Lust Series (fini)
by Stephanie Dickinson

Graves, stumps of salt lick. Stones hold stillbirths down-scattered, tiny skeletons inside larger ones, girls bled out in childbirth. Tulip and hickory roots snarl over the ground, branches snake overhead lace together. Nothing goes into the ground here since 1907. Widowers flanked by bone brides.

Stephanie Dickinson has lived in Texas, Iowa, Louisiana, and now New York. Her work appears in Cream City Review, Mudfish, Green Mountains Review, PMS, Storyquarterly, Feminist Studies, Ontario Review, Water Stone, Columbia Journal, and the McGuffin, among others. Along with Rob Cook, she publishes and edits the literary journal Skidrow Penthouse. Her novel Half Girl, recently published by Spuyten Duyvil, won the Hackney Award (Birmingham-Southern) for best unpublished novel of 2002. Her story “A Lynching in Stereoscope” appears in Best American 2005 Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers. Rain Mountain Press has recently released her short story collection, Road of Five Churches, and she is a 2006 fellow in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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