Robin Behn is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Yellow House from Spuyten Duyvil Press. She has been teaching in the MFA Program at the University of Alabama since 1988.

Carrie Chappell is a poet by ways of Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and now living in New Orleans. Her poems have appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review, Bateau Press and elsewhere. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans, where she serves as Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine.

Jesse DeLong is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Illya’s Honey, Copper Nickel, 751 Magazine, and others. In collaboration with artist Sonja G. Rossow, Curly Head Press released his chapbook Tearings, and Other Poems.

Darren C. Demaree is living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and daughter. Most recently, his poems have appeared in The Tribeca Review, The South Carolina Review, Meridian, Grain, and the Hurricane Review.

AB Gorham’s poems can be found in DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, & Front Porch Journal. She currently lives in Tuscaloosa, AL.

Samuel Gray is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. His poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in CutBank, International Poetry Review, and Words Without Borders.

Katy Gunn is an MFA candidate in Tuscaloosa, a place she has quickly grown proud of. Her work has recently appeared in Slice Magazine and Cellpoems.

B.J. Hollars is an instructor at the University of Alabama where he also received his MFA in 2010. He is the author of the forthcoming Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America (University of Alabama Press, 2011). He calls Tuscaloosa home.

Steven Casimer Kowalski spent four years in Tuscaloosa, Alabama studying creative writing. He misses the city and its people every day. Roll Tide.

Erin Lyndal Martin is a poet, fiction writer, and music journalist. Her work has recently appeared in Guernica, InDigest, and Crowd. She is associate fiction editor for H_ngm_n and runs the music website Euterpe’s Notebook.

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and has lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for the last 15 years.

Chris Mink was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and tries to get back as often as possible. He received an MA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas at Austin. He currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida where he is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Florida State University. His poetry is forthcoming in The Greensboro Review and The Chattahoochee Review.

Brian Oliu (http://www.brianoliu.com) is originally from New Jersey and lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Work appears in Hotel Amerika, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, Sonora Review and elsewhere. His book of Tuscaloosa Missed Connections, So You Know Its Me is forthcoming in June on Tiny Hardcore Press.

Kirk Pinho studied at the University of Alabama, where he received his MFA in poetry in 2010. He is the assistant editor for a newspaper group and teaches English in the metro Detroit area.

Juan Carlos Reyes is originally from Guayaquil, Ecuador. He received a PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellowship in 2007 and is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Alabama. He has presented his work at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and the Benham Gallery in Seattle, WA, and he has published in Tertulia Magazine, Steel Toe Review, Arcadia Magazine, Cavalier Literary Couture, BlueStem, and Black Warrior Review. He currently lives with his wife in Tuscaloosa, AL.

Laurence Ross holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. He lives, writes, and teaches in Tuscaloosa, AL. He has recently completed a novel, Also, I’m Dying, in which characters deliver performances of crisis, education, anarchy, vanity, husband, wife, child, and alcoholism – among other things.

Justin Runge currently lives in Lawrence, where he works as a graphic designer and edits Blue Hour Press. His own poetry can be found at DIAGRAM, Linebreak, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere.

Katie Jean Shinkle moved from Michigan to Tuscaloosa, Alabama to be rid of snow (among other things) and now leaves Tuscaloosa for Denver, CO where she will be in snow once more.

Danilo Thomas is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Alabama, where he lives with his wife and pets. He was raised in Butte, Montana. His work can be found in Milk Money, Precipitate Journal, The Flying House, and elsewhere.

Erik Wennermark lived in Tuscaloosa from 2006 to 2009–he remains a devotee of Crimson Tide football. Check out erikwennermark.com for more info and other work.

This Is A Test of the Emergency Alert System

by B.J. Hollars

DIRECTIONS:
To the best of your ability, please answer the following questions:

1.) How many times can you say “devastation?”

2.) Please use the following in a sentence: “strewn”, “flipped”, “sifting”, “sobbing”, “spinning.”

3.) Define: Death Toll (Hint: This is NOT the toll one pays for death.)

4.) True or False: You were just a little scared.

5.) These are the dimensions of my bathtub: 58″ x 30″ by 16″. If my wife, dog and I tuck ourselves inside, will we be a perfect fit?

6.) Which of the following is not currently found in my bathtub?

a.) My wife
b.) My dog
c.) Me
d.) Tornado

7.) Which of the following activities are best performed while riding out a tornado in your bathtub?

a.) Secret sharing
b.) Storytelling
c.) Dog petting
d.) Scrubbing out your tub.

8.) Which of the following is the proper response after surviving a tornado in your bath tub?

a.) Calling family
b.) Calling friends
c.) Waiting for a cell phone signal
d.) Continuing to wait for a cell phone signal
e.) Leashing your dog
f.) Thanking God
g.) Introducing yourself to God
h.) Introducing God to your wife and dog
i.) Living up to your part of the bargain
j.) Exiting your house
k.) Wondering why all of your plants are still upright
l.) Drinking a beer
m.) Drinking two beers
n.) Drinking zero beers and remembering your part of the bargain.
o.) Making a joke to lighten the mood
p.) Impersonating the Cowardly Lion: “It’s a twista! It’s a twista!”
q.) Understanding that the tornado did not miss everyone, just us
r.) Knocking it off with the impressions
s.) Pouring out the beer
t.) Going for food
u.) Going home
v.) Lighting candles
w.) Telling your wife what you meant to tell her in the bathtub
x.) Remembering your part of the bargain
y.) All of the above
z.) Some of the above

9.) Which of the following quotations has been fabricated?

a.) “People laid blankets over the bodies of neighbors…”
b.) “First responders didn’t attend to the dead.”
c.) “The earth went to moving.”
d.) None of the above.

10.) Where is the silver lining?

11.) And what do you mean when you say “gone?”

12.) In the space below, please draw a picture of anything but this.

13.) Which of the following tools most efficiently removes fallen trees?

a.) Chainsaw
b.) Axe
c.) Bow saw
d.) Poem

14.) How did your students respond to your attempts to contact them?

a.) With kind assurances of their safety
b.) With concern for your safety
c.) By writing you a poem
d.) By writing you an email
e.) By asking you for her final grade
f.) By thanking you for an “awesome” semester
g.) By wishing you the best of luck
h.) By wishing you no ill will (despite the B-)
i.) By informing you that his car was found two miles from where he’d parked it.
j.) By apologizing for the late paper—”The tornado ate it.”
k.) By asking for extra credit
l.) By asking “pretty please” for extra credit
m.) By asking you for your story
n.) By asking you what she’s supposed to do now
o.) By asking you the definition of death toll
p.) By asking you if he’ll seriously never see you again
q.) By telling you she’ll facebook you someday
r.) By telling you he slept through it
s.) By telling you that composition class taught him little of survival
t.) By telling you that African-American lit class taught him little of survival
u.) By asking, “What is the use of tornadoes?”
v.) By writing, “The nightmares won’t quit coming, will they?”
w.) By writing, “TTYL”
x.) With silence
y.) None of the above
z.) Some of the above

15.) Where does it hurt the most and why?

ESSAY:
In the space provided below, please allow me with the opportunity to talk for awhile. You can understand, I’m sure, the necessity of talking, or of writing, or of overexposing an issue like a dark room left to light. In this essay, please attempt to imagine my great relief in waking up the morning after. Consider my minor inconvenience in having to sleep in the sweat-soaked sheets. Do you believe the world is quieter when there are no lights on? And what are your feelings of a town turned twisted and inside out? How exactly does an exterior become an interior? How exactly does a roof become a floor? True or False: Question 4 is the only one that matters. Please provide specific examples below.
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Distance = Rate x Time

by Erik Wennermark

I am away. I am twenty-two months away from Tuscaloosa, July, 2009. I am eleven-hundred miles away from Tuscaloosa in the lobby of a hotel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Boston Celtics are playing basketball on the television. Men speak of ice hockey and when the doors slide open the air outside is cold and crisp.

The complimentary USA Today on the table has a picture of the wreckage on the front page; several more are tucked inside. Despite the captions, I recognize nothing. It says 15th Street—a street I drove a hundred times—but I see only broken planks and overturned cars. I see no Bowling Alley, no Smokeshop, no Taco Bell. Even my memories have been torn apart.

They do not understand you here. A man on the news last night wore an Auburn polo shirt and an Alabama baseball cap. He spoke of bleeding orange as he passed out bottles of water to those whose crimson blood dripped from eyes, elbows and dusty shins. He is a decent, God-fearing man. The viewers here do not understand. These viewers never will. In a different time the Yankees burned you to the ground. Tuscaloosa, I fear for your future.

I am sitting in a lobby in Portsmouth, New Hampshire writing in longhand about a devastation I have seen on the Internet. A cataclysm received via text message and watched on youtube; the dripping I.V. of a facebook feed. I am writing to remember a place I have often tried to forget, or at least not remember so hard and so much. It is only now that you might be gone—so they say—that I miss you for the first time. Roll Tide.
               

Erasure

Chris Mink

Here is the Alberta Bridge where he spray painted               ROOSTER
          in blood letters

Here we were once boys and knew only
          what boys’ minds know          paper clouds so thin
the moon tore open the sky to draw its crescent in amber

Kids who died           in winter car crashes
          while another waited for the leaves to green

flowered his father with a shotgun

There was laughing               Teeth extracted as keepsakes
          We all took punches I suppose

And words thrashed about our feet             and so a heavy stomp
          as to hammer out an understanding with boot heels
against           pine-dead straw

                              that enshrouded                     snakeskin,
                              pocketknives                         dulled into dirt

Into the Black Warrior we waded                  barefoot           then bare-ass
          Some got pregnant on Wild Irish Rose

The rest made out with only limestone scars
          lips bitten just at the corner

                                                        Girls                 you see

Black-stripped land of a coalmine
          and legs around my neck                     river water up to my waist

Here             we river

Our slow-moving currents carry crawdad claws                     catfish whiskers
          bottle caps with the names rubbed off

Go easy                     we say

Years have gone

                              But longer still                     a word on an overpass

                                        ROOSTER

I remember day still burned in the concrete
          even to hands mud-lousy from submersion           bottled poison
river-wet with the inner-tube girls

That night we held him tight by his ankles over McFarland           the paint
          blown back on our faces

18-wheelers roared below us and I closed my eyes
          watched the colors corrugate orange and yellow

Here is today’s obituary                    We Are Old
          and we drive to a funeral to escape the sun

Here is where Tuscaloosa has erased a word           erased us all
          and I tell you what once was
               

Tuscaloosa

by Katie Jean Shinkle

Magnolia drop, your root system
is showing—green sky, silence, green sky
where are you/how are you/lets meet here
at 8/lets meet here to eat/how can I help?

Magnolia, what is the difference
between Wednesday and Thursday
but green sky silence, green sky
destruction, green sky are you alive.

Where are you/how are you/lets meet
here/how can I help you, Magnolia,
I am worried, Magnolia, I am scared,
drop, drop, drop your root system—

the difference between Thursday and
Wednesday a funnel, an echo.
               

Tuscaloosa,

by Carrie Chappell

You are not just a swarm of mosquitoes,
Sweat around my neck, a forest of poetic
Kudzu, a whistle-stop. You are not just a tub
Of sweet tea, a gravy biscuit, a one-screen
Theater. Tuscaloosa, you are not just. A wrinkle
‘Round my eye, a city of ghosts, a trip
To the thrift store, a court house. O,
Tuscaloosa, you are not just. I lie
In your Dolly Parton Sunday mornings,
In the hammock of your strip mall, in your
Puddles of bourbon, in your beds of
Catfish. Tuscaloosa, queen city, reverend
Mother. You are not just.

Tus-Kah-Loos-Ah. You are not just. A word.
You are not just. A night-sky-red-clay-
Crimson-tide-BBQ-moon. A yellow hammer,
A hammer and nail. You are not just. You go
Along talkative in the trees, a roaming, pockmarked
Veteran. You stammer to the thump of high heels
On green quadrangular grass. You haunt
Our library. You lounge under a historical marker,
Catching rap lyrics from an air-conditioned car.
You are over the bridge of Northport, sunbathed.
You smell like rootbeer, dying. A line of country knot,
Drying. You wrathful yell. You are an angry god.
You are not unjust. Just a godless country. Just.
Lawns of nativity. A late-night taco, a steeple
On the river, capstoning. You are a stop
On a back road from Birmingham.

Tuscaloosa, you are. The destination. Tuscaloosa,
You are as loyal as motor oil. You are the sling
Of my heart. You are not a tame bird. But
You are a steadfast winged thing. You are
A bench for reading Frank O’Hara. A stoop-less
Vista-less river walk. You are a dreamland
Of landlocked nightmares. You are unjust.
O, Tus-KAH-Loos-AH, you are a secret art
Museum. You, you. You are a smoke stack
In a smoking town. You are a lofty breeze.
A place where we live, lordly as we please.
               

Tuscaloosa Missed Connection #37: Construct – m4w – Home Depot

by Brian Oliu

Let me build you a house. Here, a nail. Here, a piece of wood. I have told you that this will all be gone soon: the ground is unstable, the ground is not solid. I would rebuild this city for you if I could—I would place long smooth stones into the silt and we would walk on them, your heels digging into the gaps from time to time so you would stumble. My feet are flat—they have no arch, all things structurally flawed. My bones, they are soft. My skin, stretched thin and translucent from years of abuse, years of not building anything, years of not walking. When I build you something, something will be built. When I build you something I will know the meaning of this—to put my back into something, to know what power is and what it might be. The building we are in is taller than both of us together, we cannot touch the lights. When I build you something, I want you to stretch your arms above your head like you are praying, like you are praising. I want you to lay your hands flat on the ceiling, to bend your wrists backwards, to cause your muscles to tense up. I want your hands to feel the acoustics, to rub your fingers over the bumps like when you used to put your hand on my face, cupping my jaw, telling me that you like it when I don’t shave. I will build you this because this will all be gone. We will have a housewarming party—we will tell our friends to bring red wine, to bring candles and cookware, to place oranges in a bowl and cover it with foil. You will wear a dress and I will wear a tie and we will answer the door: we will look through the small square windows—glass I broke into shards with my hands. When we open the door, no one will be standing there. When we open the door, the water will rush in.

Tuscaloosa Missed Connection #13:  Intersection of Bryant and Magnolia Drive

by Brian Oliu

My view of you was blurry—the type of blur evident when all is in motion: mothers moving in quickly to place kisses on the cheek, everyone quickly turning their heads when hearing the word ‘sister’, hearing a song, hearing a name that is similar to their name. This is something that I do not understand while moving, rotation on top of rotation driving me forward yet away. I would spend action on you, but as you know, this whole thing is Greek to me—Hellenistic where there is no Helen, no woman at the end of the sea, no understanding of what these shapes mean: these shapes are not me, these shapes are not my language. I fear you. I fear your handshakes, your dead birds, your coffins, your chairs, your teas, your mixes and mixers, your buttons, your service and services. The gift you bear has no wheels—I am the one moving forward, you are the one still. If I were to cut you open lord knows what I would find: a building, a new city, a torch to burn my city to the ground from whence it came. If the gods deemed it so, I would throw my momentum into a lamppost, into the pillars of your new home, into the river. I would die ingloriously without a struggle with no great thing—nothing that you will remember me by. You will find all of this sad, but your house will move on. I fear you. I fear that this was meant to be. I fear that this is in your god’s will. I fear so I say nothing lest the snakes come out of the ground and swallow me and all I hold dear. In passing, you see me about to speak. Look at the pretty horse I have made for you, you say. Look at the attention we have given to its hooves, its wooden eyes. Please, I beg of you, do not try to contact me. I have no need for horses—I have broken all of them.
               

15th and Oakwood

by Samuel Gray

Planted all at once forty years ago,
the water oaks along my street
rot from the inside out.

The boom trucks, one after another,
extend their booms,
and as the limbs fall hollow
the air fills with spore.
No sound. The saws
swallow even themselves.
               

Tracks to Tuscaloosa

by Jesse DeLong

     1.

On the Pacific, coastal towns are drowned in salt winds, erosions,
cast glass rounded in the lap, lap, lap
of a tide’s rhythmic motions. The zero of beginnings, the zero of ends.

A seagull sinks in the ocean, unable to blink, to breathe.
Green water darkens to the thickness of centuries tar.
A tempest spills over a fold of waves,
holding under its stenciled pour. Storms roar.

A jellyfish blisters in the bank-washed seaweed.
Beyond the shore, in the tall grass, gnats feed, clouding in swarms.
A woman on the beach, book in lap, squints her eyes
against where charcoal rubs the water’s edge.
Sand erases its glister to a landscape told
in a failure to fold. A failure to forget.

Our woman is thinking, as she turns a page,
not only about what is right, or wrong, but about what is graspable.
Deloria the Known One, and Birdsong.

In the sand, a child’s footprints lift, form drifting to the tide.
Beside his mother, he covers seaweed over a stick,
flicks green threads onto the shore, watching, in the distance, a tempest pour.
Bird songs on the ocean. Birdsong on the beach.

     2.

Deloria enters a journey marked in the kerosene
spark of a smoldering skyline. A snowcapped highline.
California to Idaho. Idaho to North Dakota.
North Dakota to Illinois. Chicago to The South.

On the journey,
Deloria will lay his body down, a train spike in San Francisco.
Deloria will lay his body down, a track mark in Sacramento.
Deloria will lay his body down, a train spike in Salem.
Deloria will lay his body down, a track mark in Astoria.

He treks through orange groves, buttes, plateaus, redwood forests.
He sings the leafed chorus of the final grasslands laid before us.

Deloria will lay his body down, a train spike in Spokane.
In the rail yards, his ribcage turns to rebar.
Deloria will lay his body down, a track mark in Sandpoint.
Deloria will lay his body down, a train spike in Post Falls.

Beside men working in sawmills and machine yards.
Beside women working in processing plants and penitentiaries.

Deloria will lay his body down, a track mark in Missoula.
Inside the Bitterroot Valley, his heart scars in battery acid.

From Montana, he carries Birdsong, beat to bone,
to the ends of a west expressed in silos, silt creeks and grains.
In the Dakotas, Birdsong stops, splinter-shinned.
There is no where for him or from here.

Deloria will lay his body down, a flint spark in Bismarck.

Over icicle-thin airs of mountain ridges, tendon-tight heights
of steel bridges, over gravel-scattered plains,
lands where grass blades seldom soak in rain, Deloria continues.

In the higher Rockies, his limbs tatter to static.
He lingers longer in the towns where he can rest his boots,
look over the horizon
and be certain there are still places where smog hasn’t smothered the air.

Clouds bury the skyline and refine to rain.
The horizon could be anywhere. This is the end of the West.

Deloria will lay his body down, a track mark in Pierre.
On the loading dock, his breath emits tailpipe-lit exhaust.
Deloria will lay his body down, a train spike in St Paul.
Deloria will lay his body down, a track mark in Green Bay.

Deloria will lay his body down, a train spike in Chicago.
In the city, his spine knots into the twine of steel bridges.
In the boiler room, his veins harden to sewage pipes, pistons.
Chemicals in a meth lab. Tar roofing, pigeon shit, smoke stacks.
And farther off—pine trees. A lake where weather splinters water.
The roads from where they hustle, brow sweat and muscle

Deloria will lay his body down, a track mark in Indianapolis.
Deloria will lay his body down, a train spike in Nashville.
Deloria will lay his body down, a train spike in Tuscaloosa.
In the heart of dixie, his lungs fill with pavement chunks and he cements.
               

Water Always Leaves the Knife

by Darren C. Demaree

     For Tuscaloosa

How the chip
& hammer,
so paused in both,

that we live with the carry
& away
of that sun sum

of what fingers do
when it’s char
or the painted red faces

of about, of about
the town. Rats,
lost scorpions,

the full ribs
of such beauty
is blood, is fat, is ship.
               

Boomers

by Kirk Pinho

Very few things are illegal when you’re in love,
so with evening still in its bratty infancy, we smuggled
the bottle rocket stash from her bedroom
to her backyard, near the cord of pulp logs

covered with damp powderpost beetle larvae.
Wicks alit, how we made them homesick for the stars.
How they yowled, prows hacking through the troposphere,
raked against the greening sky like fishhooks in trout cheeks.

Sure, those neighbor dogs yelped in octaves.
Yeah, the wood thrushes & chipping sparrows scattered
like dice to preen elsewhere & went beak-first
into the sunroom window teasing them
with silk trees. All those brains blooming
into pinkish rosettes. All their baby birdies
orphaned. Still, success, we thought. No snitches,
no sirens, our little bug hearts reeved together.
Ham-fisted, the two cigarettes we filched from

her dad burned slow like a pilot
light, which was a bigger deal than it seems.
Fire, & gravity, & light have always been
a big deal, I guess, the moon being those 1.2 seconds
older than we know it & all.

The Practice Funeral

by Kirk Pinho

It’s never mentioned in the Book of Exodus
that, in my house, she sees me in herself,
still in those beige FUCK ME espadrilles.

In the kitchen, she pirouettes
in her antebellum dress, runny tar makeup,
toeing the holy linoleum, rolling her tongue
like a double helix. Methadone sweat oozes
down her cheek & skitters as crickets do.

Looking out the window at the files of birch trees,
God makes a brief appearance. Days later,
when her asps slither away, we butterfly
a four-pound chicken, plump & wet,
into a meaty notebook & etch our names
into its pages. Potatoes boil. Starch cakes
on the pot’s ring. Lettuce leafs crunch
together in a bag like a mass grave.

Where our voices go when they‘re gone
remains to be seen. Where our bodies S
together like shrimp on a skewer,
we think of highways, ribbons
across rickety towns far from here.

As she sleeps, she dreams of taxidermy, how
the chickens on her father’s mantle looked,
the veins in their throats like hammers.
               

Egan’s

by Danilo Thomas

Thick smoke and loud music. Jagermeister machine; a certain woman that always sits in the corner. She wears eye shadow. Cobalt. Partially deaf. She walks with a limp and her dresses are consistently considered to be festive. The pool table is for more than just billiards. Wooden cover. Inexpensive seating. Ripped red linoleum benches. Accidental cubism. Bathroom spray-painted nightly. The integrity of the establishment will not be lowered with trying to poop and only farting. Broken hearts. Soiled denim. We ask ourselves, what makes a home? Familiarity. A jerk of a thumb from a viking bouncer as he tells you to get your ass in here. Open arms in a damp South. We don’t need that ID. I remember you. Two dollar Busch tall cans and that case of Delirium Tremens, the only one ever bought by the establishment that is still sitting at the back of the mini fridge. Blue foil shimmering in the light of a burning matchbook, because, yes, “We’re still open, dammit.” And you’ll miss us when you’re gone.
               

Escapism On The Rocks With A Dash Of

Laurence Ross

Dead bird hoodie in the Tuscaloosa street holy shit you scared me would you like to come inside for a drink. Egan’s is closed so this must be serious this must be something like the end. I have not showered my roommate smells like sex where is the lavender. We are having a picnic in the sun what is going on I do not know I do not want to know I just want to wash my clothes I have been wearing different pairs of dirty socks for days. There is one candle and this one candle is supposed to be The Most Powerful Helping Hand with its stencil of fingers and saints. I know I have not been much of a helping hand but please forgive me give me more candles more light more news no not so much the last part I will figure out what I need to know just sitting here in the dark, just pissing here in the dark. Do not touch the refrigerator unless you are getting a drink. I hear the President is coming I hear men are hauling trees on their shoulders I hear chainsaws everywhere and that there are people with chainsaws everywhere I hear my phone ring until it dies. You loot we shoot. Aloe vera backrub Xanax Xanax backrub aloe vera. Do not watch us do not watch the pot so it will boil our compromised water source would you like a case of water for thirty-six dollars would you like to find your passport would you like to find your final grade would you like a piece of melon I bought it on Tuesday and it still tastes good. Come to the cookout where we will cook everything we can cook before it spoils this is like a party where some people are sad you think pot lucks are always sort of sad lettuce wilting because who wants vegetables when all we want is comfort. What is the right attitude for us what is the best action for us what is the most appropriate sense of humor for us what is the proper spirit for us to have please dear God please dear God let that spirit be gin.

               

Vigil. Summer. Alabama.

by Robin Behn

A withering green that sags to yellow and yellow
that chokes on brown and brown collapsing to the color of everything.

Chipmunks, little fists of dust.
Hummingbirds broken in half.

Every morning the word morning stuck to the flowers’ tongues.
Every evening time rubbing itself raw.

Who’s been interrogating earth?
What did they do to make her crack?

The yard man showing up to shave
the scabs off the grass so he can eat.

Digits rising. More Alabama boys
enlisting in the sand.

In the field, every ear shriveled. The sun giving orders
to a convention of the deaf.

Where we are cut, a brief, sidereal rust.
What if not a drop appears in the upcoming history of earth?

Jay: a blue powder
sprinkled over the outlines of the lesser finches.

The magnolia doesn’t even stink.
Eventually color won’t exist.

We’ve taken to rising en masse,
embarking upon the still-dark hours

with quiet, similar voices.
Tired beasts. Slack leashes. Other tired beasts.

By noon, since lunch exists, outside the mission
crisp brown camos ignite in the wheelchairs’ gleam.
               

from The Smallest Space We Both Can Take

by Justin Runge

In the Southern fashion of decrepitude and neglect, my car forms a carapace
of pollen spread from dandelion and ironweed, from boneset and elm, thick
and the color of tea stain, spores adding golden green which makes the body
almost an environment, thriving with spiders that disperse as I turn the key
and swing the door, a haunted house’s web and dust kicked up, a basement
must I filter through a pulled-up tee shirt, sat long enough to find the lights
don’t work, and leave to spring the trunk lock, leaves and seedpods spilling
over the forgotten belongings: muddied clothing quarantined, a newspaper
marking the last date of sunlight, sporting equipment, tools produced at last
time’s attempt to fix this—the contents, topped with new dirt and the dead
shed of trees, are what’s left of an apathetic time capsule, a half-looted tomb.

from The Smallest Space We Both Can Take

by Justin Runge

I sealed my sweaters tight in Tupperware without knowing
this state would call for them, would forget some months
its promise as subtropic, its pledge to never freeze the soil,
concrete the streetside leaf piles into unmoveable masses,
turn transparent things opaque, what’s let out of the lungs,
or rain in its pelt cloudy like milk that only occasionally
stiffens to snow (so rare the locals stay home or, curious,
hold five-second old flakes like ladybugs in their palms);
I don a cardigan outside and in, the home sorely unready
for frost, walls solely insulated by the dead or hibernating
animals that exploit the holes and cracks, antique heater’s
gush running a bee line to window gaps that did not hold
cellophane in the face of a sill-bound cat who cries his fur
is not enough, just as ours is not—we live in our sweaters,
we sleep in our sweaters, nothing and no one well-adapted.
               

Near the Solitary Plover

by AB Gorham

Wasps found their humid way
           inside our onion lantern

           Buzz rapidly, trying to get free
& the carpenter bees too

I don’t know how they got in there
           I just know they’re stuck

           I take down the lantern
from the porch’s ceiling
           to show you

The globe vibrating, hanging from my hand

           I rock it back and forth
so pollen smokes yellow

from the tin canister bottom
           Humming swells to a steady

           numb, & you stare open
           as I approach, still

The South sings its offerings
           We gracefully handle them
               

Tunnels They Will Leave

by Katy Gunn

It is darker than your eyes are shut
covered with a house.

There is hall space, spare room space,
space below the table, space above the table,
and stale bread space inside the space
inside the breadbox – they are all the same.

Emma told me one tree stood up,
roots curled into the sky
like there was something to find there.

There is space in the veins
of its leaves in the clay,
and it is the same as the sky.

Annie said the other side of Queen City
has light, which can’t be. It is dark as no hand
when you hold it to your face.

Your hand
is a house. Your house is sky.

Ashley said power poles will come out
like splinters. The tunnels they will leave
could fit your legs, your kitchen floor,

some books or dolls. All things are dark
and weigh nothing.

The sky is not yours,
but there is space in your lungs.
Tonight, pay attention to the way it expands.
               

Four Alabama Seasons

by Michael Martone

     Winter

Even when the fans are not running under power, they feather in the breeze. Turning over, the blades mill wind. Flatbeds stacked with chicken cages piled two stories high pull in behind the wall of fans parked for a turn at the loading dock. White chickens stuff the black wire cages. The fans start up, turn, blur. The air pushes through the cages, and feathers spit out the other side. Everywhere on the ground are loose white feathers. The feathers blow across the street, cars stirring up the feathers, catch in the breeze that has not been manufactured. Breeze that is breeze. The feathers form a drift of down next to the red cedar slat fence of the city’s junkyard. Balls of feathers, hefty as chickens and as plump, tumble into the ditch. Up north, a fence like that would be strung along a highway to knock the snow out of a blizzard. Loose feathers swirl around wrecked police black and whites in the lot, begin to tar the car, coat the surface of muddy puddles left by the rain.

     Spring

Spring and all is new green grass drowned by new white, white sand of the golf course groundskeeping. The rain puts a crust on the traps that must be raked until they shimmer, a sawing corduroy seen from a distance, a breeze chopping up the surface of a scummy pond. Pollen, the gist of the season, tarnishes every surface, takes away its shine, a mat of grainy finish. But today, see? Spilled sparkle of sand curved through the blacktopped intersection out front, traced a dump truck’s too-tight turn. Already, house sparrows bathe in the fresh dune, intermittent puffs of dust along the drift, a moon’s crescent in shadow. There, the white sand turns black. A mockingbird on the strung cable mimics the neighborhood’s air conditioners. All emit this compressed chatter as the sun clears the stand of oak soaked with wisteria. It will rain later and the sand will melt, forget itself. That dawn’s gesture’s just grist.

     Summer

Sundays, a white city pickup truck steams slowly through the side street spraying for mosquitoes. The fog machine’s engine, an insect, drowns out the sound of the engine of the truck, a steady gearless whine. The fog itself leaps back from a funnel trailing off the bed, appears to propel the truck alone, a jet of clouds under pressure. The white spray dissipates, gets grayer as it spreads and, heavier than air, it trails the truck, a wake that spreads and skirts the curbs of the street. It spills down the hill, fills the hollow, evaporates like that afternoon’s rain turning the concrete to vapor. Later, the truck crisscrosses the grid in the neighborhood, the sound muted and amplified by the spaces between houses, the trees, the yards, and the residue settles into the bunkers of the golf course, a ground blizzard sweeping over the greens, a fluid tarp. Above, the moon breaks up, fogged in the fog as it sets through it. The summer air twice thickened.

     Fall

White pine. The new needles replace needles that fall as straw, rake into springy piles in the gutter. The hardwoods stay bare-limbed, leaves exhausted. Clouds of mistletoe are caught in the branches, twig mist. The spindly azalea under-story. Too far north for Spanish moss, the trees trap trashed plastic bags, look like shit. But in the crevices and corners and on the stripped branches, lint from the cotton fields gathers. On the scored red brick and the dull mortar in between, woolly cotton patches of the stuff stuffs the joints, points the grout, a seeping spun sugar. The lint escapes the screened-in trailer trucks of the raw harvest or gets kicked up by the gleaning in the fields and threads itself into the wind, winds up coating anything with a burr enough to stick. It snows, little squalls of it accumulated in the niches, the pockets fall has turned out. It is snow that is not snow, a white reminder, until it dyes itself with all the other detritus, becomes the glue of bark and twigs and leaves, leaving nothing but filth, tilth, a kind of felt.
               

Tuscaloosa Lore and Legend: An Introduction

by Steven Casimer Kowalski

There is a Troll who lives beneath the Southbound Lurleen Wallace Bridge. He has a long tongue which he dangles down into the Black Warrior to lure fishes. When he catches one, his tongue rolls up like a yo-yo. It is rumored he went to Auburn.

A small but powerful band of Hobgoblins inhabit the lower stacks of the Gorgas Library. It is commonly assumed that they are responsible for the misplacing of books just before they are requested for scholarship. However, this assumption is false and book disappearances remain unexplained.

If you look at either side of the Bog Garden at the UA Arboretum at sunset, making sure to never look directly at the bog, you will see the reflection of a boy in the water. You can release him by saying his name three times. And once he is out he will grant you one wish. He then returns to the bog and, in his spare time, manages several rental properties in the city.

Beneath the Dreamland Barbeque are vast and complex sauce mines. They stretch deep into the Lithosphere and comprise the largest and most coveted natural sauce deposit in the world.

A flower grown in Tuscaloosa soil will generally bring good luck, two of them doubly so.

There is not a single haunted building in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The ghosts there prefer the outdoors and will often leave beer cans and tire-tread marks on the lawns of those who will one day join their ranks.

The A-7E Corsair on display at Veteran’s Memorial Park stands at a unique cross section of celestial magnetic fields. At this strange convergence, the normal laws of the physical world cease to exist. While a full study of this phenomenon has not been undertaken, it is agreed that one of its effects is a tendency to forget where one has parked one’s car.

Lake Tuscaloosa is home to a two headed sea creature named Eben-ezer. The creature was, for most of history, regarded as kind. Only recently has he been found out to be a gossip and a spreader of intrigue. To gain his favor, land a back flip on your wakeboard.

Three witches live in the belfry of Denny Chimes. Each year, after technicians precisely tune the chimes, the witches set to slowly detuning each note.

The Alabama Museum of Natural History has one of only five genuine unicorn horns known to exist. The horn was won in a poker game by then University of Alabama president Basil Manly. It was stored in secret until 1982 when a decision was made to hide the artifact in plain sight. The horn now poses as a bone in the skeleton of a Basilosaurus which hangs from the ceiling of the museum’s central hall.

The Alston Building in the city’s downtown area is a noted gathering spot for wizards. As a result, many of the downtown shops carry brightly colored capes and pointy hats.

The fountain at Shelby Park is actually the head of an ancient well-spring prized for years due to its curative properties. Headaches, stomach aches, nausea, dry mouth, fatigue, diarrhea, and dizziness are routinely abated by standing beneath a cascade of these waters for between five and fifteen minutes.

Beneath an unmarked grave at Evergreen Cemetery lies the body of Mary Hill, who died of an apparent poisoning in 1903 at the age of 17. Throughout the month of July, she rises from her grave and roams the southeast helping young men and women learn the art of fly fishing.

While once plentiful, the Leprechaun population of Tuscaloosa has fallen in recent years. Though city officials are dismayed, they frequently point out that the falling numbers coincide with national trends and are currently investing in several civic programs to provide incentives for the Leprechauns to stay.

The water of the Black Warrior River will render human inhibition and fear inert for 25 seconds. The individual must be completely submerged for the effect to take hold.

A curious phenomenon unique to Tuscaloosa is that it is very easy to dance there and look good while doing so. This causes frequent outbursts of dancing at nearly all hours. Doctors the world over recommend that people who cannot dance spend time in Tuscaloosa to improve their skills.

The last dragon to inhabit the greater Tuscaloosa region disappeared from record in the early 1700’s. The dragon was female and all known references use variants on the name “Woford.” It is rumored that Bryant-Denny Stadium is built directly above the large cavern which was once her home. To date, 114 brave men and woman have gone searching for her. All have returned safely and all have refused to share their story.
               

Trains

by Erin Lyndal Martin

Because darkness knew it would come to Tuscaloosa

and thread through the smoke of the paper mill,

embossing epitaphs, leaving the stench of the tire factory

uncloaked, it made an offering and set down train tracks

behind Ashley’s apartment. Therefore Natalie and I

accepted, offered back our selves and stride, bought cold beers

and kept them in our pockets, shaken after climbing

the magnolia tree. Our feet went down to the ground,

ditto the railroad’s scar which we walked past hackberry trees

and Natalie’s story about her lover who climbed the radio tower

to show her he would. Then our footpath shook, then the enormous

twin lights appeared. We hoped off the tracks into the darkness

that gave them to us, kissed each other’s cheeks, waited for the train to pass.

because there were pink petals on the first of may

by Erin Lyndal Martin

somewhere sometime I’ll say the last thing that I’ll ever say to you.

it makes me feel lonely now.    if I see your light on when I drive

home I’ll knock on your door with a box of pizza and a bottle of wine.

it’s the least I can do. that and staying silent during the game

shows, letting you whisper the answers to yourself like a liturgy. I

would like that. it would remind me why I love you.       and maybe I

would mention again how someone you didn’t know dreamed of you

dressing that way that you never dressed, not way back then, but how

you have stitched yourself to me now like pages in a book made from

yarn and cardboard where the letters are the height of knuckles



and I am reading this to you again over the din of classic rock and

law students comparing notes on esculpatory evidence and a little girl

in a striped shirt who is picking up littered cigarette boxes and I

think her father is going to tell her to stay away from them but

instead she rips off the proof of purchase so he can send it in to get

some reward or another, and then she is putting the box top under the

ashtray to keep the wind from blowing it away



and I am  thinking that someone somewhere would be sad to see the way

you talk to me, jealous even, and how this line crooks like an

interstate is wiggling through whatever strange messiness we’re bound

for, awkward and jagged, the way the roads look on that old trucker’s

atlas you have where we spread it out on the whole sofa and point at

places we used to live and places we’ll go once we leave alabama and

the hackberry trees and the exoskeletons of palmetto bugs that litter

our floors



and I think you’ll still say beautiful things about me

not because I was beautiful, not all the time at least

but because that’s in your nature
and I will love you for it



the past few days while you’ve been away, I’ve thought about watering

your plants.

when you are really gone, I will take advantage of vertical space and

stack things up high in my inevitably small apartments because of you

and I will know that you are getting drunk and napping in stairwells,

or you are writing painful stories about old men who make their own

artifacts and swim out beyond the shore to leave them in a lake.



at night the am radio will toss and turn between collegiate sports and

conspiracy theories and scraps of donna summer will rain in like

confetti.       I didn’t think I could miss you. I didn’t think I

could not.
               

the bama bolero

by Juan Reyes

idleness a function of power
time a sum of everywhere you can help
ours is the fourth rubble on the left
at the magnolia lying across the road

bring your gloves hedgerow cutters and
gas-drunk chainsaws and loose arms
we’ll wait, toppled roof broken tables
collapsed cupboards and tossed kitchen sink

if you’re hungry, we have cookies

we’re not the only dog and pony show, though
you’ll see, the new prairies beaming now
like an after hours prom, confetti everywhere
and who knew we’d have so many brooms

to sweep bodies trees and mud the evening
spinning dancing downstreet leaping wind left
its head cocked gasping searching, the right step
left step misstep, the dedicated pacing it takes

to choreograph the bama bolero

and it’s no one’s fault, really, even the clouds
run blind raging tearing crying with no regard
to the traffic and standing walls of people
lakes schools and malls, and so ours

is the fourth rubble on the left, past the blue
flatbed pickup and broken plywood, walking
on the shattered bathtub, pacing circles
around the overturned gutted sedan, see there

that’s me, i’m the one waving