ANTIQUES OR ARTIFACTS

by Carol Parris Krauss

by David Horsey

Some people like to comb the beach for gold coins, silver medals.

There’s an entire group of Civil War buffs who scan the fields
of Suffolk, traipse down to the marsh looking for mini-balls 
and musket pieces. You can purchase the luxury metal detector
for just over a hundred bucks plus shipping online. Artifacts. 

Webster defines the word as an item of cultural or historical interest. 
Pieces of who we were, the battles we chose. I know a man who 
has an entire room walled with knotty-pine shelves 
where he displays his Rebel buttons, Union canteens,
and the occasion dried-up timber rattler. His wife watches 
from the kitchen window as he walks the fallow fields 
with his robot arm shaking. Hours later, he comes inside
and grabs his iced tea. Two lemons. Plops down on the plaid couch
he inherited from Me-maw and begins to watch Live @ Five. 

Breaking news coming from Tennessee. How an entire building
seems to be jam-packed with artifacts. Old white antiques
hidden away in locked rooms. Secrets covered in a layer of dust.

Carol Parris Krauss loves to use vivid imagery. Her work is in One Art, The SC Review, Louisiana Literature, Broadkill Review, Story South, and Susurrus. She was recognized by the UVA press as a Best New Poet and her first book Just a Spit Down the Road was published by Kelsay.

WINGS

by Tricia Knoll

This photo combo shows Katie Posten holding the front and back of a photograph she found stuck to her car's windshield on Dec. 11 in New Albany, Ind. The photo is from a tornado-damaged home in Kentucky that landed almost 130 miles away in Indiana. The photograph was among dozens of personal items to turn up far from home in the aftermath of the tornadoes that sowed a path of destruction across six states. Photographs, by far, were the most common find. In major storms, they’re often carried the furthest, said John Knox, an associate professor of geography at the University of Georgia. “They’re like little wings when they go up into the air,” he said. (AP via The Washington Post, December 12, 2021)

I archive my family’s wings

    letters Union soldier William Lewis wrote home during the Civil War

    my grandmother’s photo holding my squirming mother

    my mother in her fancy hat leaning against my dad’s black Buick

    my mother rocking my newborn daughter

    my daughter holding her newborn

 I have no idea where they go next. 

 

I cannot forget    

    I found the photo of an altar boy wearing a halo

    and a white gown in a driveway in the Ninth Ward

    in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. 

I never knew whose angel he was. 

 

What hurricane wind tears apart

    flies, lives that shift from black and white

    to battered color. Wings beating birds 

    to refuge on a windshield,

    a mud puddle. Stuck in the twig

    of a naked sycamore. 

 

Angel memories try to find

    a way home. I believe

    the only thing my mother feared

    was the hurricanes in Florida. 

    I have no pictures of her fear.

Author's note: I am the archivist of most of the Civil War memorabilia of my great-grandfather William Lewis who served in an Indiana regiment. I never heard back from the historical societies in Indiana when I offered them the 65 letters he and his friends wrote to my great grandmother. Some of what he said is included in my book of poetry How I Learned to Be White.

Tricia Knoll lives in Vermont which catches the tail end of most weather systems that flow from west to east. Her poetry appears widely in journals, anthologies and five collections. Most recent is Checkered Mates, a chapbook out from Kelsay Books. Her next collection entitled Let's Hear It for the Horses—love song poems to horses—is on pre-sale discount from The Poetry Box publishing house through December 31 for its release on February 1.