North Carolina | The Common

Dispatch: Two Poems

June 4, 2025 Dispatches

By SHANLEY POOLE

a broken down, rusty car faces out toward a lightly forested, sunny, and hilly landscape.

Photo courtesy of author.

Hot Springs, North Carolina

A Mathematical Formula for Continuing

I’m asking for a new geography,
something beyond the spiritual.

Tell me again, about that first
drive up Appalachian slopes

how you knew on sight these hills
could be home. I want

this effervescent temporary, here
with the bob-tailed cat

and a hundred hornet nests.
Will you tell me the sequence

of Fibonacci? The secret
of the nautilus? Answer:

After the departure of your bedbound
lover, you took to the spiral,

reached what was thought the end
and found yourself pirouetting.

I have just entered the dance,
crawled inside the shell, you promise

this is its own beginning.

a smiling person lying on their stomach on a beach. the photo has a sepia-toned filter

Photo credit: Rachel Balkema (IG @raba.co)

Lake Michigan

This Trail Leads to Lake Michigan

I’ve been reading to numb things, namely
the evidence that my childhood creek
is drying, that something inside me is splintering,
like that wedge of the dock that buried itself in my thumb
while we watched quagga mussels starve another body.
You asked if I still had thoughts about starving. Lake Superior
is the clearest of the Great Lakes, but its belly is hungry.
I dust the house for the third time this week and wonder
at the ecosystem of our apartment: the under watered plants,
the dog that’s always pacing. I meet a stranger on a walk
and learn his home has woodfired heat, that his dog howls
when his wife leaves, that after this he’ll head to church
to cut the turkey. Today is Thanksgiving. I do not ask directions,
I let my conversation ask for company. He points to the trail post.
This leads to Lake Michigan, he says. As if I hadn’t walked this path
since the age my feet could carry me. At home, I ask
M if he’d like a woodfire stove, if he’d like to run away,
build a home with me. Somewhere Great: Lake Superior,
Huron, Erie. How about here? He asks. Why wait to start building?

Shanley Poole is an MFA candidate at UNC-Greensboro. Their work is forthcoming or has been published in Analog, F(r)iction, 14 Poems, and Quarter(ly) Journal. She was a 2017 fellow at the Beargrass Writing Retreat, a 2024 writer-in-residence at Azule Residency, and former Storyteller at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency.

Home and/or Home: Seán Carlson Interviews Erin Fornoff and Gustav Parker Hibbett

February 10, 2025 Interviews

When ERIN FORNOFF, GUSTAV PARKER HIBBETT, and SEÁN CARLSON met over a drink in the lobby of the Arms Hotel, located on the main square of Listowel in southwest Ireland, they introduced themselves by comparing their American upbringings. Having grown up in North Carolina, New Mexico, and Massachusetts, respectively, they shared their experiences residing and writing in Ireland.

For Fornoff, Hibbett, and Carlson, their lives in Ireland have granted them new perspectives on their lives in the U.S. and welcomed them into new communities that help bring their poetry to life. Before leaving, they all paused for a photo beside a typewriter and a goose-feather quill pen on display under the gaze of a countertop cherub sculpture. In the longstanding hub of an agricultural community, where tractors still regularly cart calves to market, the traditional tools of writing also reinforced the lifeblood of local literature.

The Con Artist

December 3, 2024 Fiction

By GLENN BERTRAM

In April, Simon went down to Murray Park to eat hamburgers with the Methodists. It was his monthly tradition. The Methodists’ burgers were charred and rubbery, but the Methodists themselves made ideal marks. They were upstanding citizens with steady jobs at regional banks and local power stations. They’d known neither poverty nor wealth. And they weren’t teetotalers like the Baptists, so you could ply them with craft beer and get them yapping about golf and gambling and everything their marriages lacked. They assumed good faith in the people around them. Simon loved the Methodists. Despite his taste, he chose to find them charming: a matter of professional habit. It was Leonard who’d showed him the way. You had to love your marks.

Muscle and Rubber and Cotton and Bone

July 16, 2024 Fiction

By JULES FITZ GERALD

There is no such thing as silence in the South. There is always the percussive hum of insects, winged bodies waiting in the weeds for dusk. This sound fills the fissure before Coach Meeks fires the gun, while Joanna leans over the spray-painted line in the crabgrass field. She is sixteen but still as stick-legged and bird-chested as she was at twelve, brushing daily knots from her homeschool-length hair because her mother gave up trying to teach her how to make a braid. The billow of smoke erupts from the pistol’s nose before the crack of the blank reaches her ears. Her hair streams behind her, loose and wild, as she pushes off the line. She believes that it makes her faster.

Para-

June 12, 2024 Dispatches

By MARY LEAUNA CHRISTENSEN

Image of a wooded mountain range with gray clouds in the sky and green grass below.

Photo courtesy of author.

Cherokee, NC and Phoenix, AZ

As a child, I watched horror movie after horror movie. An attempt to make myself brave or to make others think I was. And now, I fear I’m manipulative because how much can a person really change. Bones and weight and cartilage can only be altered to certain degrees.

When it comes to film, body horror disturbs me the most. Things that happen to a person’s body without their permission. And sometimes they don’t notice until their bodies are so acted upon that they are grotesque, twisted, so completely othered with pain they are no longer sovereign, but colonized by something outside of themselves.

Into the Woods

August 23, 2023 Dispatches

By ANNE P. BEATTY

Stone Mountain, North Carolina

A mile into the woods, I am always slightly afraid. Fear’s lace knots the cuff of an otherwise lovely afternoon. Nights, when I peek out of the tent, the moon is a bright friend too far away to help.

A Geology of Memory: Whiteside Mountain, North Carolina

January 29, 2020 Dispatches

By GREGORY ARIAIL

Romanes, Whiteside Mountain from Road to Grimshawes

Whiteside Mountain, North Carolina

Some call it the world’s oldest mountain. Once, millions of years ago, it was Mount Everest.

Quartz and feldspar stripe the cliffs of this vast pluton, which looks burnt, as if it had survived some great conflagration or were, in fact, a meteorite scarred by its descent through the atmosphere.

Redressed

October 17, 2012 Dispatches

By KRISTA LEAHY

Cold beer, slippery hands, cigarettes no one (everyone) wanted,

Hurricane Alex, 2004

August 27, 2011 Dispatches

By JAMES A. GILL

We sat side by side on the shore, staring into the sky above the sea, as if we could see the hurricane approaching. The same as standing on the porch back home, scanning the horizon for a tornado, wondering where it would hit. But this was no tornado. There was no escaping it.

Two Lighthouses

August 17, 2011 Dispatches

By JAMES A. GILL

Cape Hatteras Light

We visited the lighthouse on our honeymoon. Tallest in the U.S. It stood right on the sand, backdropped by surfers riding between wooden jetties built to keep the thin strip of beach from disappearing into the sea.

All posts tagged: North Carolina

Dispatch: Two Poems

Home and/or Home: Seán Carlson Interviews Erin Fornoff and Gustav Parker Hibbett

The Con Artist

Muscle and Rubber and Cotton and Bone

Para-

Into the Woods

A Geology of Memory: Whiteside Mountain, North Carolina

Redressed

Hurricane Alex, 2004

Two Lighthouses

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