2006 fiction graduate Larry Bingham‘s essay “What My Father Heard” was recently published in the Appalachian Review. Read an excerpt below:

What My Father Saw

My dad was twenty-five years old when he saw a man die. He didn’t hear or see the slate roof fall, but he heard Bonsell Robinson scream. It happened in 1967 inside the Beatrice Coal Mine in Keen Mountain, Virginia, where my dad worked. He was just starting out, five years into a job he would do for the rest of his work life.

At the time of the roof collapse, my dad was a buggyman. His job—to make sure the buggies, or shuttle cars, that carried coal to the beltline were full. He had just moved up to buggyman from stoper (“stow-per”), one of the deadliest jobs in an underground mine. The stoper stands up wooden posts and drills bolts into the slate roof to keep it from caving in, so the excavation can advance deeper into the seam. It takes two men to do the work. Together they auger into the rock above them using a tool that looks like an upside down jackhammer.

My dad was glad to get off the stoper job. Not only is it one of the most dangerous, it’s also one of the hardest. It’s the position given to miners newly hired, or new to a mine, to see if they’re tough enough to survive.

To survive in the mine, Dad had to get used to working deep inside the earth. He had grown accustomed to crouching in dark, narrow tunnels and listening to the rumble of bedrock, like distant thunder, as it shifted and settled around him. He was used to sloshing through cold, standing water and breathing in air dirty with coal and rock dust. What he wasn’t familiar with was the primal sound of a man dying.

The day the roof caved in, midway through the third shift, Dad had been spelled out by another miner so he could eat his dinner. Mom used to pack his bucket with an Armor Treet meat sandwich, a thermos of black coffee, Vienna sausages, a Little Debbie snack cake and a tin of Del Monte fruit cocktail. That day, he found a dry place to sit and ate with three other miners, 100 feet away from where the stopers were setting timbers, when Bonsell Robinson screamed—an animal sound, like the yelp of a dog when it’s been kicked.

Dad and the other men rushed over to find Bonsell pinned to the ground, his chest and waist crushed under a rock the size of an armchair and weighing thousands of pounds. The other stoper wasn’t touched.

The entire Beatrice mine shut down for twenty-four hours so state and federal authorities could investigate. All the miners climbed into the mantrip, the railcar that carried them back to the surface, and the machines sat idle. Dad drove home on barren, pre-dawn roads unable to stop thinking about what he had seen. And heard.

Beatrice reopened the next day for business as usual. Because somebody had to do Bonsell Robinson’s job, the foreman tapped the last man to work as a stoper—my dad. It was one of the hardest shifts he ever pulled.

Fifty years later, I ask him why.

He sighs. How do you describe how it feels to step into a dead man’s shoes?

I imagine the fear he must have felt. I wonder if he prayed to God to keep him safe. Did he bury himself in the work until it was over? Did he feel like he was playing Russian roulette?

My dad is not a man who talks easily about his feelings, but the death has never left him. He can still see Bonsell Robinson crushed under that big slab of slate. He can still hear him scream.

There’s something else my dad won’t ever forget. A few days before he was killed, Bonsell Robinson got religion. When the men ate their dinner together, deep inside that dark mine, all Bonsell wanted to talk about was getting saved.

As if he knew death was coming for him any minute.

Read the full essay here: https://appalachianreview.net/2019/09/20/what-my-father-heard/

Poetry graduate Kerrin McCadden recently had a poem featured on Love’s Executive Order. Read an excerpt of “Running Errands” below:

Running Errands

I saw a woman’s face today in the supermarket.
She was standing at the end of the wine aisle, 
waiting to use the automated checkout machines, 

just breathing, just standing there as if it was okay
to have her face out, a little Rushmore statue
of herself for everyone to gaze at, unmasked—

first woman president of Aisle 3, important, revered,
and I realized I hadn’t seen a stranger’s face 
in forever and wondered if we will forget how 

to read faces. For a minute, I wanted to announce 
to the whole produce section of PriceChopper 
that we had one among us, a non-believer, 

someone who didn’t fucking care, but then 
I remembered she might be someone
who can’t wear a mask, then ruminated

among the packages of lemon grass about how
now there is one more thing to divide us.
It looks like we might be at this for a long time. 

Read the entire poem here: https://www.lovesexecutiveorder.com/?fbclid=IwAR2mibNlwQRJGrqhxJGbL-2WGjC7WMrN9lpOYv9iy97yCn-iYTa7jCHgM-M

Poetry graduate Leslie Contreras Schwartz recently had an essay featured in Luna Luna. Read an excerpt of “Quarantine” below:

Quarantine

The lights in the bedroom flickered off and on. I lay in our bed listening to a heavy thumping coming from somewhere, quickening. In a half-dream, I created the idea of walking to the door and shouting, Who’s doing that? Even the thought of it was tiring, and I rolled over with eyes half-closed, lucid enough to be afraid to sleep but longing for it with the same urgency I longed to take a deep breathe without pain, or to be able to sit up with my lungs feeling crushed. I tried to fill my thoughts without something other than the every second of half-breathing, the crushing and stupor.

Was the sound growing near? Was it a foot banging a door, my daughter running circles in the living room, feet pounding in a rhythmic pattern? Was it the neighbor at some task again that required loud repetitive pounding and screeching? The questions were something to latch onto in my mind. I entertained them.

A slit of light broke from the bedroom door and my son crawled in beside me, wrapping his small limbs around mine underneath the coat of blankets. He was whispering but I could not hear because of the thumping. Who is doing that, I said. I slept.

My husband woke me to feed me soup, water from a straw. I sat up in bed, the room bluing. Our five-year-old was jumping on the bed, adding a beat to the drumming that started again when I opened my eyes (though I was sure I heard it in my sleep). It had been weeks since I’d left either the bed, or the couch, laying, blinking, and when awake, staring through the window, at a wall, at one of the children’s faces. Breath came as if through a tiny sieve, which I gulped in small pockets. You’re here, the doctor said this morning on the phone. Be grateful. So the air like fish eggs, like the meager rationing in the form of pills. Sucking, coughing, my chest strained and ready to snap. Nebulizer hush and burr. Inhaler sip. Eight more times. Times seven. Again. Times sixty days.

Read the rest of this essay here: http://www.lunalunamagazine.com/blog/leslie-contreras-schwartz

1992 poetry graduate Don Colburn recently had a poem featured in Hunger Mountain. Read an excerpt of “The Thing About Perfection” below:

The Thing About Perfection

The thing about perfection is
how nobody sees it coming
except those destined for disappointment.
A journeyman hurler, brush cut and big ears,
whose teammates call him Gooney Bird,
goes out-and-out untouchable one fall afternoon
and 63 years later his obit in the Times
has to say “perfect” a dozen ways.

He wasn’t scheduled to pitch that day,
Game 5, Dodgers and Yankees,
until he opened his locker and found
a warm-up ball in one of his cleats,
the manager’s unspoken code.

The best he could hope for
was to keep the Yanks in the game
against Jackie and Campy, Pee Wee
and Duke. But by the top of the fifth,
goose eggs accumulating, the crowd
began to murmur and buzz.
In the dugout they shunned him,
no chatter, no eye contact, nothing
to jinx what might be happening.

You can find the entire poem here: https://hungermtn.org/the-thing-about-perfection-don-colburn/