by zamora | November 6, 2023
Just south of what was once the Louisville city limit, beyond the border marked by a long-abandoned toll gate, are the headwaters of a creek that once ran over a distance of more than a mile. It wove, according to a nineteenth century map, through what were then...
by zamora | October 20, 2023
Even cleft palate, considered a deformity today, may have been viewed differently in the past. Erika Molnar, a paleopathologist at the University of Szeged in Hungary, described a man born with a severe cleft palate and complete spina bifida around 900 C.E. in central...
by zamora | October 20, 2023
You pretend to play on the rusting swing set knowing that when Dad has finished skinning the rabbits, he’ll need you. He’ll holler from the coon dogs’ pen that you need to run up to the house and ask Mom for a pan of cold water. You are anxious knowing the way he’ll...
by zamora | October 20, 2023
The mud smelled like shit. It was shit, partially, but it felt better to say it smelled like shit instead of admitting that I was, in fact, wading ankle deep in a chunky and slimy swamp of mud and trash and, yes, shit. Of both human and dog...
by zamora | October 20, 2023
Dwight. I met Dwight at the beach pavilion. My cousin, Ann, was with me. He said he’d been in trouble with the law. He and his buddy broke into the local police station to steal some marijuana. I call that desperation but forgave him because I was looking...
by zamora | October 20, 2023
But who will reveal to our waking kenThe forms that swim and the shapes that creepUnder the waters of sleep? -Sidney Lanier, “The Marshes of Glynn” Words hold a mystic, physical appeal for me; I feel them in my mouth, they tickle the ear—rarely, in...
by zamora | October 19, 2023
Country musician Tyler Childers stumbles over the word ‘resources’ during an interview in Colorado while trying to explain the history and legacy of colonialism and exploitation in Appalachia. Or he doesn’t exactly stumble, but rather loses the word entirely....
by zamora | October 19, 2023
On the dark side of the cul-de-sac lay Dr. Wagman’s Woods. His ten-acre parcel of second- or third-growth deciduous forest was one of the only undeveloped plots in Allendale, an undistinguished commuter hamlet twenty miles northwest of New York City. Beneath the...
by zamora | October 19, 2023
The street was empty. An abandoned toddler’s swing hung from a neighbor’s porch, reminding me of one of those fake nuclear towns, filled with accessories of life but no life itself. My grandma, who’d bought her beach house over...
by zamora | October 17, 2023
The hen knows when it is dawn but leaves it to the cock to announce. The myth I heard is this. An old woman named Buktu, the last of her village, set out alone in the desert. Her family had gone, her friends had died, and her intention was to do the same. She wandered...
