Cover image: “up in the air (Day 32: 04/21/20)” by Margaret Wiss
Gallery 1
A sea of colored silk
C.M. Clark
Sky Dive at Sunrise
This is the peril,
the rabid dog time. Out
of which quadrant of sky
will wet teeth snap?
Clear sight or a clean shot lurks just
beyond five outstretched fingertips. You
breathe out, the zero zen gasp held
ever since freefall. The parachute seems
to hold. You were told
not to twist, the blatant danger of strangle knot
or tangle of vital lines, but now
the urgency clutters your throat, swallowing
the rising sun. The day’s oblique onset, its path shadowed
and foreshadowed. A new riddle,
more math
than mystery.
You assemble the brown mass of cows, the fields beneath fog
as cool dung and animal earth
first stir, the warmth of flesh opening
from sleep, dreams of food and shade and the forthcoming
turbulent young. Below, a coast road collates
oncoming traffic, separating
what remains stilled from
the grunt exhale of movement.
If an object falls free to earth
at 9.8 meters per second squared, how long
before you’d make contact with unforgiving ground?
Do the math! you nudge your invisible companions,
the indifferent vapors, the blinking,
unseeing eyes,
now insouciant and
sunstruck.
A pound of feathers and
a pound of lead, both descend.
One smelling of game bird, one
carcinogenic.
Twin equal signs,
indistinguishable
in the bead-blurred air,
the dull, coy clearing.
If the retina can separate
in a paroxysm of light’s alarm – last burst
of unnamable glare and fleet object –
what seems sturdy and fixed, in fact
isn’t. Do the math! you whisper still
a half mile above the rocky promontory. What
are the odds? What are my chances
to survive the textile collapse, the freefall
on a given Thursday morning early
in January? Catch as catch can the day’s mandate:
the inevitable plummeting
to deaf acres, awash
in a sea of colored silk.
C.M. Clark’s work has appeared throughout the U.S., in Canada, and internationally. Publication credits include Painted Bride Quarterly, West Trade Review (forthcoming), Prime Number Magazine, Vallum Magazine, Punt Volat (Barcelona), and Gulf Stream Magazine, Travellin’ Mama, and Voices from the Fierce Intangible World (SFPJ). Clark collaborates with artists from other media, including a partnership with contemporary composer Andres Carrizo, the video project “String Theory” with painter Georges LeBar, and Miami’s SWEAT Broadside Project with artists Dorothy Simpson Krause and Kim Yantis. Clark was a finalist for both the Anhinga Press 2021 Chapbook Prize and the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series. She is the author of full-length works Exoskeletal (Solution Hole Press, 2019), Dragonfly (Solution Hole Press, 2016), Charles Deering Forecasts the Weather & Other Poems (Solution Hole Press, 2012), and The Blue Hour (Three Stars Press, 2007), and chapbook The Five Snouts (Finishing Line Press, 2017).
Daragh Hoey
Cuckoo
The cuckoo chick
gullets half-digested insects—
a foreign slop—
and learns play in the treetops
of another bird.
Adopted, it earns prey
(and mating habits).
And when the time presents
to repatriate the nutrients
of the stolen hoard,
rather than board the winds
for cuckooland’s needy shore,
I turn tail
for the birds
like the birds
whose beaks and beats raised me.
Daragh Hoey is an Irish ex-pat who has lived on all three American coasts. Now settled in Seattle and buried in family life, he has very little (if any) formal literary education or publishing history. But he is glad to be writing poems.
Susan Christensen
Susan Christensen established her career as a visual artist in Southeast Alaska after completing her MFA at the University of Washington. She has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibits throughout Alaska and nationally. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Alaska State Art Bank, Clausen Museum, and numerous private collectors. Susan has been awarded several major public art commissions in Southeast Alaska and has served on the Alaska State Arts Council’s Visual Acquisitions panel. Susan is represented by Lynn Hanson Gallery in Seattle. She lives in Bellevue, Washington, with her studio assistant dog, Sirius Star.
- Website: www.susanjchristensen.com
- Instagram: @sus52
A. Pikovsky
When it pressed the small of my back
Thursday moon made a yearning malleable,
minced the night by its throat
yodeling, lifting, warming.
Saturday sun came heavy,
mild was the moment simmering
sweltering towards the
___squeeze.
Bursting at the seams,
hot air pocketed mouthfuls of fabric &
when it pressed the small of my back
it gripped thru my fear,
it sweat thru my longing,
& pinched
towards the
___drop.
Slow-burning haze—
puckered & contained,
it excited my heart’s percussion.
curious, I
touched the tongue of sugar-cane &
the crystals began pouring
(( in-out-in ))
of the flames
& licking the legs
of the oak loose.
legs licked, dancing
inside the revolving door
of spongey transgressions.
I sang
“Incinerate” in a loop of recall,
but the gravitational pull
of my muscles pulsating
spread like wildfire(s)
across my collarbone,
painted & parachuting out (they)
t(r)ickled towards the
__stream.
Monday rains made a purging dirty,
carried my chest by its heart.
steaming, rotating, falling—
murky is the mind
attached to memory,
fixating.
I wore the garment of my heart fluted
& like the bosky horns of a beast
I stood erect, leaving
scent trails
that folded thru each bloom
& wrapped over every tendril.
I was my mouth tasting—
first thru the twist,
& then for the soured flesh.
Transient & tough,
the wisteria opened me
like pigs to the truffle.
The sternum vibrates as it peaks
& parts as it prays.
Spring lingers
by the hooves of its musk,
bouncing, burrowing, beating.
& like roots of a tree,
salted from earth,
potency pines always
for the same host:
D|E|S|I|R|E.
A. Pikovsky is a poet living in Philly and is the child of Jewish Soviet immigrants.
Zach Snyder Smith
You are the cherry from which I breathe
You are the cherry from which I breathe,
ember enlivened by a carnal drag.
Hungering lungs chamber your essence
like cruets of altar red turned vinegar
forgotten cellared in boarded cathedral.
And black moths
commune in the aureoles
of cold candles, marshmallow hands
lingering
over a tremulous little flame:
they deliquesce,
blisters bursting with hyacinth blossoms.
I imprison us in a stand of norway spruces,
a bed of moss where wind swirls like tongues
all september.
do not let me return to these ruins again.
do not let me return to these ruins again.
Zach Snyder Smith is a poet and musician living in Rochester, New York. His poetry has been featured in Roadrunner Review, Lucky Jefferson, The Finger, and ANGLES. He holds a BA in creative writing and film studies from SUNY Brockport. He is especially fond of bourbon barrel ales, Xenomorphs, wind, bokeh lights, mummies, everything bread, screech owls, and A24 films. You can find him posting amateurish nature photos on Instagram @ashen.antlers.
Jack Bordnick
Jack Bordnick’s sculptural and photographic imagery is a reflection of his past and present forces and the imagination of his life’s stories. They represent an evolutionary process of these ideas and how all of life’s forces are interconnected, embraced and expressed through creative art forms. His works represent what he has accomplished with this art form. He calls this changing from one form to another his “quantum and metaphoric moment.” They express and implement his thoughts and feelings regarding taking risks without any guarantee of their success…and to reflect these in his present works is his goal. The predominant imagery deals with faces of both living and non-living beings and things. They are expressed in these many forms and images and do speak to us in their own languages.
Christie Cochrell
L’Inconnue de la Seine
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time . . .
(John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn)
In the latest of a series of unworkable relationships, Reid Sims had fallen in love with a dead woman.
The circumstances were perfect for romantic pining, and he was ripe for it. He’d stopped in Paris with the stated intention of “malingering” on his way home from Turkey and the dig. It was late September, with days waning and the light mellowing richly before finally leaching away, reminding anyone with literary leanings of Prufrock or Strether (Eliot and James, respectively), who life had wistfully passed by. Reid, at merely 37, couldn’t claim that for himself, but felt it threatening nonetheless. He drifted for long, elegiac hours along the river, across bridges, at the alluring mouths of alleyways, past warm-lighted cafés, feeling that sense of not belonging anywhere, with anyone.
To add to his rather delicious melancholy, Rachelle was expecting him for dinner the next evening. The immigration lawyer he had been involved with for five years and put off in his vague—“maddening”—way for five, until her sister’s death and her resultant need for something deep and lasting he didn’t have in him sent him back to California, counting himself lucky to have put an ocean and a continent between himself and his emotional failure. Six months later, in the mairie du XVIe close to the Embassy of Bangladesh, Rachelle married Jean-Yves Bertrand, an earnest Savoyard Reid had first known at the Sorbonne. The couple was insistent now he come and see them while he was in town.
“And Josine,” Rachelle added.
“Your mother?” Joëlle, he thought, confused. Surely he remembered her name? Joëlle, jowly and fierce, with a defining vein of self-disgust like the dark matrix veining turquoise, which she’d passed on to both her daughters.
“Our daughter, Reid. Born just after the New Year. I know Jean-Yves let everybody know.”
That threw him. He supposed he had ignored the e-mail, and a wave of grief for what was lost, what might have been, took him completely unawares. It was complicated by the recurring remorse at how badly he had behaved two years ago—how badly he always behaved. The loss was bigger than just this one woman.
Christie Cochrell’s work has been published by Catamaran, Orca, Lowestoft Chronicle, Cumberland River Review, Tin House, and a variety of others, and been honored with several awards and Pushcart Prize nominations. Chosen as New Mexico Young Poet of the Year while growing up in Santa Fe, she has recently published a volume of collected poems, Contagious Magic. She lives by the ocean in Santa Cruz, California—too often lured away from her writing by otters, pelicans, and seaside walks. Website: www.ourgreenscooter.blogspot.com
Margaret Wiss
Margaret Wiss holds an MFA in Dance from New York University Tisch School for the Arts. As an interdisciplinary artist, her practice incorporates dance, choreography, and film, as well as science. She values the vitality of collaboration and is currently researching the language of collaboration between choreographers and composers. Wiss has taught at Mount Holyoke College, The Five College Dance Department, and Tisch School for the Arts. In 2018, she founded Xsection Film Festival, a Boston-based event sparking interdisciplinary collaboration between dance, science, and film. Currently, she is pursuing her Doctorate of Physical Therapy from Columbia University.
Kait Walser
Geode
Hands craft a legacy
on the horizon,
combing through
clouds. Reach toward
a reimagining. Unearth
a collection: glimmering
tools, precious and polished.
Remember when you wished
to become an archeologist?
Remember the gentle
touch of discovery?
Decades of healing powers
on reserve. Wait for the right
moment to strike, to reveal
what we know to be true.
Shimmer. Strength. An unnerved
love. To the core. Rose quartz
frame and you know the rest.
There’s always an exhale
to reach you when your sails
need a push. Elixirs and petals.
Texts from trustworthy friends.
The right words for those
less-than-right moments.
This bounty. This beauty.
This brilliance. The best
part? We’re all in on it.
Kait Walser is a New York City-based poet and nonprofit copywriter. She holds an M.F.A. from Wilkes University, where she won the 2013 Etruscan Prize. Kait has facilitated workshops, curated, and hosted readings for Union Square Slam and At the Inkwell NYC. She was awarded a 2015 Delaware Highlands Conservancy Artist Residency and a 2020 Brooklyn Poets fellowship. Her work appears online in Poems in the Afterglow (Indolent Books’ 2020 election series) and the print anthology In Absentia: Reflections on the Pandemic (Bicycle Comics, 2020), among others.
Phyllis Green
Phyllis Green’s art has appeared in ArLiJo 123, Earth and Altar, ThereAfter, Superpresent, Novus, New Plains Review, CERASUS, FERAL, and Gulf Stream Magazine, and will soon appear in little somethings press, CALYX, Aji, I 70 Review, and Club Plum.
Kathleen Caprario-Ulrich
Kathleen Caprario-Ulrich is a writer, award-winning visual artist and arts educator who traded the concrete canyons of the New York Metropolitan area for the real canyons and broad skies of the Pacific Northwest where she resides, writes and creates.
- Website: www.caprarioart.com/home.html
- Instagram: @kcapart
Emily Donaldson
Near
The familiar, eddying currents of thought,
threatening to pull body under as riptide, the invisible wind,
a threat and promise gusts below the surface.
A multitude of storms, tempests of mind
the all-too-forced voice or impassive face betrays.
We cannot speak the things we cannot bear.
Iridescent glacial cracks on too-thin ice,
a condemnation, each searching to atone
for the consequence of singular steps.
I would give anything for you
to love yourselves with abandon,
without reservation; in the bone-deep knowledge that
life’s complexity was never a personal failing.
My pleasure has been as witness.
To marvel at the evolving landscapes of your hearts and minds,
those magnificent and fragile mountains, your
bravery, that rugged kindness, forged by elements relentless and wild.
This is an invitation:
Set your worries down as stone upon the wall beneath the lilac.
Sit closer to the fire, breathe deep despite the ache. Anoint yourselves with
soil, uproarious with life, weaving roots anew.
Ease or throw yourselves into snowy meadows, a profession, the ice,
books, the dark sea. Revel in the imperfection of striking into unknowns.
Take shelter and heart. Our paths trace as continental fault lines, behind us
Pangea stretches in our wake.
Emily Donaldson grew up amidst the chaos of her mother’s gardens and a multitude of rescue animals with her two siblings in Vermont. She recently moved to the coast of Maine and is in awe of the North Atlantic. She writes as a way to connect with everything around her and to explore the relationship between the natural and our inner worlds. She loves playing her mandolin and reading Terry Tempest Williams, and refuses to drop out of races she failed to train for.
Melissa Mulvihill
A Mouthful of Storm
I don’t like to be reminded of the wind between us. These gusts may have brushed your cheek when you went to work this morning, may have blown your hair back out of your eyes where it hangs low, waiting for you to flip it back, but now, five states later, they’ve turned seiche, bellowing in from the west in the dark, their bodies bent around mine. I say please carry me, but not forever, and they say please understand that nothing gets made until all old things are destroyed. I stand on the bare Lake Erie bed, where there’s nothing but sand left because all the water has raged to the east toward Buffalo. Things become lost between you and me, and yet we see them forever, these old things that sway in the dark, so full of gone and days. This storm is a breath of past that insists on itself. I turn my body into the wind and lean forward, arms spread wide, ears full of the delicate and thin pages of us we have yet to write. I hope the wind will hold us upright. This is everything I can say with a mouthful of storm.
Melissa Mulvihill writes about the rituals that surround living and dying in our society and the rituals that surround healing in relationships. In 2021, she had essays published in Tangled Locks Journal, Pangyrus Literary Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, Months to Years, and HerStry. She graduated from Kenyon College with a B.A. in Psychology and from John Carroll University with an M.A. in Counseling. She lives in northeast Ohio with her husband, who is an attorney. You can find more of Melissa’s published work at www.melissamulvihill.com.
Em Harriett
Em Harriett is a queer author, illustrator, and photographer from New England. She is inspired by nature and enjoys writing speculative young adult fiction when she isn’t knitting. Her photography has been published in F-Stop, Reservoir Road Literary Review, and Portrait of New England. You can find her at www.emharriett.com or on Twitter @em_harriett.
T-M Baird
What I Left By the Ocean
No more wheeling my stuff down the sidewalk,
who knows how far, today.
No more open morning
going who knows where.
My nerves crashing into every crack in the sidewalk,
my heart curling in on itself
every time I see a flight of stairs.
The incredible burden of all my belongings
being so visible, as they bump into everything
that’s supposed to be here.
No more possibility,
no more madness of infinite hope.
This afternoon, I’m as much a freelancer
as a diplomat, as a street performer.
No more hunger until I can find enough.
No more looking a fish in the eye
as my equal, someone I might have to wrestle
for dinner. You never know.
No more the whole of me invested
in every offering of a word, a look.
No more cardboard stashed in the corners, just in case,
ready for next time.
Leaving the labels around the edges: books, hairbrush, mixing bowl.
Folding them up and putting them in the recycling bin
feels like throwing out cash.
No more my heart belonging
to this sunrise, this breath alone.
The stolen hours,
watching the waves reshape the beach;
befriending the pigeon with the hobbled foot,
sharing my crumbs;
being solitary enough to hear
the man whose one thought was getting to
Sunday,
having the chance to tell him,
yes, it could still turn out to be a good one.
Sharing the open air.
Sneaking through, into the stolen spaces
of other people’s doorways,
the friendly couches, unclaimed floors,
empty churches with rows of soft cushions,
sunny stretches of grass in public parks;
always getting away with being alive.
that safety, the raw trust
for the kindred dirt under my stomach.
It was a different kind of freedom.
How I shall miss her.
T-M Baird has been writing poems since childhood, which took place in the Midwest and upstate New York. She has a BA in Classics from Whitman College, an MA in Religious Studies from Lancaster University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of San Francisco. Her poems have appeared in several journals, including Deep Wild, Sheila-Na-Gig, and The American Journal of Chest Physicians. T-M has followed a number of different paths, including a lot of hiking trails, swim lanes, and garden furrows. Staying in motion and contemplating Mystery—especially where it concerns the Divine—are where she feels at home. She currently lives in Vermont with her husband and dog.
Judy Bales
Building on 30 years of experience in diverse artistic endeavors (including fiber art, avant-garde fashion, public art and photography), Judy Bales creates art that combines cold industrial materials with the sensuous qualities of nature. She utilizes industrial materials (many found, recycled, or salvaged) in an ongoing effort to reveal beauty in unlikely places. Bales, who received both her BFA and MFA degrees from the University of Georgia, majored in painting as an undergraduate and completed her post-graduate work in fiber art. This combination of distinct disciplines has served her well and explains her unique work. While closer to a fiber artist in her choice of materials, she approaches her art more like an abstract painter, relying more on improvisation and painterly techniques than the controlled approach traditionally favored by fiber artists.
- Website: www.judybales.com
- Instagram: @judybales_field_of_view & @judybales_studio_fashion
