Blue Ridge Baby

Blue Ridge Baby, a novel by Tim Barrus

Appalachia Kicks

I live in Appalachia. Supposedly, this, too, is North Carolina. I live here because it’s cheap. Economics is the great leveler. I eat what I can grow. Why is that supposed to be a humiliation. This is the land of No One Makes Much Around Here Anyway. We are not…

Tim Barrus: Clown Car Reboot

I seriously doubt that this one will be published. They’re fishing for a voice. I am not that voice. It’s a voice I know how to play to. I just don’t always use the same exact voice because the rhythms will begin a rendering of monotone because it’s pretending to…

Tim Barrus: The Woods of Cleopatra

On Ponies Whatever nature is in its just causes, the winter will arrive. There is no such thing as an alignment that men do not stand still. Next to looking inward at what is interpreted as tragedy, I do not buy it. The last of the cringe and the plot…

I left him there because we have gone through this fifty times.

How many times can I bail him out of detention before they finally have had their fill of him. Boys like him in Appalachia are a dime a dozen. He needs help. Not prison. Where do you think most rapes of boys happen. It happens in the very institutions we…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

You don’t get to have just one.

Tim Barrus, New York Times

We dance a fancy dance all around the issue of deep poverty. Because deep poverty is doing its bloody dance all around us. These constants – deep poverty, abortion – beg an irony that has babies no one wants. No one supports kids in crisis anymore because there is no…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

People are crazy. Krazy Daisey dazed and confused as shit. I don’t read comments if they apply to me. I go off on people but I am swallowing my autistic Asperger’s Tongue They Might. I send this stuff out and there it goes into the Upper-Middle-Caste of the cast of…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

Here, in Appalachia, we’re too uneducated to be joyful. We do not live in America, and we are quite good at ignoring debilitation because it might mean us. We know decrepitude when we see it. It’s ordinary. School is decrepit. Media is creeping decrepitude. Law is decrepit. The coal mines,…

Most People In The Blue Ridge

Most people in the Blue Ridge live like this. I do. Our silence is not Us In Absentia. The dirt bike is in the back yard.

That I Should Love a Particular Star

Is he crazy again. Yeah, this time it was a snake he saw a snake and flipped out. It was, of course, an illusion. There were no snakes, and I am not sure he has ever seen a snake once in his entire life. Maybe Tube. I could swoop him…

DOGWOOD DELL

Tim Barrus, New York Times

I contracted a fatal disease. Dementia sets in. I do get lost, and find it rather interesting as it is usually somewhere I have never been. I have a 16-year-old (going on 27) “helper” who does everything. His spelling is bad but he proofs my stuff which is always a…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

WE ARE THE LIVING DEAD The issue of hunger finally arrived in Appalachia. People cannot feed their children. The suicide rate has exploded as have the covid cases. No one is joyful to come back home. Home is often a trailer in the woods, and no one left for the…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

Going Rogue We are the culture of greed, death, indifference, cruelty, mass incarceration, poverty, hunger, suspicion, hate, patriarchal monarchy disguised as democracy, and genocide. Within the context of that evil, bête noire – exactly how is that any different from the cultural nightmare that was ancient Rome’s legacy to the…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

Eating Dog Food and the pandemic are overwhelming realities, here, in Appalachia. I see nothing in the media about how desperate it really is. On my block, people are eating their dogs. Not stuffing. The shame runs deep. Suicide runs deep. Hopelessness runs deep. Failure runs deep. Giving up runs…

the photography is a sketch

the sketches they make of the boats out on the lake do not reflect the lake/ the lake as they know it is something they can jump in/ naked, of course/ even in the rain/ and they will go on falling and failing and flipping everyone they know the bird/…

U Better Run

poverty porn like lunar silences i only take the photographs/ it’s a grave thing, to take a place, to objectify it/ our sovereign sleeping leaves no cum stains on the sheets/ you get to comfort yourself with the understanding there is a beauty to the thing/ i have seen appalachia…

Appalachian General

the appalchian sky made cheap as if standstill was attracted to a fading sun and the miles of parking lots scattered once again like the dead chain of emptying pilgrim souls who have arrived in the lower reaches of the hollows from the civilized east burning wood for warmth https://twitter.com/timbarrus

My Appalachia

cautionary bones/ we could climb the tree to get through your bedroom window/ even winter’s scalpel cold, and the fireplace was burning oak, and that warm scent would hibernate under your sheets and quilts like caves where your tongue inside my mouth was not unlike walking through the fields with…

Toilets of Appalachia

the truck stop down the highway from the coal mine used to buzzsaw with the traction of the action/ today, it’s kinda like getting fucked in the ass in a graveyard/ the walls of the toilets are a literary subterfuge/ call joey has been dead for twenty years/ people still…

My Appalachia

My Appalachia

I do not know of a single individual in Appalachia who fishes or takes what is seen a food – not an experience – from either the woods or the water. It’s to eat, not to catch, and then release. It’s about survival. Picking wild herbs from the Appalachian hills…

gas and groceries

this is where we used to go to buy groceries like beef jerky on the gas credit card https://twitter.com/timbarrus

ferris wheel of rust

we were insomniacs who played on an abandoned ferris wheel whose pendulum in appalachian rain was one blind eye and sullen just like you and weary where your skin leaked raw and your bones in the dark were soup inside your nerves to be so high such as we were…