Crossroads

Imani Perry on the South’s Vital Place in America’s Identity

The South is made to carry the nation’s slop jar. That’s deliberate, because then the United States doesn’t have to actually contend with all of its violence. We just put the blame on that region where bad stuff happens and where those backward people are. I don’t think it’s incidental, either, that it is the Blackest region culturally (and demographically) speaking. So it is at once seen as the most racist and the Blackest.

Lost and Found

I want to be a good man, a good son, but that’s hard to pull off when it’s 100 degrees and feels like 115 because of the 90 percent humidity—current conditions in southeast Georgia. I’ve come home to visit my eighty-two-year-old mother and assuage some of my guilt for not being here fifty weeks out of the year.

Time in the Shape of Hills

My bones wake me up at night. It was my hips at first, then my femurs screaming. Now my ankles. But my doctor won’t listen. It started last year when my son and I walked the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route that runs through Spain. I’m sure that’s why my bones hurt—from all the walking.

To the Arresting Officer

You patted me down roughly, went through my pockets and pulled out three crumpled twenties, some guitar picks, my stepfather’s pocketknife. “You got drugs, son?”

Without the Gate

Usually he has a morning episode, then he’s placid most of the day, chatty, gently losing his mind in starts and stops. But after dinner the maximum horror falls on him. He stiffens, his face wracked. He’s at the threshold; he can almost remember the “thing.”

A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

Art During Wartime

In opposition to Vladimir Putin’s invasion, Ukrainian performing artists are reasserting their national identity. When I photographed the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, they were rehearsing the works of Stankovych and Barvinsky, Ukrainian composers who’d been banned during the Soviet era. This declaration of Ukrainian culture was considered so important that fighting-aged male symphony members were permitted to leave the country when the symphony took up residency in Germany.

Back Cover

Cows in the Parking Lot of the Emergency Dentist

The day I waded out of the lake with a stand-up / paddleboard and a split tooth was four days after I knew / I would leave you and eight days before I told you / I knew.

Hymn

We exist on the cusp of light and ruin. / Some nights I pray for time // to fold into itself, then spit us out / small and smooth like tumbled rocks, // alloys of past and present.