Sydney Lea

It comes in sharp, a smell like the James River's foam. It remembers azalea, willow, the sway Of laurel, or camellia's pink-smoked buds dawning open like a woman's hands with moonlight in his dark room. It flings invisible from where he lives hands [...]

His old man's gone to ground, who bruised him black   when young. So's the drunken uncle whom people nicknamed Coal-   chunk, who hurt him otherwise, who's likely dead as well, though how say how or where? Violently-in-jail would make a decent be [...]

It was my scream, not the knock on the head, that put white spots before my eyes. Nothing lay handy to attack but a metal barrel, I crashed it like a cymbal, spilling rubbish. The racket sent our cat flat-belly across the kitchen floor and downcell [...]

As forecast, last night brought this slight layer of snow. Today will be my final one to hunt grouse: the feed is vanished, the game-cover skinny, the scent worse and worse. I have, of course, the 'flu. In recent years the first storm, the last d [...]

—for Jim Cox Blue deepens, sucks the children's shouts away as crickets creep to the ballfield, trill and scrape. His radio whispers from another time zone: the Plains states beg for rain, have even called —out of his room in a county "home"— a [...]

He knelt next to the kennel and traced with one finger the long track. Its delicacy surprised him, a hoofmark like a stretched Valentine's heart, the cleft narrow. But the creature's power was shown by the gash in the chain link and the head of the [...]

  —in memory of DV Cousin, I remember the first drunk: more than either of us might say of many to follow. Both of us fresh off some new amorous sorrow: you, knees like river weeds, down on the bank, chanting "I Love You, Peggy Sue," wretched who [...]