Welcome to the 23rd Issue of Waccamaw,

Our favorite rivals are beauty and pain: pink skies in the evening
traffic, sad women hanging on the walls of museums,
violins echoing off hot pavement as old men busk for spare change.

In these pages, find the small details that remember you. Bring them
up in conversation, like ice breakers.

You’ll leave from the same dock, but you’ll never cross the same river.

With the testimonies of this edition, we are not adrift. As long as we glimpse
either beauty or pain, we have rudders, paddles, sails.

Love,
The Waccamites

Issue 23

What Sticks

This is not a poem of leaving                those velveteen branches or that frowning hedge at the yard’s edge. This is not about the brushes left…

Carriages

      You walk Ajax the Dog three times a day, minimum. Often five times, up and down the cobblestones — you chose this…

White Center, 1950

The figs, arranged in                still life,               as if by Chardin’s                   quiet violence;                          the house exists to hold them. Bruised bodies beaded         dark wet,                glisten pressed to                  porcelain in this…

From Mea Culpa to Me Too

I am teaching Sherman Alexie’s collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in my Native American literature class the week the sexual harassment…

Chitin Diaries

    The kitchen full of babies roosting on high shelves like cups for punch one by one she pinches their cheeks sinks in the…

Vulgar Magic

    We could live suspicious, breathing to bleed—but my mouth had nothing for strange quiet. I was too much, waiting to make my good…

Fathermark

    I.          Unmedicated visionary, full-time armchair operator— he could turn a truckbed of scrap lumber          to a hen house squared-up enough no fox could slide. Lucky…

The Night After Newtown

a father high and tight,     a father reservoir of poses                                — Farid Matuk, “A Daughter Having Been of the Type” On her first day of…

Dinner Table

We fill the void behind our teeth with silence, the grinding of wedding rings against knife handles a language of compatible hollowness. * The neighborhood…

GRAVIDARUM

Secret They talk with the lights off, / words kept in bedroom  dark so this  moment will  live /  for only them.  They speak of…

Editorial Team
Managing Editor: Madison Rahner
Copyeditor: Rose Pleasant
Assistant Copyeditor: Frank Sanford
Design Editor: Parag Desai
Assistant Design Editor: Lindsay Hickman
Fiction Editor: Justin Easler
Nonfiction Editor: Kayla Jessop
Assistant Nonfiction Editor: Victor Cocco
Poetry Editor: Brittany Atkinson
Assistant Poetry Editor: Olivia Dimatteo
Staffer: Ian John

Faculty Editors
Editor-in-Chief: Colin Foote Burch
Digital Content Coordinator: Alli Crandell
Nonfiction Editor: Lane Osborne
Fiction Editor: Jeremy Griffin