Happy April! Regarding Amy Karon's prose poem "Arizona Drought," staff member Lou Berger said, "Gorgeous. I could smell the tar leaking from the pavement, see the wild bracken amidst subdivision homes," and Keith Lesmeister's "Everything Feels Far Away" is an exercise in breathtaking sorrow, capturing the emotion we all hope to achieve when writing (and reading) nonfiction. Travis Truax's "Ecotone" and "Driving Back," two prose poems, were favorites of Kelly Waite & Sarah Weaver. Fiction based on the Creek War (War of 1812) is the essence of "Emuckfaw" by debut author Shelley K. Davenport, an admirable effort by this new author. And staff member Craig Woychik said Amanda Crum's "The Harvester" aptly expressed the emotions needed for a story such as that. We hope you enjoy each selection. Our Fictions line will remain open all summer. Submission details are here. We'll soon announce our 2018 award winners - stay tuned! With nearly 700 prose poems and lyric essays submitted, and dozens of full book manuscripts, we still have some reading to do, and final acceptances to make, but we should finish in the next few weeks or so. Thanks for visiting Eastern Iowa Review! - Editor
APRIL
NONFICTION & PROSE POETRY
(PROSE POETRY)
ARIZONA DROUGHT
AMY KARON
~
Dusk of scorched August kills lights and batteries. Bereft, we feel our way downstairs to sleepwalk rippled asphalt. Night blooms around us. Awake now, we trace faded memories of desert petrichor, the sweet, pungent exhale of creosote after rain. Lights stay out, and eastern hills birth a dense moon. Our neighbors emerge, phoneless and befuddled, to murmur low and circle the lone field where nighthawks croak and boom and poorwills snatch moths from ghosts of ironwood. Moonset sends these tenants of earth and sky to sleep. But we stay out, the join of our fingers a compass marking the path toward thunderheads that burst on the horizon (at last, at last, at last).
(HYBRID ESSAY)
EVERYTHING FEELS FAR AWAY
KEITH LESMEISTER
~
Her name was Juliet.
She was my mother. She is my mother. I still don’t know how to refer to her—in the past or present.
She was five feet tall, soft-spoken. Sometimes I had to lean in to hear her.
On my sixteenth birthday she threw me a surprise party. We had “dump” dinner.
She married my father on December 1, 1978. I was born five months and twelve days later, on May 12.
In the evenings, she wrote letters—pen to paper handwritten letters—to family members, most of whom still live in the Philippines.
Continue reading.
(PROSE POETRY)
ECOTONE
TRAVIS TRUAX
~
You live on the edges of learning, of gaining, of leaving. You live on the fringes, the fabric of life-gone-by. And what do you get? You get the ruddy distances in the desert west, you get memory. You get your mother picking you up from school. You get your grandmother’s tea. You get the crude, rock-drawn novel of where you’ve been. It all returns on the coattails of going, of coming. A carapace of what lasts. The ecotone, the place between. Transition. An estuary, a reed bed, the space between biomes. A blend. You feel, always, the tension of what you walk away from long after it’s gone. That lag in time. The river, trying to understand salt. The salmon somehow understanding both.
Continue reading his other poem.
APRIL
fiction
(DEBUT FICTION)
EMUCKFAW
SHELLEY K. DAVENPORT
~
Elisha Massey had never wanted to go to war. He wanted to stay home, marry Bess, grow corn and teach his eventual grandsons how to whittle. None of this seemed very likely, now that he was waist deep in the frigid waters of a slippery Alabama stream, trying to keep his shot-to-pieces cousin from drowning while the Red Sticks handily slaughtered Jackson’s army in the mist.
He gave Caleb another hitch, trying to ignore the seven arrows protruding from his cousin’s body and muttering consolations like, “Just wait ‘til we get you upon the bank there,” and “I seen worse, I seen worse.”
Continue reading.
(WOODS-WESTERN-MOUNTAIN-APPALACHIAN)
THE HARVESTER
AMANDA CRUM
~
The old man walked along the border of his property, feeling the cold squish up through his boots like a rising damp. There was nothing here but scrub and fallen tree limbs, tangled together in a fractured web, but something about the edge of his land came as a comfort in the dying days of autumn. Here was a view of the last forty years of his life, breakback and hard-fought. If he stood at the edge of the barn and looked west, he could almost see the entirety of his parcel floating in waves, undulating rows of wheat stubble bowing to the sunset. He didn’t need photographs or old letters. Here was the seed of his memory, tucked deep down into the velvety soil.
Continue reading.
APRIL HIGHLIGHTED CONTRIBUTORS:
Amanda Crum is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in publications such as the Bluegrass Accolade and Dark Eclipse and in several anthologies, including Beyond The Hill and Two Eyes Open. Her first chapbook of horror-inspired poetry, The Madness In Our Marrow, was shortlisted for a Bram Stoker Award nomination in 2015. She is also the co-editor of Whiskey Shivers Magazine, alongside friend and fellow writer Chris Shea. She currently lives in Kentucky with her husband and two children.
Shelley Davenport has one ghost story published by Everyday Fiction. She lives and writes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Amy Karon's poetry and creative prose have appeared in Iowa Heritage Illustrated, Cricket, Inking the Unthinkable: Poems About Poetry, Mystic Blue Review, and Eternal Haunted Summer. She lived for years in the American Southwest and now divides her time between India and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Keith Lesmeister is the author of the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here (MG Press 2017). His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Redivider, Slice Magazine, and many others. His nonfiction has appeared in River Teeth, Sycamore Review, The Good Men Project, Tin House Open Bar, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. He received his M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives and works in rural northeast Iowa.
Travis Truax earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Southeastern Oklahoma State University in 2010. After college he spent several years working in various national parks out west. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ascent, Quarterly West, Bird's Thumb, Barnstorm, and The Cossack Review. Currently he resides in Bozeman, Montana.
Amanda Crum is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in publications such as the Bluegrass Accolade and Dark Eclipse and in several anthologies, including Beyond The Hill and Two Eyes Open. Her first chapbook of horror-inspired poetry, The Madness In Our Marrow, was shortlisted for a Bram Stoker Award nomination in 2015. She is also the co-editor of Whiskey Shivers Magazine, alongside friend and fellow writer Chris Shea. She currently lives in Kentucky with her husband and two children.
Shelley Davenport has one ghost story published by Everyday Fiction. She lives and writes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Amy Karon's poetry and creative prose have appeared in Iowa Heritage Illustrated, Cricket, Inking the Unthinkable: Poems About Poetry, Mystic Blue Review, and Eternal Haunted Summer. She lived for years in the American Southwest and now divides her time between India and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Keith Lesmeister is the author of the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here (MG Press 2017). His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Redivider, Slice Magazine, and many others. His nonfiction has appeared in River Teeth, Sycamore Review, The Good Men Project, Tin House Open Bar, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. He received his M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives and works in rural northeast Iowa.
Travis Truax earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Southeastern Oklahoma State University in 2010. After college he spent several years working in various national parks out west. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ascent, Quarterly West, Bird's Thumb, Barnstorm, and The Cossack Review. Currently he resides in Bozeman, Montana.
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