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Poetry,
Fiction and
Talking River |
Celebrating 10 Years of Continuous Publication: Scroll down for examples of this issue. Contributors in this issue included: |
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Will Baker Kim Barnes Mary Clearman Blew Keith Browning
Claire Davis |
William Johnson
Ron McFarland Christopher Norden Robert Wrigley |
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| From the
inside Cover: The staff of the Talking River Review would like to thank the following people for their help with the founding of this magazine: Quddus Addison, Ryan Gill, Laurell Haapanen, Mike Hostetler, Kersten Hui, Roger Johnson, Greg Sojka, and Vana Vernon. Special thanks to Vince in Montana. |
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Poetry: |
Wisteria Ethel Whitehill You did not wait to see the Wisteria bloom that Spring morning, seven years since it was planted, when the vines had climbed and interlaced the trellis and porch. The blossoms took more time to come. They covered the crooked skeleton and the leaves, wanton loosely growing flowers that droop and shiver in each breath of wind perfuming the garden. I thought, when you were gone, to pull the vine up, ripping out the memories with the roots. But I couldn't do it. In my gnarled and whitened age I see the quivering flowers, the fragrance even death could not remove. |
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Artwork: Barbara Clark
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Fiction
Excerpt:
From where she sat on the porch, Martha could hear music spilling
out of the corner bars, down past the street lights and the couples
leaning like sighs against brick-red buildings. Pigsville squatted
in a small corner of the Menomonie River Valley floor, heart of old
industrial Milwaukee where factories with brick chimney stacks had
long since grown over the pig yards and slaughter houses. Down
there, the dropforge hammered metal plates, its staggered two-beat
rising up through the streets and the floorboards of houses. Her
palms spread on her thighs, she felt the pulse rising up through her
feet. Sometimes she thought the whole neighborhood breathed to it.
Sometimes she thought it put her own heart off balance. |
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Creative Non-Fiction
Excerpt: Zack Garner Little Town I grew up on the Upper Snake River Plain where the desert breaks into rolling dry farms, then Rocky Mountains. Sand dunes drift slowly across the sagebrush and juniper-covered lavas to the north and west as the Henry's Fork plunges from the mountains and begins a meander that almost circumnavigates the state. The Snake River takes its name there, for the tendency to wind its way south and west across the plain. The sky takes up nearly all the room except where it is tattered at the edges by the Sawtooth Mountains, the granite Tetons, and the occasional volcano or butte on the desert. On an August day, the mountains loom blue and the white veins of unmelted snow draw them into sharp focus. It's as if you could touch them with your finger. It is a dramatic country, containing both wetland and desert; mountain and plain; grizzly bear and sheep rancher; dry, lazy summers and cold harsh winters.  In late March and early April, we chased down the
remains of ancient snow drifts and kicked all that was left of the
grainy drifts into oblivion, a last stand for the snow boots that
had grown too tight on our feet. We scoured the vacant lots of St.
Anthony for buttercups, the first flowers. Soon after they came, we
knew the balsamroot would appear and we could pick our mothers some
decent bouquets. You could sense the day the buttercups came: the
aroma of sage rolled off the lots, and if you listened closely you
could hear the crackling of sage drying in the first warm day of the
year. For the first time, you could seethe heat, rising in waves
across the land. |
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