Combing the naked soil one country morning, my mammoth Pawpaw taught me to spot an Indian arrowhead amidst dun rocks, beneath the wheel of crow chatter filling pine shadows cast long like swords across buckbrush. Imagine my hands, the buck fever I would have felt (countryside echoing rifle-blast) if we had shadowed that day like […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Something in the sound set in me a longing to grow up, listening late at night to the low departing whistle of the last express as it escaped to the world walled out from me by the mountains. Later when I learned that my coal valley city lay above a catacomb of tunnels and shafts […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Old man in a caravan grease-stained coverall retired lo lo nine point three years now. On the shortest day of the year shimmed down to a decimal electric fires spark, smolder, the trailer fills with creosote smoke; a bird’s nest ignites into a crown of thorns. The whipped cur of oily dawn slinks around this trailer park as Orion […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In the lumpy region I call home, a study determined to the surprise of few that tooth disease is our most serious health problem. If you’re working three low-paying jobs just to get by—as one of my neighbors did until he had a stroke while cutting his firewood—who has time for the dentist even if […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
From Salon, by Deborah Kennedy: I was 6 years old when I saw my first cockfight. It must have been a gray day, because even though I was very young, I remember clearly the bright color of the roosters’ feathers – white, black and blood red, even before any damage was done – and of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The sudden vision of the wings of seven-banded color made me halt as I headed for the doomed pig’s pen. I blinked at the striped light like refractions from twin prisms and the knife slipped from my hand and I swiveled and the men behind me parted. In a trance I retraced my steps and sat […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Don't miss it: Offutt interview by Alex Dezen
The waitress has a hummingbird tattoo behind her ear. She sings Volare, over the clanking and clatter. I sit in a booth next to a window. I let the sun warm my hands as I wait for my soup and bread. This morning I found a nest of your hair in the upstairs drain. I […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
They haggled out the terms. “You know I like to go fishing,” Ten said, “at least once a week. I do not like to work indoors. I won’t make much money.” “Well, but I like to have nice things.” “And I understand that, Joley, and you’ll have as good as I can provide you with, but you’ll […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Nashville Punk Scene Decades & dues before Hank III cometh with his thermo-chemical cow punk, Jason & the Scorchers rolled onto Rock City like a barrel keg cooler brandishing neon notes to Nashville’s conservative music establishment stomping Punk’s Liberty Bell hell into the plastered beer torn psyche’s of unfuturistic fans who would transform the audience of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator (magazine) Issue 0
GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator (magazine) Issue 1
