We are excited to announce the winner of the June 2022 Chattanooga Writers’ Guild Monthly Contest is Natalie Kimbell with the submission “Circa 1971.”
Natalie Kimbell lives in Sequatchie County, Tennessee. She is a mother of two, and a grandmother of four. She works as a teacher of English, creative theater, and creative writing at her high school alma mater. Her poetry is published in The 2019 Chattanooga Writers’ Guild Anthology, and The 2020 Garfield Lake Review, The 2020 Chattanooga Writers’ Guild Anthology, the 2021 Appalachian Writers Anthology, Dorothy Allison Version and The American Diversity Report. Her work appears in the 2021/22 Women of Appalachia Project’s “Women Speak” anthology, the anthology, Beautiful: In the Eye of the Beholder, and issue 82 2022 second quarter in Abyss and Apex. Natalie also serves on the board of the Chattanooga Writer’s Guild. Her nonfiction ” Attention Deficit Lollapaloosa” will be published in the Chattanooga Writers Anthology for 2022.
Circa 1971
Circa 1971 now a skeleton of splintering plywood, our abandoned centennial of childhood lost to the briers, mourns a leaning frame of kid foraged 2x4’s salvaged scraps of faded paneling pieced like a quilt teeter underneath pieces of rusted corrugated tin a madman’s haphazard array of nails half in, half bend over in grief illustrate our childish mastery we built it, my sister and I on the edge of the yard among winter dusted sage grass when completed we elbow crawled side by side scooting our puppy Charlie Brown, ahead of us our legs extending beyond the doggie door, our mismatched sweats, gloves and tousled toboggans soaked stomachs and thighs absorbing thawing ground beneath our Taj Mahal just us, hidden in our masterpiece of the discarded breathing the secret satisfying smell of earth and puppy
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