Cover image: "Pilgrimage" by Liza Boyce Linder
Gallery 1
The shattered whole
Kaylee Schofield
A Hostel in Athens
Carmina, my bunkmate from Brazil,
stops one night in the bathroom
her hair a sheet
reflecting the orange stall doors
a windowsill dispensing storm runoff
or a bead curtain swaying
“You’ve been doing it all wrong,”
she says softly, asks to take the brush
and demonstrate—how one false move
replicated over a lifetime
equals compound interest
in fallen strands
how you have to start at the end
and slow yourself down
to the point of rage
and then slow down some more
how the only casualty of this is time
but that all things considered
it evens out
but mostly how you have to treat this organism
fool as it is
as if it’s something you’ll have
your whole life
Kaylee Schofield lives in a small Pennsylvania river town with her partner, three pets, and a host of harmless spiders. She is a woodworker, sound bite hoarder, and night-specter-about-town.
Jenna Nielsen
Tequila Sage Revealed to be the Cloud of Unknowing
Dense, lime-leafed, leggy-limbed and sprawling,
its purple stems soft-bristled, its brambles of branches tangling,
from out of its undergrowth red and dimly glimmering
petals drowsing into dirt, and just a handful of flowers now
on the vine, but enough; they keep the zooming bird-jewels fixed
on the nectar of this green and impenetrable mercy seat,
this seraphic cloud of verdure and perfume, flowering nimbus,
labyrinth that only small creatures can thread— mandala for the winged, the legless crawlers,
small scuttlers— extravagant, multiple, whirring, bled of light yet shimmering, its center shrouded from
those of us who walk on two: a closed paradise I alone seem to long for,
this knotty-rooted, mycelial, cobwebbed underworld that I can taste
at the back of my throat— cool, tangy, iron-edged, alien,
in which the godhead sits and spins out, apparently endlessly
and, each time, singularly, its equally unfathomable spawn, breath-brief
and gone—
Jenna Nielsen has worked as a bookseller, registrar, receptionist, bank teller, and chaplain. Her poems have appeared in The Braided Way, Barren Magazine and St. Katherine’s Review, among others, and in the anthology Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose. She lives in the Bay Area but dreams of moving to Italy.
Marcia Trahan
The Misunderstanding
Sunset and the last notes of birdsong.
The sky called Fly to me,
and I thought that was not its real voice,
so I stood still.
I don’t always understand signals.
I don’t always read the beauty of the world.
I am reluctant to engage.
The sky drew its purples around itself
and left me small on my doorstep.
What else could it do if I did not move?
Then the silence. Then my regret.
Marcia Trahan is the author of Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession (Barrelhouse Books). Her essays and poetry have appeared in HuffPost, Two Hawks Quarterly, Cloudbank, The Rumpus, Catapult, The Brevity Blog, Fourth Genre, and other publications. Marcia works as a freelance book editor and holds an MFA from Bennington College. To learn more, visit www.marciatrahan.com.
Karen Fitzgerald
Karen Fitzgerald was born and raised on a dairy farm in the Midwest. It is this early, close relationship with the natural world that informs her work. She has an active exhibition history in the US and abroad. The Queens Community Arts Fund, Women’s Studio Workshop, and NYFA Artist Corps have supported her work. The work is in private, public, and museum collections. Heavily influenced by poetry, her work delights in the energy of gardens, mysteries and all things invisible.
Christie Gardiner
A rented farmhouse in Vermont
It’s quiet in your house. My children are asleep in the same beds beside which, years ago, you bent and kissed hair, matted like thatched grass, on the heads of your own.
Tomorrow, we will wake to evidence of your home’s resident mice, their nocturnal romps tracked like carpenter ants across our blanket-covered bodies.
Holding hands, toes pressed against your dock, we will jump together into Silver Lake, our skin pricked by dichotomous cold, the feeling of alive.
In the cemetery up the road, spongy, sunken ground atop centuries-old graves will grab and pull at our ankles leaving us to swallow hard against our pulses even while swaddled in sunshine.
By lamplight my daughter will play your piano, out of tune twenty years, each dissonant note a spirited finger tapping my arm for attention. I’ll turn, but I’ll not see you there.
The staring eyes of the woman in the framed picture atop the stairs, surely your ancestor, will elicit giggling screams from the children each time they pass.
But that is tomorrow. Today, I break your house’s silence, walking across the singing floorboards to the room that was yours.
I open the bedside window, flooding the space with coyote calls and stream stories—raindrops slapping the sill and slipping down the wall like hopes unmet.
Switching the light, I whisper my secrets to you in the dark as if we are little girls at a sleepover. Only you, my playmate, are dead.
In one agnostic second before sleep comes, I think I see you, sitting at your vanity in a white cotton nightgown, looking toward the night. Green Mountain Eidolon: What haunts you?
Christie Gardiner is an award-winning author, poet, writer, and performer. Her literary oeuvre includes four ecumenical books (one currently in its ninth printing), four anthologies, journal publications, booklets, articles, and the writing of her own videocast/podcast. Christie has also cohosted two successful podcasts and facilitates writing groups for women. She works in poetry acquisition for Inscape literary journal and holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Utah Valley University. Upcoming publication credits include interviews with poets Ross Gay and Michael Lavers. Christie received generous support from the New York Writers Institute in 2023, Utah’s Best in State Nonfiction award in 2020, the Ivory Futures Award 2022-2023 and the Capitol Reef Field Station 2023. Read more of Christie’s work @christiegardinerofficial.
Charles O’Donnell
#4-1/2 Sweetheart
The Old Man couldn’t let a scrap of paper lay on the floor for more than a minute before he’d order me to pick it up, or do it himself. Thirty years later, his garage was a disaster, so full that Mom had to park her car in the driveway. He’d left a crooked path among the heaps, piled front to back, side to side and high as I could reach. With the door open and one tiny window for light, the contents—cardboard and wood cartons, furniture in all stages of disassembly, benches covered with paint cans, coffee tins full of nails, hand tools unused since the Old Man lost the strength to lift them—all ran together into an amorphous black mass until my eyes adjusted to the dark.
I followed the path to the workbench, a crude thing made of two-by-fours and plywood, cheap but sturdy, with a steel vise mounted to the top. His tools weren’t hanging on the pegboard, each in its white painted outline, but scattered on the bench: a hand saw, a claw hammer, two chisels, a brace and bit.
And a plane—a Stanley smoothing plane, solid cast iron, with handles made of rosewood, the same wood guitar makers use, beautiful and strong. It wasn’t lying on its side, the way he’d taught me to lay down a plane, but on its sole, with the iron touching the bench. The iron’s what does the cutting and it needs to be razor sharp. Laying it like that, with the iron down—that was an unpardonable sin.
It weighed five pounds at least. Most hand tools you want to be lightweight, but not a wood plane. The effort’s all in the start of the cut; your arms add momentum as the iron bites the wood. Then you launch it. The plane finishes the cut under its own power.
A purpose-made tool is a thing of beauty. This plane was 80 years old, built to last the life of its owner and of his heirs. Yet its sides and sole were no longer smooth, gray iron but rust brown; the once-gleaming brass knob was splotched and dull. The gracefully curved rosewood handle, designed for a strong, hefty hand, was broken in two places. A few flecks of black paint clung to the top of the plane body; the STANLEY name, once embossed in yellow, was barely legible. I tightened a scrap of wood in the vise and tried a cut. It caught as I leaned into it; the wood chipped and splintered. The iron was as dull as a dinner knife.
I found a screwdriver in a pile near the back of the bench. The screw holding the plane together turned with squeaky reluctance. I dissected the plane into its parts: the lever cap, the chip breaker, the iron, the body, and the frog, a term that still makes me smile more than forty years after the Old Man taught it to me. I laid out the pieces.
“Did you find something worth saving?”
My mother walked among the stacks to the bench, taking hold of boxes like handrails as she walked with painful effort. It took a moment for her to recognize the disassembled tool.
“Your father’s wood plane.”
“Yep,” I said. “Kind of a mess. It needs work.”
Mom twisted a broken piece of the handle with two fingers. “Your father loved that plane.”
“It’s a beauty,” I said. “Used to be, anyway.”
Mom touched each piece of the plane as if taking inventory. She picked up a chisel, once as sharp as a scalpel, now in the same sad shape as the plane. “They all used to be, all shiny and sharp. All hung up there on the wall, each one in its own spot.”
“He liked to keep things in their place.”
Mom gave out a short, breathy laugh. “Uh huh. Everything right where it’s supposed to be.” She puckered her mouth. Her pale eyes crinkled behind thick glasses as they wandered over garden tools leaning in the corner and scraps of wood bristling from a garbage can. “His place.” She nodded. “His hideout.” She put a hand on her hip as she leaned against the bench. “You know, he spent more time out here than he did with me.”
I smiled. “I’m the same way with my hobbies.”
“Hobbies,” she repeated. “That’s what you do to relax. Your father was not a relaxer.”
“He liked it. Woodworking, I mean. Didn’t he?”
Mom shrugged. “Some men have mistresses—your father had his tools.”
“Mistresses,” I said, grinning. “That’s funny.”
Mom looked past me, as if she were staring at some object on the horizon. Her mouth turned down and her chin quivered. Her eyes looked dull and wet.
“Dad loved you, Mom.”
“Oh, yes.” She tilted the plane, glancing at its underside. “Not as much as his tools at times.”
“Mom, it was his pastime.”
“I’m not saying he sometimes loved the tools more, only that he sometimes loved me less.”
“They’re just things.”
Her face twisted into what could have been a smile. “Whenever we had a fight, this is where he’d come. If it was late in the day, he wouldn’t come back in the house until after bedtime, when he was sure I was asleep and he could get into bed without talking to me. But I almost never was asleep. I could smell the sweat and sawdust on him, and sometimes the beer.”
I kept my eyes on the pieces of the plane, laid out on the bench like an autopsy. “So, would you say something? When he came to bed, I mean?”
“No. Well, mostly no. When we were younger I’d try to talk to him. But he wouldn’t talk. The next morning we acted like nothing happened.”
She looked out the window, although the glass was so filthy she couldn’t see a thing through it. She sighed. “Every fight broke a bit of our marriage, some little part not working quite right. Over the years I stopped talking to him when he came to bed. It got to be such a chore.”
I never took my eyes from the bench. A minute passed; the only sound was a neighbor trying to start his lawn mower. It would turn over, occasionally catch, run for a few cycles, then sputter and halt.
“Mom, can I keep this plane? I think I might be able to fix it.”
She laughed a little. “Oh, of course you can. I hope you can do something with it.” She put her hand on my arm. “Do you know what your father called that thing? He called it his ‘sweetheart.’ Can you imagine? He used to call me that, but who calls a thing ‘sweetheart’?”
She asked the question the way a child might ask about a bug she’d found, like she’d be satisfied with any answer, or no answer at all. The sadness etched into her face a minute ago was gone. I looked at her, imagining what she was thinking, guessing that she was deciding what she would fix for dinner.
I kissed her cheek. I picked up the iron and held it in the light, rubbing the grime from the symbol stamped into it—the name STANLEY, enclosed in a box, beneath it a heart with the letters S.W. inside.
“The S.W. stands for Stanley Works, but everyone calls these planes sweethearts.”
Mom bent closer, adjusting her glasses for a better look. She stared at the logo for almost a minute. “So that’s what he meant.” She put her hand on my shoulder as she straightened up. “Well. That damn thing was his sweetheart for sixty years, and that’s what he meant. Nothing.” She looked out the window, her eyes shining in the light. She crossed her arms, pressing them tight against her chest as she whispered, “The Old Bastard could have told me.”
Charles O’Donnell writes thrillers with high-tech themes in international and futuristic settings. His works include the espionage thriller The Girlfriend Experience, the political thriller Moment of Conception, and the dystopian novels Shredded, Shade, and Univirtual. Charles recently retired from a career in engineering to write full-time, drawing on his experience leading teams in many countries to create compelling settings in faraway lands. Charles lives with Helen, his wife and life partner, in Westerville, Ohio.
Jess Brightly
Jess Brightly, an upstate New York-based artist, wields heavy-bodied acrylics and imitation sprinkles to craft nostalgic, tactile celebrations of indulgent treats. As a registered dietitian, Jess infuses her art with perspective, redefining expectations in the domain of painting and gastronomy. Her studio sanctuary, lit with rainbow neon signs and light prisms, serves as the sacred stage for her expression. Beyond the canvas, Jess finds solace in the purrs of her three Bengal cats and the high vibes of her closest squad. In the last decade, she has evolved from a self-employed car painter to a successful dietitian-artist. Her aim: to awaken senses, sparking hunger and appreciation for life’s silent orchestrations—textures, light, and the kaleidoscope of colors that paint the tapestry of human experience.
Andreea Ceplinschi
In the absence of a turbulent time, lush with chaos
the poet considers praying to the new moon in Cancer to remove the block
and the recurring dreams of non-violent loss of teeth.
For in the absence of violence, the poet’s body
has grown cavernous with misplaced resentment
and the poet’s passions are stilled with jealousy
over the hushed agony of honeysuckle birthing its blossoms.
In the absence of turmoil, the poet is praying for the night
to buckle to the ground under the strain of fireflies
treetops screaming alive as the poet chokes wordlessly
and summer keeps flooding in with ravenous glory.
The poet yearns to be an open field.
Andreea Ceplinschi is a Romanian immigrant writer, waitress, and kitchen troll living and working at the tip of Cape Cod. She writes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Her work has been featured in Solstice Literary Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, The Blood Pudding, and elsewhere. When not writing for herself, she volunteers for Passengers Journal. Find out more at poetryandbookdesign.com.
Michelle Niemann
A Private Phenology
To Liz
from Holliday Park, fall 2022
for Eagle Creek Park, 2020 & 2021
low smartweed
tall black oak
wilting wild ginger
woods by rote
remember that time,
yellow butteds everywhere
on the red trail’s ragged
point, not long before
frozen, a loon
overlook?
soon we’d be seeking
cutleaf toothwort, trout
lilies, spring
beauties,
trillia, then britches,
if these years kept their
timing, if our time
kept its pace
stately, like the sharply
dressed wood duck
on the first unnamed
water-spot in the glory
of another annual
effort at
beginning,
like the ring-necked
pair sliding the square ice-
skating pond, so called, opposite
their perfect
reflections, before the
frogs take it over with
their joyous
amphibious many-
bubbled gurgling.
by the bluebird
meadow in thick
summer the cattail-
choked puddle humidly
invisible
but for
flutterbys
tiger swallowtail
dense
blazing star
turn around and
there you are
Michelle Niemann is a poet and academic writing coach who lives in Indianapolis. She grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and earned her PhD in English Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. As a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA, she co-edited The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017) with Ursula K. Heise and Jon Christensen. Her essays on poetry and the organic farming movement have been published in Modernism/modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, Victorian Poetry, Edge Effects, and Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. Her poems have appeared in RHINO, after hours, and CANNOT EXIST. Website: michelleniemann.com / Instagram: @michelle.re.writing
Lisa Delan
vessels (tikkun)
this is everything
our forms shadow
the shattered whole
nothing more
than this piece
born before the
world is ours
we sift shards
tongue and groove
to marry the one
we have carried unbroken
fragments exhaling the
names we took when
we fell from the skies
we blend the seams
with holy sparks
cast without sight
this is how new worlds are built
paths forged with tikvah
that we will not be alone
on the long walk home
Return
I wished for you / until I wished you away / layering
bits of ribbon / feathers / and words like nacre
spinning sand / I sealed you in scalloped edging /
sank you with the sea / and slept.
When your shell fractured / I awoke in Neptune’s
palm / his trident luring my siren’s song /
euphonious / riding a thoracic wind / to your
mollusked ear.
I drew you with my breath / or maybe the sea
delivered us / waves racing with palace horses / or we
were carried by laughing gulls / away from Neptune /
and my own resolve.
Did we plummet from red beaks? / Sink in salt
marshes? / I summon memory / see us in our
shattered casings / enrapt and doomed / with brined
breath rising / evanescent.
Lisa Delan’s poetry and prose have been featured in American Writers Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, Drunk Monkeys, Passengers Journal, Poets’ Choice, and Viewless Wings, among other publications. She was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Song settings of Delan’s poems were premiered by Festival Napa Valley in 2022, and she is currently collaborating on a libretto for a new choral work to premiere in 2024. When she is not writing, you can find the soprano, an international performer who records for the Pentatone label, singing songs on texts by many of her favorite poets.
Liza Boyce Linder
Liza Boyce Linder lives with her husband, her light box, and her insect collection in the state of Maryland. She welcomes correspondence through Instagram @lizaboycelinder, where more of her work can be seen.
Nathaniel Van Yperen
Our Lady of the Back of the Church
The stained-glass window paints reds, blues, and yellows on the marbled floor. Among the flickering colors, a speck of red sits still and dead center on one of the tiles. It is a ladybug. All around her, we rise and fall, keeping pace with the action up front.
We are sitting in the back of the church, back near the baptismal font. It is as far back as you can go and still be in church. It is where I feel most comfortable and, as it happens, it is also the one place where this congregation tolerates the busy feet of children. But when a six-year-old boy in a light blue puff jacket breezes by, I am unnerved. His foot falls but inches from my little red neighbor. A disciple once asked the Teacher, who is my neighbor?
I decide to act before the boy in the blue puff jacket doubles back. I bend down on my knees. I scoop the ladybug up with a bulletin and slide her down into my hand. I think of the bad art in the Sunday school room—the poster of God’s giant, white hands holding the Earth. I’ve got the ladybug in my hands. I’ve got the little, bitty bug in my hands.
The priest is more enthusiastic today than his parishioners. It’s not the first time. We sit still while he gesticulates. The cadence of his words drives us past familiar road signs of a homily. We are buckled in to our pews. I study my ladybug to pass the time. She is like a bead of the rosary. The priest is slowing down. Are we there yet?
We rise to recite the Nicene Creed. I lift my glasses up onto my forehead and bring her up close, so we can really get a look at each other. I count her spots. I am still not sure if she’s quick or dead.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
I believe she makes the smallest of movements.
We have made it to the prayers of the people. My wife is used to my restlessness at the back of the church, so she has not paid any attention to my paying attention to the ladybug. This morning, she is wearing a new GPS watch that counts steps for her. A vibration sounds out from her wrist. It is telling her to move. Lord, hear our prayer.
The Lord does. We’ve made it to the Peace. I wander around the sanctuary with a secret: the ladybug is cupped in my left hand. I stop to greet strangers I greeted last week and the week before and the week before. We smile and shake hands and then we find our seats again. An older woman with two rows of pearls strung around her neck is wiping away tears. I wonder why. She doesn’t say. We are all so fragile. I am careful not to squeeze too hard with either hand.
The Peace of the Lord be always with you.
And also with you.
I bring the ladybug back with me to the back of the church.
I think briefly about placing her in the gold offering plate that is making its way around the sanctuary: a gift of God as a gift for God. But I think better of it. I worry that she will be lost in the pile of bills and coins. I pass the plate instead. We are nearing the end.
In a moment we will be called forward. In a moment, the priest will place Christ’s body next to the tiny creature in my outstretched hands.
Nathaniel Van Yperen’s writing has appeared in Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, The Common, and The Land Speaks: New Voices at the Intersection of Oral and Environmental History (Oxford, 2017). He is the author of Gratitude for the Wild (Lexington, 2019). He teaches courses in the humanities at The Pennington School. Website: www.nathanielvanyperen.com / Instagram: @nathaniel.vanyperen
Jason Wallin
Jason Wallin is Professor of Media Studies and Youth Culture in Curriculum at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum (Palgrave MacMillan), Arts-Based Research: A Critique and a Proposal (Sense Publishers) and co-producer of the extreme music documentary BLEKKMETAL (Grimposium, Uneasy Sleeper).
F.M Papaz & Arthur Perpall III
F.M Papaz is a Greek-Australian creative who believes that there is space at the literary table for everyone and is excitedly setting up your cutlery. Her poems have appeared in Mantissa Poetry Review, Literary Revelation’s poetry anthology Hidden in Childhood, and The Victorian Writer. In 2023, she joined Tabula Rasa Review as an Editorial Assistant. Connect @fmpapaz or fmpapaz.com/ings to find her monthly newsletter about living a creative life.
Arthur Perpall III, the eldest of three siblings from Prince George’s County, Maryland, uncovered a profound passion for illustration during childhood. Fueled by kids’ art supply kits and inspired by his favorite comics and animated shows, Arthur spent his time away from schoolwork and sports honing his illustrative talents. After being awarded an Arts scholarship, Arthur delved into both visual and musical realms in high school before refining design skills at Bowie State University. Currently, as a freelance illustrator and designer, Arthur embraces a whimsical style inspired by cherished childhood comics, animated shows, and movies. Arthur’s unique path as an illustrator has been shaped by his diverse influences and experiences, including traveling, athletics, movie history, and art.
