Cover image: "Emotional Proximity to Constellations Formed from Wounds of Tender Infatuation" by Nicole Irene
Gallery 2
Abscission
Dana Miller
Sprunny
I can’t believe the people I used to believe,
how ardently I searched for heartbeats beneath the snow,
wrens pecking on drums,
it’s just another way to talk about weather—
—what you call affection? only palms crossed with silver.
Bezique and banana marbles
and orchard maps Smyth-sewn in a shiretown limned by marzipan moors.
For boys I really love I become a drag king,
trying on their stance and the coat of their courage,
making plumes of their passions,
slipstreaming their satyr and making Jazz Age depravity out of their every breath.
This one I’ve loved for so many eddying evenings.
He had the good sense to save me for last
—and for that we never run out of firsts.
He’s only just tame enough to touch;
still, you reach out your hand to August horseflesh
quivering as to a fly.
He won’t swat you with his tail if you walk up right.
He is ever the earthworm writhing on the sidewalk in the afternoon light.
Dana Miller is a wicked wordsmith, giggling provocateuse, and mega-melomaniac from Atlanta, Georgia. Her poetic syllables like to trundle in the wilds—usually in search of a smackerel or two. On their way, they have found themselves featured in Postscript Magazine, Better Than Starbucks, Fairy Piece, Sledgehammer Lit, FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Small Leaf Press, Tofu Ink Arts Press, and Nauseated Drive. When not wielding a lethal pen, Dana adores surf culture, Australian grunge rockers, muscle cars, Epiphone guitars, glitter, Doc Martens, and medieval-looking draft horses with feathered feet. Oxford, England is her spirit-home and Radiohead is holding the last shard of her girlhood heart.
Victoria Dym
The Hatchet Sun
How empty the lake with no water, weeds, grass and dried cattails
where water once was
where water hid fishes
where water gave deer a drink
The lake lay bare, like a lover, the first glimpse unclothed
where I am toppled by heat
where I struggle for air
where water once was
A lone vulture calls; I squint, raspy drawn-out hissing sound
where birds of prey convene
where water once was
where carcasses now grow
Grunting, like hungry pigs or barking dogs in the distance
where bones turn from pink to creamy yellow
where water once was, and fishes and deer
where the hatchet sun sets
Victoria Dym is a graduate of Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Clown College with a degree in Humility, a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing-Poetry from Carlow University. Her two poetry chapbooks, Class Clown and When the Walls Cave In, were published by Finishing Line Press in 2015 and 2018. She lives in Tampa, Florida, where she hosts the annual Haiku Challenge, teaches poetry and storytelling, and facilitates Laughter Yoga workshops for Cano Health.
Meg Boscov
Meg Boscov’s award-winning photography has appeared in numerous in-person, print, and web exhibitions, including The Photo Review, Shanti Arts Still Point Gallery and Quarterly Journal, the Foley Gallery in NYC, the PhotoPlace in Middlebury, VT, and various galleries and art centers in the Philadelphia area. Her book Hand-in-Hand pairs her macro-photography with micro-essays, one for each week of the year. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and currently resides in Wayne, PA, where she continually finds personal joy and creative energy in her surroundings.
Cara Waterfall
La Arribada: A Disambiguation
Ostional Beach, Costa Rica
From afar, the turtles are little more
than unadorned vaults,
sombre domes silvering the water,
but under the red gleam
of our guide’s flashlight,
we glimpse the mother’s
work as one glistening egg drops
& then another
until she compacts the sand.
Saltwater drips from her eyes,
she bequeaths her eggs
& then retreats —
each deposit, a star-guarded
orb nestled
in the beach’s harbour.
The eggshells constellate sand:
epitaphs for the lost
or epistles to hapless mothers.
A pastoral gone awry,
where water has dominion,
& kingdoms rise & fall
in pools of shadow as strays
& vultures lurk.
Giving birth here
denotes custody, but not care.
O, but how the ocean
wails each name as if
it might be the last. She knows
what can be lost
and still she goes.
Ottawa-born and Costa Rica-based, Cara Waterfall’s poetry has been featured in Best Canadian Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, The Fiddlehead, SWWIM, The Night Heron Barks and more. She has won Room’s 2018 Short Forms contest, Room’s 2020 Poetry Contest and PULPLit’s 2020 Editors’ Prize. In 2019, she was a finalist for Radar Poetry’s The Coniston Prize and shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Most recently, her manuscript was a finalist for the Animal Heart Press Poetry Chapbook contest. She has a diploma in Poetry & Lyric Discourse from The Writer’s Studio at SFU.
- Website: www.carawaterfall.com
Callum E. Lee
Cosmogony
heady and eye-watering as garlic,
i lie in your small hours,
sundowning in this field of touch,
cloves of fingers, purple pulsings
beneath bone-white, break open
against my skin like the face of a blade,
minutes-wide and trembling light,
as you thumb bruise-marks into me,
blood rising up to meet the body
it holds in place,
they are planetary, moons dusked
with desperate touch,
and this is how you make god of yourself,
writing fresh universes with your hands,
or a new, unspoken letter,
voweled and veined upon my arm,
punctuation marks toothing their sunset
through a fleshed sky,
your endless flight of ellipses
chaptering me into a welted midnight,
how, after you go,
i still hold this broken galaxy
against the mirror and count my lucky stars
that you created this,
this eighth day,
brief and many-weathered,
like a pink and perfect wound,
i am created from scratch,
your touch, this kilned thing,
what sweet pottery you’ve made of me with it
terracotta, terra-nova, tomorrow,
i lie in the field, feeling
through the blonde streaks of your moonlight,
waiting, like air, to be moved,
to be caught in your naked eye
so that i can once more be realised,
your want tethers me to this world,
gravity a simple matter of opinion,
at last, you look at me again,
eyes eating the very light around me
and you search for yourself the way a shadow
searches itself,
feeling with every black hand
for an afterglow
in what it has just swallowed.
Callum E. Lee is a poet, Sagittarius and die-hard Phoebe Bridgers fan from South Lanarkshire, Scotland with a concentrated interest in the themes of identity, sexuality, mental health and relationships in the age of social media.
Brent Atkinson
Red Ives
The fire had died overnight, making the air in the cabin frigid and stagnant, the rooms seeming wider, hallways longer. After making a new fire he put on his heavy red-checked flannel coat, pulled his frontiersman down to his brow, and walked onto the porch with coffee. The thermometer read negative-two degrees Fahrenheit. Jack’s nose hair froze within seconds, and the skin around his mouth became taut. Steam rose off his coffee as he surveyed the mountains.
A red-breasted bird, about the size of a sparrow, fluttered down and landed on a branch in a sixty-foot Douglas fir that stood in front of the cabin. It was a red-breasted Nuthatch. He watched as it fluttered in and out of the tree, eventually disappearing into the heavy branches altogether.
He finished his coffee and spat off the edge of the porch, leaning over the railing and watching the warmth of his saliva melt into the snow. It left a coffee-colored pockmark in the surface. He lit a cigarette and headed to the woodshed. As he made his way across the snowy lawn he looked at the ridgeline across the river. A heavy, freezing mist intermingled with the pines, and there looked to be a small clearing in one spot along the top. He planned to hike to it, but was waiting for a clear day so he could really capitalize on the vista.
The morning was spent cutting, splitting, and hauling firewood onto the porch. Given he split wood almost every day, often just for exercise and to pass the time, there was more than enough to last him through the winter. He worked feverishly, like he had been taught to as a kid. Work hard and fast, block out any pain or discomfort he felt in his body—or his mind—and lose himself in the labor.
Brent Atkinson currently lives in the desert of southeastern Washington state. He has worked many jobs, including as a custodian, a grounds crew member for a minor league baseball team, and field operator at a nuclear waste cleanup site, among others. He has a great concern for wilderness and climate change issues and a deep affection for the landscape of the American West. These themes find their way into his work. Brent is Fiction Editor for Dress Blues Press: The Online Journal of the Military Experience, and is currently working on his MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Find him on Instagram @brent.atkinson or visit his website at www.atkinsonbrent.com.
Rachel Arturi Pruzan
Rachel Arturi Pruzan’s art is emotional and evokes self-reflection. She paints abstract works and dreamy landscapes that feel organic, textural, and mysterious. Her current work reflects liminal spaces, or thresholds—transitional spaces between states of consciousness, phases in life, or physical places. It communicates growth or transformation, and the powerful emotions and dualities that accompany it. “Liminal Spaces and Nowhere Places,” Rachel’s first solo exhibition, opened at Valley Arts in NJ in September 2021.
- Website: www.rachelpruzanart.com
- Instagram: @rachelpruzanart
John Hansen
For the American Robin
The city swells west with new plot markers
assigned to grasslands in Waukee. A robin,
the native tenant, surrendered its abode.
Terrorized by blasts from the quarry
it emerges flushed from a thicket.
Its heart has been shattered in the end.
And yet it fluttered in circles over the old territory,
near the community against the hazy dawn sky
fresh as dead leaves plunge to earth,
as if to bring a scarlet warning – a beacon
signaling erratically, relentless, unadorned.
In the barren gully hedged by switchgrass,
razed, no speck of ground left for it to land
and peck a seed or two – restless, in a field
of sunlight between two elms,
no way to evade the exploding rocks
in the quarry. When it finally takes solace
on a shingle, taken wistfully at the glimpse
of smolder, it glides back to the quarry –
hollow as promises – it dips its beak
in the warmth of rocks just split
into a thousand pieces.
John Hansen received a BA in English from the University of Iowa and an MA in English Literature from Oklahoma State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Summerset Review, Trouvaille Review, 50-Word Stories, One Sentence Poems, The Dillydoun Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Eunoia Review, Oddball Magazine, Litro Magazine, Amethyst Review, Drunk Monkeys, and elsewhere. He is English Faculty at Mohave Community College in Arizona. Read more at www.johnphansen.com.
Kathryn Weld
The Solace of Pure Excess in a Waning World
I’d say they arrived like a private gesture from across the room,
or an envelope embossed with eight commemorative stamps –
Does this rewrite the day’s history? In truth, I was looking back
through aster and vine when nighthawks above the meadow
caught slanting sun – twelve dozen on pointed wings,
a frenzy of feeding. These ground-nesters, raddled
and frowsy, rarely breed here anymore – I’d never seen them.
I watch hundreds angle the air – their playing field – bobble
and score – a raucous stunt show, bravura and generous.
And I remember the giant lilies someone wove with dayglow
lanyard on the Harlem fence, and within a month cut down
and wove again – tulips, this time. Tomorrow the birds
will fly wherever migrants go. Georgia maybe.
Like long-awaited letters, opened, savored, thrown.
Kathryn Weld’s chapbook is Waking Light (Kattywompus Press, 2019). She was a finalist for both SER’s Gearhardt poetry award for her poem “Seedbed” and The Bellevue Literary Review’s Jan and Marica Vilcek award for her poem “Staying and Going.” Her work has also recently appeared in The Cortland Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Blueline, The Midwest Quarterly, and more. Her prose appears in The American Book Review, Connotations Press, The Critical Flame and elsewhere. Having earned her MFA from Sewanee School of Letters, and her PhD in Mathematics from The Graduate Center CUNY, she is a professor of mathematics at Manhattan College.
Anne Hampford
Playa Santa Marianita
I haunt the beach listening—
brine and its inheritance
stones tumbling in the uprush resisting
the journey back while a collared plover
probes the sand
at dusk a dog in the barrio starts to bark—
others join in creating a chorus
that rolls down the coast
a sustained note not quite melody
not quite cacophany that subsides
into silence filling
where the light had been
like when my mother whistled
with her fingers—
thumb and middle finger touching
the fold of her tongue against them
her breath becoming
a beacon of sound
with no answer but my bones
Anne Hampford is a writer, traveler, yogi, and lover of nature and animals (especially dogs). She is based in Connecticut but is spending time on the coast of Ecuador, enjoying life in another language. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Connecticut River Review (2019 Pushcart Prize Nomination), Crab Creek Review (finalist for their 2020 Annual Poetry Prize), Naugatuck River Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, River Heron Review, Wild Roof Journal, and Dogwood Journal. Her first poetry chapbook, Everywhere Is North, was published by Finishing Line Press in October 2021.
Nicole Irene
Art instructor, aspiring poet, and mixed media artist Nicole Irene creates out of her home in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. A gem + mineral enthusiast and consciousness explorer, she believes in magic. Nicole Irene is moved by the beauty of the nocturnal sky, esoteric spirituality, astronomical phenomena, mysticism, and cosmology. Nicole Irene specializes in abstract geometrics, fluid applications, and reinventing our rich heritage of craft through employing artistic processes and embracing methods that lie outside the art historical canon. Rebelling against conservative categorization and aesthetic conventions, Nicole Irene challenges notions of status, excess, and taste with a fresh and playful sense of experimentation.
- Instagram: @NicoleIreneArt
- Website: www.NicoleIreneArt.com
Sarah Wallis
What the Islander Child Knows
When a clam is bad and where the good samphire grows, when the tide is on the turn and you should leave the shore, how to gauge the time from the steep lines of the sun and the tang of salt in the air (always sharper on your lips in the morning), which cast-down soft breast feather is from the gannet’s suicidal scream dive and which is from the herring gull’s doomed dawn bonxie bout, and all the named and nacreous shells buried deep down in the sand, how to catch a fish and how to catch a cockle, and how to swim in crabwise, on the parallel for safety, to avoid the riptide pull, and how to sail a small boat into a stone-built harbour, safe out of a lively squall…
Sarah Wallis is a writer based in Scotland, UK. Recent work is at Beir Bua, The Madrigal and Spectra, and forthcoming in The Broken Spine and Ample Remains. She has two chapbooks, Medusa Retold from Fly on the Wall Press and Quietus Makes an Eerie from Dancing Girl Press, with How to Love the Hat Thrower due next year from Selcouth Station Press. She tweets @wordweave and you can find out more at www.sarahwallis.net.
Melissa Fox
Melissa Fox graduated from University of South Florida with a degree in Fine Art with a focus in drawing. She has always engaged in representational and realistic techniques. She often begins with geometric forms, which allow her to become grounded. Once in a meditative frame of mind, her imagination takes over with various forms, textures, and lines. Although her drawings are abstract in style, they are representative of a subject matter she finds fascinating and inspirational: prehistoric symbols.
Bruce Arlen Wasserman
One Thing
And then there’s the story:
a guy and his stuff and all the chaff
like steel filings filling the floor
of a metalsmith’s or Houdini before
the knowing of molecules and thoughts
of movement like these 24 hours flying
in a beanpole pitching from New Jersey
or the tornado we shot through the last hour
right side up like a corkscrew, shorts and shoes
and sandals flapping pressurized air and
the guy besides bulging eyes clamped and
tonguing mumbles like vapor, less like a
rushing brook, less like a brazen mixture of
yellow flame across the sky or post-partum
sound breaking attempts in foreplay arcs
like that night in Wyoming and the shooting
star I saw that fell, streaking mother
and child silver ink thrown against the dark
but blazing pop bang then just mystery
on my retinas and every kind of memory
second rate compared to that, like the ancestry
of hair that used to sprout but disappeared
and bald is nothing but new shaved scalp
and never ending cashflow the new nothing left
and always frenetic figures like each lost love
compared to some other and the one thing
that needs rethinking may not be a thing
it may have no significance, after all.
Bruce Arlen Wasserman received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a literary critic for the New York Journal of Books. His writing has been published in the Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology, Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, River Heron Review, Kindred Literary Magazine, Broad River Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, High Shelf Literary Magazine, and Washington Independent Review of Books. Beyond writing, he creates visual art as a potter at Bruce Arlen Wasserman Studio, where he draws from the reservoir of poetry and his experience in working iron and wood, correlating a continued exploration of language, function and esoteric form. At other times, he is a musician and trains horses from time to time.
George L. Stein
George L. Stein is a writer and photographer living in Boonton, New Jersey, and working in New York City. George works in both film and digital formats in the urban decay, architecture, fetish, and street photography genres. His emphasis is on composition with the juxtaposition of beauty and decay lying at the center. He has been published in Midwestern Gothic, Gravel, Foliate Oak, After Hours, Hoosier Lit, 3Elements Magazine, The Fredricksburg Literary Art and Review, The Ilanot Review, and Darkside Magazine, among others.
- Instagram: @steincapitalmgmt
- Website: www.georgelstein.com
