Half Blood / Dual Coasts
Rhienna Renèe Guedry & Chris Stafford
2020 Summer Collaboration Contest Finalist
After 30 years and a thick Appalachian divide you wrote swiftly back, mesh memory enough to set right our inherited mis- remembrances. Cajun stock and all that damn hair: we looked more alike than our full-blood siblings. It only took a patriarch dying to excavate one another: a slip off a stepladder picking pecans, or did I make that part up, too? The fiction I stitched meant I was always wondering. Girls grown, thick with flight. Brother, I Oregon is evergreen and we live in year- |
My daughters have a father and your father has a daughter I know this much is true that when we hit some troubled water there’s a bridge, then there’s a let down, and a road to let my crown down, the potholed drop from Jones Creek Road to downtown. But I always know you’re waiting over on President Street, southern songs and bare feet: you and I, sister, we just might get along for the long haul. Not just some 90’s kid, this, my ode to Grass grows from roots in new ground, so |
Rhienna Renèe Guedry (she/they) is a writer, artist, DJ, and tarot deck creator who found her way to the Pacific Northwest, perhaps solely to get use of her vintage outerwear collection. Her work can be found in Empty Mirror, Oyster River Pages, HAD, Bitch Magazine, Screen Door, and elsewhere on the internet. Rhienna holds a MS in Writing/Publishing from Portland State University.
Chris Stafford (he/him) is a writer, artist, and musician who has been a public high school art teacher for almost two decades. Working in education has continually increased his love for teaching, especially the joy of helping students find and express their voices. He has driven the entire Southern United States from coast to coast, tried to teach drum lessons, and has had artwork hanging in the same museum as Robert Rauschenberg. Chris holds a Master of Arts in Teaching from USC.