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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Winter 2022
2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST BY JUSTIN HUNT
Why I Flinch at the Thought of Daylight Squandered Deep into her last year, my mother would rise from breakfast and proclaim, Gotta get movin’! She grabbed time by the neck, throttled every second into purpose and task: dishes washed and jangled back to shelves, floors swept, sweaters knit and hauled to church bazaars, flowers planted and watered from the well-pump hose she dragged across her yard, housedress aflutter, knees stabbing above her knotted, twitching calves – until she could drag and twitch no more. And so it was with my father, too, that life-timer in the art of harnessed living, graduate cum laude of my granddad’s open-air school for cattlemen, butchers, and farmers. Like a plow horse, he never slipped the reins of work, never balked at the gee and haw of doing,
JUSTIN HUNT grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. His work has won several awards and appears, or is forthcoming, in a wide range of literary journals and anthologies in the US, Ireland, and the UK, including Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Florida Review, Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, Crab Creek Review, Cider Press Review, and New York Quarterly.
