Fly Away

By William Woolfitt

In Oklahoma, Albert Brumley was picking bolls in the cotton patch, singing to himself while he picked, rearranging parts of "The Prisoner’s Song," changing it around, squinting when he sneaked a look at the mean red sun, too bright and hot for mid-morning, his face sweaty, his overalls damp, his body damp, his hands sore, could he have another life, could dreams take him there, could blue clouds, could a whirlwind, his father a sharecropper, neighbors bringing him down to size, neighbors saying try your hand at coal, get you a job in the strip pits at Rock Island, but he was listening to the notes in his head, to the new sounds, to the ragged wind, he straightened up and called out, when the shadows grow, a bit of new song, unformed and crude.

William Woolfitt is the author of three poetry collections: Beauty Strip (Texas Review Press, 2014), Charles of the Desert (Paraclete Press, 2016), and Spring Up Everlasting (Mercer University Press, 2020).

Photo by Julie Dixon.

I Am Healing My First Tattoo

By Mim Murrells

Tired of my worrying, my younger brother showed me a photo of an actual infected tattoo so

I would know what that kind of thing actually looks like, and I couldn’t tell if it was a

kindness or a cruelty; stagnant, the summer makes sharks out of flies.

Mim Murrells is currently eighteen years old and a Creative Writing student at UEA in Norwich, England.

Art by Jay Baker, an artist from Colorado living in Oregon, by way of New Mexico; he records music as Tom Foe.

Puzzle Rules

By Neema Bipin Avashia

My first grade teacher deemed me cognitively disabled because I could not tie my shoes, hold a pencil, cut with scissors, complete puzzles, could not make my Brown skin white, and for 24 years after being in her class, I avoided all fine-motor tasks, so I typed instead of writing by hand, wore slip-ons instead of sneakers, refused to join the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle because my inability to grasp how the sharp and curving blanks and tabs fit together, felt somehow an indictment of my intellect, a failing I was unable to fix, until I met Laura, who gave me a photo puzzle for my birthday but ended up completing it all by herself while I battled strep throat, who then created a second photo puzzle for our surprise wedding ten years later where each guest got a piece and had to work with others to solve the mystery of why we were all gathered, who taught me the rules of puzzling—find all of the edge pieces and build out the frame, then sort and join the remaining pieces by color or pattern, and then, when doing the most complex parts of the puzzle, choose one piece at a time and hunt the board for the blank space that matches each tab shape—rules I didn’t learn growing up in an immigrant home where no one had time for puzzles, and no one knew the rules, either; thus I seek out puzzles now, let my mind go blank as I work on a color or pattern or corner, savor the tiny buzz of satisfaction that comes when I snap a tab into a blank, when I own the rules.

Neema Avashia is a teacher and writer whose book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, will be published by WVU Press in 2022.

Photo by Neema Avashia.