Osage History by Joshua Heston A summer rain is coming. Clouds gathering over dusty streets, the old brick buildings of downtown and the white Moorish spires and porticos of the Coleman Theatre — a lavish movie palace built by mining dollars back in 1929. The wind dies and main street is still, save for the…
PLATE 1. U.S. MARINES WITH COMBAT LOGISTICS BATTALION 22, 22ND MARINE EXPEDITIONARY UNIT WAIT FOR A CH-53E SUPER STALLION HELICOPTER, APRIL 25, 2014. Yankee Whiskey, Mike by Lauren Hembree I wrote a poem once. It was about you and how you had decided to run off to the military instead of marry my cousin (or…
Artwork above courtesy of Raine Clotfelter, Branson, Missouri US Navy Swift Boat PCF 43 by Joshua Heston The mission was code-named Silver Mace II. The day was April 12, 1969, and the United States was at war in the mangrove swamps and rice paddies of Vietnam. Songs like Hey Jude by The Beatles and Mrs.…
Great Pumpkin Sheet Cake “The Great Pumpkin Sheet Cake showed up at a family Thanksgiving meal decades ago. I believe my sister was the one who baked it. I asked for the recipe and then immediately tweaked it to make it my own. Now, I don’t remember exactly what I did to make it mine.…
Remember Me by Joshua Heston There ain’t no such thing. No such thing at all. That’s what I kept telling myself, sitting on the third floor of the old, boarded-up mill. It was deep winter and night besides. The white limbs of the old sycamore showed like a skeleton’s bones in the bright moonlight, moonlight…
James’ Footprints by Joshua Heston I still remember it awful well. That old hot summer had kind of given up — fitful-like — to become a fall that just couldn’t seem to make up its mind about what it would grow up to be. And it hadn’t been a good summer either. My cousin James…
Turkey Creek Art by T. Adkins The Meeting by T. Adkins Lawlessness prevailed after the Civil War with no legal protection for the settlers of the area. This need for law and order brought the citizens together to form a vigilante group to drive the criminal element from the area. This group of law-abiding men…
PLATE 1. A simple bonfire takes on otherworldly tones, hinting of a darker past. Ozark Magic & Hoodoo by Joshua Heston Our rational, scientific world filled with textbook knowledge and an overabundance of electronic equipment has little room for the unknown or inexplicable. “Faith” is carefully relegated to quiet, predictable corners of our lives…
PLATE 1. Smallin Cave entrance at night. Smallin Cave BY JOSHUA HESTON (STATE OF THE OZARKS JOURNAL, OCTOBER 29, 2010) Here in this dark holler of the Ozarks is a cave of great and powerful majesty. The Osage people called this the Place of the Underground Spirit — Winoca. And here I sit in the…
PLATE 1. Missouri winter and spring branch. The Eau de Vie by Joshua Heston The spring branch still runs at the Eau de Vie, (pronounced O-divy), that desolate Missouri ghost town abandoned by the mid-1890s. Remants, and there are few, are scattered over three lonely, beautiful hillsides, thick with oak and cedar. PLATE 2. The…