We are proud to introduce our exciting new series at the museum—Americana Stories—highlighting poetry, fiction, and essays that will bring outstanding new work to our museum readers. Each week we feature selections of exciting repurposed Americana, a chance to expand the writers we serve with new fiction, poetry, memoir, flash, and essays, and regularly bring new voices and new perspectives on American culture to our museum readers.
Walking Directions to Dunton’s General Store—Sara Epstein
From our house on Beaver Pond, walk past the Murdaughs’ house.
On the dirt road, kick the stones and watch the dust swirl.
Cattails rise from the edge of the pond behind the four identical cottages.
Next pass the Silvas, and then the fourth house.Can’t remember who lives there this year, it changes every year.
Read the full poem here.
Family Legend—Cassandra Whitaker
Read the full poem here.
ON THE OCCASION OF TRACEY’S 54th BIRTHDAY, AND THE 175th BIRTHDAY OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN—Kim Roberts
“The most popular words used in the pages of Scientific American are displayed here by
frequency, from 1845 through 2020…Each year is represented by a single word, selected
through a text-analysis project that started with all 5,107 issues of the print magazine.”
How to get it down on paper?
The words, beyond what words require,
when the early outlines of day
steal over your beloved, a person
whose role in this act is to receive
Read the full poem here.
The Aquanaut—Fiction by Francis Felix Rosa
Nightmarish shades of darkening blue cascaded into one another, moving continuously downward. The slosh of ocean clanged through iron girders, creating a bedroom echo in the corrugated steel cabin, like a leaky faucet. Crayola-colored fins, sparked outside the porthole beside blankets, shag carpeting, and stuffed toys in their jellyfish fur. Life at last!
Read the full story here.
Elliot’s Story—Fiction by S. Blair Jockers
Looking back, I realize I had a serious crush on Joe. People didn’t think that way in 1949, but I should have figured it out the day he told me he was leaving Pensacola as soon as his enlistment was up at the end of the year.
“I’m sick of the Navy,” he said. It was June, and we were eating grilled cheese sandwiches together in front of the PX. “I’m outta here, off to Montana, someplace like that.”
Read the full story here.
Beyond—by Lou Turner
Read the full poem here.
Elliot’s Story—Fiction by S. Blair Jockers
Looking back, I realize I had a serious crush on Joe. People didn’t think that way in 1949, but I should have figured it out the day he told me he was leaving Pensacola as soon as his enlistment was up at the end of the year.
“I’m sick of the Navy,” he said. It was June, and we were eating grilled cheese sandwiches together in front of the PX. “I’m outta here, off to Montana, someplace like that.”
Read the full story here.
Skin Smooth—Laine Derr
Until her mother died,
she’d forgotten a thumb
calloused from killing –
Read the full poem here.
Morels—Amy Love
“When old apple trees quit yielding,” she says,
fingering scarred bark with sun-spotted hands,
“farmers beat them with chains. It stirs up traumatin,
a hormone that shocks them into blooming and bearing again.”
“Apocalypse sex for trees?” She laughs, but
her thumb probes a rift and I flush just watching.
Read the full poem here.
Sometimes We Just Want History to Repeat—Karen Paul Holmes
One of the last times Father managed to stand in the kitchen
to chop and to stir his Macedonian Bean Soup,
we captured notes on paper now tomato-stained.
The five of us keep trying to recreate him.
Read the full poem here.
The Songster and the Horses—a Hollywood Elegy with Cocaine—Fiction by Nick Sweeney
Bass-fiddler-about-town Edvald Ebert found the place at a crossroads off Glendale, a mansion going for a song.
“Which song?” songster-at-large Stephen thought out loud. He forgot that Ebert always answered rhetorical questions. Didn’t Americans know you weren’t supposed to do that?
Read the full story here.
the museum of americana: A LITERARY REVIEW 