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…
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…
Her youngest crawls through the dog's dish, then back again to retrieve a red Fruit-Loop floating in water. She sits underneath her crackle of blonde hair – three shades of peroxide streaked like chicken trails through straw, while the TV screen flashes her time like riding out the weekend on the fumes of her clunker through town, marking […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
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 born author and editor […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
First thing you notice is the color. “Red” doesn’t do it justice. This shade only exists in Technicolor. They haunt my dreams in late February, when a foot of snow covers the ground. Not ruby, not scarlet, not cardinal. “Pulsing red” because they beat like hearts on my plate. There are four left. Last harvest of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
A Milk Jug Birdhouse My mind rejects what my eyes can see. A girl— using a phone book for a booster seat— sits at a table in the yard, beside an abandoned clothes dryer. She’s carving a birdhouse from an empty milk carton. A suit of armor and a plastic pineapple are under a longleaf pine, where […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator (magazine) Issue 0
GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator (magazine) Issue 1
