Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 36

Ghost Teeth, by Dena Rash Guzman

My dead and buried speak from the memorial cards inside my white Bible. They command through their ghost teeth, "Again." Grace! There is no again. The leaves turn red and turn gold. I go old, writing softly, pulling down inky words like snuff spit into great-grandma's tin can.   Dena Rash Guzman is a Vegas […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Hillbilly Handfishin'

What do you all think of this show? I like it, but I wonder if this isn't just another  'look at the weird stuff hillbillies do' show.   On the other hand, I first learned of noodling from Burkhard Bilger's Noodling for Flatheads, a wonderfully interesting book about noodling and much more.  

The Bull: A Jack Tale, fiction by Jeff Wallace

Jack and Mrs. Jones stood in the foyer of the Big House. Her half-blind, soupy eyes blinked, focused, and looked him over. He felt them range from his worn tennis shoes up his thin legs and thread-bare jeans and across his grey cotton t-shirt. Her lips were pulled together in what, if she had been […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Portrait of a Robot, fiction by William Trent Pancoast

He doesn't know how he got this way. Crazy, that is. Most things, you think about them long enough, you come up with an answer. All he knows for sure is that he got to work this morning in his Chevy pickup, the laundry is done, there are ham sandwiches in his lunch pail, and […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Frank Bill's Hardcore Stories: Crimes in Southern Indiana

Farrar Straus Giroux made an interesting—and exciting—choice when they published Frank Bill's linked collection Crimes in Southern Indiana. Never known for having crime fiction or indeed for having books about anything other than upper class literature or literature in translation, this first selection of their new fiction line, Originals, fairly screams its difference from the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

The Rack, fiction by Mather Schneider

I needed to make a rack for the back of my old green truck, so I bought these 2 X 12 boards, treated cedar, from the lumber yard. I was from Chicago, new to Arkansas, but I was learning my way around. We had been in those backwoods for a year, me and Clare and […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Mountaintop Removal Myth: a summary

From Beth Wellington at the Guardian. CNN correspondent Soledad O'Brien's recent piece on mountaintop removal (MTR) in the Appalachian mountains has the troubling title, "Steady job or healthy environment: what [sic] would you choose?" How about we choose both? In any case, MTR does not, despite industry claims, deliver employment to offset its environmental damage. It's simply […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Poems by Dennis Mahagin

Blues For Billy C I'm used to being fucked but it's not what you think; flip me a couple bucks? I won't trip, I don't drink. A shower of violet misty steam feels good. Costs four bucks at Pilot truckstop banya cedarwood. It's cool in the morning you don't look like a saver. I be […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Interview with Verless Doran

Verless Doran lives and writes in the hills of East Tennessee. His works have appeared in The Smoking Poet, Heroin Love Songs, Lit Up Magazine, The Suisun Valley Review, Prick of the Spindle Press, Dogzplot Literary Journal, and Riverbabble Journal. His first collection of short stories, Saints and Angels, is available now online and in […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Black Coffee, fiction by Dena Rash Guzman

1- If you were sitting here with me and I closed my eyes and asked you what color they are, you wouldn't know. You don't see me. The other boy who loves me, I don't love him. I don't love him back at all, because I'm stuck loving you, but he looks at me like […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...