Cover image: "Untitled #35" by Jacqueline Staikos
Gallery 1
Snarls of Light
Judith Mikesch McKenzie
The Rope Line
Why we continue to call it a woodshed, I don’t know
we don’t keep wood in there, other than the
weathered boards of the doors and walls
It should have stacks of wood for winter fuel,
shelves of canned goods, bins of dry goods,
and stacks of things like tools, matches, and
the kinds of storm supplies that seldom find
use in real lives – matches, hurricane lamps,
dusty wood blankets and maps we’ll never need
We have none of those – some empty jars
for autumn canning we always plan to do, and
stacks of flat cardboard boxes for the next move
Nothing here we’ll ever need within a storm, but
anyway, when the sky darkens, we still tie a rope
from its grey wood door to our back door
to help us, within a blizzard, to find our way
there, and back again
Judith Mikesch McKenzie has traveled much of the world but is always drawn to the Rocky Mountains as one place that feeds her soul. She loves change—new places, new people, new challenges—but honors a strong connection to the people and places of her roots. Writing is her home. She recently placed & published with The Cunningham Short Story Contest and The Tillie Olsen Short Story Contest. Her poetry has been published in Poetic Bond X, Wild Roof Journal, Halcyone Literary Review, Plainsongs Magazine, Elevation Review, Scribblerus, Gyroscope Review, Cathexis NW Press, Griffel Literary Review, Bookends Review, and others.
Ceinwen E. Cariad Haydon
Love’s Tough
You find the weather forecast, read it
out loud. Warnings of strong winds –
on this, the final day of our vacation.
We arrived a week ago, sad and quiet
with faltering hopes. Sunshine failed
to materialise as we walked on high
ridges then sank low to boggy valleys.
Once, we saw a vivid rainbow arc
beneath dark clouds, after being soaked
by relentless showers. Fighting tears
you took my chilly hand in yours
and kissed my fingertips, before
shrugging and continuing along
our stony path with twisted roots.
When we walk today, you say, we must
stand firm, not allow these fickle gales
to blow us clean away. I laugh out loud,
dear evidence of our retrieved affection.
Your eyes crease and smile old magic.
Winter weather’s changed our direction;
placed us on the same page, at long last.
Ceinwen E. Cariad Haydon lives near Newcastle upon Tyne, UK and writes short stories and poetry. She has been widely published in online magazines and print anthologies. Her first chapbook, Cerddi Bach [Little Poems], was published in July 2019 by Hedgehog Press. Her first pamphlet is due to be published in December 2021. She is a Pushcart Prize (2019 & 2020) and Forward Prize (2019) nominee. After a career in the health and social care, she is now developing practice as a participatory arts facilitator. She believes everyone’s voice counts. Twitter @CeinwenHaydon
Dominic Klassen
Dominic Klassen is a German artist who emphasizes the human experience and dedicates his artistic expression to catharsis. Besides his pop-up gallery, his work has been displayed in various cities across Germany and has been published in Peatsmoke Journal. He owns a clothing label and lives all around the globe.
Nancy White
Unemployed
the door of it
suddenly you’re on the other side suddenly
that place and though you can see
the way back it’s no choice
just a view back to where the others
are eating toast speaking normally
your voice is no door but
a pool you cannot get to ripple
though space widens horribly
though the air fills with horrible light
returning so the light becomes disappearance
swallowed shackles of light
gullies slabs broken fingers freckles tunnels
and snarls of light the needles in your throat
commanding breathe breathe
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.
John Tessitore
The New Pattern
I spend too much time beside this small stream,
standing, staring, trying to decide if I belong
to the mosses and lichen or the scavengers
hiding. My dog noses the slush beneath
the branches of oak, maple, the solitary
cedar that stretches its splendor in winter
while everyone else slouches narrow and
naked. Like a child, I try to be surprised
again, to look through your eyes. A red leaf
under ice is the iridescent wing of a fly.
I wonder what to make of the radiant
web on the skin of the water. I think I see
a memory of our bodies in happier times,
our fragile veins like dry lightning, summer
moonshine; or else a sign of my desire
to shatter, crack apart, piece us back together.
How I want to climb this bone-cold bark, weary
my arms, burn away my seethe and fever,
and throw myself to the forest floor to bleed
for you a new pattern in snow and pine straw.
John Tessitore has been a newspaper reporter, a magazine writer, and a biographer. He has taught British and American history and literature at colleges around Boston and has run national policy studies on education, civil justice, and cultural policy. Most recently, he has published poems in the American Journal of Poetry, Canary, and the Wallace Stevens Review. You can find more at www.johntessitore.com, on Instagram at @jtessitorewriter, and on Twitter at @johntessitore3.
Jacqueline Staikos
Jacqueline Staikos is a largely self-taught contemporary artist living in Quinte West, Ontario. She has exhibited her art in several Ontario galleries, including exhibitions in Toronto, Kingston and New York City. Her creative process involves working with inks, acrylics, oils and mixed media. She is currently working out of her home studio in Trenton, Ontario. More of her art can be viewed on her website, www.jstaikos.org or on Instagram @jstaikosart.
Marilyn Woods
The Art of Bonsai
The burly hunk of a man, a thatch of coarse flaxen hair sticking out from under his straw hat on the right side, concluded his demonstration by holding up the bonsai plant. “We are growing small.”
With sweet calls of morning birds in accompaniment, a diverse group of wannabe bonsai-ers gathered in mirrored sunglasses, sunblock, and garden hats at Mission Hills Nursery, eager for both knowledge and the icy cold bottles of water being passed on trays.
We were there to learn how to bonsai succulent plants. The expert, his strong hands and arms burnished a rich tan, the color of cognac, began by showing a few of his prized works. First an interesting, gnarled Euphorbia; he joked, “It’s a Mammillaria Variegata, but you can remember it as a corn cob!”
“This is a jade plant, the Crassula Ovata,” he explained, switching plants. “Fleshy, green, easy to bonsai. Just remember, bonsai plants require attention, nourishment, maintenance.”
His last example, an Operculicarya Decaryi. He grinned like a proud papa and boasted, “This is my favorite of all the South African species.”
I was smitten. I had made my choice for a succulent bonsai project, enthralled by the captivating Madagascar specimen he held up for us all to admire. However, when he commented “This one is twenty years old” I began to think I might look for a faster-moving new hobby. I remembered hearing bonsai referred to as an endless ritual. A lifelong endeavor.
The outlook for some lives is longer than others…
The stunning bonsais we’d seen at the Gaku-ken Exhibition in Kyoto, Japan took their turns in my mind. As far back as 500 BC, the Chinese began growing these small potted plants. I realigned my patience virtue and dug back into the learning.
At home, as I struggled to mimic what had been demonstrated at the nursery on my own Operculicarya Decaryi, no bigger than a pilgrim’s quill and just as delicate, my fingers and hands seemed to enlarge. I fumbled nervously with the tiny specimen and tinier tools. So awkward. Me. King Kong atop the Empire State Building with Fay Wray in one hand and a smashed plane in the other.
I stepped back, breathed in deeply and centered myself in front of my project. In baby steps, like we had been shown, I dumped the gravel from the four-inch pot, massaged its sides until the plant came loose, and turned it over onto my hand. Carefully, I shook the loose dirt from the root ball and held the plant up high to examine which straggler roots to trim. Snip. Snip. Snip.
I placed the undressed plant, its wire-thin trunk and polished deep green itty-bitty eyelash-like leaves, aside and began to mix the potting soil. Eighty percent pumice and twenty percent organic cactus soil plus a bit of bone meal. I dampened the mixture, placed a two-inch layer in the bottom of my chosen rounded pot, a rich russet color certain to complement the itty-bitty evergreen leaves, and then reached for scraggly weed-like growth that would be my small potted tree, a perfect replica of its larger version.
As I worked, I meditated.
Growing small—the opposite of everything I’ve known about growing since my mom stood me up against the wall and measured my height just before kindergarten; she marked it on the kitchen wall in pencil. Each year taller and taller.
It occurred to me that the concept of “growing small” is a good one which both intrigues and haunts me. Although Covid-19 wreaked havoc on all life we had known, its legacy for me is a yearning for more of quarantine time. That alone time. A smaller time.
I am living smaller, but I continue to grow which seems to make my life more artful. Much like bonsai, an art that has been studied and refined for centuries and finally found its way into my everyday life on a summer Sunday morning.
The art of bonsai.
As the expert had done in the demonstration, before final placement in the pot, I put my soon-to-be-tree on a lazy Susan so that I could study all its angles and select the most pleasing. If it survives, my prized species will gently curve slightly right and upward and then gracefully arc left.
It may need some help and I studied how he wired his young planting, guiding its gentle s-shape swing left and back to right. Making studied decisions and choices each step of the way. I want that for my life.
The trunk is foremost in the art of bonsai. I am the trunk of this life of mine. In both cases, it is extremely important that the trunk twists naturally in its own unique manner, has some graceful curves, and has interesting lumps and knobs. I’m not even going to comment on this parallel except to say the trunk forms the foundation, providing inner strength and character.
After careful selection of our plants and the planting, the demonstration had turned to pruning, an essential part of creating the perfect small tree. It would occur to me later as I worked on my miniature tree that pruning is exactly what I’m trying so hard to do with my post-pandemic life. It touched me when I heard the nurseryman say, “Ultimately, pruning is not about following strict rules, but about establishing the best design for your tree.”
I so want the best design for my life now, retaining a goodly amount of the solitude and slowness and thoughtfulness of isolation. Nourishment. Maintenance.
My takeaway on pruning that morning—you snip unnecessary things. Get rid of cross branches that don’t go the way you intend the growth. There is a purposefulness about the selection of which cut to make. I intend for this purposefulness in choices to guide my everyday life.
This is what I learned from the enforced isolation of Covid-19 and the pandemic about my inner strength—I am more effective, efficient, creative, and satisfied when I trim away cross branches of worn-out obligations, unwanted or unnecessary activities, and busywork.
The bonsai grows slowly.
All my life I went fast. College choice made on a whim; the experience compressed into three years and three summers. Immediate first marriage. Unplanned pregnancies. Rapid divorce. Rapid remarriage. Relocations. Job changes. Adventures. Victories. Losses. A whirl of a lifetime leading to now.
Now, I want to go slow. Maintain well. Nourish myself.
There are more snips to make as I and my small tree grow small.
Go slow and sure, with purpose, like the art of bonsai.
Marilyn Woods is an author, artist, and art educator who began her career as a broadcast journalist. She and her husband became pioneers in radio syndication, which led them to live in major cities around the country. In retirement, they learned to be farmers on their twenty acres in Pauma Valley, CA. They planted a vineyard, built a winery, and became winemakers. She currently lives in San Diego and is a docent at The San Diego Museum of Art.
Tia Cowger
This is what a love song sounds like in the ocean’s voice
Listen, listen.
Bury me deep; someday when my fingernails are bent-nail long, hair—ash. The shell of a human must undergo a metamorphosis. This is my chrysalis—a salt tomb.
Listen, listen.
The shore will take a bow—tell you a single, diamond, secret. In that moment, before the tides fall, my corpse will swim out to sea. I will be a single constellation in her lonely, drowned abyss.
Listen, listen.
Moon full, silent wolves. They stare into briny waves with fangs too sharp to be mine. They know the proper way to grieve.
Listen, listen.
You will bury me someday; part of you may wish to pursue. Split yourself—tie an anchor to the cliffside. Understand you can only see smoke, not follow it.
Tia Cowger is a graduate of Eastern Illinois University. A poet at heart, she has had her work published in The Examined Life Journal, Gone Lawn, The Olive Press, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Coffin Bell Journal.
JW Summerisle
JW Summerisle lives in the English East Midlands. Their poetry & artwork can be found in the Lily Poetry Review, Catatonic Daughters, The Madrigal, SAND, & Re-Side. His twitter is @jw_summerisle, and he has a shop at www.jwsummerisle.etsy.com.
Dilys Wyndham Thomas
monsters in the shape of people
as a child
I made nighttime pacts
with the vampire circling my bed
spied on kobolds that shadow-clawed
up curtains
held my breath hard past
pain in kelpie-plagued bathwater
then ushered Bloody Mary to
the mirror
I said grace and please
and thank you, looked first left then right
stepped over cracks, crossed my fingers
knocked on wood—
I was never taught
to lock my bedroom door at night
speak up when never spoken of
break their curse
Dilys Wyndham Thomas is a Belgian and British writer based in Amsterdam. She has lived in Saudi Arabia, Belgium, France, Germany, Jordan, the UK and the Netherlands. Dilys is an assistant poetry editor at Passengers Journal. She also hosts an online feedback group and organises writers’ talks for Strange Birds Migratory Writing Collective. Her work has appeared in recent issues of Beyond Words, Rust + Moth, and Willows Wept Review. Find her online at www.dilyswt.com. Instagram: @dilys.wt / Twitter: @dilyswt
Eben Bein
What I meant to ask about the flashcards
when I called you earlier was not where
I put them on the counter or desk drawer or maybe my jacket
pocket where you inserted your hand
while the cell crinkled and roughed what I meant to ask
about was where I should put us
like will it
will it just end like it started in a language
I have only begun to learn evading
percept or recall though I often
sit cross-legged on the rug
and sort them into piles:
hobbies times of day things we eat
things we are:
American Chinese
busy happy
late approaching
the bottom of the deck
hand frozen in indecision, still
unsure where to put “you”
where to put “me”
Eben Bein is a high-school-biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator. He grew up in a cohousing community on Nipmuc land (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 and Education Manager for Our Climate, where he educates and empowers the next generation of climate advocates. In the margins, he writes poetry and nonfiction; he recently won the Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest and he has also published poems in Passenger’s Journal, Wild Roof Journal, and Meat For Tea. He currently lives on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with his boyfriend. Facebook/Twitter/Instagram @beinology.
Amy Wellman Edwards
Amy Wellman Edwards, an art educator of 26 years, enjoys spreading her love for the arts to students in DFW, Texas. Teaching elementary students during the day and college students in the evening offers exciting diversity to the day. Edwards has worked in mixed media, photography, and digital art, but she is also extremely interested in writing as an art form.
Kiana McCrackin
Burned Letters to My Lunar Wife
The beach is moving. Not the beach but everything on it. Birds swoop down and up, waves come in and recede, palms swirl. It would all be so peaceful, a ballet, if it weren’t for the hurricane down the coast.
My hair is an alive thing. I like how it makes me anonymous when it flies in my face. I could be anyone, anyone. I could be who you wished I was.
I’m alone on the beach. I’ve never been alone on this beach. With hair in my face I forget that I don’t have to step carefully around fluorescent beach towels and limbs coated lightly with sand and sunscreen. You and I used to sun our faces just over there, where the grasses are bowing to the Earth.
I see phantoms everywhere but I don’t believe in ghosts.
I see them in the vacant swings at the park swaying gently in the still air.
In the ripples that appear when no stone was thrown.
I feel your fingers in my brain, though I never see you anywhere, anymore. They are compressing, shaping my thoughts like the modeling clay you used to buy at the dollar store.
You believed in ghosts.
You woke one night shaking and shivering and I pulled you into me, shadows dancing on the wall.
No, I still don’t believe in the mystical but I check my horoscope every day now. Remember when you told me you were born under all the wrong stars? I laughed at you. I laughed because I’ve never met anyone as lucky as you.
My lunar wife I used to tell our friends.
My solar wife you would retort.
I’ve been trying to be that woman, the one who you thought could swallow clouds. I’ve been sitting in the sun until my skin is red and sore.
But the clouds are following me. (You always wanted me to be more honest. So I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you: I’m following them.) The hills in the distance disappear behind a wall of water, falling, falling. When they appear again they glow golden. Like you.
I wish I could tell you about the storms here. Not like this, not whispers into the wind, but really tell you: I look and look for them. (I look and look for you.) First on the radar, then in my car. The same junker I bought for two thousand bucks. The one you hated riding next to me in.
Stevie Nicks saw herself in the mountain, I see you in the sky. I feel you on my skin when the clouds let you go. I collect you on my tongue. And since I promised honesty, I think you should know: I wish on every star that you’ll take me in a violent flash of electricity.
Kiana McCrackin is a writer, a photographer (with a BFA from The Brooks Institute of Photography), a cloud gazer, and a mama. Kiana is eternally inspired by the emotions of the human experience and the landscapes she has called home; Alaska, California, and Washington. She currently resides in South Dakota where she is learning what the wind has to say and translating what the trees tell her. Kiana has work published or forthcoming in Pif Magazine, Sky Island Journal, Moonlight Magazine, and Words & Whispers.
Marisa P. Clark
Awaiting the Orionids
Awaiting the Orionids,
I prepared my wish, to fall
in love again. To fly
and in descent, not to dive
and crash, but level off,
then glide and rise and dip—
a constant motion, like breath,
dependable, something to call
relationship. I stood outside
shivering, and searched
the sky. Free
of moon and full
of stars. Hours I watched
for the promised rain
of meteors to streak hope
against the black. When faint
gray rimmed the mountain range
and encroaching daylight wiped
away the stars like specks of salt
spilled on a tablecloth,
I went inside and prayed
to rest, and the stirring world
love moved among
got on with life.
Marisa P. Clark is a queer writer whose prose and poetry appear in Shenandoah, Cream City Review, Nimrod, Epiphany, Foglifter, Rust + Moth, Texas Review, Folio, and elsewhere. Best American Essays 2011 recognized her creative nonfiction among its Notable Essays. A fiction reader for New England Review, she hails from the South and lives in the Southwest with three parrots, two dogs, and whatever wildlife and strays stop to visit.
Susan Cummins Miller
Tucson writer Susan Cummins Miller, a former field geologist, paleontologist, and college instructor, has published six novels and an anthology containing the works of 34 women writers of the American frontier. Her poems appear frequently in journals and anthologies. Two poetry collections, Making Silent Stones Sing and Deciphering the Desert: A Book of Poems, are forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Website: www.susancumminsmiller.com
