The author writes: "For me, being born in the rural South meant being born already at a disadvantage, without easy access to good healthcare, educational opportunities, and inheriting a very visible hurting past. But I did grow up on the same land that my family has been farming for centuries: I ate off the same dinner table where they laughed and cried, and I drove down the same road to the same church to sing the same hymns they did every Sunday. And that births an unshakable boundless mysticism that can't be learned or bought. No matter where I go, I carry the ghosts of my people in me and these poems and sounds speak to that."


Loretta Lynn Hymn

Reuniting in your new Telegraph Avenue Apt, Oakland, CA

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips grew up on her family’s farm in Woodland, North Carolina—she still lives there. She has an MFA from UNCW and she’d like to thank you for reading her work. Please read more in Hobart, The Nervous Breakdown, X-R-A-Y, drDOCTOR, and Show Your Skin. Follow her on instagram/twitter: @woodlandraised