Cover image: "I Am That I Am Not" by Nicholas Karavatos
Gallery 3
Visual Art, Poetry, and Prose
Peter Sagnella
A Methodical Lust
Once I saw them huddle on a long, dead branch,
a coven of black backs humped and silent
in failing light. Another time, summer,
they lined three and four on thick fir boughs—
statuesque, quiet, gazing and waiting
like sable robed judges. No rage, no contempt,
nothing in that August air said they gorge
the sweetbread of power. But up close
today I knew those solemn watches portage
a patient, methodical lust. For half an hour
one picked and tugged a mound of fur, seized
bloody innards like a ferryman seizing
tickets on a pier. Beak deft as fingertips,
soot-black wings taut, poised as the oar of Charon.
Peter Sagnella lives and teaches in North Haven, Connecticut, where he has taught Composition, Poetry, and Environmental Literature for eighteen years. His work has appeared in many journals, most recently in SLANT, New Haven Review, Kestrel, Cold Mountain Review, and Cathexis. He won Noctua’s non-fiction contest in 2008, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2015, and selected Edwin Way Teale as Writer-in-Residence at Trail Wood in 2017.
Cindy Rinne
Glowing Stones
Feldspar
Deep underground the Basalt Goddess
wears seed pearls and licks honey from her fingers.
She knows she’s part volcanic glass and feldspar
flows in her veins. Her astral body of light,
like vapor in the cliffs, travels to the moon,
Mars, and Venus. Time means nothing.
Magma questions in the shadows.
Aquamarine
The Basalt Goddess wonders if her organs
will become fluid as a glacial river
beside craggy basalt columns—hexagons formed
from melting snow. She explains,
I must return on an adventure to the red planet.
Treks beneath the regolith surface in ancient waters
and births a mermaid with aquamarine hair—
vitreous luster, symbol of universal harmony.
Glows in the passageways. She tattoos a whale
on her child’s arm to remember earth’s history.
Amethyst
Olympus Mons gently slopes. The Basalt Goddess
digs for amethyst formed in hydrothermal veins.
Some radium required to grow in a place
of cloud-dust and ruins. Selkie creatures
with wrinkled skin summon her daughter.
They check her teeth with concern for cranial
damage. They permit the young one
to stay in their home of sea and smoke.
Mermaid as map connecting worlds.
Cindy Rinne creates fiber art and writes in San Bernardino, CA. She is represented by Lark Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, and is a Pushcart nominee. She is also the author of Words Become Ashes: An Offering (forthcoming from Bamboo Dart Press), Today in the Forest (Moonrise Press), silence between drumbeats (Four Feathers Press), Knife Me Split Memories (Cholla Needles Press), and others. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, Verse-Virtual, LitGleam, and anthologies. Website: www.fiberverse.com & Facebook/Twitter/Instagram: @fiberverse
Clark A. Pomerleau
Clark A. Pomerleau is a teacher, writer, and creative from Washington State whose first poetry chapbook is Better Living through Cats (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Although he has created drawings, paintings, photographic art, mixed media, and quilts since childhood, this is his first visual art publication. Other poems appear or are forthcoming with Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, Peculiar: A Queer Literary Journal, Lupercalia Press, Beyond Queer Words, Poached Hare, Coffin Bell Journal, and the anthology Welcome to the Resistance (2021). Pomerleau’s scholarly essays and book (Califia Women, 2013) historicize feminist diversity education, feminist views on sexuality, and trans-inclusive praxis.
Lance Umenhofer
Truth or Consequences, NM (An excerpt from Off the Road)
The paved road turns to dirt and dust and broken beer bottles and two lovers walk out into the desert through the sage and brush still green in winter, holding their breaths with their hands clasped as the desert sun descends into gloaming. Ahead of them lies a plateau, its flat top ranging from one end of the sightline to the other and it remains solid, the only thing separating the horizon from the lover’s gaze, a shared focus, four eyes into two. A pair fading to twilight, they let the eyes trick them into the plateau turning light blue and beyond it rising a brilliance of hues signaling the now dark plateau is headed into the abysmal fate of us all, letting nighttime with its consummate reach trickle into the eyes, and for a moment, blindness.
Unhindered the two lovers cross in the mild wind, the scent of cool dirt and the lingering upheaval of pollen that has traversed through miles and miles of open air now sits swirling above them unseen and reduced to a mere fragment in each lover’s mind. They are forever children. Here. Irrepressible, wild, and in the heart of a dream. Tomorrow, puckering its lips and picking its outfit, as the day fades into a swift enshrouding, the light at once cabalistic has become scarce and red beyond the plateau and the wind swift and bitter, again wafting and now torrenting through the lovers’ hair though their hands remain enclosed in the other’s.
And the crunching of broken glass has all but stopped now that they are amid the sparse green brush flitting its branches and leaves and passing along its scent to the animals grazing and emerging as the red turns to gray and the dust picks up in the wind. In the gray they see the first light of night–stars, a few, piercing the gray that now seeks death into black and twinkles as sure as vultures circle the injured and dying gazelle that had caught its foot in between two rocks and broken a bone lying on its side and understanding that when its chest stops its rising and falling they would descend. And feast.
Forever time is told with the colors of the sun and sky.
Forever the wind sweeps and shapes and brushes the flat top of the plateau.
Forever the pollen from the west circles its way east through the barren land.
To swirl here.
And be forgotten.
Again.
The two lovers wane into dust and black and together, light.
There are no consequences, only truth.
Lance Umenhofer is a Southern author from Nashville, TN, USA. He is Editor-in-Chief of April Gloaming Publishing and the literary and arts journal Waxing & Waning. You can find previous work from him in Prometheus Dreaming.
Daniel Edward Moore
Centurion Me
If driving a spike beneath the shadow of a branch
reminds you of the worst thing you’ve done
in the history of shadows & branches, like an
animal praying to the burial god, it’s doubtful
forgiveness will flower and seed the yard with
redemption’s red cape. Not at this point in your life
or day, whichever has caused you the greatest grief,
kissing the ground with a hammer’s lips. Like
all animals who call themselves men before giving up
the ghost midday in a pool of sweat and clover,
you’ll find the time to pound the earth’s vein
with another delicious nail. Centurion me, Centurion.
Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His poems are forthcoming in Chiron Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Bitter Oleander, Plainsongs Magazine, Blue Mountain Review, Drunk Monkeys Magazine and Nixes Mate Review. He is the author of Boys (Duck Lake Books) and Waxing the Dents (Brick Road Poetry Press).
J.B. Hill
The Sigh
I have written my will in this disguise of love.
I have told you of the long, stretched wooden path
sprinkled with rows of corn and swamps and birds.
I have guided myself to a single tree,
its bark cutting my surface and catching my eyes.
Where are you in this thickness?
You can aim for my heart.
I’ll allow it.
Tear it, climb inside, sew it—
stand next to it and breathe in its coffee scent.
Today I am still, but moving,
as simple as a toy balloon.
Tell my heart to run away
to fly forward
to reel in the dark past
to the greys and blues
and occasional amber eye—
To walk in photographs,
to snatch the lightning,
simply to breathe, to love,
never to let my eyes close
or the sun cast too fiery a light.
It seems as though the birds are
pulling me away.
The birds.
They help me in the days,
the cold ones,
when I can’t slip through my own eyes.
They bring me to a child’s forgotten place,
to fables and stone art and humbling songs—
grass, root, and a silent finale of life.
I don’t want the world
or to want anything at all.
But now, in the light, my skin
becomes thinner—
and I must think
there exists an invisible string,
which pulls me to the dirt.
J.B. Hill earned a BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College, where she also worked as an editorial assistant in poetry for Ploughshares. Her work has and will be published in the San Antonio Review, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, and The Dillydoun Review. Hill has worked as a reporter in Boston, a screenplay analyst in Los Angeles, and a writer and editor in Austin. She has been a featured storyteller and poet for organizations including Hearsay Poetry, Testify, The Living Room, and The Story Department. Instagram: @ideamakerupper / Facebook: @jbhillwriter
M. Russek
M. Russek was born in April of 1968, in Cleveland, Ohio. M. has worked as an IT specialist, wildlife director, and editor, and took part in the 2008 economic crisis. M. Russek has won various photography and art awards, and is also a poet, teacher, editor, and essayist.
Evan Benedict
Seven Ways of Being Open
i.
a cracked door on a winter morning
bracing wind and slivered light
steam from a coffee mug
lit by sunrise,
and onrushing
of waking.
ii.
bared teeth baboon
smile peeled back
lips stretched in rhesus rictus
face of incisor
and bicuspid,
canine bend
to turn muzzle
to bone
the smile only warns
those who know
how to read it
iii.
a book, obviously.
imperfect metaphor
for oversharing.
an open book requires
an active reader,
but why not tell
the stranger
about your eighth month
of sobriety?
iv.
vomiting up
your binge-eating habits
to your therapist
until your guts
slop the floor
like an overturned
trough in a sty
you empty yourself
like a morning weigh-in
jog before you eat
sweat it out.
he says the scale doesn’t give you value
but everyone else says it does
and you wonder if internalizing
adds to the number.
v.
speak stresses into
the sunlight, that it may strike—
disinfectant beam.
vi.
The parts of a lock:
springs, pins, bible, cylinder.
a little tension,
thin wire
clicks binding
sets driver
turns mechanism
foreclosed homes
only shut out the unhoused
if you let them.
vii.
ask how they’re doing
listen when they answer
you are not the only side
of the open door
Note: This poem was first published in Silver Rose Magazine, Issue 1: silverosemag.com/issue-one. It appears here with permission of the author and first publisher.
Evan Benedict is a high school English teacher at Norfolk Collegiate School in Norfolk, VA. He writes poetry in his spare time, which he has because he neglects other things.
Alison Davis
throwing seeds at rocks: a meditation on affirming, accepting, and allowing
i take the seeds in my hand. they tickle, settle into the lines in my palm, stick to my skin. they are heavy and light, heavy and light, heavy and light. i start to practice a gentle, steady breath. receive and release. soon, i will blow all these seeds loose. soon. i will send them on their way, knowing their way is not away. you are not going away.
i have read the instructions on each packet. mound spacing, seed depth, indoor sowing for when the outside world seems too harsh to support new life. i took note of sensitivities to root disturbances and soil drainage indications. i read botanical names aloud, each an incantation, each a celebration of the mystery of growth, how we dare to name it, even before we know what it means, if we ever can truly know what it means. i tracked the adjectives – pungent, smooth, dazzling, stiff, mature – and the promises of the harvests to come. none of this is the matter at hand, the matter in my hand.
today i have come to do what i don’t know by opening my fist and letting go.
i will share every red seed I have ever loved in us, with unshakeable faith in where it came from and its Grand Return. scarlet emperor words, spoken into enormous silences and vaulted hopes. red burgundy okra heartaches that turned into trading paintings long into the night. drop dead red sunflower summer afternoons when everything was in bloom. scarlet gleam nasturtium and scarlet o’hara morning glory footsteps over the wood chips, around the mulberry tree, beside the black cumin. celosia chief red flame glances traded when we thought no one else was looking. empress of india nasturtium eulogies of the ones we couldn’t keep alive. red amposta heartbeats, layers of pulsing and throbbing and thrumming and singing and and and and. red kuri winter squash promises of surviving the cold, of the warmth within. oriental brilliant red poppy sketches of forms I am just beginning to perceive with you.
i have given myself over to you in so many red ways,
red, the color of my own deep blood that I am learning to keep.
but we’re bigger than just these shades. we are also broken colors four o’clock drawings in the sand and dust. remember how I danced myself into the surf while you watched from afar? it took you until asilomar to know what garrapata had already shown me. the lilies guarded my secret. we are also milkweed hello yellow songs and strumming patterns, feel how those songbird delight chords teach us to touch and intersect. watch these seeds waltz right out of my palm.
watch me release the moments that are bigger than color itself. i can release them because i know they could never leave me. bright lights swiss chard airport runs in your first year away. halo hollyhock paper bag treasures. glorious gleam nasturtium walks around the block, with or without an agenda. bright lights cosmos game night at the donut shop, one Scrabble tile at a time. torch tithonia magazine envelopes, postage paid, solar eclipse stamps, the thrill of seeing my name in your handwriting. all of these bring home the butterflies moments are initiations. look how many new loves we are starting when we give away the impatiens midnight blend of skin on skin.
i feel the vastness of our beginnings. i will not yield to the temptation to try and control them. i am willing to scatter coreopsis double sunburst embraces when the sky blushes and the light breaks through, as if just for us. blazing star harmonies that were years in the making. sensation double click blend and sensation cosmos sharing clothes and writing poems and driving narrow roads. phlox grandiflora starry eyes blend blessed reticences, because here we are now with such courage, here in such precious obliteration, entwined among the riddles of the astronomer’s world. how can I not read the rest inside you when you are splattered across the sky and keep revealing new constellations every time i look up?
You teach me the
keepsake of the lace flower,
promise me the perennial of the bloom,
put the wild of the arugula on my tongue.
I trust
our wild. I trust
our growth. I trust
our letting go. I trust
our everywhere.
Alison Davis intentionally blurs the boundaries between who is teaching and who is learning as a faculty member in a small, independent school in Northern California. She holds graduate degrees in literary studies from Very Important Universities but has come to prefer the Academy of her unconventional family and misfit collection of oddly named pets. Her work has appeared in SAUTI: Stanford Journal of African Studies and the Waldorf Research Bulletin.
Nicholas Karavatos
Until recently, Nicholas Karavatos was an assistant professor of poetics at the Arab American University of Palestine-Jenin in The West Bank. He was a U.S. Ambassador’s Distinguished Scholar to Ethiopia in 2018 at Bahir Dar University, and from 2006 through 2017, an assistant professor of creative writing at The American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. At the Modern College of Business and Science in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman from 2001 through 2006, he was a senior lecturer in humanities. His first year as an expat worker was on the faculty of the Fujairah Technical School in the UAE from 2000 to 2001. Nicholas Karavatos is a graduate of Humboldt State University in Arcata and New College of California in San Francisco.
Nicholas D. Kanaar
Anchored
Floating 2,500 feet above earth, the sky is clear, but the wind is cold. The hot air balloon pilot tells you no, and then tells you no again, but when else will you be here? When will you be so high up again? Never, you tell him. Not during this lifetime. It needs to be now. Right now. He hits the burner. The buildings below look almost two-dimensional. The propane smell has dissipated. You clutch the plastic bag; you can tell it makes him nervous. The gray cremains pillowed like a sack of flour. You’ll make it quick, you say. That’s not the point, he insists, you can’t just drop cremains over a city. But you can. You must. It wasn’t in your ex-husband’s will, but nothing significant he ever did was planned. Not the marriage, not the two daughters, not the loss of one, not the divorce, not the dementia, not his death. Not even your trip to Nashville. It was a last-minute work thing, but it was splendid. You tell the pilot why here and why now. This was the place, you say, the last place when things were whole. When the family was intact, all here together. The last place you held his hand. The anteroom to trauma. The pilot shakes his head. I understand, but no. He says, I’m sorry, really, I’m sorry. If he heard the whole story he’d understand, but he’s pulling on a lever and the balloon is descending. You can only tell him in fragments, the highlights. You try it from your ex-husband’s perspective, holding up the bag as if he’s a puppet and you the puppeteer. You’re shocked by the eclectic memories that flood your mind, some colorful, others bland. The pilot falls silent and concentrates on the approaching ground. Damnit, he’s here, you say. You know it. No, not just in here, but in Nashville. You witnessed it firsthand, the dementia. You saw how malleable his memories became. You saw him traverse along the spectrum with ease. You know he came back to Nashville to stay because we were whole here. Maybe you’ll jump out with him? The pilot’s eyes are wide. You won’t, you won’t, it’s just hyperbole. But maybe you should? The balloon is dropping fast, the pilot is cutting this ride short. He wants to get away from you, the crazy old lady with a bag of ash. It’s now or never. The pilot is not looking directly at you, but he’s watching. You can see him slightly turning his head. You turn your back to him. What are you doing? he says. He places a hand on your shoulder. Your finger pokes a hole in the bag and rips quickly. Ash spills out. This surprises you. Don’t! he says. You toss the bag over the edge of the basket and then lunge for it. You feel frantic, realizing you’ve done something irreversible. But the moment is still here, still composing. Should you jump after all? You’ve left him alone too much, you tell the pilot. You’re yelling. Can you change the moments you revisit? Did he change anything when he came back? If you don’t jump now, can you jump later? You’re leaning over the edge, but the pilot has two strong hands on your shoulders, a white-knuckled grip. He’s saying something, but you can’t hear him. Below, the cremains spiral out of the bag, wide circles coalescing into smaller ones, until one final puff kisses the open air and is blown out of sight.
Nicholas D. Kanaar is a PhD student at Binghamton University studying Creative Writing. He received his BA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas, and his MA in English Literature from Grand Valley State University. His work has appeared in Coffin Bell, The 3288 Review, and in others. Currently, he resides in upstate New York with his wife, Rita, and son, Walter. You can find him on Twitter @nickanaar.
Kindra McDonald
Tropical Depression
Today, on a stepladder in the dirt
I washed windows. The last step
in the cleaning and clearing of a well lived-in
home. The hurricane creeps up the shore,
humidity clings like spiderwebs,
wasps fall with my rags to the ground.
Inside, my mom removes the screens,
works the puzzle of these ancient windows.
We are nose to nose through glass. We
spray and wipe circles in unison. The ashes
in a box. The boxes on a truck. The windows
gleam, we walk away.
Kindra McDonald is the author of the books Fossils and In the Meat Years (both in 2019) and the chapbooks Elements and Briars (2016) and Concealed Weapons (2015). She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She is an Adjunct Professor of Writing and teaches poetry at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, VA. She serves as Regional VP of the Virginia Poetry Society and was the recipient of the 2020 Haunted Waters Press Poetry Award. She lives in the city of mermaids with her husband and cats where she bakes, hikes, and changes hobbies monthly. You can find her in the woods or at www.kindramcdonald.com. Instagram: @kindramcd / Twitter: @Kindramcd1
Nancy White
The Helpful Poem
Call me unfinished or
give me an order. I’ll help.
Snap the heads of the peonies!
Let the sun break the table!
Of course the cliffs are the wrong color,
darling. And your unrepentant eyes.
When we first met, kite tails
flashed and ants scurried off
with their eggs held aloft, and during
our vows, the seething window
pained us. But not on purpose!
Sometimes we couldn’t cross
that space, the lovely shoulders
of our lies. Are you still full
of bones? Or snow?
What kind of river are you?
Nancy White is the author of three poetry collections: Sun, Moon, Salt (winner of the Washington Prize), Detour, and Ask Again Later. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, FIELD, New England Review, Ploughshares, Rhino, and many others. She serves as editor-in-chief at The Word Works in Washington, D.C. and teaches at SUNY Adirondack in upstate NY.
Edward Michael Supranowicz
Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Russian/Ukrainian immigrants. He grew up on a small farm in Appalachia. He has a grad background in painting and printmaking. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food, Streetlight, Another Chicago Magazine, Door Is a Jar Magazine, The Phoenix, and other journals. Edward is also a published poet.
Alison Jennings
Birds of America
During deepest
trouble,
sit beneath the broad,
extended arms
of the thickest oak,
and listen—
for at such a moment,
your soul
will be soothed
by the blessed force
of birdsong,
the blending accents
voicing
Nature’s healing spirit.
Or perhaps
pursue a walk
in sylvan serenity,
and hear
these varied
notes: gray jay,
joyous and lively
at all times;
the ominous
screech
of black-shouldered
kite, portending
destruction
in its train;
and softly hooting
snowy owl, Buddha
on a branch:
full beauties
of an early spring,
harmonizing
a melody,
returning us
to the garden.
(Thanks to Audubon’s watercolors)
Alison Jennings is a Seattle-based poet who began submitting her work after retiring from public school teaching. She has recently had thirty poems published in various literary journals. Please visit her at Air and Fire Poet.
