Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 50

Leveling Appalachia

Link courtesy of Endless Emendation.

During the last two decades, mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia has destroyed or severely damaged more than a million acres of forest and buried nearly 2,000 miles of streams. Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining, a video report produced by Yale Environment 360 in collaboration with MediaStorm, focuses on the environmental and social impacts of this practice and examines the long-term effects on the region's forests and...

Rosanne Griffeth's Errid and Delilah, fiction

Some nights, running his rig down Highway 25 through Hot Springs, Errid would go past the brown brick building. He'd glance to see if any lights glowed in the three trailers out back, like maybe she still worked there. Maybe she worked there right now, her black nylon slip sticking to her belly and her bra digging a rash into her flesh in the summer heat. Maybe she turned her back to some stranger, tucked a strand of limp blond hair behind her ear and said over her shoulder, "Hey Mister, can ...

Karl Koweski's Holly Go Darkly, fiction

When I cup my palm against my mouth I can smell her on me.  A not unpleasant odor that instills a desire for more.  I stand in the bathroom of an almost expensive hotel.  There's enough light bulbs above the mirror to illuminate a Hollywood movie.  I can feel my self-esteem puddling at my toes, seeing the bathroom spotlights emblazon my scalp through the sparsity of mousy brown hair.

The water continues to gush and swirl down the drain.  The toiletries loosely gathered around the sink belong s...

Trailer Park Fragments by David Ensminger

Mike Young published this e-book, Trailer Park Fragments: A Place called Whispering Lanes, through his Magic Helicopter Press. I urge you to check it out. I was going to say it gives you a perspective on trailer parks you maybe haven't seen before but that's horseshit. It just affects me, who has never lived in a trailer park but has known a few. It's an impressionistic set of pieces I think you'll enjoy-- proems, not prose poems--because if anything's linear here, it seems accidental. Great...

Rural Brain Drain

I left, too. They're talking about people like me, in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

By Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas

What is going on in small-town America? The nation's mythology of small towns comes to us straight from the The Music Man's set designers. Many Americans think about flyover country or Red America only during the culture war's skirmishes or campaign season. Most of the time, the rural crisis takes a back seat to more visible big-city troubles. So while there is a...

Silas House and Ben Sollee Read and Sing

Two Poems by D. E. Oprava

DEEP VIDALIA DIRT

Tomorrow he'll be back at work cleaning rigs
on a truck-stop tarmac off highway forty-one, sucking
up diesel and putting more sweat, less love
in the hub caps that need to gleam brighter
than a southern sun. He's had his eye on a girl
working in the diner, Melissa smiles out through
the plate-glass window as he hums a tune every
man here seems to know and at night
he'll be on the porch playing guitar listening
to cicadas ring as others inside sing, music
seems to come from the very...

Down by the Creek, fiction by M.E. Parker

Stove up from working the harvest, Jessie hobbled up the porch steps holding his hand out for Chester. "Ches," he called. The old bloodhound, "nothing but ears and ribs" snoozing in the shape of a question mark, usually stumbled up from his spot on a mildewed tarp behind a short-block motor when he heard Jessie coming. "Where are you boy?"

At fourteen, Chester wasn't chasing rabbits anymore, but he still enjoyed a scratch behind the ears every evening. When Chester didn't stir, Jessie gave...

Rural Medical Camp Tackles Health Care Gaps

  Betty Lettenberger/NPR

Link gakked from AppyLove, story from NPR.

Think about this story for a moment. Or two. We need new, better, options for health care, and we need them yesterday. And that's probably as political a post as I'll ever consciously make.

It was a Third World scene with an American setting. Hundreds of tired and desperate people crowded around an aid worker with a bullhorn, straining to hear the instructions and worried they might be left out.

Some had arrived at the Wise...

Wine and Cheese with Alexi and Natasha

Last night in my apartment, I heard Natasha through the thin walls, "Nyet! Nyet!" Today I stare at her black eye when we have wine, whiskey and cheese as we do every month.

"You like my wife?" Alexi asks.

Natasha was wet-eyed like a puppy behind the glass of a pet store and he was the first man that wanted to take her home after high school. A month later they were in Florida, a place where the screen door blew off after each storm. Twenty years of fighting later she works an old drill and a ca...