noticed
the sudden influx of violent birds and WWII planes
filling the sky so I thought I'll take over…
at which point the plane shot straight up in the air
and I realized I did not know how to fly a plane
any better than she and we landed on her grandmother's
house and her grandmother was very angry to have us
uninvited as she had “people coming over tomorrow”
but she was finally beautiful, skin so fresh, hair so sleek,
and it was only when I awoke and remembered her
funeral was today that I laughed. Perfection
is often rotten, but it's all there really is.
I truly despised the sound of the cat’s lapping—
on and on and on the water harvested, ripped
from its placid lake to travel the depths’
insectile broth, opaque’d of necessity borne
within. Such an idiot journey—the fecal instant
delayed, souped repetively: a thousand complaints
unanswered: why why why cried the waterfall
must it be us to flush life’s guts when all we want
is to revel in the sun, disband and float reborn,
one drop to be millioned, each landing on
garbage, leaf and limb—but it is the passage,
we remind ourselves, through which we grace
and grandeur, the cat’s vagina as suitable as flower
to travel dessicate nights, urethral dawns, so lift
your cup and drink us down, soft mouth,
drink us down and piss.
Author’s Note: Both of these poems are based on actual events that, in the process of writing them, expanded beyond their straight-forward beginnings through the triggering of forgotten associations along the way. I had the first line of “Perfection” in my notes, which caused the remembering of the kitten, which led to the remembering of the actual dream, which had been completely forgotten until my daughter told me about taking the kitten to the funeral.
“Until I Listened” began with the writing of the first line after I had removed the cat’s food and water bowls from my writing room, which, silence restored, led to my hearing the water itself complain of its own torture until “we” made the leap of acceptance (though the bowls remain in the hall...).
Matt Dennison is the author of Kind Surgery, from Urtica Press (Fr.) and Waiting for
Better, from Main Street Rag Press. His work has appeared in Rattle, Bayou Magazine, Redivider, Natural Bridge, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Cider Press Review, among others. He has also made short films with Michael Dickes, Swoon, Marie Craven, and Jutta Pryor.
my black family reunion is jealous my white family reunion is jealous
they are covetous of each other’s things
My mom’s folks use two picnic tables while the other reunion requires a resort
one is intimate and one is swollen
this one; we all here despite the odds that one; more kin than you ever seen
attendance percentage v. actual numbers
but jealousy peeks through when over a busy, packed-calendar summer
my kids can only tamp down a suitcase for one
they don’t get to see parts of themselves where are the jokes, the cousins
they missed growing up
driven by instinct, I react as mediator playing dozens or spades at the picnic
praying over fish-fry hushpuppies
praying over burgers and dogs what we remind ourselves of is this:
it is important to give thanks for
everything that seems a given every member able to torque a schedule
the meal that brings us together and
fills our spirit like heaping plates, leads us outweighs envy, no one eats until the prayer
confirms how one we are
Author’s Note: As the product of a southern interracial marriage, I am always keenly interested in the prevailing thoughts and attitudes that were either prevalent when my parents began courting or had been heavily influenced by things like the Racial Integrity Act or this Health Bulletin that announced it. Erasure gives me a way to talk back, to subvert the conversation, to create a contrapuntal where the document is altered by both black space and white space. There is also room, particularly in the footnotes, to contemplate [dominant race]ness—what it means, how it’s viewed, and (for lack of a better term) how it is policed.
My family has two family reunions each year, my dad's side and my mom's side. I wrote the first draft of this poem after a particularly busy summer where my kids could only attend one of the family reunions due to scheduling conflicts. A conversation with them reminded me of how differently they experience these two events, even though they love both reunions. In subsequent edits it seemed natural for the poem to be a contrapuntal, where there was a natural friction and various perspectives that ultimately rejoin to one conclusion—gratitude for family. Oneness.
Junious Ward is a poet living in Charlotte, NC, and author of Sing Me A Lesser Wound (Bull City Press). Junious has attended and/or received support from: Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo, The Frost Place, and The Watering Hole. His poems have appeared or are upcoming in Four Way Review, Columbia Journal, DIAGRAM, The Amistad, Diode Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.
i suppose i am safe / i could explain where the doubt
comes in but what would be the point? / i am safe here
i am cradled by a bed holding no memory / i am curled
against the neck of a bottle, the cold feeling better than a body
that’s a lie / but am i not allowed a lie to slip through?
i am waiting for an answer / the truth / some sort of satisfaction
none come, but i don’t expect it / i expected the emptiness
to spread itself into a blanket for me to lay on, and it did
it covered the grass, or the wet, or anything else i didn’t want
to touch / it did what i asked it to / the emptiness
i’m going somewhere here / but i can’t decide where
the last three bodies i asked to see did not come
it was not a punishment / not anything but fear, a lack
of luck / still, i spread out in the emptiness / waiting
for something to find me there and pull me out / ask the right questions
that pull the right answers / from their place beneath my tongue
all of this is real, except none of it really / i misjudge
where i’m going, and i can’t walk for days / when i tell you
i secretly enjoyed it / i don’t mean it / i mean it was not a secret.
i reach for you in my sleep,
find you there within me
i wake to your body bathed in
the blue of pre-dawn
i find the comfort of the womb
in the waking world—
i crawl inside
grow smaller, smaller,
until there’s nothing left of
who i used to be
i find darkness and shrivel into it
i find nothingness in myself
and pull it all out
i wish to be whole and full and
straight-backed, for my heart
to weep only in a way
i can bear
Author’s Note: "lamentation" came about in the hazy hours just before dawn, when the difference between dreams and reality can be hard to place. It lives in the interior as an exploration of longing, desire, and lack of its fulfillment. "5/10" examines desire as well, but it exists more as a wry set of excuses, deflections, masking a sincere desire for connection.
BEE LB is an array of letters, bound to impulse; they are a writer creating delicate connections. they have called any number of places home: currently, a single yellow wall in Michigan. they have been published in Crooked Arrow Press, Badlung Press, and Revolute Lit, among others. their portfolio can be found at twinbrights.carrd.co.
what if
if what
we think
is is is
sacred be-
fore the
subject
sucked in-
to predication
completes
any thing?
Or
if is is a
bond, band,
what if what
is does is
tie the pliant
spirit of
a person
to the act-
of-being
and so
in fact un-
tie the price-
less is of
who one is,
the Is in
any of us?
Author’s Note: This poem developed out of my linguistic musing upon the concept of identity and the ways in which language both liberates and enslaves. I think of it, broadly speaking, as a poem of social justice.
Joshua McKinney’s most recent book of poetry is Small Sillion (Parlor Press, 2019). His work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. He is the recipient of The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, The Dickinson Prize, The Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. A member of Senkakukan Dojo of Sacramento, California, he has studied Japanese sword arts for over thirty years.
The egret, her beak muddied, fishes
on beanstalk legs
by the pebble-strewn & infinite
laid-down ladder of the freight tracks,
snacks on frogs scared into stillness
at the runoff’s plastic shore,
is perplexed to find herself
this far South, misses the occasional
Aurora Borealis show
& the primal threat of autumnal snow.
Above, upon this car-wide overpass,
I briefly observe her,
feel rushed to arrive to an office
devoid of outstretched wings,
lacking nests, shedding wilderness
like a virus slathered
with the foam of antibacterial soap,
my fingers intertwined
in a rusted diamond fence, as I scan
this abyss between us,
this avian diner appeasing her belly
before the waiting sky’s caressed
by her plumage,
lower limbs snuggled to her body
like a child rocked to sleep
by the wind, as if
in an unraveling cot at risk
of falling, uncertain of where she is.
Author’s Note: The genesis of “Shedding Wilderness” is pretty straightforward: It was written shortly after the experience of viewing an egret fishing by flooded train tracks as I stared down from an overpass on my walk from home to work one morning. I live right across the Hudson from Manhattan, yet am still privileged to see occasional wildlife, whether it be turkeys, deer, racoons, skunks, possums, snakes, herons, hawks, groundhogs, or field mice. At the same time, these brief glimpses of nature can’t help but remind me of all that we’ve lost.
Jonathan Greenhause won the Telluride Institute’s 2020 Fischer Poetry Prize, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in FreeFall, The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry, New York Quarterly, Permafrost, Poetry East, RHINO, and Tampa Review. This is his 3rd time appearing in Roanoke Review.
That night you built a bonfire on the street corner— remember?
Everyone walking by on their way home from parties
stopped there a while to shiver a little less violently.
You wished they would stay longer as they left.
To pay a compliment or two to the fire’s precise construction.
I fantasized going off with them, but I couldn’t leave you cold.
If it had been summer, we would have waited for dawn.
There would have been birds and dew. But it was winter.
Nights are long and end just like that.
As the bonfire went out, we went inside. There I was,
kneeling by your bed, the lights off, holding your hand.
When you speak, it’s like the world has run out of eyes.
I slept for just a while until you shook me.
You were never happy with me, so I put my clothes in a bag.
You followed me out to smoke. A porch will lengthen any goodbye.
What to make of the bus ride home, or the snowflakes?
There is a gravity to weeping— a sudden collapse,
like those logs on their knees, crawling deeper into the fire.
When I crawled out the creek
and looked into the water,
there wasn’t a single feature on my face.
No nose. No deep-set valley for the eyes.
There I was, ambiguous,
incomprehensible,
Spring’s shadowed oaks
freeing me from this body.
I grew my hair for a year—
cut it all off last week.
Decisions? Just whims
swelling over time.
(Last August
almost told my doctor
I want to transition.)
I never could stand that dead silk
falling into my eyes.
Silt caked into my pelvis.
Passing by the mirror,
staring at the face and body
that is apparently mine,
all the way into the namelessness
of steam-trapped curtains,
the question rises:
What if I’m not? If it’s all a lie?
But “he” turns me to glass.
And this has been going on
for a decade.
I am tired of my inaction, but I feel dangerous—
Every morning, a thousand knives
sprout from my face.
The surgeries, the hormones,
could render me acidic:
a eunuch, and with what beauty left?
Would you be able to tell
I killed a man to get here?
Will I leave that much blood on my hands?
Author’s Note: Poems change so much. I started “Aubade” by obsessing over the key to this house, and this one time I tried to give it back. The person closed my hands around it and told me to keep it. In the end, the time I said “no” turned out to be less emotionally charged than the time I was told to leave. Eventually, abuse can convince us to beg for our own destruction.
I received a comment in a workshop that “When I Crawled Out the Creek” wasn’t quite framed correctly—that transness is more about becoming a person than it is about destroying a person. But emotions are rarely this neat! I don’t like how my body currently is, but I am also terrified of saying goodbye to it.
Elliott Carter is a non-binary artist who is surviving. They studied poetry at the University of Virginia and has been involved in spoken word communities in the DMV. They want to bury their shame, live a good life. On Twitter and Instagram as @frutsnacc.
(Recurring dream, circa fifth grade)
or harm at least because danger
was always nigh because strangers
invaded the playground time and again
and tried to whisk Allison away
keyword tried
because I was there as always
sometimes they got her
almost to their car
but I came chasing after and showed them
what happens to those who take Allison
triumphantly I carried her back
to much applause and buzz but Allison and I
we just needed time
and so we retreated alone
to that gap in the fence
between the little kids’ side and the big kids’ side
where it was all overgrown
Jeff Tigchelaar is the author of Certain Streets at an Uncertain Hour (Woodley Press, 2015), winner of the Kansas Authors Club Nelson Poetry Book Award. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal (as runner-up for the Adrienne Rich Prize), Harpur Palate, Hobart, Hawaii Pacific Review, Heavy Feather Review, Rattle, Rhino, The Museum of Americana, New Ohio Review, and North American Review, as well as in Best New Poets, New Poetry from the Midwest, and Verse Daily. Recipient of a poetry fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, he works at a library in Huntington, West Virginia.
I learned about negative space in art class.
My teacher said, without the emptiness
between the objects, they would clash
into each other and become one.
The nothingness around everything
is what makes all the difference.
I didn’t understand it then
but I do now. Now all I think about is negative space
and distances and how far apart we are
since you left. Today I found the birthday card
you gave me when I turned twelve.
I didn’t look at the words as much as the gap
between them, and wondered what you meant
by leaving an empty hole between love you,
and always. I asked mom where you were
and she told me the story of the heaven
and the sky. If she is right and you are in heaven
with grandma and uncle Mo,
what do you all do when you get bored?
Do you play in the bouncy house of clouds,
twirling around in the ether like a bunch of loons?
I can still feel you, like I felt the sun
this morning, radiating through the blinds,
waking me with its rays.
I bet you are very close, and if I blow you a kiss
it might hit you. I just did it, did that tickle you?
Sometimes I close my eyes and wrap my arms
around your hollow embrace. And sometimes
I gaze into the abyss hoping that you stare back at me.
It drives mom crazy when I talk to you like
I am doing now. She puts on her headphone
and does her Zumba routine like a whirling dervish,
trying to forget her pain. She believes
in the heaven story and heaven is too far away.
My art teacher would probably say
that you simply blended into the negative space.
And there you are, posing for me to draw
your holographic portrait. All I need
is tracing paper, a rainbow to set the mood
and stardust to cover your face.
Shakiba Hashemi is an Iranian-American poet, painter and teacher living in Southern California. She is a bilingual poet, and writes in English and Farsi. She holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Laguna College of Art and Design. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Atlanta Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, I-70 Review, The Indianapolis Review, Cream City Review, The Summerset Review and the New York Quarterly Anthology Without a Doubt: poems illuminating faith.
A mind eraser is a type of drink consisting of several
There was a kid at the hospital with a pronounced delay
I grew up in the suburbs, but what made it exotic was that
Layers of spirits, shots separated by their densities
The neighbors kept peacocks & allowed them to roam freely
The kid blankly received verbal information as if unengaged
High proof rum or grain alcohol is floated on top
Peacocks were used since ancient times like watch dogs
Three days later, the kid would return with a response
Lit aflame & blown out before a straw is added
For nights they crow at every nearby unexpected movement
Often cutting into an ongoing discussion on a separate subject
You drink it all at once through the straw. The fire
(trespassers: wind bending the branches, raccoon, snowfall)
The process would repeat with difficulty on a three-day lag
The crow was a purely maternal scream, sorrowful, a dirge
Is for the memory, which holds there like a tender ghost
Christ was said to have risen after three days entombed
The light we hold burns from a dark star orbiting
And I would awaken on occasion to it after my little brother died
I always wondered what Christ did during his delay
With a planetary gravity of loneliness & longing.
Or maybe it was my mother crying through the walls. She
Mesh of space & meaningless as the distance between
Who is dead now herself & who did not after three days rise
Just as I wondered what Christ did with his youth. Perhaps
The old marble statues of love. Give me your hand
He tried out his powers, or maybe he was a kid in a hospital
But continued dying herself, each day a little more, until
Interdigitate that I may feel time moving through us
With a pronounced delay. It suggests only that the afterlife
All that was left: an empty box of chardonnay in the fridge
Might require some adjustment, the same way that the body
Always diminishing, always forgetting, but for this:
needs three days to purge alcohol, while others need Christ.
If I could, I would take from her mouth, this exotic emptiness
That I will always know her as what I have missed the most.
Author’s Note: This poem was an experiment with form that resulted from first writing three separate and distinct poems independently, one of 13 lines and two of 12 lines. I thought there might be some connection between the three. So I preserved the linear construct of the originals but shuffled one line from each to build a new, combined, single corpus. In each 3-line cycle (12 cycles in the poem plus an end line), a line from each poem appears only once but in a variety of orders. There is a slight disruption in this strategy in three cycles plus the end line, which was the 13th line in the first poem. By breaking it into couplets rather than tercets, this muddied the relationships further. But the theory was that each original poem would benefit by its forced relationship to the others. I had become bored with my linear style and sense-making. I was afraid that my poems at that time were becoming prosy. I was not going to write a single poem and abuse a standard form, so I created a form of my own that seemed to carry what I wanted and forced me, in a way, out of myself. Often the enjambments made for strange fragmented syntax outside of lines while preserving it inside the lines. This helped. Form should not be a game of pure limitations, but the container or logic of the form should at least signal the message of its contents, or even, as was the case with this poem, create it.
Darren Morris lives in Richmond, Virginia, edits poetry for Parhelion Literary Magazine, and is the recipient of a fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Other poems appear in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, and Poetry Ireland Review. Work is forthcoming at The Blue Mountain Review.
How did mother get to be 89? Seriously. How?
One minute we’re stopping off at the Penny Candy Store
because we’ve been good in church
the next minute she’s shuffling along
like an old wounded bird holding onto me.
One minute we’re passing around turkey
mashed potatoes and gravy
at her sister’s on Thanksgiving
the next minute she’s crying –
Michael Estabrook has published his poetry in the small press since the 1980s. He has published over 20 collections, a recent one being The Poet’s Curse, A Miscellany (The Poetry Box, 2019). Retired now, writing more poems and working more outside, he just noticed two Cooper’s hawks staked out in the yard or rather above it which explains the nerve-wracked chipmunks. He lives in Acton, Massachusetts.
Light bounces
tufted sky, rooftops
tangle with wire. It was
a strange ferry
ride there. My best
friend’s mom dying
again. The screen
in my pocket shares
tulips dusting a window-
sill. Yellow petals
softening the fluorescence.
In the simmer
and mirage a wave
makes a whale. A spell
is like this: to live through
language. Grammar
and grimoire,
the same root— I place the word soon
by a bundle of collected stems, press
prefixes like mon-, then wild onions, canary-
grass onto paper. Dusk glamours
so I keep arthropod husks
and hollow reeds, conjure
losing as a whisp
of soft brush. Rain is different here,
a mist trilling my face, static. In August,
desert breaks open
gypsum, curves a new land
-scape. Here— here, heavy heads
foreign my palms
hovering hydrangeas
plumed from heat.
I forage for all things
stony and mushy: a claw,
kelp. I remember
and it is almost
funny to me now, what we choose
to remember. Her mom in the car,
NPR on. The transition
music rumbles in a shopkeeper’s
tiny radio, this must be
what they mean when
they say everyone
gone will stay
right where you’ve left
them. Sifting mineral,
I search for red frost
-ed glass. Sun-soaked
and kissed by ruptured
streetlights— prayer
is like this: to live
on nothing.
I keep the hoard close,
make an inventory of all things
once alive and all things eroded,
softened, and half-eaten. An old wreck
divides the bluing
horizon. One side
holding Venus and the moon,
the other a threadbare
cloud. Hotel vents whistle,
windows bolted, balcony
facing the expanse
that is night melded
with sea— a silhouette
spans its wings
when I wake, a drift
of sunlight shuttering:
a gull’s swift
shadow a weight
-ed blanket pressed
with morning. My body
salted, shelled open.
Author’s Note: For this poem, I was interested in how the landscape could transcend the complicated experience of second-hand grief. The shorter lines allowed me the space to create a slow and ritualistic pacing which fits the themes of alchemy and conjuring of memory.
Lisa Compo is an MFA candidate at UNC - Greensboro. She has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: The Journal, Rhino, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Cimmaron Review, and elsewhere. You can check out her recent interview with Alexandra Teague at storySouth, issue 52.
I am writing to express my interest in
engine oil leaked onto a parking spot,
the battered truck of the man selling cantaloupes,
the stain of deserted shopping malls,
the carcasses of decaying beasts.
In my current position,
I visit the graves of strangers,
lie naked in tall grasses,
observe, near the reservoir,
moss on a low slung rock wall.
This, and my familiarity with
the grief of 3am and
unresolved pixelations,
make me the perfect candidate
to believe, of your company, almost anything.
Additionally, the mezcal on my father’s breath,
my mother drunk behind the wheel,
far-off tassels of campfire smoke,
are qualifications beneficial
to your organization’s success.
Thank you for considering the
smell of rotting tobacco barns,
the rattle of a washing machine,
a sick dog yelping from the ditch,
how I parachute into nightmares
& look forward to hearing from you.
Author’s Note: On the one hand, I think “Cover Letter” captures the absurd juxtaposition of the bland, formulaic ways we often must present ourselves professionally and the quirky, wonderous wierdos we are underneath. On the other hand, I think the poem asks us to wonder, What if we thought of our strange preoccupations, musings, and attention to odd, seemingly inconsequential details, as a type of real job for writers and poets? As usual, I wasn’t aware I was doing either of those until I completed the poem and read back over it a few days later. Depending on how it’s read, the piece can make me laugh or it can make me sad. That’s probably a good thing.
Seth Clabough’s debut novel, All Things Await, was nominated for the 2017 Library of Virginia Book Award for Fiction, and his creative work appears in places like Blackbird, Smokelong Quarterly, Barely South, West Trade Review, Magma Poetry, Litro Magazine and in numerous other journals and magazines. He lives in an old farmhouse near a peach orchard in Crozet, Virginia, and teaches English and Creative Writing at Randolph-Macon College.
