TIMBER 8.2

My mother’s sadness—diaphanous, which, to me, was like the rolled prayer shawl held overhead, one’s toe breaking the shallows, stepping where cardinal fire bloomed dark on the whetstones. Give heed to the shots of fire crackling behind her; hope the gears don’t slick in the river’s current. Darius Atefat-Peckham is...

Our ghost bones hollow in the stringed light; her fears, undead and slow in the morning after the morning she told me she felt burnt. From up here, every glint a penny, smoke pouring as we’re told it does, pulled to go anywhere but here, the old Western impulse. Like...

i. when he thinks you cold so you sit in the kitchen, matches in hand, trying to decide when enough will be enough. the scorches on the tile, your mother walking in, and you, swallowing whole. ii. when he climbs you, when he sifts your gold, leaves the dust in...

The barn behind our house was nailed shut, scheduled for demolition. Stay away, my father said, strange people lived there. We found a side door, pried it open, walked into a world of dust and forgotten lives. We built a bee catcher once. They crawled in and were trapped. The...

"Forgive me; I’m thirteen,” she said to me. “No, you’re not,” I told my mother. But that was back then. Back when I was thirteen and she was forty-three. I still remember feeling the summer bees’ wind beat around my head and ears. And seeing the winter’s water churn the...

The things we no longer need can be disposed of in a few ways. I see this in my family. Often they’re burned— in a bonfire, or rusted oil-barrel in Red’s yard. Some of the older relatives stand around it, the rural version of a water-cooler. They look out across...

You once told me about your kneeling parents—both of them groveling, hands cupped in front of their hearts as if receiving alms—though later, as I came to know, my memory of your story was wrong: reworked from the stuff of my own recollections. These two figures were, in fact, my...

Juxtaposition 23 John W. Bateman was the first person in his family to leave the fly-over states in more than 200 years. He recently finished his Master’s in English at the University of Buffalo and is back in the South, looking for words in unsuspecting places. John writes and shoots...

Untitled #1 Untitled #2 Untitled #3 Jim Zola is a poet and photographer living in North Carolina.

Welcome to TIMBER 8.2! Untitled #1 by Jim Zola Poetry Darius Atefat-Peckham Of a Sufi Woman William Cordeiro Pyrotechnic Charlotte Covey phoenixing Darren C. Demaree bone requires bone #29 Emma Hyche Evening Song / Three weeks after Halloween Allen Jones Writing Hannah Perrin King Held Sara Ryan Raw Honey /...