Cover image: “Longing” by Namoe
Gallery 2
Bring Your Songs
Kay L. Cook
Feedback to my poet self
There’s a danger in speaking out
about life still treading water.
Opinions can be sucked under
by the power of passing ships where
wakes follow
blinking eyes toward
a destined shore where
indifferent crashes leave
mounting deposits
on our brown and black
earth thickening thin
drawn back out
tossed into undercurrent
where white foam undulates
takes eternities
ruminating
spending time
as if free
to make a choice
to take a risk
to tell the truth.
Kay L. Cook was raised in the Midwest and is a longtime New Yorker. As a gay parent in a racially diverse family, she focuses much of her writing on racial issues and the need for systemic changes. Her formal background and degrees lie in education and psychology. Her recent poetry has appeared in Wild Roof Journal, Poets Reading the News, Closed Eye Open, and The Elevation Review.
Chloe Bausano
Duck Pond in Winter
One hundred or more ducks sit wobbling
on the surface of the water, looking more
like wooden bathtub toys than reality as
they bob to and fro in the inlet. Ripples
off the main pond, rocked and kneaded by
wind that has hiccuped like a skipping rock
over the parallel ocean, press divots into this
teaspoon, concave, little thing on the coast.
Slowing from 15mph to 5, left blinker, sidling up
to the precipice I wonder how I might capture this
moment. If only I could paint, oil on canvas, or cut
from the corners of my vision pieces of collage – to
paper mâché the moment into perpetuity. I put a pen
to paper, a word picture will do, hundreds of brown
bodied ducks with black bills, bumping over seaweed
fields and murky fish dens, hiding from a storm that has
not yet arrived, encroaching on the seagulls’ territory, I
speed up again to begin composing this moment: a
detailing of this skein to tuck into my pocket alongside
yesterday’s sunrise; my sister’s birthday party; a soft-shell
crab from early spring, that may be seen in the plush
of a bird’s winter wings.
Chloe Bausano is a New York City poet who holds a degree in English Literature from Cornell University. She has previously been published by Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, TDR Daily, the Dillydoun Review, and others. Her work centers around childhood, nature, and nostalgia, and she enjoys playing with writing form.
Vian Borchert
Vian Borchert is an established expressionist artist. She has exhibited extensively in group and solo exhibitions within the US and internationally. Vian is a Notable Alumni from the Corcoran George Washington University, Washington, DC. She exhibits in major cities such as NYC, LA, London, Washington DC, and Hong Kong. Borchert’s art has been vastly featured in press like The Washington Post and MOEVIR Paris Magazine, as well as literary publications such as Wild Roof Journal, The Closed Eye Open, and Passengers Journal. Borchert is an art educator in the Washington DC area. Website: www.vianborchert.com
Andrew Monroe Rice
gatherer
a life in thirds
spider-webbed
across respectful intermissions met
setting intention
whether human animal or stone
water as polish, oxygen on loan
all remarkable with time’s markings
how the young deny her
the sandwiched contest her clamoring inevitability
the aged
content to bathe
in her strawberry wine, a banner year after
winter time
relishing all
left over
on the upswing of a breath
hugging longer,
tiny dyings stronger
filling a stranger’s empty belly
a mirror he is alive, seeable
we all shall be agreeable
to lie down first
in the carved muddy sanctuary
that
births
each soul arriving
not merely
surviving,
but thriving
with time.
Andrew Monroe Rice is a writer and contemplative teacher. A graduate of Colby College (BA 1996) and Harvard University Divinity School (MTS 1999), Rice lives in Oklahoma City with his wife and two sons. He is a former State Senator. Rice published the novel Ghosts of Ursino in 2020 and has written three collections of poetry: Luminosity (2020); Jung, At The Unraveling (2020); and becoming.poems. (2021). His poem “penumbra” appeared in The Scapegoat Review (Winter 2022), and his poem “dominant hands” was published in a collaboration of The Well and The On Being Project called “Mindful Poetry Moments.”
Susan Landgraf
This Old Floating Boat
Toad stools rise from the loam and nurse logs;
ants build their mounds and the stinging hairs
of the nettles glisten.
Go. Walk the trails
among fiddlehead ferns greening
the light. Listen for bark-and-needle talk,
slither of snake, red-headed woodpecker’s drilling.
Go to the garden
with its verve of poppy, delphinium bells,
and asters. Hear sunflowers turning their heads
and chickadees their chatter.
Go. Breathe in daffodils, hyacinths,
fresh-cut grass that looks like a quilt of feathers
laying itself down in a certain slant of light.
Let the wealth of shoots and buds
and the sprays of yellow, purple, and blue
soothe you long as they can.
Susan Landgraf was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship in 2020. The resulting book of Muckleshoot Indian Tribe poetry will be published by WSU Press. Two Sylvias Press published The Inspired Poet, a writing exercise book, in 2019. More than 400 poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Margie, Nimrod, Third Wednesday, Calyx, Rattle, and others. Other books include What We Bury Changes the Ground, a chapbook titled Other Voices, and Student Reflection Journal for Student Success, published by Prentice Hall. Landgraf has given more than 150 writing workshops, including the San Miguel Writers’ Conference, Centrum, and the Marine and Science Technology Center. A former journalist, she taught at Highline College for 30 years and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2002, 2008, 2010, and 2012. She served as Poet Laureate of Auburn, Washington, from 2018 to 2020.
Bonnie Matthews Brock
Bonnie Matthews Brock is a Florida-based photographer, as well as a school psychologist. She enjoys capturing raw single-capture images of things that draw her attention, especially nature and urban scenes. Her work has been featured in Ibbetson Street, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, Ember Chasm Review, and Oddball Magazine. You can view more of Bonnie’s images on Instagram @bonniematthewsbrock.
Namoe
Namoe is a photographer and poet from Oklahoma, currently residing in Michigan as he finishes graduate school. Archaeologist by day, Namoe seeks to explore the intricacies of existence and its many individual, fleeting moments through his art by exploring themes of nature, abstract, and humanity. Romance is a way of life for Namoe and starts with simple awareness. He had his first publication appear in the latest issue of Free Verse Revolution Literary Magazine. Namoe is a cloud fanatic and also enjoys staring at pretty lights. He can be reached and his work found on Instagram @namoephoto.
Ahsan Chowdhury
Growing Holy Basil
I
The clear plastic container he had used to cover the holy basil with was missing.
“Amma! Amma!”
“What is it, Khokon?”
“Did you throw it away?” asked Fazlul Islam Kazi, whose Bengali nickname was Khokon or “Munchkin.”
Several indoor plants had died as a result of his mother-in-law’s guerilla gardening tactics. As if that was not bad enough, she insisted on calling him Khokon. This nickname was his mother’s idea. If you called your child by its “real” name, an evil spirit might learn it. Having cohabited with the Hindus over the centuries and their ancestors mostly converts from the lower castes, Bengali Muslims had not been able to give up such pagan beliefs entirely. His own family traced their lineage to a Kazi who had emigrated from Arabia shortly after Muhammad ibn Qasim’s conquest of Sindh in the eighth century C.E.
“The poor thing couldn’t breathe!”
“It needs the humidity.”
“But you never covered the zucchini and the squash plants.”
The ignorant woman was referring to his attempt to grow vegetables in the backyard during the few snow-free weeks they call summer here. He had been living in his brother-in-law Iftikhar Kazi’s family ever since arriving in late February of 2020 as a landed immigrant. The winter lasted eight months here, and the Muezzin’s call to prayer did not sound from myriad loudspeakers as it did in Dhaka, the capital of his native Bangladesh, as well as in Kuwait City where he had worked as a pharmacist. He hadn’t even recovered from jet lag when the city and the entire province went into a lockdown. It was winter now, his first full-fledged one in Canada.
“I am sorry, Khokon!” Mrs. Kazi left him alone among the indoor plants displayed in front of the bay window overlooking the frozen backyard.
Ahsan Chowdhury is an adjunct lecturer at a Canadian University and uses creative writing as a therapeutic outlet during the months he is unemployed. His previous publications have appeared in scholarly as well as popular platforms, both print and online.
Annie Dawid
Annie Dawid has been published in Wild Roof Journal, and her work has been on the covers of Into the Void, Blue Earth Review, Cake, Oregon Focus, American Poetry Review, and Westchester Review.
Kadie Kelly
Photosynthesis
Ripped
water split
is photosynthesis
ripped
water split
becomes a part
of a larger set
of reactions
so the story
can be seen
green
Kadie Kelly was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan and has lived and worked in Oakland, California since 2005 when she started a small business, Superpower of the Song™. She holds a master’s degree in public policy from Mills College. A lifelong writer and composer, this is the first time her poetry will appear in an online journal. Nature and spending time outdoors with her partner and children inspire her work.
Dawn Erickson
Fortson
I see a flash of my son’s grey t-shirt as he veers into the alders, before he is swallowed into their blotchy white trunks.
“I want something of mine in a museum someday,” I hear him say over his shoulder. We are at the old town and mill site called Fortson, poking around crumbling house foundations and mill remnants. The town is just upriver from our home in the Stillaguamish River valley northeast of Seattle. A valley tucked off in a rural corner of western Washington. I once found a rusted-up crosscut saw stuck in a stump here and tell the boys, my son and his friend, that maybe they can find it. They quickly run into the forest, a second growth one, logged long ago, and mixed up now with thickets of salmonberry, alder, and vine maple trees. Hemlock and cedar and the occasional spruce. The boys zig-zag in and out of tree trunks and cedar stumps. Cedar is the longest-lived wood in the forest, the one best suited to survive the onslaught of damp common to the Pacific Northwest but even these stumps are nearly rotted and covered over with thick green blankets of moss. The sun of a late but balmy October afternoon sifts through falling and yellowed alder leaves. They land silent on the river’s surface and drift downstream. Our river, as we say. The river. Others call it the Stilly or Stillaguamish or North Fork Stilly, or most properly, the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River.
Not so long ago there was a town here. A town that sprang up around the saw mill built to process the old growth forest that once thrived here. Just over a hundred years ago. Right after the train tracks were completed along the Stillaguamish River. Tracks for the train that once ran along the grade we walk. There was a post office, a school and houses, saloons and a Sunday school. Even its own electric power plant. At its height over 300 people made their home here – loggers, millworkers, shop keepers and saloon workers. Single men in bunkhouses, but families too. The mill operated for thirty years before it shut down in the 1940’s. It sat for nearly twenty years before the machinery was bought and moved five miles upstream to a mill along the Sauk River in Darrington – now a town of nearly 1,400. That mill operates still, though it struggles. It too has been bought and sold several times, and is now part of Hampton Lumber Mills. Fortson was one of a boom of mills and adjoining settlements that sprang up along the Stillaguamish River. The rail line creating the possibility of success.
Dawn Erickson is a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. She once worked for the United States Forest Service building trails but now works on raising her son. Her essays and stories have been published at Brain, Child; Literary Mama; Cease, Cows; and Up North Literary Magazine, among others. You can read more of her writing at www.dmerickson.com.
Erin Holtz Braeckman
Bring Your Songs
Where we are going, you will need to bring your songs. Not those you rehearse, but those you remember in the call and response of sunrise. The ones that come by way of the body where, in its rapt encounter with birdsong, the seership of reverence that once made honied altars of stone can still be heard. Gather them, like you do the dropped feathers and bleached antlers of dreams in the roundhouse of morning, for these are the bone myths and old names from the last ancestor whose heart could still bear the beauty of this world. Offer them, as the seed does to the Earth, for She will know the ritual of your open palm like She does Her own salt. Bless them, in that storied tongue from the borderlands that tastes of cry and croak and carol, for where we are going, this is what will heal the place you find yourself; this is how you will become animal again.
Carol and Keening
To sing is to live from the clay of the soul. In the wilderness of embodiment, song tracks the ground of our being, knowing that to enter the country of our wounding is where we will also find our joy. The carol is never far from the keening: the two are one in song, just as it is both our ecstatic as well as our exiled places that are full with the wholeness of living. The birds meet us in this terrain of multiplicity, summoning to greet the day alongside the cairn of grief as willingly as that of grace. Like birdsong sung from the Earth, it is that clay of the soul that carries us when all else cannot.
Initiate
I come to you as Owl. Reaching down out of the bardo of night, I drop my bidding at your feet – a hunted hare, slack on the snow in a quiver of starlight. You stop stride-stunned, look to the bough I have taken, more of shadow than of feather as our eyes meet. I have lain this pelt before you of all the riches I know under the blunt thorn of Winter. It is the song upon which I hang my bones to tell you this: grief needs a vessel to pour into. So rebuild your shrines, if only in the silent vigil of the mind. Let loss keep you alive to the moment, moving one step ahead of you on your storied path. You left this eve on what you thought was a walk but now returns you as an initiate.
Ritual
There is something of the pilgrim in the wisdom teaching on humility that asks of us to become a “hollow bone” – something of finding passage through being emptied of resistance for the filling of reciprocity. In this, the birds come versed, knowing that it is the gifting and gathering of the breath reaching into their light frames that makes flight possible. All wayfaring begins at the level of bone, they sing. We need no sandals nor prayer shawl for this path, no garlands nor gold upon approach; the body is the ritual.
Sing
There is an old fallacy that assumes, because the stories of that which die stay with the land, you can only be “of” a place that houses the bones of your dead. Nomads of the wing, with a season of song at their backs caravanning in migration before the first snow, know otherwise. With flight comes this one constant: that no matter where you find yourself, the Earth is forever drawing you towards her through that unconditional love that is gravity. In the anthropology of landscape that is deep enough to hold us all, you are always home. Like the whistle made from an eagle’s wing, we are each born into the world with a song that begins in the bone. Where that bone might be from is no matter; it is “of” the place it sings in.
Claimed
To wildcraft a life for yourself from the raw beauty that takes to untamed edges, is to be claimed by place. Wrap your hands around the soft body of its mystery, and you will feel a feral heart untethered, like two wings beating. This is the magic of the Old Country from when it was still covered in forest, carried now in the cairn of birdsong; this is the land, dreaming. So go. Go now to the place you are a child of nature in, and love that.
Note: “Bring Your Songs,” “Initiate,” and “Bard” have previously appeared in Deep Times.
Erin Holtz Braeckman is a writer and educator who seeks to rewild the Earth-based ancestral wisdom traditions of the Deep Feminine in her art and activism. She holds a B.A., a B.Ed., and an M.A. in English Literature (Public Texts), as well as certification in Spiritual Counselling and a background in World Religions. She is a part-time faculty member at Lakefield College School, and teaches Hatha and Qigong as an E-RYT and reiki practitioner out of her home business, The Village Yoga Studio, in Ontario, Canada. When not with a book, her garden, or beloved family, she can be found simply observing the sacred in the everyday. Website: www.thevillageyogastudio.ca
Lior Locher
Lior Locher is a collage and acrylics artist drawing inspiration from travels and daily-life ephemera. Having lived in 6 countries on 4 continents, home is in England by the seaside now. They work in personal growth and are fascinated by people’s inner lives and how we make sense of our own inner journeys as humans, visceral and nonlinear. This also flows into Lior’s work. Maps are often the starting point, water and connection paths are important, and layers and layers appear from daily life, fantasy, and memory.
- Website: www.liordotart.wordpress.com
- Instagram: @liorlocher
Andy Oram
Depot in a valley
from the platform call back the vanished from the staging area call back the generations
from the stout beams broad planks shingles sheaved with mold
the empty space where the 3:30 was canceled one Friday in June
recall the lost wanderers
at the lattice of mountains roads and rivers
from the space stripped of the ticket counter
declaim the past congregants
the patient beams hard-trod planks
where rawhide soles turned toward the Northern cauldron
where shingles rattled at casings designated for the grinding mills
tomorrows wrapped up in the padlocked shed
rust in the ditches
where scruffy painters tuck aspiring canvases to make studio rounds
axles chugged toward the summits
signals echoed in the valley
the beams still laugh
with their elevated view of parasoled cotton bustles long trunks alongside
the joists breathe
the joists ascend to the moldy rafters
the persistent clocks
never warned their minutes would turn to decades
praise the joists one more day
praise the singing thumping rattling ringing rails
Andy Oram is a writer and editor in the computer field. His editorial projects have ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. Print publications where his writings have appeared include The Economist, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, and Vanguardia Dossier. He has lived in the Boston, Massachusetts area for almost 50 years. He self-published his memoir Backtraces: Three Decades of Computing, Communities, and Critiques, and his poems have been published in Ají, Arlington Literary Journal, Conclave, Genre: Urban Arts, Heron Clan, Offcourse, Panoply, Soul-Lit, Speckled Trout Review, Superpresent, and WhimsicalPoet. Website: www.praxagora.com
Kris Whorton
Early Monday Morning
I can’t stop pointing out the stars. Hours before sunrise,
I’m on my front porch, a deck that faces woods
and darkness. We have no streetlight, no neighbors,
so few lights in this part of town, the stars are a map
I’m still learning to read. Below me, my yard is dense
darkness I can’t see into no matter how many times I blink.
Above, the stars form a patchwork, some paths, a sequined
banner of bright, less bright. My boy dog sits at my side
awaiting the answer to some existential question I’m not
aware of, one that is bigger than Why am I here? And because
the answer doesn’t come I think the question might be
Why are there so many shades of darkness? or Why do we cry
when we’re happy? I show my boy Orion, recently returned to our sky,
and the dippers, constellations I’ve known since I was a child.
In Argentina, I searched the stars this same way. White and blue,
yellow pinpricks, arms of the Milky Way reaching
from Chile to the mountains behind me. No dippers,
no knife, no belt, no handle to hold the familiar.
The predawn black all around and above
as unknown to me on that mountain as I was in that world.
Had I disappeared—a grain of soil in the midst
of a million others—I might never have been
found, as those unknown stars were gone to me,
as we all are, each one of us, day-to-day in this world
where we think we know our place,
but we can’t always recognize what we’re seeing.
Originally from Boulder, Colorado, Kris Whorton lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she teaches writing at the University of Tennessee and Hamilton County Jail; she also teaches teens, adults, and mental health members in the community. Her poetry has appeared most recently in The Greensboro Review #109, Poets’ Choice, The Thing Itself, and Salmon Creek Journal. Her fiction has been published in Driftwood Press, Scarlet Leaf Review, and elsewhere; her creative nonfiction has been anthologized.
Angelina Salgado
Angelina Salgado is a visual artist and has always been drawn to bright colors, which are a hallmark of her artwork and personal style. The daughter of Filipino immigrants, Angelina was born and raised in New York. She received her AAS in Fine Arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology, pursued a double major in Art History and Studio Art at Hunter College, and then earned her Master’s degree in Art and Museum Education from the City College of New York. She is also the mother to twin girls. Her daughter, Aurora Annette, passed away from Sudden Unexplained Infant Death, just 3 days after she and her twin turned 2 months old. Angelina paints the Aurora Borealis as an outlet for her grief after losing her daughter, but also to keep Aurora’s memory alive. Follow @aurorasforaurora on instagram or tiktok to see Angelina’s newest Aurora paintings, and visit www.aurorasforaurora.com to learn more about her story and process.
