Cover image: "'Winter Into Spring" by Owen Brown
Gallery 1
Visual Art, Poetry, and Prose
Olivia Loccisano
Olivia Loccisano is a Dramatic Arts teacher from Toronto, Canada. She is inspired by the absurd and how young women and children navigate this strange world through their own customs and rituals.
Stella Reed
Myth from the field where the fox runs with its tail on fire
When I say run, I mean outrun
your existence, the tongue of the holy
hot on your heels. I say fox
I mean fourteen and nowhere
to go. Tender grapes, a vineyard,
flames sputtering with each footstep.
I mean fourteen and no one anywhere
tender as the grapes. Bad circumstances
bottled and relief like curling vines,
the earth soft, falling away
with each footstep. I say fox
but vixen is what they said,
the tods, the reynards. Who gave her
the torch anyway? Skulk of foxes
in their bad circumstances.
Follow the tail. This is a myth
I say and mean this field
could be anywhere
you fight fire with fire.
Stella Reed is the co-author of the AZ-NM Book Award-winning collection We Are Meant to Carry Water, 2019, from 3: A Taos Press. She is the 2018 winner of the Tusculum Review chapbook contest for Origami, and took 3rd place in The Baltimore Review’s 2020 writing contest. In pre-pandemic times, Stella taught poetry to women in domestic violence and homeless shelters through WingSpan Poetry Project in Santa Fe, NM. You can find her work in The Bellingham Review, American Journal of Poetry, Tahoma Literary Review, SWWIM, Psaltery & Lyre, forthcoming in Blue Mountain Review, the tiny journal and Terrain. She is a Best of the Net nominee for 2020 and holds an MFA from New England College. Stella works for Audubon Southwest.
Colette Tennant
She was Braided Ivy
But here is what I’m trying to tell you.
Not at first – at first she sent out green feelers
that inched their way through hedgerow shadows,
bashful of too much shine.
Eventually, she fell in love
with the number three –
Pluto’s three moons, for instance,
or the three fingers visible when you hold a pen just right,
the three pipes her father loved,
even Cerberus.
She understood the folly of his three thirsty tongues.
So one day she gathered herself into strands of ivy –
turned her long thoughts into beautiful complications
intertwined so tight no one could take apart the twisted threads.
My New Clock
is the lilac out back.
Its leaves clutch at time
the best they can.
They remind me of the way my grandmother’s
needles clicked doilies into being
out of almost nothing but slender thread.
They looked like little nets trying to catch the
minutes and hours and days that flitted
like the hummingbird I see
whose visits to the lilac are
faithful as minute hands,
the quick-circle wings of it,
while small angels in the branches
wait in its green complications
to catch what slips through.
Colette Tennant is an English professor in Salem, Oregon. She has two poetry books, Commotion of Wings and Eden and After. Her most recent book, Religion in The Handmaid’s Tale: A Brief Guide was published in 2019 to coincide with the publication of Atwood’s The Testaments. She also loves to play the piano and Scrabble.
Mane Hovhannisyan
Mane Hovhannisyan is a fine art photographer who reflects the state in between magic and reality. As a leading photographer of “Daily” newspaper, she collaborates with “Golden Apricot” film festival and has had exhibitions in Berlin, Cologne, Yerevan, and Gyumri. Twice she was among the winners of the Mirzoyan Library photo contest, and she has also been honored with the Multimedia Production Lab Grant in Tbilisi.
J. M. Eisenbrey
When a Bee Bounced Off the Window I Asked
Is the practice of joy
forgetting
or is it remembering what
we are
less bound by postal code
than by the purpose beyond purpose
Today, let’s not accumulate comforts
for a cell
when the need is for the soul of another
to pierce the distance
We can cite the evidence
for dismay
in cacophony
in infection
or species lost
and can count ourselves culpable
How much plenty accrues
before the flood erodes each priceless breath
our mindful moments tainted by cringing
And the skulking sense of futility
it’s a dodge
We are born to suffer the poisonous
and to get our pleasure where we can
within the resistance
our broken sofas aflame atop the barricade
But don’t
Just for today
Grow lettuce, a maple tree, random acts
of art
smile and wave
make some repair
reverse the invasion in any small way
sing
shake that thing
place your shining grain upon the scale
J. M. Eisenbrey is a Detroit native, father, Humanities teacher, activist, survivor of—, and handyperson. Eisenbrey has an MFA, and a BA in Russian Studies. His short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in The Nonconformist, Pif, Juxtaprose, Painted Bride Quarterly, and other venues.
In poetry, the author often works the raw edge of news and underreported events, tapping the emotions and language at the margins of suffering and privilege. In other work his concern is the imprecise or incomplete communication between the individual and self as a setting for interaction with another. Science, history, the natural world, and metaphysics collide or collude in his work.
Lara Veleda Vesta
Fire Ecology: Enduring Somatic Threat and a Theory of Infinite Loss
“For people who are chronically ill, the losses are multiple and permanent and therefore difficult to resolve. Because these losses are unending, they’re known as infinite losses…” –Social Work Today
“Life will return to burned areas in short order. Fungi are already crawling around in the ashes of the fire, laying the foundation for soil that will support the plants that will constitute the early stage of the forest’s re-growth…And ash is nature’s fertilizer. Plant blight, disease and insects are reduced or eliminated by burns. Mineral soil is the compost that Douglas fir seedling roots need to grow. ‘Dead trees’ or snags are full of life.” –Bill Weiler, wildlife habitat expert
Six Weeks Before
The face in the waterfall is clear.
I stand at the base of Wahclella Falls, one of the most powerful in the Columbia Gorge, my feet to basalt 15 million years old, a memory of time before humans, the Miocene era of liquid stone. I’ve just made an offering, an object of great value to me, tossed into the pool of the falls. In my bones is a memory of this, gold at the base of a waterfall, a spirit’s hoard. My partner snapped the photo without my knowing, and there an image, a face emerging from the water.
I am an animist because it makes life more interesting. Animism holds the simultaneous: that things can be real and not real at the same time. We don’t really know much at all about how nature works, the whys of evolution, the function of ecosystems both within and without our bodies. Believing in consciousness and reciprocal relationship has supported me in the not knowing, for mystery is inherent in any student of magic and myth.
In graduate school my research interests included the myths of Northern Europe, how mythic consciousness teaches us new ways of viewing time. These models have disappeared from most dominant systems of thought, but they exist still (in the complex of spiral eternity that is myth itself) in indigenous spiritualities. As a person of European descent, the indigenous spirituality of my forebearers (Celtic, Slavic, Nordic, Germanic) is largely fragmented, and I am separated by oceans and hundreds of years from earth-based ancestral home[1]. So I choose to live where I live, to learn about these traditional lands of the “Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Cowlitz bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla and many other Tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River.” Here I weave fabric into existence by studying the severed threads.
~
Lara Veleda Vesta, MFA, is an artist, author, storyteller, and educator transforming chronic illness into a path of healing and reclaiming. She is the author of The Moon Divas Guidebook, and The Moon Divas Oracle, illustrator of The Moon Divas Oracle Cards and the forthcoming Wild Soul Runes: Reawakening the Ancestral Feminine. Her research interests currently include ancestral connection, mythtelling, and disability as initiation, and she is currently working on an illustrated guide to death transitions. She shares her path of myth, folk magic, ancestor lore, and ritual practice with her Patreon community and through donation classes at the Wild Soul School: www.laravesta.co.
Reilly Cook
The Message in Silence
The silent and beautiful St. Mary’s river
flows forth in its own knowing
exactly what it has done to me.
It has made me vain;
every day I walk outside
and do not bother to thank the river
with a kiss.
My face hugs the strong Wind
as it journeys to and from the water;
again, I refrain from asking it
to thank the river for me,
for being there through it all.
For this I am ashamed.
When will this place feel foreign again?
When will I feel regret that this place
is no longer my home?
Will the excitement in newness return yet again—
can I return to that ignorance?
I hope that once I set sail
I remember to embrace the Wind
who pushes me forth.
Reilly Cook lives in Southern Maryland where she writes and spends her time outdoors with friends, horses, and books. She graduated with a B.A. in English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland where she fostered strong relationships with literature and poetry.
Judy Bales
Judy Bales has over 30 years of experience working in diverse artistic endeavors, including as a fiber artist, avant-garde fashion designer, public art design team member and photographer. She received both her BFA and MFA degrees from the University of Georgia, majoring in painting as an undergraduate and completing her post-graduate work in fiber art. This combination of very distinct and even unlike disciplines has served her well and helps to explain her unique work. In whatever medium she chooses, she approaches her art much like an abstract painter, relying on improvisation and painterly techniques rather than the more precise, controlled approach traditionally favored by fiber artists. She has exhibited her work in over 75 group and solo exhibitions nationwide and internationally.
- Website: www.judybales.com
- Instagram: @balesjudy & @judybales_studio_fashion
Karen Lethlean
Catch and Release
The first time I saw him he couldn’t have been more than twelve, a little ferret of a kid, sharp and quick. Caleb Johnson, haloed in the eager light of a hunter-gatherer, was first to talk to me on the wharf that afternoon.
“What kind of rod is that, Mister?”
“Old one, sonny, automatic caster.”
“And that float, never seen one like that before.”
“It’s a bubble, used to use it for trout fishing. Watch. When there is a bite, it goes under and then I just put pressure on, not too sharp. Here we go.”
Onto estuary edge grass came an undersized Bream, not the first I’ve hooked today. Caleb reached out with skinny, scabby arms to grab our extracted aquatic life.
“Wait a minute, lad, let the flipping die down a bit. See, now I run my hand down fishing line and firmly hold the thing around its belly—that way it can’t spike you. Not everything out of ocean waters is trying to hurt us.”
He watched eagerly while I disengaged a tiny hook, but then frowned as I went to toss my fish back into the channel. “What’s wrong? It’s undersize and has to go back.”
“Yes, I know it’s small, but can you put it back gently? Fish must get a shock when they’re dropped or tossed back.”
“Sure, I can do that.”
We squatted and watched textured, scaled silver—so evident on grass—dull to a mercury-like grey; tiny fish creature gasped a few times and orientated itself again into liquid surrounds. Promptly disappeared into depths, maybe to grow and present a meal-sized catch after holiday crowds were packed up and gone.
“Want to try?”
~
Karen Lethlean is a retired English teacher. With previous fiction in the Barbaric Yawp, Ken*Again, Pendulum Papers, she has also won a few awards through Australian and UK competitions. “The Almond Tree” received a commendation from the Lorian Hemingway Short Fiction competition and was published in Pretty Owl Poetry Journal. Karen is currently working on a memoir titled Army Girl about military service 1972-76. In her other life, Karen is a triathlete who has done Hawaii Ironman championships twice.
Jasmine Khaliq
Invierno I
what is there to say / I washed my hair in the kitchen sink all december / fished it halved from the disposal and told myself / jagged suited my face more / I orphaned groceries on the porch for weeks / bundles of brown cloth stork-dropped / rancid / and all I have to say / I could never bring them in. / there are things that cannot be transformed. / the pets I’ve buried rubberneck to regard me. shriveled / bushels of jasmine left belly up / hair fanned out long for spiderwebs / gossamer highlights fruit fly barrettes / and all I wanted a cracked window / you open / buds with your nail / you have to see the weeping / your voice / a bark, a dream—I don’t understand the things you say to me. room of mountains. you interpret this as you please. I see the deer in the woods; it means nothing to me.
Jasmine Khaliq is a Pakistani Mexican poet born and raised in Northern California. She holds an MFA from UW Seattle, where she also taught. She was a finalist in the 2019 Wabash Poetry Prize. Her recent work is found or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Pinch, and Phoebe.
Owen Brown
Owen Brown received his artistic training at Yale College and The California College of Arts. A resident of San Francisco for many years, he now lives and works in Minneapolis. He exhibits nationally. His works form part of collections of such institutions as the Minnesota Orchestra, the de Young Museum of San Francisco, the Nature Conservancy, and the Weisman Art Museum of Minneapolis. He has been the recipient of residencies in America and in France, was an invitee to ArtPrize Nine, was the subject of monographs from the Society for Art Publications of the Americas, and has collaborated with artists from other disciplines, such as poet Emily Wolahan and choreographer Anat Shinar.
- Website: www.owenbrownartist.com
- Instagram: @owen_artist
Jessica Manack
Preparations
They say it’s gonna be a big one, I gasp
at Neil on the long trudge up the hill to my place,
sherpa, burdened with toilet roll and cereal.
Neil sits on his porch with a Yuengling, the bottle
the only thing green as far as the eye can see.
Yep. Neil answers back, almost all there is to say.
Stocked up. Liquid bread, he laughs,
raising it in salute. It is not until then
that I wonder if all the things I have done to prepare
were the wrong things,
all the sustenance I hoarded the wrong sustenance.
I wonder if, on the second or third day,
hair matting, the cold suppressing my scent,
I will feel up to wandering out to scavenge,
wonder what I will bring myself to do to acquire
what other people smartly thought to procure,
Wielding a shovel, chipping a path through the ice.
And will it be worth it, that taste of tart wheat,
sharp and sweet on the tongue?
Jessica Manack holds degrees from Hollins University and lives with her family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her writing has recently appeared in High Shelf Press, Prime Number Magazine and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Cecilia Stancell
Saint Martin’s Cross
Where is Saint Martin’s Cross?
Where are the animals? The veal calves?
I’ve run the length of the land
And found nothing to sustain me,
Not even the forlorn or tragic.
Only the old, indifferent
Air of the mound-dwellers
Moves with any purpose.
More than once, amidst devastation,
Sorrow found us side by side,
And may yet again, I know,
Permeating time, as it does,
Like mycelium beneath soil as still and
Black as the space between stars.
I forgot that such stillness may cover
These long threads of loss knotted
Tightly with roots of joy and wonder,
But here they are. I hadn’t seen the
White gannet that now streaks upwards
Like a comet from the dark sea
Nor the black sails climbing the
Far side of the horizon, piercing the thin
Dividing line that keeps the sea from the sky.
Cecilia Stancell is a lover of words and writing. A life-long dancer, she holds master’s degrees in photography and art history. She is deeply intrigued by the worlds of legend and myth and how these live in our minds, memories, and bodies. She lives in upstate New York.
Bonnie Matthews Brock
Bonnie Matthews Brock is a Florida-based photographer, as well as a school psychologist. She enjoys capturing images of things that catch her attention, especially nature and urban scenes. Her work has been featured in Ibbetson Street Press, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, The Somerville Times, and Oddball Magazine. You can view more of her images on Instagram @bonniematthewsbrock.
