Ettore Cassetta :: Ghost Country
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My maternal grandfather was born in the south of the Marche region, southern Italy, in 1930. In 1948 he joined the Carabinieri Corps in hopes to find stable employment after the war, and was sent southern still,...
Adrienne Pilon :: Roots
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live pretty far south of the Mason-Dixon line, in central North Carolina. Though I’m a transplant, I make a mean batch of chow-chow and a sublime bourbon pecan pie. And those bitters mentioned in this piece?...
Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy :: Home Again
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am Southern by nature as well as birth. I like my tea sweet, spring finds me digging in the dirt to plant flowers and vegetable. I eat my okra fried and on Sundays you’ll find me...
C.E. O’Banion :: Fire Ants
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and raised in East Texas, I’ve lived in the bogs of southern culture my entire life. From a town with a Baptist church so big it transmits sermons to New Orleans, to college in Baton Rouge,...
Anthony Picardi :: infection ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement I moved to a small farm on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in 2004. Last year, we finalized a conservation easement on our entire 64-acre farm so it would be perpetually preserved. The community of woods, pond, fields and...
Richard Weaver: “In the Year of the Mullet”
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born on the same day that George Armstrong Custer died, though “Autie”, as he called his adopted self, and I never exchanged letters. But that don’t make me a soldier or a Southerner. The first...
May Jordan: “Walking Through”
Walking Through A Sunday lit with sunlightmade the mountainof snow we accumulated, shine as if a glacier at dawn.I was up-stairs getting dressedfor church when suddenly,my husband called for meto come down in a hurry . . .a giant, chestnut...
Barbara Conrad: “This Bed”
This Bed I’m counting the years I’ve slept in this Charleston four-poster rice bed,and yes, the men who’ve slept here with me. More than five, fewer than a dozen, only two still rooted in regret. Even when nights are long...
Paul Jones: “Hell”
About my Southernness: I am still Southern. The other day, I visited the Old St Paul’s Cemetery near Newton, NC. The place is chock full of Setzers, my grandmother’s people. The first one in the ground there came from Heidelberg...
David Kirby: “I’m Not the Person She Thinks You Are”
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I spent the first twenty-one years of my life in Baton Rouge. Like everyone else, I knew all about Billy Cannon, the LSU halfback who won the Heisman Trophy and was later arrested for counterfeiting and sent...
Dead Mule Submissions and more…
Hey ya’ll. I sent an email to those of you out there with submissions sitting in the Submittable hopper for the last eight months or more. Basically, if you submitted this year and I didn’t respond, please message me through...
What’s Your Label? Valerie MacEwan
I choose my label. “Writer” It’s rectangular. And temporary. I remove the large blue HELLO, I AM ____________ paper tag from my sweater and stick it to the mirror. Twenty years ago, my father put another label above my left breast. This...
Alexandra Melnick: Blade Running in the South
(Reprint from 2017 October Issue of the Dead Mule, seems very relevant today) In 1990, at a public lecture series on art in Los Angeles, three out of five leading urban planners agreed that they hoped someday L.A. would look...
Poetry
Essays
