Welcome to River and South Review!

River & South Review is a student-run literary journal. We seek new work by emerging writers of any age who have not gone on to a graduate writing degree. This may include undergraduates, writers without a formal education, and writers from other professions.

River & South Review is published twice annually with a Summer and Winter issue.

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About Destruction by Katie Thompson

My fingers fit perfectly in the spaces between his.

At night he would wrap his arms around my shoulders,

I’d lay my leg across his waist. He used to whisper,

voice raspy, eyes closed in a half-sleep;

I want to marry you one day.

Those nightly exhalations filled the balloon of my self-worth.

I remember the Christmas I found him tearing money

out of holiday cards pilfered from mailboxes,

littering the empty season’s greetings and wishes

for happiness on the ground like trash.

Every Christmas without my brother is miserable,

I want everyone else to be miserable, too!

My ears were barraged with the sound

of hundreds of balloons popping.

The boy I fell in love with had been destroyed,

using dirty needles as weaponry against his own soul—

somewhere in the process, his hand began to close.

The hinges of his fingers tightened into a white-knuckled fist.

I wasn’t sure if he was fighting himself or the white dragon,

but it didn’t matter. No room remained for me.

Katie (Karma) Thompson is a Creative Writing major in her last semester at WCCC. Currently unemployed, Katie spends her time warming Starbucks seats and writing horribly depressing poetry and moderately comical fiction. Katie is also learning to play guitar, a decisively more mobile instrument of torture than her piano.

No Hiding Place by Mantz Yorke

No hiding from it.  That Sunday night

I had to ride the forty miles, reckoning

I’d outrun the storm grumbling up behind. 

Ambushed at half way, I pedalled on

along the streaming road, trying to ignore  

lightning cracking the dark above my head. 

Not like when, aged six, I dashed indoors

at the first strike, scrambled under a table

and cowered under dad’s copy of The Times;

nor, teenaged, hiding under the sheets,

face pressed into the pillow, drenched

in a sweat I’ve not experienced since. 

Today I’m a hermit crab in a metal shell

beside the Everglades’ sawgrass, watching

an inky bruise suffuse the sky.  A kris

slashes potassium-light once, twice, thrice,

before pelting rain degenerates a van Gogh

landscape of tan and indigo to dun and grey. 

On a high, I restart the car and travel on.

Mantz Yorke lives in Manchester, England. He trained as a metallurgist before becoming a science teacher and researcher. His poems have appeared in a number of print magazines, anthologies and e-magazines in the UK, Ireland, the US and Hong Kong.

[In my fairy tale life] by Julene Tripp Weaver

In my fairy tale life

my friend would never

have hung herself.

My other friend would have

survived the self-inflicted

bullet she shot through her brain.

We would still visit, share stories,

write letters, laugh and cry together,

but for them, death was the answer.

In my fairy tale life

there are paths to healing,

ways to change: methods, healers,

potions, tinctures, infusions, hope.

There is the next meal out,

the next dream to explore,

mysteries to solve, beauty

and wonder for what will the next

day will bring, even on the worst days

there is curiosity, awareness

that everything changes: angels,

and fairies are possible. What

happened that made them give up

a life of potentiality, to know such

finality, to vanish miracles.

Julene Tripp Weaver has a psychotherapy practice in Seattle. Her two poetry books are No Father Can Save Her and Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues, writing from her work through the heart of the AIDS epidemic. She is widely published in journals and anthologies. She can be found online at www.julenetrippweaver.com and Twitter @trippweavepoet.