The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature – Page 32 – "No good Southern fiction is complete without a dead mule." –Valerie MacEwan, 1996

Herself, Alone by John Riley

Southern Legitimacy Statement

In August there was always the river. On dog days, school beckoning, the joy of uninterrupted time between the morning and evening chores long absorbed by a sun that had flattened your expectations of what summer would bring, I seemed to always find myself at the river. Some people are drawn to fire, others to water, moving water that is, even if the movement is nearly imperceptible, and in my South the summer heat warned me away from fire. It was the river inching through the thick woods that lured me to come, preferably alone, to come and clear away a spot to sit among the dead leaves and rocks and branches, to come and immerse myself in the stream of thoughts and dreams and ambitions that, yet unbruised by the world, raced inside the visitor sitting above the patient river.Read more

April Issue

Fabulous, isn’t it? We’re not through yet. It’s April Fool’s Day but we’re not kidding about the quality of this month’s poetry… it is as good as it gets! From Tim Peeler to Carter MonroeRead more

Cathy Smith Bowers: The Poet Laureate of North Carolina: Six Poems

Poetry Editor’s Note:

Each April the Dead Mule publishes a Poet Laureate of a Southern State at the top its list of fine poets. This year’s honor goes to Cathy Smith Bowers, Poet Laureate of North Carolina. Born in South Carolina and Southern to the core, Cathy is the sixth in the Dead Mule’s April Poet Laureate Series.

So help me welcome Cathy to our Big Ole Southern Family.Read more

Prairie Markussen: “The Women of Scottsboro”: A Chapbook

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I once had a migraine in Savannah. I saw the cherry blossoms blooming in Macon. I ate shrimp and grits in Charleston. I survived a family vacation and a freak storm in Ft. Lauderdale. I did not “Eat at Joe’s” in Nashville, but I saw the sign. I drank wine and fell in love with a bearded man I’ll never see again in Makanda, Illinois, and while that might not be the official south, it seemed pretty darn close.Read more

Jenny Billings Beaver: “With or Without”: A Chapbook

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Hey Ya’ll. My name is Jenny Billings Beaver (used to be Jenny Elizabeth Billings – SO OLD FASHIONED) and I have lived in North Carolina my entire life. I grew up on a dairy farm – in fact, I lived so far in the country that we didn’t get cable, pizza deliveries or any-kind-of-traffic until 2002. I didn’t have a bike, I rode around our 30 acres on a golf cart – that was long after we moved out of our marigold yellow mobile home with white shutters and grassy green carpet that sat under a weeping willow (it died when Hurricane Hugo came through in 1989). I drank only sweet tea the first 18 years of my life, still call my grandfather “Poppa”, love me some grits and sausage (with a lil’ mustard, of course!) and for god sake – married a man with the last name “Beaver” on Halloween. Bless my heart! Read more

Carter Monroe: Four Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’ve lived in NC all my life. When I travel North, I often find I’m the only person in the room without an accent. I believe in seeking forgiveness for my sins, but I can’t make myself ashamed of committing adultery. I understand why Southerners never move North to retire. I refuse to eat anything I can’t pronounce. If it weren’t for vampires, I’d have no use for garlic. I know what a “potteridge” is and know that to correctly pronounce it you have to slur at least one syllable. I believe in being polite to your face. If you have to ask for chili on a hot dog, somebody ain’t from around here. I deal with my high blood pressure by getting no exercise. I only drink cheap domestic beer and I never drink just one. I’m only grammatically correct when I choose to be. Read more

Pris Campbell: Six Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was raised on cornbread, fried chicken and okra in a small town in South Carolina. My great grandfather fought in the Civil War. I have a photo of him with his mule. That mule is now dead.Read more

Tim Peeler: Four Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I come from cotton farmers on the one side and subsistence farmers on the other. I grew up in a parsonage that was located on a hill above a road that forked three ways; each fork led to a separate washboard red dirt road. During the summer they poured oil on the roads. The smell of those roads is embedded in my memory.Read more

Marty Silverthorne: Four Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Everybody’s dead and visiting the graveyard just don’t feel the guilt like a good plate of almost black collards, a streak of fat, a streak of lean, two cathead biscuits to sop up grandma’s molasses. It’s about being here in the barren field with a winter wind kicks up the dust and spirits run length wise down the empty roads. I don’t know if northerners are haunted by the dead or not, I’ve never been one. I’ve been here all my life, one thirty mile loop and you can visit every grave that’s inked in the back of this ole Bible passed down to my daddy and he stole it and passed it to me and I don’t know much about southern except that’s all I have ever known.Read more

Felicia Mitchell: Four Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

How many people can claim to have had a pet roach as a child? I can. For all kinds of reasons, that confession has to legitimize my southern roots. What else can it say? The roach lived in a mayonnaise jar in my closet for a little while, and then it died. I became a poet at an early age. Eventually my mother let bring a kitten home from next door. Read more

Norvin Dickerson: Four Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was conceived on a houseboat on the Ashley River in Charleston, South Carolina and was born in Monroe, North Carolina first year of the Baby Boomers. I got my undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. My kin, Irish immigrants to North and South Carolina, fought for the Confederacy. I drive miles out of my way to eat Lexington Barbeque, and belong to a band of pirates and sailors, Brothers of the Coast, located in Savannah, Georgia. I live in the town of Black Mountain in western North Carolina.Read more

Terri Kirby Erickson: Four Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

When some of the phrases you remember hearing in your childhood are: “I swannee,” “Bless your heart,” and “Law have mercy,” you were probably brought up in the South. So, I reckon I’m Southern enough to suit The Mule!Read more

Anderson O’Brien: Three Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Biscuits every Sunday morning: Preheat oven to 450. 2 cups flour, ¼ tsp baking soda, 1 TBSP baking powder and 1 tsp salt in the blue pottery bowl Mama gave me. Cut 6 TBSP butter into chunks and cut into flour, add 1 cup buttermilk, easy now, moisten until JUST combined. Turn dough onto the old board, perfectly floured. Gently pat biscuits out and cut into rounds. Bake 10-12 minutes. Serve with salted ham, eggs lightly scrambled, fried apples, and, of course, fresh tomatoes. Every Southern girl knows how to make a Southern breakfast.Read more

Malaika King Albrecht: Four Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’ve lived in the South nearly all my life. My crawfish boils will clear your sinuses for a week, and I will put just about anything in my fridge into the pot. Though I don’t know about mules, I know that horses make 50 pounds of poop each day, which I have to scoop from their pasture. Read more

Jack Niven, The Artist of the Hour

We’d like to thank Jack for his contributions to this Mule. It’s pretty safe to say that without him, our issue would be brutish and gray. Jack is a rare artist, as far as we’reRead more

Alice Osborn: Four Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born below the Mason-Dixon Line in Washington, D.C., a North/South limbo gumbo to a French mother who hated Southern France and a father who loved Charleston thanks to his long gone Citadel days. My dad’s Beaufort, SC ancestors fought in Petersburg in the War of Northern Aggression and his grandfather has an elementary school named for him on Parris Island. I am a Southern girl because way before I lived in Charleston and Myrtle Beach I knew I had a high humidity tolerance and felt comfortable driving without hubcaps. I still know how to avoid all of the sketchy roads in Charleston and I’m mistaken for a native by the tourists every time I visit this fine city—it must be my floppy straw hat and blue flip flops. Today as a Tar Heel I’m hopelessly addicted to bacon, I freak while driving in snow, and I love to spin tales that may not have a point.Read more

Gail Peck: Four Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I am a proud Virginian, the Dogwood state. If I was going to get switched, it wasn’t going to be from a branch of the dogwood. And I did get switched on occasion because my grandmother believed, “Spare the rod, and spoil the child.” She had to make up for Poppie’s lack of discipline. He’d let me play Barbershop and lather his head with Old Spice, and taught me Solitaire which he played by pulling his chair to the bedside, the cards laid across the peacock bedspread. He scooped out oysters from the stew so I could savor the liquid. We ate jelly-roll cake together. When Granny’s day ended, we sat on the porch swinging, the morning glories closed by now. She played the harmonica and, Tango, the dog howled. That old house still stands, and beside it the apple tree I climbed.Read more

Dale Wisely: “The Woods Unbounded”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I have eaten fried squirrel, instructed by my parents to be careful to avoid the lead shot.

I can detect a phony Southern accent on TV or in movies in three-quarters of a second. Shockingly, almost no non-Southern actor can master one. Not even DeNiro or Streep.Read more

Melissa Dickson: Five Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in the South, raised in the South, left the South, and came on back to the South. I capitalize South. Margaret Mitchell grew up playing on land her great-grandparents bought from my great-great grandparents. If you go back far enough the Dickson’s and the Dixon’s are the same dang folk. My first book was half-about the Civil War. I know how to make cornbread without looking at a recipe and it doesn’t have sugar in it. I think that’s a Yankee thang. At least I know a Yankee who puts sugar in his cornbread. Read more

Paul Corman Roberts: Four Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Does the Southwest count? My grandfather was one of the original dust bowl Oakies who found a home for himself, and eventually his family in Los Angeles where I was born in 1967 before moving to Northern California at age 4, and then later as an young adult I lived in Las Vegas NV for five years. Otherwise I spent six weeks at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio Texas and four weeks at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi Mississippi. I know what it is to be hot and swarmed by bugs the size of mice. I understand the pointlessness of drying off after a shower in the Gulf Coast region during summer. And to this day, I can’t turn down the biscuits and gravy on any menu anywhere, especially if the gravy has alligator sausage.Read more

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