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Image of several grocery store aisles and a woman appearing to be taking inventory of the items.

Left column is quoted from Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States, 1962

Sarah Elkins lives in southern West Virginia. Her work is forthcoming from Cimarron Review. Her poem “Water Tension” was a finalist for the 2021 Quarterly West Poetry Contest. Previous work also appears in The Rappahannock Review, Passengers Journal, The Shore, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. Sarah holds an MFA from Pacific University. She serves as a member of Lewisburg, WV City Council and chair of the Parks Commission. She and her husband coach a youth mountain bike team and own/operate Hammer Cycles bike shop.

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Fiction,

Arborist Anthem

BY BV Lawson

I checked my notes, wondering where to go from here since it seemed we were at an impasse. This was Day 94, and Dendro, as I had nicknamed it, had gone silent. At least, as far as I could tell from a tree.

Nonfiction,

In the Garden of Gethsemane, a lamp

BY Jamie Etheridge

Olive trees stunt and twist and gnarl. It’s easy to dismiss them, to not even notice the rows and rows of olive orchards when driving around the countryside in places like Greece or Jordan or Turkey. They are unaesthetic, utilitarian. They are the ugly ducklings of trees.

But they are also my favorite story of survival, a story of flourishing.