Cover image: "A Valley of Unhappy Science" by Chris Norcross
Gallery 1
Visual Art, Poetry, and Prose
K. L. Johnston
Convalescent
I poured out the last bottle
of spring water for the most
recent rescue from the store,
a lavender violet
now gracing my windowsill.
Starved and sunburned and humble
so meek, not one who’d ever
ask for a richer flavor
or even reassurance,
just northern sun and water,
dirt and patience, till we bloom.
K. L. Johnston first published at the age of sixteen and has been writing ever since, mostly non-fiction and poetry. She received a degree in English from the University of South Carolina. While wrangling seven children to adulthood she stumbled into a career as a dealer in art and antiques. Other interests include horticulture, historical and family research, and photography.
Eva Jardine
Neptune
I woke up to my mother, gardening.
The sky wiped clean of clouds,
Sprouting a harsh sun.
Neptune grew big in the sky.
Quiet and cold,
and without a word it tumbled,
whispering
“Blue.”
Blue sends me to sleep every night.
I find it in the draws of my desk,
Thick like fog.
The dawn creeps through the forest on four legs,
And when she breaches through the trees,
I find the moon nestled in blue.
The head line on my palm is deep,
And wrapped up in ropes.
My neck is as blue as neptune,
And the sea of my father’s home.
The west sinks into the atlantic,
And is swarmed with fish that eat mountains.
New York springs up a New tower,
The water running black from the fountains.
I wear orange and brown on my scalp
Like a monarch, like a crown.
I’ll carry every word and every star
In my belly until breakfast,
Until I can be alone with the
Moon,
Until I can sink deep
Deep into the blue.
Eva Jardine is a student at Rutgers University with a passion for poetry and the arts. Her inspiration is derived from her struggles with depression, as well as the parallels between nature and the human experience. Recently, her poetry has been focusing on the color blue and all of its emotional and physical forms. In her free time, she enjoys painting, spending time with her loved ones, and watching every movie on every streaming service.
Chris Norcross
Chris Norcross is a Philadelphia-based artist and musician. His work has appeared in various journals, including Chaleur Magazine, ICEVIEW, and Slow Time. His current project explores the fragile status of personal orientation and the unbearable ineffability of certain suffering.
Andreas Fleps
The River
My eyes are riverbeds—
sometimes they can’t see the sky;
my eyelids are riverbanks—
sometimes they hold all of it
so neatly between their hands.
My sight flows down from the
mountains,
a prophet proclaiming
I’ve only seen God in his disappearing
into us—
Holy water dissolved in tears,
burden and blessing blended into
The Water of Life, barely drinkable.
Yet what are poems but the baptism of lips?—
Prayers wading into uncertain answers,
a sluice of praise to the unrousable hymns
sunk in the depths of our throats,
the gasp that finds its breath,
then loses it.
Salvation is never permanent.
When is the body not drifting
apart from itself?
Washed or washed away,
what’s the difference?
I cannot be kissed
the same way twice.
So damn the damns and damnations,
I will not be impeded. Heavy rains
hasten my tongue.
The surface of a river is a voice
that won’t stop singing until it
meets the ocean that hugs every drop
of its song; each wave whispering:
You made it—
My thoughts were the flood.
You made it—
My thoughts were the ark.
You made it—
I mumbled and stumbled
and fell into myself
again and again;
I swam in my own
cascading;
swam in my weakness
until I grew strong.
Andreas Fleps is a 29-year-old poet based near Chicago. He studied theology and philosophy at Dominican University, and his debut collection of poems entitled Well Into the Night (via Energion Publications) was released at the end of 2020. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Snapdragon, Allegory Ridge, Rogue Agent, and Passengers Press, among others. Battling Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder since the age of five, he translates teardrops.
Eben Bein
Exiting a Labyrinth
They are cheaters, you thought,
when maple seeds rode a gust
over its tiny walls. But you
were on the way in, then.
Now, you set your back
to the center. Now, there is no such thing
as achievement.
There is time to take steps,
for new grasses
to sprout between stones and how
did plants ever seem stationary
while skittering their vessels
across the minutes?
No, you are the rooted one
or rather no longer soaring
along the arc
the straightaway revs no engine
the false dive toward center
has lost its pull
and before time has run
the last corridor which is also the first
is for you the where
there are no walls
between anything
in fact you could skip
but for not wanting to miss
one moment with the ground
Abundance in the Time of the Sixth Extinction
I. Saturday, childhood backyard
Tickling the inseam
of my arm,
tasting the foot
of my chair,
dashing the margin
of my notebook I’ve been
here but ten minutes
under the shimmering dapple
of aspens and already
ants are everywhere,
a maintenance crew of millions,
many-legged cells in the bloodstream of the world,
touching, tracking, tracing
the superhighways of twig,
the frayed cores of stump,
the curvatures of dry leaf,
reducing all dimensions to
a scurry.
II. Friday, the big screen
The Avengers supervillain clenched a gauntleted fist
and half of humanity disintegrated
like crumbling leaves
and it was no fiction.
That same day, I read that entomologists from Germany
and Puerto Rico reported forty-five, fifty,
seventy-five percent losses
from Animalia’s most prolific phylum.
III. Friday night, childhood bed
Sounds I never heard as a kid—
the hoots of great horned owls,
the pizzicato of some six-legged violin,
the insistent yip of coyotes—
take the dark hemlock stage
outside my window,
fecundity on the backdrop of extinction,
a private symphony for we who held
back the backhoes, uprooted the strangling bittersweet,
the chokecherry, plucked the invasive, hook-footed beetles
from the dying blossoms with our fingers.
IV. Now, chair in the woods
Now, a fleet of maple helicopters advance on a gust,
patter on leaf litter, catch in my hair, strike my chest,
skitter a whisper across the page.
Now, an oak catkin, browning phallus,
catches on the string of my bookmark.
What in this burgeoning could ever
be endangered?
Now, an adolescent instar of
a leafhopper, a Lummi totem on its carapace,
scuttles up the binding, seeking purchase to jump
further than the jumping spider I am
now, prompting across my knuckles,
eight acute lidless
eyes of a leaping predator,
unable to detect the fat, white grub
that a solitary wasp has tasted
on the air with an antenna
and is now, exhuming with a prying, buzzing exertion.
Eben Bein is a high-school-biology-teacher-turned-climate-solutions-educator. He grew up in a cohousing community in Acton, MA, and earned a B.A. in Biology from Dartmouth College and an M.S. in Science Writing from MIT. He is currently the Massachusetts Field Coordinator for Our Climate, where he educates and empowers the next generation of climate advocates. In the margins, he writes poetry and nonfiction; his first poems were just published in Passengers Journal and Meat For Tea. When he is not working or writing, you might find him dancing, doing yoga, singing with his rock bands, or sautéing leafy greens in gratuitous amounts of olive oil with his boyfriend. Facebook/Twitter/Instagram @beinology.
Henry Stanton
Henry Stanton is a painter, poet, and writer of fiction who lives in Old Ellicott City, Maryland, acting as a conduit for the beautiful revelations offered to him by his loved ones and by strangers, sentient and otherwise. His paintings, poems and fiction have appeared widely in print and online journals internationally – most recently in Gnashing Teeth, High Shelf Press, Paper and Ink Zine, and Rust Belt Review. He has two books of poetry published by Holy & Intoxicated Press, The Man Who Turned Stuff Off (2019) and Pain Rubble (2020). His third book of poems, Moonbird, was published in 2020 by Cathexis Northwest Press. His poetry and fiction have garnered many prizes, shortlist acclamations, and awards. He is also publisher/editor for UnCollected Press/The Raw Art Review. A selection of his paintings, poetry and fiction can be found at www.brightportfal.com.
Claire Cortese
river
I will sit on the riverbank and wait with you
until the leaves turn brown, grow brittle, and fall;
until the snow comes, and blankets us in ice;
(and even) until the warmth returns and the songbirds come home,
and the flowers wake after a long slumber to find
we never left.
(Terrible gossips, flowers – we ignore their whispers
even as the bright yellow daffodils turn their heads,
our peculiar patience more interesting than the sun.)
I will sit
through a hundred cycles of time (with you)
until you decide that you are ready
to step into the water
and be greeted by the river stones.
There’s not much to be said
about the company of croaking frogs;
I much prefer the quiet companionship of red salamanders,
but they aren’t often social creatures –
much like you and I.
Though I am sure they will welcome you
into the cool mud at the bottom of the river.
You’ll be much happier there – dirty, and amongst other wild things.
(I lace my fingers together because yours are gone now)
I remind myself along the edge of the fern
that you were never meant for this world.
There are two sides of a hard concrete line;
you were born for the soft touch of tree line to meadow,
and the spinal ridge of mountain ranges
arching their back through the horizon.
I remind myself that your departure is actually a return home.
Toes are made for mud and moss, but I will forever remember you
with bare feet on hot pavement.
At night, I dream about the bed of river stones,
and think of you wrapped in warm water grass.
The red salamanders curl up beside you,
and the trout pass by to make sure you are sleeping soundly.
I watch as the leaves turn brown, grow brittle, and fall;
the snow comes and blankets you in ice,
but the green croaking frogs show you how to stay warm in the mud.
Finally, the warmth returns and the songbirds come home,
and the flowers wake after a long slumber to find
you never left.
They hold their gossiping pollen tongues so they do not wake you.
Instead, they drop bright yellow petals into the river
one by one like bedtime stories.
I wake, and think about when the time will come for me to return home to the river.
By then, you will be a bed of river stones
and a quiet red salamander
waiting to sleep beside me.
Claire Cortese was born and raised in rural New Hampshire. During her undergraduate studies, she received the Richard M. Ford Writing Award for Nonfiction, and the Frederick Hyde Hibberd ’88 Scholarship Award for Poetry from the University of New Hampshire. She received her M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Durham, where she researched the correlation between dream studies and creative practices.
Jess Falkenhagen
Pachysandra
House grief
The disbelief of those early weeks
then the tightness in the jaw making it difficult to swallow
that lasted all summer –
and now, with time, it has gentled into a sepia-colored recollection of applesauce and wool socks,
a rust colored jacket that he chopped wood in.
I came across the word pachysandra today.
And like an unexpected slap
the tears pooled in my eyes.
I couldn’t
catch my breath.
Rhododendrons,
chummily referred to as rhodas,
were forever being moved or mulched, pruned or fretted over.
Dogwood trees were a frequent topic.
The smell of lilacs hovering by the barn.
Wrought iron furniture abandoned on the frozen porch all winter.
Ceramic pitchers of zinnias and
hours spent tinkering with the old tractor, so as to mow the field before it got too dark.
The lost art of the clothesline
The rhythm of chores tied to seasons,
in a mysterious calendar known only to the adults.
There were certain weeks when the firewood was stacked or the leaves were raked into gigantic
piles for jumping into
(the top of the mounds, cotton candy fluff, the lower layers, damp and smelling of wet earth)
The late November days when the silver candle sticks were polished
An exact time when the handmade storm windows were hung
A precise day when the first forsythia blossomed and was cut with blue handled clippers and
placed in a vase on the kitchen table
a silent announcement that spring had arrived
Summer was the screen door slamming, bare feet on the red brick, slimy and slippery with lichen and dew,
to find her on her knees, weeding the pachysandra.
Jess Falkenhagen lives with her husband and 4 children in an old adobe house at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Northern New Mexico. She has a background in Cultural Anthropology and reads an enormous quantity of memoir, travel literature, ethnography and poetry. She has been to 41 countries and has been proudly social media free since 1973.
Caroline Polich
Caroline Polich is a landscape painter based in Virginia, and received her B.A. in Studio Art from Drew University in New Jersey. Her work has been exhibited in several locations in the United States as well as in Florence, Italy, at venues including Second Street Gallery, Green Point Gallery, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, SACI Gallery, and The Korn Gallery. Caroline’s watercolor paintings examine the effects of climate change, while using the natural world as a vessel for human emotions such as tension, loss, and nostalgia. To view more of Caroline’s work, visit www.carolinepolich.net or follow her on Instagram @caroline.polich.
Nancy Knowles
On the Verge
Deer crop vegetation on the verge of the campsite,
their cheeks rippling under a sheen of soft red fur,
lips gathering quivering leaves, teeth only oblique
abrasion, liquid knowing eyes at ease in the feasting.
The array of ears swivel, drawing heads around
to note a zipper unclasping, the surge of a faucet,
water for coffee echoing into an empty saucepan.
Suppose deer were dream, just a myth of persistence
long alienated from this land. We might unearth
the ghost of a jawbone jasperized by glacial
accretion of minerals. We might return home to
trabeated structures with nothing to house in them,
history books retelling the same boulder rolling
downhill, our hands heavy, always in present tense.
Nancy Knowles teaches English and Writing at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, OR. She has published poetry in Toyon; Eastern Oregon Anthology: A Sense of Place; Torches n’ Pitchforks; War, Literature, & the Arts; Oregon East; Willawaw Journal; and Grand Little Things. “Namaste” is forthcoming from Amethyst Review. She earned honorable mentions in ghazal and dizain categories from the Oregon Poetry Association. “Sixth-Grade Homework” is available here, “The Only Eternal” here, and “Be Still” and “Red Tulip” are available here.
Sarah Croscutt
Connectedness
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” – John Muir
On October 30, 2018, feeling disconnected and fragmented, I left my family, my friends, and my home to embark on a bucket list adventure to the remote Inupiaq community of Wainwright, Alaska, a place far north of the Arctic Circle. I worked as the middle and high school science teacher in the small village school. The kids were tough, and I was an outsider. Even as a seasoned educator, my first day in the classroom with the 6th graders was indescribably difficult. Reaching to connect with them, I decided our first lesson would be comparing the animals found in the Arctic tundra to the animals found in Richmond, Virginia, my home of 28 years. They spoke of the majestic raven and I of the sweet songbirds of the temperate climate. As the weeks passed and we continued to learn from each other, I felt trust taking root and relationships budding. We were growing our connections to each other, intertwining our cultures, much like plants use the tiny network of fungal roots to connect and communicate. One day, one of my most difficult female 6th grade students handed me a traced drawing of a songbird. To me, it was a simple sign of peace and acceptance. We are all the same, no matter our climate or culture. We all need the same things—a connection to others and an acknowledgment of our inner beauty and wisdom.
Edward O. Wilson defines the hypothesis of biophilia as “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms. Innate means hereditary and hence part of ultimate human nature.” Connecting ourselves with nature can provide us the space and breathing room to unearth our own inner beauty, find our voice, celebrate our gifts, and confront our fears. Sitting amongst even the simplest setting in the natural world has positive effects on the physical body and can move one from a state of thinking to a state of mindful being where peace, joy, and clarity are sustained. Discovering our place in nature, our interconnectedness to all living things, fills us with humility, gratitude, and awe. We step outside of our stifling small world into the Big Picture where we can exhale. Backyard garden or bucket list outdoor adventure of a lifetime, our relationship with the natural world challenges us to practice our patience, boost our bravery, and raise our resilience as we learn to go with the flow and connect to life’s circle, reminding us we never have to do this alone.
Sarah Croscutt has spent much of her career working in the field of science and outdoor education. Sarah has had many incredible opportunities to design and teach a multitude of creative, experiential programs for all grade levels in an assortment of unique settings. With a BS degree in Biology and a MS degree in Environmental Science, as well as a deep love for the outdoors, she has cultivated a rich, sacred relationship with the natural world. Her scientific knowledge, adventures in travel, gardening, and outdoor exploration, as well as her personal journey of healing, are the inspiration for her creative process. Through her unique perspective, she has created Lessons from Nature, a series of essays connecting readers more deeply to themselves through the natural world. You can connect with Sarah through her blog, From the Outside, and on Instagram @sarahc_outside.
Nicoline Franziska
Nicoline Franziska is a multi-disciplinary artist from Toronto living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from Parsons, The New School for Design in 2019 with a BFA in Fine Arts. With a primary focus in oil painting and pastel drawings, her process-based work investigates relationships between two-dimensional surface, line, and form, as well as how these moving elements can be composed to indicate narrative. With a nod to surrealism and magical realism, these paintings orchestrate a different type of reality. Drawing from the tradition of storytelling, they represent a development and investigation of language and the passing on of knowledge.
A. Pikovsky
i love you to Jupiter’s 79 moons & back, sprouting
Sprouted
As it were
A flower dream
By the garbage pail
Well, it had other reservations
Like the sensitive pith
Of a woman’s woes
“;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/“
As if the flower dream
By the trash & other hesitations,
Was other
Than a tree keeping a peace
Between its spawned sorrow
& roved joints
Those roots ever-expanding
Just seedlings of time
Sprinkled over the cursed
Garden of girlhood
“;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/“
Marked in matrimony
Wading thru womanhood
It’s the pitched imaginary
Another watered trope
Of the masked maiden,
awakening her sullen cheeks
“;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/“
Flirting waves of her hair bouncing
Fixed in the feminine
Feet digging past the clay
cradling earth, crawling
Over the heightened breast of the lonely hills
Whistling over her body
Bare
as the desert she drank from
“;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/“
& barren
Is her landscape
Her legs lifting
Locating then dislocating then locating again
Lush is the language of the loquacious
No man is an island but every woman is hades
“;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/“
She lies
Facing east then west then east again
Lines of the grid forgotten, swallowed up like
“Gretel with her breadcrumbs falling”
Who is she
when she hums
A finger
like a songbird
Of her womb
Still laughing
“;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/“
How telling
Are the sharing of secrets
Like the breads of our bonds breaking
Brushing
Peach nectar
& raspberry bloods
Across her dimple
Blotted then bottled
In singularity
“;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/“
& as for the ritual
Of contouring
Love, highlighting loss
She covers her eyes praying
Wearing white bane, catching the flame
Lacerating the bone
Beneath her milky
Wishes grooming the
Olive-tinted headscape
A twilight of generous ears
“;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/“
Oh, how generous are her soft,
Ever-folding ears?
Above her shoulders rising
Like the Lark Ascending
A violin stretch
On an octave so high
Her whimpers might never reach it
Flailing to her swelling death
So sudden
is the sweat & flush of her life
& body
Of work
Imploding
“;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/“
In the corridor,
pooling saliva & soiled in surrender
Where she watched faithfully
Hope
As it were
Sitting & dancing in the disconnected
Spaces of the floorboards
Lost between the havoc of
Lint, dust, & derivatives
“;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/“
Always in the former birth
The woman declining
Another дама crunching, while reclining
She is a reservoir, the Королева
She is the ocean
She is wet tears drying inside of closed palms
Locked in lasting shame
She is every lady feasting
Carefully on the chocolate bark of sentimentality
She is surrounded
by pointing hands & hooved horrors
Turned up, dispelled, then turned up again
Turned & facing the hateful
They hover in salacious reckoning
It’s the hum of the disfigured beehive
MARKING her “a bitch in heat”
“;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/“
& still, even as Spring begins
It enters her, again
& like all the years prior, it too
Must come to its faithful end
As did that first plague
& every death collected
Merges, casting a blinding light
But with its edges of soft darkness
Judgement from the old blade
Lights the new path
“;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/“
As it were
Like that flower dream
By the garbage pail
Where young feet pranced
dressed in rescue, wrote
“i love you. you’re pretty fun with kids & that’s how I want to be when I grow up”
& so she said,
sprouting
“i love you more—to Jupiter’s 79 moons & back”
As it were
A flower dream
By the garbage pail
Overflowing, emptying, then overflowing again
She
“;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/’“`;/“
A. Pikovsky is a poet living in Philly who is the child of Jewish Soviet immigrants. Instagram: @Little_Windmil
Laura Schaffer
The limits of augury
They belong to something large, I thought,
the bones, amid shell hunks of a creature
sawn clean and now with the weft exposed.
I imagined approximate pebbles of
myself washing up like this,
portending, as microbes perused
the parallax-slow vault of an archway,
themselves and the tide bearing
witness to all the cathedral things
we miss in our marrow.
Laura Schaffer is a poet and English teacher living in Columbia, SC. Her educational background is in Liberal Arts and Appalachian Studies, and she completed her MFA at Boston University in 2019. She has published poetry (or has work forthcoming) in 3Elements Review, Blue Mountain Review, Appalachian Heritage, and The Raw Art Review.
