Cover image: "Handwritten Sea" by Emily Krill
Gallery 2
The moonlight on my clothes
Julie Nelson
Archaeology
One day when my spirit
crawls out of the dark cave
of my fossil frame
and joins the open landscape
of sky, I will stay back
here with the bones of me
bound in clay,
sinking into the round
round Earth.
This living thing we are
is good, so good
as just now, lying here, just
breathing, I hear frogs
sing in the muddy banks
outside the window
in a place where
one day I will lie down
in the brown soft land,
the bones of me
an archaeology
a place where
this certain future becomes
the past.
Julie Nelson is a creative writer and educator who lives in southeast Michigan with her partner of 37 years. She has published poems and stories in various literary journals including Wild Roof Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, East by Northeast Literary Magazine, Critical Reads, Passengers Journal, and Passager.
Michele Johnson
Deer Passing Through a Ghost Forest
The (deer) ask me
And I have no answer.
Their eyes
Are two wet question marks, two liquid
Interrogating flames . . .
—Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Dog”
We move through a ghost forest,
nothing but ash and cast-iron snags
rising like stove pipes, the smoke
long since cleared. I know this place,
its dead
pedicels pinpointing the undulating
terrain. What I’m trying to say is:
when I deconstructed my belief
in an afterlife, all my beloveds died
at once
in a landslide of anticipatory grief—
lover, daughter, son. I feel the deer
before I see them passing through
the ghost forest, as if clouds across a
caged sky
in the ghost forest Libido and Mortido
call to one another in the same voice,
neither without the other. I know this
place not as sadness not as joy
but as reconciliation
Michele Johnson lives in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state. As an introvert, she enjoys wandering the Pacific Northwest backcountry as well as her vast inner landscape—she sometimes confuses the two. Michele’s work has appeared or will soon appear in The Bluebird Word and Ghost City Review.
Susan Cummins Miller
Thunder in the Morning
i.
Awaiting dawn here, in Sabino Canyon, alone under recalcitrant moon, world swaddled in pandemic shadow, static-graceful light growing sharp. Bone-ivory sand curls around striped gneissic boulders. Thunder in the east does not dampen the ardor of mourning doves or sour the notes of curve-billed thrashers. All decisions should be as clear-cut.
ii.
The heart of the sky pulled the key and the exotic words dropped among the unknowing gathered around the crabbed skeletons of bluestones, chanting drumbeats: Revelations as profound as flaked tools shown to those who hunted with rough stone, or a field of planted grain to those who knew only the gathering way. What followed: a fearful flight backwards to a safe place, each time ending at a precipice.
iii.
The canyon trail ahead twists and twines like a child’s braided plait. Around every bend, curving water trickles over algae-draped stones, falling like mood music into tannin-brown pools. The sun rises at last between black-fleeced clouds to touch whatever lies behind my careful smile. Far below, the exit road branches. Only one fork leads to a fierce beginning.
Award-winning Tucson writer Susan Cummins Miller, a former field geologist, paleontologist and educator, is the author of seven novels (including the forthcoming My Bonney Lies Under), a nonfiction anthology of 34 women writers of the American frontier, and two recent poetry collections, Making Silent Stones Sing and Deciphering the Desert. Website: www.susancumminsmiller.com
Sandra Hosking
Sandra Hosking is a photographer and writer based in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in West Texas Review, 3Elements Review, Edify Fiction, Red Ogre Review, and more. She holds M.F.A. degrees in theatre and creative writing. Instagram: @sandykayz99
Lindsey Warren
Lindsey Warren received her MFA from Cornell University, and her three collections (Unfinished Child; Archangel & the Overlooked; and Sentence, Forest) were published by Spuyten Duyvil. Earlier this year she finished her first short poetry film entitled What an Uncruel Moon It Was (generously funded by the Delaware Division of the Arts and Integrity ACA), and this spring a manuscript of her poem collages entitled The Urge to Say Beautiful was a semi-finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Some of Warren’s poem collages inspired by the artwork Falling Garden (by Steiner and Lenzlinger) are forthcoming in Fugue. She lives in Arden, Delaware with her dog Toasty.
John Tessitore
No Sudden Movements
When blooming
precedes the flower
we should speak
in slow sentences
to dull the shock
of color at the instant
of flourishing.
Sometimes a sentence
about quickening
is the stem of compassion.
What wakes the burgeon?
What opens while we sleep?
What will you see
by gray light of morning?
We have in common
a life-giving metaphor,
bridging our distance
to tell our story
the same way once: a late
blossom in June,
a new extravagance.
John Tessitore has been a journalist and biographer. He has taught history and literature at colleges around Boston and directed national policy studies on education and civil justice. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press. His poems have appeared in a variety of books and journals. He has published several volumes of poetry and a novella, and hosts a poetry podcast, Be True, available on all major podcast platforms. Website: www.johntessitore.com / Instagram: @jtessitorewriter
Emily-Sue Sloane
Throwing Shade
A flock of seagulls
rises off the pavement
screeching, circling, diving.
Crouched beneath the frenzy,
hands covering my head,
I wait for the storm to pass,
for sharp yellow beaks to hush
and wings to fold back into silence.
But the shimmying earth
keeps toppling buildings,
spewing searing lava,
whipping up wood-splitting winds,
flooding us with rivers of rain.
I’ve left prayers on sandy beaches,
in muddy footprints,
under thinning forest canopies.
Forfeited sleep to the beat
of my worried heart.
Scientists now suggest
we fashion a parasol
for our Little Blue Planet,
protection from
the sun’s burning rays.
Clearly we’ve moved
beyond mere course correction.
In the silence of the moon
no rivers run, no sap rises.
Emily-Sue Sloane is an award-winning poet who writes to capture moments of wonder, worry and human connection. Her work has appeared in numerous literary online and print journals, anthologies and magazines, as well as on WNYC’s Morning Edition in celebration of National Poetry Month. She is the author of a full-length collection, We Are Beach Glass (2022), and a chapbook, Disconnects and Other Broken Threads (The Poetry Box, March 2024). Sloane lives in Huntington Station, NY, with her wife, singer-songwriter Linda Sussman. For more information, please visit EmilySueSloane.com.
Emily Krill
Emily Krill is a Pittsburgh artist who makes large collages out of vintage paper. Blueprints, ledgers, homework, player piano paper, and letters from the 1800s all go into the work. She takes these materials and adds color and pattern to make something altogether new. Her work brings the past into the present and infuses it with a sense of joy.
Tyler Jorgensen
Reflections on the Buffalo River
There are these moments of receptivity, when you are tuned in to everything around—the frequency of cicadas, the croaking of bullfrogs, or the cascading dirge of a sad canyon wren, the skittering surface movements of the water spiders . . . when you feel like you are getting it, or feeling it again. It can happen to you on a run in the rain along Bull Creek. Or when you hold her hand for the first time. Or on day two of a paddle trip down the Buffalo River, and you come across the old concrete bridge piers of the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad still jutting out of the water, the railway long ago washed away by high waters.
You can see it all and you know you must capture it all before it slips away again . . . the tiny sparkle of a creekbed stone, the flash of a fin underwater, the gray canvas of a rockwall or the blue of a mountain or the whole grand spectacle of the entire range, the plains leading up to the foothills and the ridge beyond. And in your mind you can trace the tributaries climbing backward, up from the river, smaller and smaller at each branch point, back to their high mountain source, back through the history of the place, the collapsing barn, the chimney standing in the field, the rusted metals of the railway men, the settlers, the miners, and the castoff crockery and flint knappings of the natives, and the nearly forgotten battles and the massacre, and the waterways and the seasons and the snowmelt and the upthrust of the tectonic plates and the fossil beds now memorialized in stone and the lava flow.
And if you squint just right you can almost track the past adventures of the day hikers and the backpackers and the cave-dwelling hermits and the previous generations of now obsolete camping gear in the late afternoon mountain storm. And you recall the molecular formula of the water on which you float and its contents and its surface tension and the field mice that burrowed beneath the snows that birthed its flow and the water’s eventual inclusion in the great oceans of the world. You sense the lifecycle of the locusts, the moss on the north side of a tree, the aphids and the lichen on the decomposing hickory. And in those moments, you are tuned in to it all.
You surrender to it, as if floating on your back in water in utter darkness except for the stars above you and their rippling reflections on the water and the water is chilly at first and steals your breath but you get used to it because we are born in water, we are grown in water. Breathing slowly, you re-enter and are connected by this current, this stream, which floats you and buoys you and sometimes floods you and you sometimes have to rescue your drowning memories and mop up the floodwater and tear out the drywall that would dare contain you.
There are these moments of receptivity when every road sign is magic because it’s particular. And every person you meet is magic, because you realize that they are made in God’s image. This particular human. Not humankind. This one human. Because God did not create life, God created individual living things, and breathes life into them. And this one before you—this person, this frog, this tree, this rock—is magic.
And you know.
Tyler Jorgensen, MD, is an emergency and palliative medicine physician in Austin, Texas. He is also an outdoorsman and adventure racer. His conviction that wonder awaits those who seek it leads him to practice medicine and explore the outdoors with an open posture, ready to be amazed by the people he cares for and the wild places that care for him. His reflections and stories have been published in creative writing journals such as Wild Roof Journal and Snapdragon, and in medical literature in the Annals of Emergency Medicine and the Journal of Palliative Medicine. He and his wife are open to suggestions about raising teenagers.
Amy Leigh Davis
Understory
We follow the wet trail through the trees, avoiding the nettles
along the edges.
It is spring and the leaves of the canopies are just beginning
to be reborn.
The light of the sun cannot be seen directly—
enough to kiss the shady fields of Henbit buds in bloom.
*
My daughter sits in her bedroom
playing guitar with the windows open.
Birds keep themselves hidden but sing.
*
Mayapples cover the understory
umbrella leaves hang
from their stems.
Our tour guide kneels on the earth
cupping a plant
not yet bloomed—
the stalks purple as human veins.
“It will take from the surrounding plants all it needs.”
*
We drive through the beat of night.
“Stop the car,” she says, after ending a call with her father.
“I don’t want to go home. I want to run in circles.”
In a grocery store parking lot, I pull the car
over and wait.
I too once wore the moonlight on my clothes.
*
The Baldwin Reserve owes itself to a river that morphed
into a sand deposit.
There is nothing like it for a thousand miles.
*
She had always preferred her father
over me—
they fished in lakes, made music
and could sing.
At some point, a daughter realizes—
“My dad is only human, not a king.”
Fairy tales should always have a real ending.
*
When the Mayapple ripens it flowers
becoming a golden fruit.
Turtles, low to the ground, are the perfect shape
to crawl beneath it and eat.
*
Come summer the forest will go dark.
*
We cross the reserve by foot on a collapsed tree
where the roots are revealed by the banks of the old river.
Above us, branches extend towards the clouds—
a redemption from the world we live in.
Amy Leigh Davis is the author of The Alter Ego of the Universe, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press in 2011. Individual poems have recently appeared in SLANT, Right Hand Pointing, Dream Pop and Unlost. She attended the Kenyon Review Summer Writers Residency in Gambier, Ohio. She resides in northwestern Missouri. Website: www.amyleighdavis.com
Nicholas Trandahl
The Pronghorn
After Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Antelope”
Look around.
This could be Dawn,
her rose-colored robe
sliding
over nude curves
as she rises
from the bed she shares
with Tithonus,
his childhood dreams
of Troy
pressed,
smothered
by radiance.
Soft pink firmament,
rose quartz color field
as though Rothko
fell from flames
like Icarus
instead of from dark
desolation.
Yeah,
this could be Eos,
but you and I both know
this is an ending,
dusk settling
over Navajo land,
rugged western mountains
swallowing the end of the day
like the final pull
from a bottle of añejo,
too suddenly
empty,
final whispers
of nuclear fusion
falling
Godlike
on a pronghorn’s skull
half-buried
in the desert.
I get it.
I understand.
I also went to the desert
to die,
though I didn’t know it
until I was there.
Nicholas Trandahl is an award-winning poet, journalist, outdoorsman, and veteran residing in northern Wyoming, where he currently also serves as mayor of his community. He has had six poetry collections published and has also been featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Trandahl has been awarded the Wyoming Writers Milestone Award and has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Additionally, he works as poetry editor for The Dewdrop literary journal and as a contributor for The Way Back to Ourselves literary journal.
Francis de Lima
Hadalpelagic (that forgets me, that remembers me)
To Caiti
the pebble is in love with the ground
falling if not suspended by some force
the earth in love with the rest
underneath the trapped cascade of holding
an infinity is just a very long distance
walking through a wall has nothing to do with its height
and in a horizon of impossible forms
the dyke only exists to fend off the tide
a litter of dogfish dead on the beach
the wave must have crested over the bank
in its retreat left no survivors, let no one back from the other side
placed a pebble in each mouth as a full stop
a dotted line of the nimble dead
a signature of some thing beyond the anvil of dualism
we live submerged in time
I hold my breath to age into
an abyss between these hands or those
call it fate or what you will
children’s bodies become discs hurled through years
where remembrances are a knife in adulthood’s open mouth
or again the ocean’s arms make the sound bare its teeth,
open the oyster into the brink of a smile
the black cat brings the mouse in a jungle of teeth
drops this small living thing as if to say this is what we all are
the mouse escapes into the abyss beneath the couch
we never find the quivering body, rebelliously alive
and I would have married you two in an instant
if only to ridicule time, to mock it back into immateriality
see, someone must have forged the ritual out of the thin glass of memory
formed for the first time into spontaneous applause, the rite, the burial, the congregation
listen, you are the pebble and the earth is in love with you for an infinity of oceans,
and when time fails you, all there is to do is to embrace the feeling of falling and believe it to be love.
Francis de Lima is a Finnish-Brazilian poet and translator currently living in the UK. They are completing their undergrad at Royal Holloway, focusing on the intersections between class, ecology, and poetry. They’ve collaborated extensively, mainly with Finnish underground artists, on projects like art books, albums, and performances at venues ranging from concert halls to backyards. Their work can be found in magazines like ONLY POEMS and the engine(idling.
Sharon Denmark
Sharon Denmark is an artist and writer from the southern part of Virginia. Her written work has appeared in ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Watershed Review, ballast, and Floyd County Moonshine. Her visual work has appeared in Moss Puppy and as cover art for 3Elements Review. Her work can also be seen at www.sharondenmark.com.
Jack Bordnick
Being a designer and sculptor has allowed Jack Bordnick to share his professional experiences in a beneficial way for both business and community projects. He has been a successful designer with over twenty years of experience in design, fabrication and installation of numerous and diverse projects. As an Industrial Design/Sculptor graduate of Pratt Institute in New York, he had his own professional design business and was a design director for numerous companies and local government projects. These include a major children’s museum as well as the city of New York and Board of Education, where he was involved in all aspects of the marketing, design and installation.
Caroline Dodson
Brick House
It was brick. No windows. People wondered how we dealt with the darkness, the isolation. They didn’t know about the skylight. They didn’t know about the prisms cascading light into every corner. I never understood the physics of the light. The way it seemed to reach around corners, under shadows, between the plants.
That they really don’t understand. The plants. They thought it was barren, cold.
The house was engulfed with green. Vines lined the spiraling oak staircase, moss overtook the bathroom tiles, and trees and bushes filled in the cracks between furniture. The wooden floors were ornate with wildflowers from every corner of the planet.
I remember planting them. The dirt under my fingertips, the fertile smell of earth. I don’t remember them growing. I didn’t water them, at least not intentionally. I can’t imagine you sneaking around behind my back, watering and feeding and helping them grow. You would have relished in showing your labor. But they must have been sustained on our sweat and tears. The slippery byproduct of us soaking into the bones of the house, into the roots of plants.
But I don’t remember them growing. I don’t remember the leaves unfurling and revealing themselves to us. One day, I woke up and the house was full of life. That was around the time that the doors started to change, not only in shape, but also in placement. The six paneled eggshell white doors became dark walnut moon doors. We played a game where we would nonchalantly pass through a door only to whip around, trying to catch it on the move. Each time we would turn around, a mess of green leaves would stand in place of a door, now six feet to the left of where we entered.
And the flowers. Those happened after the moon doors, but before the fruit started. At the beginning we would try our best to identify them. Excitedly pointing out carnations and marigolds. That gave way to our own names. We began pointing out sweet mornings, red bitters, and hazy screws.
The longer we spent in the brick house, the less time we talked about the outside. Slowly, we stopped wondering what was happening past our brick embankment. I hoped that the same was true. That they were finally forgetting us. Then they knocked. I remember where we were. In The Library, as we called it, but the entire house had been overrun with books. Each time we were convinced we had read them all, we’d walk through a moon door into a room we had never seen before and piled high would be book after book, each one begging us to read it, begging us to stay.
We always moved the current selection into The Library. At some point (after the planting, before the moon doors), we moved the guest bed in there. We kept the main bedroom intact with the intention to keep it in use, but soon we only left The Library to explore. That’s where the fruit started, in The Library. One afternoon, you brought me an orange. You said it came from the tree in the corner. We marveled at its singularity. An impossible breeze seemed to shake the plants in pleasure and, out of a gratitude for our pleasure, fruit began appearing across the room.
You were eating a mango, a gift from a favorite tree, when the knock came. We were sitting in opposite corners of the bed, I was reading out loud. The knock echoed up the stairs into our haven. We both went down and looked at the door. I had forgotten it existed. I had forgotten we could leave. I had forgotten every reason there was to leave. I told you that I didn’t want to remember.
You called me silly and laughed. So I walked away. I thought you would follow me upstairs, back into bed, back to eating fresh fruit and discovering new worlds together. But when I finally called for you, you didn’t answer. We were so often together that I had never needed to search for you. I started by the skylight. I let the sun warm me and fill me with hope. I traveled through each floor, marking rooms as I searched to accommodate for the trickiness of the moon doors. When I had finished, when there was only one place left to look, I returned to The Library. I opened the book. Out loud, I finished the chapter, glancing at your corner every so often. Then I walked down the long spiral staircase. The door was open, but barely. Light oozed in, but it was not our light. It was not the malleable warm glow that seeped into every space of the house. The crack in the door allowed the new, harsh, yellow light to form a straight line, hitting the far wall and ending abruptly. You were gone.
Caroline Dodson is originally from Boston but has called Colorado home for the last 10 years. She is currently getting her Master’s in Literary Arts from the University of Denver.
Nicholas Olah
After
post-rain, a hush—
the earth soft as a pillow.
everything is quiet
like a ball of yarn
unwinding
in slow motion, quiet
like the sound
of starting over.
Nicholas Olah has self-published four poetry collections: Where Light Separates from Dark, Which Way is North, Seasons, and You Are Here. Olah’s work has been published in Humana Obscura, Free Verse Revolution, Querencia Press, Permafrost Magazine, and more. Check out more of his work on Instagram at @nick.olah.poetry or visit his Etsy shop at www.etsy.com/shop/nickolahpoetry.
