Cover image: "Mind's Clear" by Sofie Rosalien Deen
Gallery 1
Visual Art, Poetry, and Prose
Liza Wolff-Francis
I cannot read river water
no one ever taught me
the mysteries of its text
or how to identify
whether trout are male
or female. But I watch
the tan-brown color
of currents of the Rio Grande
for signs of where it will go
next. This river water
fish memorize the taste of.
The sand bank I lay back on in summer
to dangle my feet, to take away
ferocity of sun, was gone
by December, dried up,
landed. It had moved
thirty feet east
and I bet
that move
was foreshadowed
months ago in the currents.
When the temperature of the day
is just warm enough, the city’s
heat island stifling, I go
to river, take
its temperature
with my toes,
my fingers,
wipe drops on my forehead
so it will remember the taste of me,
my sweat, my fever.
I try to gauge its pressure,
speak to it, offer thanks to it,
bribe it with coins,
pet it with my hands,
spit into it to join
my spit with deer
and coyotes
who drink from it,
with snow wash and mountain,
to try to go with it as far
as it goes, through Texas,
through desert hills, by the shacks
right up against it in Juarez.
My body, almost seventy percent water
The Earth, almost seventy percent water.
Every so often, the wind will read river aloud
and for a moment or longer, if I can breathe it in,
hold it inside of me, I understand
the text of river and my body
knows it as if it had always
understood.
Liza Wolff-Francis is a poet and writer with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College who served two terms as a member of the Albuquerque Poet Laureate Program’s Selection Committee and continues on the organizing committee. She was chosen to write in Tupelo Press’ 30/30 poetry challenge for the month of September 2020. Her writing has been widely anthologized and her work has most recently appeared in the magazine El Palacio: Art, History, and Culture of the Southwest, Steam Ticket, and We’Moon, among others. She has a chapbook out called Language of Crossing (Swimming with Elephant Publications, 2015) and she blogs to support mental health through writing at www.writeyourbutterfly.com.
Kristan LaVietes
The Beekeeper’s Uniform
Zipping up the suit
separates tripartite psyche;
padded jacket blocks
interference,
and under netted hat is only
desire. In here,
behind the cloud from the smoker,
I nuzzle memories
and hunger, and no one knows
how much I want
the butterfly’s new
heart to thrive.
I want the orangutan
to smile in her sleep.
(I remember a sapphire pin in her hair.)
I want an origami baby
glowing in the dark the way
babies do.
And I want you, and
highball glass humidity,
and porcupine quivers whumping dead center
in the target on your chest.
Behind the lazy bees, is a force
of instinct and impulse,
a skeleton un-haunted,
a sleek-eyed rabbit
out of her trap and wild again.
Kristan LaVietes is an indie greeting card ace and an ordained officiant of shotgun weddings and backwoods unions. Her writing has been described as “alkaline” and “swaddled.” She writes almost exclusively on the backs of post office receipts. Her work has been published in Pearl, Nerve Cowboy, The Savannah Literary Journal, Texas Poetry Journal, Moria, and Isotope.
Jennifer Willoughby
Jennifer Willoughby has spent three decades as a commercial artist. Her experience spans marketing, photography, illustration, graphic design for both print and web, video production, 2D and 3D animation. Jennifer is a Colorado native and currently resides in Westminster.
Claire Wilde
iii.
sometimes it is
fog or smoke
or breath
and sometimes
it becomes
a spangling
of dawnlit mist on the
face of the deep
and in that vanishing—
i.
much much later came the de-scribers. they dwelt in the ruins of abbeys and warehouses, in graffitied cloisters clotted with nettles and needles and old broken bottles; they dwelt behind pane-less windows full of sky; they dwelt with the moss in the cracks, and with young ferns.
where once the scribes had netted the stories with letter and line and gilt, the de-scribers set them free.
“de-scribe” as in “demolish.” as in “destroy.”
describe: from the latin de- (‘down’) + scribere (‘write’).
write down, right down back to the center of things.
novices liturgized the death of the digital: they took up the laptops and the tablets and the ancient desktops, kissing them before wiping clean the hard drives and emptying the cloud, a downpour of data returning to the worldsoul like rain to the ocean; information tending back towards knowledge, knowledge watershedding its way to wisdom.
after that immersion in the virtual, it was permitted to get one’s hands dirty….
~
Claire Wilde is a queer parent, writer, and childcare provider living as a settler in the ancestral territories of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other peoples. She organizes with the Portland, OR chapters of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), and she is passionate about exposing the intersections between white supremacy, US imperialism, and climate chaos. You can find her exploring the Johnson Creek watershed with her wife and toddler, reading about witches in her tiny blue house, or, occasionally, on Instagram @re.wilde.ing.
Sarah Wallis
Out Amongst the Plunge Divers
mad weather, stinging rain and squall
the gannets are out plunge diving the plenty,
flash of white back and black-tipped wings,
like one of Degas’ ballerinas,
all in pirouette, they skim and back dive
the water with angel’s grace, ’til,
sword faces first they break through
the surface, devil-faced for chickfeed,
with an ice-driven focus, arrowing
to target and fish gulp, white horses splash,
the feathered folk dive
God and the Weather you know you’re alive
prizes sought and won, they’re back
to spiralling, a float
of angel’s ink, shadowtipped for home,
as we all are,
dipped in the water and thinking of home
Sarah Wallis is a poet and playwright based in Scotland, UK. Recent work is at Trampset, Lunate and Abridged (Nyx issue) online and in print journals Finished Creatures (Stranger issue) and The Alchemy Spoon (Metal issue). Her chapbook Medusa Retold is available from @fly_press and she tweets @wordweave.
Nicole Irene Anderson
Nicole Irene Anderson is a visual artist working in painting and drawing media. Her work reflects a sensitivity to human vulnerability, and aims to trigger a sensory response that evokes memory and heightened awareness. With a camera in hand, Anderson travels to places that elicit emotional stimuli. Dwellings, land inflicted with environmental damage or human alteration, historical locations, or mundane, the discarded make their way into her paintings. When translating her photographs into paint and pencil, Anderson articulates a collective uneasiness of the times. Anderson is especially drawn to places that show neglect, and painting them becomes a way to empathize and make special the overlooked. Anderson lives and works in Santa Rosa, California.
Valyntina Grenier
Under Trees
Her piano quickens me
w/ its great glass garbage
it’s a reverie in all green
as the shallowest edge of the river
reflects the canopy clear through
to reach of the sky
To fear nighttime
is no apostrophe
Monitors beam
marriage as the image of purgatory
homicide as the turning point
of love and desire
Gods fight over who is the god
Or god is breath
aspirating death
A multi-genre artist living in Tucson, Arizona, Valyntina Grenier is the author of the chapbooks Fever Dream/Take Heart from Cathexis Northwest Press and In Our Now, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her work has recently appeared in The Impossible Beast: Queer Erotic Poems, High Shelf Press, Gaze, Impermanent Earth and Wild Roof Journal. Find her at www.valyntinagrenier.com or on Instagram @valyntinagrenier.
Kristin Berger
Passenger
Remember drawing lop-lobed hearts
onto a fogged window with a hot finger,
the small miracle of breath opaquing the world
for just a few moments, while the hills of the heart
descended in drips before you had a chance to strike
an arrow through, take a sleeved-elbow to swipe,
see snow zeroing in, inhale, exhale, start all over?
From the backseat as a child, I could find my way
north to our cabin, no directions but by the sprucing
of the skyline, the way bridges thinned their spans
and farmland filled with the pulse of oil wells,
blue and gold beacons in the rearview mirror, like campfires
I would gallop my imaginary horse to if not
for all the fences gridding the horizon.
There are details of the story we drive away from.
Like a disappearing river, or a spouse’s love.
I learned my way like the fiery warblers retracing
their route from somewhere hot and south,
along the same spine of road and ditch, the scent
of pines imprinting on us a safe sandy habitat
around the hemisphere’s bend, some home
just out of reach: rolling landscape that appeared
when I cranked the window down, let hearts slip
into the car door’s sealed sleeve, snowy air
rushing in—something solid, a name
to press my lips to.
Kristin Berger is the author of four poetry collections, including Refugia (Persian Pony Press, 2019), Echolocation (Cirque Press, 2018), and How Light Reaches Us (Aldrich Press, 2016). Kristin is the curator of The Lents Poetry Project and Poetry Editor for Anecdote Magazine. She lives in Portland, Oregon. More at www.kristinbergerpoet.com.
Shelley Rothenburger
From artist statement: My characters come together through a series of taking bits and scraps of material retrieved from the bin of “unsuccessfuls” and placing them here and there. I don’t work from preconceived ideas. I work fast and intuitively to stay as far away from logic as possible. If rational thought interferes, the process becomes stalled. As I “map around” the composition I allow forms to grow out of themselves and expand and evolve. It’s a process of redefining what I have started with as I construct the image based on what the preceding scrap piece tells me. […]
It is this openness and freedom of discovery as I manipulate what I have that keeps the image fresh, real and unexpected. This is the aesthetic I strive for.
Cleo Griffith
Stairs without railings
in the forests there are
pilings of timber
fallen away from
trees long dead
in the buildings of commerce
there are stairs without railings
falling from which
are the backward and blind
in oceans under moonlight
octopi flounder
sea scallops dive
toward mermaid’s blue cave
moon-scape’s machine-view
photographs distant black holes,
suns collect matter,
build galaxies from dust
we in our houses
hold gravity’s ring
learn as we go
how to tie our own shoes
Cleo Griffith was Chair of the Editorial Board of Song of the San Joaquin for twelve years, and remains on the Board. She has been published in Cider Press Review, Homestead Review, Iodine, Main Street Rag, Miller’s Pond, More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets, POEM, the Aurorean, The Furnace Review, The Lyric, Tiger’s Eye, Time of Singing, Wherewithal and others. A member of the Modesto CA Branch of National League of American Pen Women, she lives in Salida, CA with her two cats, Amber and Neil.
Elizabeth Farris
This morning I found a track in a muddy patch on the east side of my cabin. I was quite excited, since bobcats have been seen in the area recently. Much like a bird watcher, I keep a running tally of the animals I observe around my place. It might be considered cheating, but I also include the near misses. When I find a track but don’t see the animal that created it, I classify it as “Left a calling card. Missed him because I wasn’t watching.” This was one of those instances. I ran inside to get my animal tracks identification book before the early light shifted or the track was destroyed by another drizzle of rain.
Small and rustic, my cabin is tucked inside a canyon cut by a perpetually-flowing river in the mountains of Arizona. At 5,000 feet elevation, the environment is a transition between two very different landscapes. To the south is the northernmost edge of the Sonoran Desert which covers the bottom half of Arizona and stretches down into Mexico. Travel north another ten miles, climbing an additional two thousand feet, and you’ll enter the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world. In this transition area I have a little bit of everything. My land has clumps of ungainly juniper and self-confident oak trees. Clusters of manzanita bushes covered in red berries. Giant sycamores line the banks of the river, firmly rooted into the damp soil. An occasional pine tree is around, almost embarrassed to not be hanging out with the main tribe up north. A prickly pear cactus will surprise with its presence, sometimes unpleasantly.
I squatted down to get a close look, measured the track with my ruler, counted four toes and noted the shape of the heel pad. It looked similar to the life-size bobcat print in my identification book….
~
Elizabeth Farris earned an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University, Wellington New Zealand, in 2015. Her short stories and essays have appeared online and in journals in the US, Australia, and New Zealand. A dual citizen, she divides her time between a tiny cabin in the mountains of Arizona and a small house with a big view in New Zealand.
Sofie Rosalien Deen
Sofie Rosalien Deen is a self-taught visual artist and writer. Photography, painting and poetry are a means for her to study the subconscious. Inspired by the surreal, she is currently working on her second photography & poetry book. More information about her work can be found at www.sofierosalien.nl and at her Instagram page @sofierosalien.
Stephen Massimilla
Stricken
I looked for you
among the shivering Pleiades
hovering over
locked-down
Rome, near the ice sheets
of the Spanish Steps
which mirrored
an insomniac archipelago
of ghost lights
reclaimed overhead
by the depths, but tilting
warped rain scrims
back toward me,
starry fossils yielding
in each curling wave
to mist-life—
an unfollowed orbit
ellipsing.
**
Yes, we are that close.
So I scrape off the frost
on your forehead
from when you were passing
through all those clouds
in that storm-struck dream,
your feathers shredded
by cyclones, when suddenly
you wake to a jolt
in the real night sky
only to recall an astral burial field
blinking past sleep, further
down the passage
where morning tapers vaguely.
**
Come noon, the crooked elm
in the ancient cemetery extends
its burning shadow, a freezing sun
so low on the cityscape
and the other shades clinging
to the alley of branches
do not know
you are here.
Stephen Massimilla is a poet, scholar, professor, and painter. His multi-genre Cooking with the Muse (Tupelo, 2016) won the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the National Indie Excellence Award, an Independent Author Network Book of the Year Award, and others. He is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Social Justice. Previous books and awards include The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat (SFASU Press Prize selection); Forty Floors from Yesterday (Bordighera/CUNY Poetry Prize winner); a study of myth in poetry; a Van Rensselaer Prize, selected by Kenneth Koch; several Pushcart Prize nominations. He holds an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia University and The New School. For more info: www.stephenmassimilla.com and www.cookingwiththemuse.com.
Mary Jane Tenerelli
Mary Jane Tenerelli is a photographer, poet, legal writer and mother. She began taking photos in March of 2020, coinciding with the start of the pandemic. Her work so far seems to reflect the waxing, waning, waxing again, and finally real subsiding of the virus.
