Category: Poetry

Southern Legitimacy Statement: First off, my name is Pepper. Nuff said. Secondly, I’m from Mississippi. But to continue… in the summers I would visit my Mamaw who made “sun tea” by putting a jar with filled with water, tea bags, and...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I swear on a stack of Bibles I’m from the south. To be specific, I’m a Tarheel born and a Tarheel bred and when I die I’ll be a Tarheel dead. I can still twirl my baton...

SLS- my grand father was a miner, then a railroad man before he left that life to live in Erie Pa and chase my grand mother. My wife grandmother lived in West Virginia where her father was shot dead on...

Mr. Martin needs no detailed Southern Legitimacy Statement, he has graced our website before today but I do want to include this: “I am a Southerner by birth and tradition. I was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1933. I send these pieces...

SLS I was born, like everyone else, in a particular place.  Alabama:  not just a Southern state, but The Heart of Dixie, where vowels are long and round.  I spent my early years in the woods (without a gun) searching for answers to how the...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in the South Carolina Low Country in a swamp so think that airplanes had to shift into low gear to fly over it. I retrieved the bones of Quentin Compson from the...

Southern Legitimacy Statement:  I’d like to tell you about the poorly shrouded frost-burnt parrot carcass stashed in a friend’s grandmother’s freezer, but it’s not my story to share. I do tell on my housemates’ haints all the time, though, because...