‘Bootheel Lullaby’

Estelle Santulin is a high-school senior from Connecticut who currently lives in Abu Dhabi. Along with painting, drawing, and photography, she enjoys playing soccer with her friends and spending time with her family and three dogs.

Bootheel Lullaby

Hands, wrinkled with grain,
oak-like.

Callused in silence,
tender and meek.

Hands that move seconds,
catching breaths in a net
already filled with lightning bugs.

A boy, eyes locked, asking
clocks, why the hands
that turn are hard.

Days thicken,
spring-green running off,
retreating into summer heat.

The boy kissed with new life,
ending in dirt—

a long pause between.

Born again, dancing prisms of color,

insects in the lungs,
smoked out by tobacco.

Flint in a wink,
a Bootheel lullaby,
rocking the boy to sleep.

J. R. Welch is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and photographer from Hayti, Missouri, in the Bootheel, and based in New Orleans. His work explores the cultural memory of the Lower Mississippi River Valley through painting, photography, installation, poetry, memoir, and essays. Drawing from the landscapes and communities of the American South, his stories examine memory, faith, identity before they disappear from the historical record. His writing has appeared in The Christian Century, Reckon Review, Blueline, Queen's Review, Pictura Journal, and other literary journals. He is a 2026 Arts Interchange Resident with the Ross Lynn Foundation and an MFA student at Louisiana State University, New Orleans.