Americana Stories is a weekly feature of poetry and prose that examines
and re-envisions American culture.
The long list of people who want to run away with the circus,
by MJ McGinn
graffiti pirate ship hold outs
asleep in hammocks stick
and poke smiles
that feeling when you’re really doing it
combing your hair with fingers and sea shells
Read the full poem here.
Cityscape After Our Old Cat’s Death and a Summer Shower,
by Susanna Lang
Ronan Park, Chicago
All the traditional June flowers—once-blooming roses
like red velvet blankets thrown over fences, purple
clematis, orange daylilies that only last the day—all
more vivid after the rain; sharper smell of garden dirt
and honeysuckle and urine as I walk through puddles
shimmery with oil outside the construction fence.
Read the full poem here.
This Is Not Nostalgia, by Anne Panning
“Rural America’s in Decline” the headlines read.
I do the math of corn and beans, subtract Main Street.
My parents’ general store demolished now and dead.
They came for overalls, Havarti, twine, white bread;
It’s best to buy your bacon off the slab.
“Rural America’s in Decline” the headlines read.
Read the full poem here.
Two Poems by Robert Estes
DISCRETIONARY POWER
We took up chewing tobacco
for a couple of weeks
My friends and I did
in the ninth grade
Just to push it
to the limit of bravado
I put a chaw in my mouth
in class one day
FLIGHT DELAY
Facing me on the other side
of the low partition
that separates our food,
a beautiful young woman
leans forward to
peer intently
into her plate,
eyebrows dark with authority,
Read both poems here.
Two Poems by KateLynn Hibbard
Decompensating
Little pings of rain on the window, cold, grey sky,
autumn coming. Now the rain gathers speed,
momentum, camaraderie,
a social movement of rain, we hurry
to get out of the rain as though
we don’t know what it is to be wet.
Sunflowers, revisited
Years ago, on the way to visit my mother,
I stopped the car in the middle of nowhere
to look at a field of sunflowers, stunned
by abundance, acres and acres of dazzling
light, their sheer practical luxury.
They were nothing like the print
Read the full poems here.
The Queen of Cabbage, by Shayna Shanes
I am Queen of the Wallflowers! I am their champion. We are sanguine sisters in blue stockings, armed to the teeth with quills. We prefer a quarto to a quadrille, a counter argument to a contra dance.
Read more here.
What they should have sent was a poet, by Sally Ashton
Frank Borman, Apollo 8, the first mission to orbit the Moon
. . .except Borman later said he hadn’t said that, so maybe it was just what everyone else said he’d said. Or wished he’d said, wished so hard that someone decided he had said it? Because if you say something enough times. . .
Read the full poem here.
But the Thing Is, When You Dive Deep, by Grey Held
into the past, results can be
iffy, conditional, distorted.
the way the underwater lens
of light plays positional tricks.
Read the full poem here.
Daily Routine, by Ruyi Wen
Wake up, yawn, greet the sun. The first of six tiny meals, each of which fits on a teacup saucer. Accompanied by the teacup, brimming with your favorite form of catechins, jasmine loose leaf. Just enough to dull the hunger. Scientists say rats who consume forty percent fewer calories live forty percent longer. I nibble at overnight oats the ashen color of a corpse, silently chanting with each bite that nothing tastes as good as life feels.
Read more here.
Listen to Ruyi read her piece here.
The Game of Departure, by Jennifer Battisti
Darling, she mutters, nocturnal, the wild suburban in her clinging to his departure like a small static sock pulled from the dryer. My father doesn’t reply. The buzzer goes berserk, a hostile Goodnight! I come upon the lion in the kitchen. It licks a circle of bologna suctioned to the linoleum.
Read more here.
Two Poems, by Joshua Merchant
The First Gig
we showed up in all Black with streaks of yellow
hornet tongued and hive minded. about our coin
but that day’s currency was respect. Oscar Grant
had just been shot and our eyes were just the same.
spilled. the organizer’s belly? if chloroform had a color.
I, the geek, now geeked up. my elders were equally
Read more here.
Masked Litany 5: After Waiting, Unmasked Visitors, by David Wright
What could matter on the hike—black raspberries grown wild and devoured? The blue
and purple dragonfly on its veined launching leaf? Green sheen of prairie weeds,
and a thousand invisible birds complaining? My children reunite for a day, perfumed
Read the full poem here.
Old Man Proffitt, by Scott Solomon
In 1979, after another aimless year away at college, I returned to my parents’ suburban home in the latest version of the New South. The Old South and its monuments to Confederate generals resided, as always, in the predominantly Black city limits. Meanwhile, Walgreens had invaded from up North, forcing locally owned Sudboro Pharmacy to compete for the business of the white citizenry in the surrounding county by instituting a new delivery service. As summer-job luck would have it, I became a new delivery boy, entrusted with the stubborn stick shift, absent air conditioning, and temperamental radiator of the drugstore’s decrepit red Gremlin.
Read the full story here.
Two Flash Fictions, by Carol Dorf
Most years we would drive down for the day to walk the Atlantic City boardwalk. My father marched along, while my mother and the three of us girls straggled behind. She because of “lady shoes,” and possibly because of wanting space, while we checked out the windows. My favorite was a store that sold life-sized stuffed animals. Lions and tigers and bears and yes, giraffes, with their slender legs and magnificent height. I truly needed one of them. Much more than I wanted one of the “Cathys” with their creepy plastic faces and rough blond hair.
Read more here.
Sing to the Earth, by Margot Wizansky
after Psalm 95
Read the full poem here.
The Hanged Man, by Gabriela V. Everett
Houdini can feel the blood rushing to his head. The stocks chafe his ankles as an assistant fills the tank with a hose; he supposes the water will taste like mineral and metal when he drops, but for now, he is museumed above, eaten by the eyes of the crowd. Then the pulleys go slack.
Read the full story here.
Trav’lin Light, by Shaun Turner
I’m hopelessly clumsy. My daddy used to say that I looked like a barn cat—my shoulders up, couldn’t walk in a straight line if my life depended on it. I didn’t have the grace of my younger sister, who, like a dandelion seed, would flit through the summer heat on her tip-toes, the muggy Kentucky air thick around me like syrup.
Read the full story here.
In Life I Wonder Where Have All the Dead Boys Gone?
by Stephen S. Mills
“The female is always already dead: this is how the plot begins”
— Maggie Nelson
I know they exist
somewhere beyond
the American imagination.
Read the full poem here.
the museum of americana: A LITERARY REVIEW 