A Vietnamese Mardi Gras krewe.

The Black longshoremen of Mobile’s Banana Docks.

A meditation on rice and belonging.

This Food Issue isn’t just about what Southerners eat—it’s about who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

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Blue-winged Warbler

Photo by Bernard Hermant via Unsplash

 They say that deep in the interstices

where dream and waking dream and what, between the two, I’ve 
called a life, each crossing the other, 
seem a nest of swords, flashless, as from long neglect, 

          there’s a meadow’s-worth left, still, of the aftergrass 
that grows in sweeter once the first hay-crop’s been cut down, just 
believe in it hard enough, 

everything’s findable, even now, they say (parallel, ascending), but 
                                         that’s not true; not true.





Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips’s new book, Then the War, will be out in early 2022. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.