Issue 5: Gallery 3

Cover image: "Blue Azalea" by Bruce Panock

Gallery 3

Visual Art, Poetry, and Prose

Andrea Alonso

Andrea Alonso is a photographer, flâneuse, and full-time non-professional dancer living and working in Málaga, Spain. Her work looks to capture the intangible confluence of intimacy and isolation, or separateness, inherent in the human condition. Seeking out liminal spaces and wading through liminal states of mind serve as has her biggest inspiration. Follow her work at @reaalonso.

Anna Genevieve Winham

prosopagnosia

i imagine the day when i no longer recall
your face.
the morning i wake and
i do not see your features
imprinted upon mine,
when i do not brush your teeth,
meet your eyes in the mirror.

they have told me this is me
in these photographs: i went to these places;
i did these things. i cannot believe
them. in crowds i see a crowd
of you. in solitude you are
with me
too. in the woods
a tree recalls you; a leaf has
your cheekbone, a stone your
jaw. i have told you your eyes
look like redwoods,
but was it the other way around?
as i gazed, they stared back
and saw me.

Anna Genevieve Winham writes at the crossroads of science and the sublime, cyborgs and the surreal. She is Ninth Letter’s 2020 literary award winner in Literary Nonfiction and Writer Advice Flash Fiction Contest’s 2020 3rd place winner. Anna reads prose for Passengers Journal, and she writes and performs with the Poetry Society of New York. You can find her poetry in Q/A Poetry, Panoplyzine, Meniscus, Breadcrumbs Magazine, and others. Her prose appears or is forthcoming in Tilde~, Oxford Public Philosophy, Rock & Sling, Paragraph, Gold Man Review, and Passengers Journal. While attending Dartmouth College (which was the pits), she won the Stanley Prize for experimental essay and the Kaminsky Family Fund Award.

Website: annagwinham.com

Tyler James Russell

Who Pays

your flexed trapezius, sponging
flecks of food from a gouged table, half-
stripped and hieroglyphic with nail polish, bled
—through Sharpie
needle mist of rain on window

how often I forget to breathe
who pays attention to anything?

I move like a deer in a fog-field, cloud
of flies, carrying
parasites,

slowly chronic, the refrigerator
is full of pills, who pays

enough to sink beneath texture, to the place where
strings writhe-wave like anemones, invisible currents
blowing from god
knows where

Tyler James Russell is a writer and educator from Central Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife Cat and their children. His first chapbook, To Drown a Man, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2020. He is a graduate from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of British Columbia, and his work has been published in Apiary and Riddle Fence, among others, and was a nominee for the 2011 Rhysling Award. You can find him at tylerjamesrussell.com.

Todd Bartel

Todd Bartel received a BFA in painting from RISD (1985) and an MFA in painting from Carnegie Mellon (1993). He was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow in 1990 and received a Connecticut Council on the Arts Grant in 2000. Bartel has taught at Brown, Carnegie Mellon, and Manhattanville College. He has been a guest critic at RISD & Vermont Collage and New Hampshire Art Institute. He teaches drawing, painting, collage, and conceptual art at the Cambridge School of Weston (MA) and is the founder & Gallery Director of the Thompson Gallery, now in its 13th year. His collage-based work examines the roles of landscape and nature in contemporary culture.

Additional Notes

“Garden Study (Volcan Beginnings)” was first published in Hunger Mountain (The Vermont College Journal of the Arts & Letters), Fall 2004.

From artist statement:

The Garden Study series is, in the spirit of Alexander Von Humboldt’s pioneering work, an effort to credit the imagery, which has shaped the Western view of land and wilderness. However, whereas Humboldt sought to explore the last horizons of the globe in an effort to make an “inventory of the world,” [1] the Garden Studies series is an editorial inventory of the history of land depiction and its relationship to geography and land treatment. The Garden Study series is part of my ongoing investigation of, creation mythology, natural history, cosmogony the history of landscape painting, and the relevance of land depiction in contemporary culture. The Garden Study drawing series relates to a larger series of assemblage sculptures entitled Terra Reverentia and are meant as a kind of compliment series. The Garden Studies are drawn over the pages of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Each work has a miniature hand-painted landscape—a marginalized view of land—referenced from either the history of landscape painting or imaginary or observed landscapes.

[1] Jean Clair, Humboldt to Hubble, found in Cosmos: from Romanticism to Avant-garde, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Prestel Verlag, New York, NY, 1999, p. 21

Wynne Brown

Ponderosa

High upon Rustler’s ridge,
your crown holds up a roof of sky
sheltering woodpeckers, tassel-tailed squirrels, indigo jays,
the wind humming its song through your arms.

Then
savaged by fire.
Your bark seared black
your needles shriveled crisp.

Felled.

Landing on the forest floor with an almighty thump,
crown shorn, arms torn off,
your trunk hauled to
the desert below where you lay
through summer solstice, monsoon rains,
amid skittering lizards,
chittering quail with top knots nodding.

At the communal roof-raising
— laughter, music, whirring tools —
winter sun warms my back.
With hammer and chisel
I chip your outer layer,
strip your blackened bark,
here fragile with ash there
stubborn and clingy,
revealing
gray-white wrinkled maggots
curling away from sudden sunlight.
Straddling your bulk,
I pull the draw-knife,
its age-smooth handles in my age-rough hands
relishing the rhythm
the reaching-out the drawing-in
to peel you smooth.
Pausing to blow the dust from your skin,
to stroke your soft butter-yellow inner core,
preparing you
to hold up another roof
the center pole
sheltering this human family.

Wynne Brown’s writing often emerges from intersections and contradictions. Perhaps it’s not surprising she lives in an urban desert oasis not far from the meetup of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts and where the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Madre collide. She often hikes among saguaros in one of the few areas where antelope jackrabbits and black-tailed jackrabbits co-exist. Her poems have appeared in Sand Script, High Country News, Oasis Journal, The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide by Eric Magrane and Christopher Cokinos (2016), and Spilled: A Collection by the Dry River Poets (2011). She is a writer, editor, and graphic designer and can be found at wynnebrown.com.

Karen Carter

The Bridge

Green, hefty branches,
shaped like heads of broccoli
from summer’s early garden
adorn patches of land
on two sides of a lazy river.

A stream cries
for wooden planks caressed with rope
to greet an adventurous traveler,
commune with the treetops,
reach hands to the sky,
walk deliberate steps in moccasin soles,
tip a safari hat to nature’s blossoms.

Fresh air absorbs morning dew.
Birds chirp to announce the dawn
the closing of the gap
between unknown territories
beckoning the wanderer.

Note: “The Bridge” was an ezine publication and honorable mention in the annual poetry contest by Bards and Sages in 2002.

Karen Carter, PhD, is a seasoned teacher both at the post-secondary and secondary levels. For the past two years, she has lived in Columbia, NC, near the Outer Banks, and teaches English at Columbia Early College High School. Her goal is to integrate teaching and writing from practicing the craft and teaching it in public school. She has poetry accepted for publication for fall 2020 in The Broadkill Review and Miller’s Pond and previous publications in ByLine Magazine, Bards and Sages, Broomweed Journal, and Pegasus.

Bruce Panock

Bruce Panock is a student of photography for more than 20 years, though most intently for the last eight years. He is primarily a landscape photographer. His studies include more formal training as well as a great deal of self-study. Photographers and painters of various genres from Western and Eastern cultures are all part of this foundation and contribute to his work.

Recently his photographic voice has migrated to the creation of work with particular reference to encaustic painting and ancient Chinese and Japanese brush painting and woodblock art.

Phil Gallos

A Grove of Willows

It is more than 3,000 miles from the western slope of Mount Tamalpais to the table in the Left Bank Café where Dagomar told me over coffee and dessert the story of his vision; but the intervening distance had not dulled its edge, nor had the intervening time.

He ascended from the south, from Pantoll Ranger Station, climbing up from the shade of redwoods and madrones, onto and up the slanting, sun-touched meadows that hang from the hem of the high tableland where the paths diverge. He was in no hurry. His pace was slow, his steps deliberate.

Occasionally, he rested. He looked down, back at the places he had passed through; and he looked up, forward toward the places he thought he would be going. He walked gently, attentive to his surroundings, trying not to become seduced by and then obsessed with the idea of destination.

On the plateau, upon reaching the swale from which all the paths fan, he had planned to continue north through dark fir forests to the golden meadows of Bolinas Ridge. Instead, he turned west. He was not sure why. He could say with certainty only that he felt drawn. Had he heard something? Perhaps a voice calling, or a particle of song.

He walked from knoll to saddle to knoll to saddle to knoll again, each knoll slightly higher than its predecessor and each revealing another beyond the intervening saddle. He proceeded steadily and easily, stopping to look at the patterns thrown against a boulder by a bush or to examine trees he had not seen before or, rather, trees he had seen before but through different eyes – or so it seemed to him.

The sun passed mid-afternoon. The light was changing. He was walking into evening when he came to the crest of the final rise, O’Rourke’s Bench to his left marking the spot where most people stop.

Click here to read the full story

Phil Gallos has been a newspaper reporter and columnist, a researcher/writer in the historic preservation field, and has spent 31 years working in academic libraries (which is more interesting than it sounds). Most recently, his writing has been published in Cagibi, The Writing Disorder, STORGY Magazine, Treehouse and Streetlight Magazine, among others, and is forthcoming in Wisconsin Review. He lives and writes in Saranac Lake, NY.

Judith Rayl

Judith Rayl presents innovative semi-abstract photography. Her fresh visual perspective explores natural reflections and refractions to compose raw single-capture images. Judith’s photography reaches for the tender beauty at the intersection of nature and the human-made. Judith seeks luminous moments of balance between ecology and urban life. She is inspired by emotive, naturally semi-abstract images of harmony and reconciliation. Her unaltered photography uses no double images, layering, nor retouching, instead embracing the impermanence of each moment.

Since embarking upon her art career in 2017 Judith’s work has been selected for 57 exhibitions, with 14 solo shows and 4 awards. She was chosen for the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture Ethnic Artist Roster. Judith Rayl’s art presents stories of healing, and shares evanescent moments of connection and beauty.

Website: judithrayl.com
Instagram: @judith_rayl_photography

Nicole Holtzman

Be Thou a Guardian Angel

As a young boy, I was fascinated by the Danube. The way the water struck the banks. It was nothing pleasant. Pools of black and blue, the flood enticed, carried, and then snapped like siren gates. We all knew someone who’d drowned in one place or another. And we’d heard the stories of the wars, the bodies floating down the river, reports of dead cows bloated, swelling, uncontrolled, raising and falling with the waves. One Deda claimed that the river had turned red. Men would rush into the current, struggling with the weight of the bodies. On shore, they’d pull apart the limbs and roast them, keep the skin if they could. No one, and at the same time, everyone, believed the Deda.

But it was my own Baba who told me the story that captured my thoughts, that drew me to the river again and again.

The most beautiful woman in Banoštor, Milena, was to marry a man from Begeč. Both villages were invited. And although this winter had been difficult, unusually cold, the villagers prepared torte that would have made your mouth water, roasted the remaining pigs, pogača the size of a dining room table had been baked. A gang of musicians was hired, twenty or so with trumpets, accordions, guitars, drums, tubas, fiddles, singers, and the poet.

The first day of the wedding was to be held in Banoštor, and the second and third in Begeč. It was so cold that the Danube had frozen over completely. The great river was almost unrecognizable, so far as it was under all the ice, and only in the deepest moments of sun could you see any blue beneath the surface. The river became a pathway, a new road for the villagers. And what a celebration!

Milena was bargained for; the children ran into the street screaming for the musicians. The poet began, his shouts immortalized in puffs of cold, smoky air. And a moment of silence. Milena’s mother sat quietly, tears falling, until the groom’s mother approached her, wiped the tears, kissed her twice on the cheek.

Click here to read the full story

Nicole Holtzman is a graduate of the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has been published in the New Engagement and the Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review. She has a short story coming out in Archipelago in January 2021.

Doug Van Hooser

First snow

Shaken salt in the wind seasons
               change from October to November.
                              An ending that begins, a pupa to a moth.
White stars sparkle in the air,
               dab the ground and dissolve,
                              blink when swallowed by the lake.
Breath’s fog surrenders to the cold
               Dissipates like Hello, how are you?
                              and a mittened wave.
The onyx night brings inches the wind
               drifts in an angry ocean. The white swells
                              shroud the hibernating yard and gardens.
Oak statuary stand shivering in the air’s numb grasp.
               The branches gnarled arthritic fingers
                              no longer tether trembling leaves.
I escape, smoke up the chimney,
               curl and disappear, another
                              day succumbs to winter’s trance.

Doug Van Hooser’s poetry has appeared in Chariton Review, Split Rock Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, After Hours, and Poetry Quarterly, among other publications. His fiction can be found in Red Earth Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Bending Genres Journal. Doug’s plays have received readings at Chicago Dramatist Theatre and Three Cat Productions. See more at dougvanhooser.com

kerry rawlinson

Decades ago, autodidact & bloody-minded optimist kerry rawlinson gravitated from sunny Zambian skies to solid Canadian soil. She now follows Literature & Art’s Muses around the Okanagan Valley, still barefoot. Her creative leaning is expressionistic, towards exposing the battle-lines of people vs place; the examination of the edges & intersects of nature/construct, culture/chaos, order/anarchy, failure/success; what emerges from people, collectively, and what happens when we’ve disappeared. Contest achievements include Edinburgh International FlashFiction Award, FishPoetryPrize, and CAGO Online Gallery Prize. Newer photo-art appears in Sunspot, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Synchronized Chaos, Sunlight Press, Tupelo Quarterly, Dual Coast, Yes Poetry, among others. Visit on Tumblr or tweet @kerryrawli.

Ricky Ray

Prelude: Quiet Opens the Door

It’s snowing,
and the mind is most beautiful
when she whispers
her thoughts

so far down
into quiet,

one can hear an idea
echo all the way back to creation,

and the Universe—that quivering mouse—
has a chance to slip out
into the owl-less hours
to admire what’s become of itself.

Ricky Ray is a disabled poet, critic and editor who lives on the outskirts of the Hudson Valley. He is the author of Fealty (Diode Editions, 2019), Quiet, Grit, Glory (Broken Sleep Books, 2020) and The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself (Fly on the Wall Press, 2020). His awards include the Cormac McCarthy Prize, the Ron McFarland Poetry Prize, and a Liam Rector fellowship. His work appears widely in periodicals and anthologies, including The American Scholar, Verse Daily, Diode Poetry Journal and The Moth. He is the founding editor of Rascal: A Journal of Ecology, Literature and Art. He was educated at Columbia University and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and he can be found hobbling in the old green hills with his old brown dog, Addie.

Sramaga

As an amateur artist and photographer, Sramaga’s photographic expressions are generally simple and minimalistic with emphasis on abstracts. The subjects are ordinary, mundane things, and situations set exclusively for creative aspects, often resulting in new perspectives.

Website: www.sramaga.com
Instagram: @sramaga_art_photography