Ode to the Tongue

by Jeff Worley

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This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

Jeff Worley

Jeff Worley has published poems widely in such magazines as The Threepenny Review, Black Warrior Review, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Sewanee Review, and The Southern Review. His latest book, A Little Luck, won the 2012 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize from Texas Review Press. He divides his time between Lexington (Kentucky) and a cabin at Cave Run Lake. For more information than anyone should ever have to know about Jeff (he says), visit: jeff-worley.com.

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Ashland, Kentucky

by Julie Gard

No teeth. Soft face. One hundred years old and straight-sitting all day. Riding mower up and over and around (her son). Tenants, always tenants. Young mother on porch on phone, flaking trailer smooth skin. Hollers, curves, and turns. Where my grandmother lived, what she left at 23. Who stays? Virgie stays. In the Coalton cemetery

Spring 2017

Siblings

by Sheila Carter-Jones

because my sister hadn’t been home in a few years and hadn’t been bedside when our mother died of lung cancer and I wasn’t there either but had been there all day and had gone home for something to eat where after rice and chicken livers smothered in gravy with sliced onions and bell peppers

Summer 2024

Autumnal

by Kathleen Hellen

One-by-one the trees undress in carcasses
of seed, scatter in cascade, in flimsy under-orange,
a negligee of red. The colors lost, caught with vine between
the tines of rile and wind. What dread in bleeding?

Spring 2013

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