Cover image: “A Line in the Dark” by Coralie Huon
Gallery 1
The Blue Beyond
KB Ballentine
Moonlight Over Paper
The moon spills its lemonade-light,
summer’s bliss in the crickets’ sighs.
The bird’s eggs we found in a fallen nest
cracked and grew wings, a safari
of bone and feather, a song in the dawn
still hours away while I scrawl
and scratch, stare into the yard.
The candles, my heart wavering
across the page.
I write with the mutter of tree frogs,
raccoons snuffling bird feeders, claws scraping
the metal mesh. Deer tugging grass and bushes,
now stopping to listen, now curving
their necks again, motion-light on but aimed away
from my portion of the porch where I hug
the darkness. Paper the only emptiness
I try to fill, reaching into the shadows
again and again.
KB Ballentine’s seventh collection, Edge of the Echo, launched in 2021 with Iris Press. Her earlier books can be found with Blue Light Press, Middle Creek Publishing, and Celtic Cat Publishing. Published in North Dakota Quarterly, Atlanta Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, among others, her work also appears in anthologies including The Strategic Poet (2021), Pandemic Evolution (2021), and Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.
Heather C. Moll
Magpie
I hear a magpie caw in the tree, making a holy ruckus
above my head. It’s always the black and white ones
that have the loudest voices. I can’t see the bird
but I know the sound of his voice. I have a black
and white striped feather on my desk, collecting dust.
This is a day of reckoning — my own sins on display —
how often I have folded myself, soaked my feet
stepping in puddles so others could have the right
of way. I thought it would be easier to love me
if I kept myself tucked and tidy but I was never
welcomed past the entrance. You see where
this is going, don’t you? How many seeds
does a tree release, hoping one will land
in the soil and become a tower that holds a black
and white magpie in the middle of the city, an entrance
someone can step through to the blue beyond?
Heather C. Moll lives on Treaty 7 territory and Metis Nation of Alberta Region 3, on the edge of the windswept Canadian plains. She is a deep-hearted queer poet who spends her days searching for her muse (who visits, most often and inconveniently, when she is cleaning or walking her big, fluffy dog), parceling words into poems and seeing the world through her camera lens. She’s a mom to two teenagers, nature-lover, autodidact, and continual work-in-progress. She’s been published in Beyond The Veil’s Mental Health Anthology and with Sweet Tree Review and has work forthcoming with Quillkeeper’s Press. You can find her on Instagram @heathercmollwriter and on Twitter.
Cyndi Gusler
Cyndi Gusler holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing. As the Director of Visual Arts at Eastern Mennonite University in VA, she shares her love of immersion into these mediums with her students. In Cyndi’s Chestnut Art Studio are oil and acrylic paintings combining her physical environment with her imagined reality. Daydreams is an evolving playground of imagery that grounds the artist and allows her to fly. Her paintings invite viewers to enter and explore or relax in the color-saturated richness with a glass of lemonade. She explores the potential of materials to become “paint,” pulling substances like used coffee grounds from the waste stream and re-appropriating them as drawing mediums in her ephemeral artwork. Although physically short-lived, these drawings hold potency in the memory of the viewer. You can see more at www.cyndigusler.com.
Susan Landgraf
Watch for the Green Lightning and Give Warning
If there are no woods to give
their live oaks, no grass to feed the goats…
If there are no hands to remember wood
and goatskin to house the heart of the drum…
If there are no fingers to pull out the drum’s thunder,
buzz of mosquitoes, sweet mangoes, coral, conch…
If there are no hands to cut the shackles,
no machetes, smoke, feathers, fingers, tongues…
Can a drum wait like a cup to fill in a hurricane?
Can moth-balled spirits breathe?
Susan Landgraf was awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Laureate award in 2020. Her books include a writing exercise book The Inspired Poet (Two Sylvias Press, 2019), a book of poetry What We Bury Changes the Ground, and a chapbook Other Voices. More than 400 poems have appeared in publications like Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Margie, Nimrod, The Meadow, Rattle, Calyx, and others. She served as Poet Laureate of Auburn, Washington, from 2018 to 2020.
Subhaga Crystal Bacon
What the River Says: McFarland Creek Boat Launch
Here’s my wild turning, crashing blue green
at McFarland Creek, foaming whitely
into breakwater. Part of me whips past
in surface eddies, part curls toward the stony
shore’s shallow pool, bottom flowered
like speckled trout. Meandering a slow
circle, I part and join myself making lazy
way beneath yet one more bridge where rocks
lift me into rejoicing: freedom! Flowing
south below the highway, old stone peeled
out from brown grass shows the centuries
in layers like clouds. Close to me, it’s carved
like masks of the people gone, their eight
thousand years here forgotten. The wild people.
We shaped each other, when time used to live here.
What the River Says: Methow-Columbia Confluence
Serenity, surrender, let’s call them sister words.
To finally arrive here from my deep-drop journey,
and merge my waters with the sweet Columbia—
dammed, stilled, controlled—what can I do
but surrender. Everything arrives in its own time.
This new season of dying. Small yellow leaves
afloat, and geese at rest. I keep coming from the top
of your world, flowing until I freeze, then collect snow,
a reunion of parts. I go up in sun, come down
in cold. Still, the heart of me keeps beating, currents
don’t end. If you’re patient, you can see what time is
by watching me. I sleep and awaken and reflect,
always whole, always new, always the same.
This scent of sweetness meets me here. Come,
live in the smell of water.
Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s new book, Transitory, is forthcoming in fall of ’23 from BOA Editions. She’s the author of two collections, Blue Hunger (Methow Press, 2020) and Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey (BOA Editions, 2004). A Queer Elder, she lives, writes, and teaches rural northcentral Washington. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in the humana obscura, Indianapolis Review, Wood Cat Review, and Hare’s Paw. Her work can be found on www.subhagacrystalbacon.com.
Jocelyn Ulevicus
Jocelyn Ulevicus is an American artist and writer whose work interrogates the transience of being and the hospitality of presence. Her work is either forthcoming or published in magazines such as SWWIM Every Day, The Free State Review, The Petigru Review, Blue Mesa Review, and Humana Obscura, amongst others. Ulevicus is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee and her in-progress memoir, The Birth of a Tree, was shortlisted for the 2019 Santa Fe Literary Award Program. She is currently in Amsterdam completing research for her first collection of poems.
Adam M. Sowards
Submerged Stories, Breaching History
A few times a year, when the crowded shelves of my university library and the cramped apartments in this college town threaten to bury me, I go to the river.
It’s a 20-mile journey, although a red-tailed hawk could do it in a dozen. To get there, I drive up out of town, cross the state highway, and move through the rolling hills, held in place by a century and a half of wheat and before that by bunchgrasses sinking their roots into loess so deep as to be practically bottomless. Soon, the road banks and opens up next to Union Flat Creek along which the area’s first homesteaders planted their stakes. Old farmhouses and rusting equipment sit beside new combines and tractors off short spur roads and long gravel driveways that branch off the route I’m driving like trickling tributaries to the main stem. On backroads around here, I often see signs nailed to barns—SAVE OUR DAMS—a talisman meant to ward off environmentalists who wish to breach dams so that salmon abundance might be restored to regional streams. When I reach the stop sign, I turn and descend Wawawai Canyon, where over the course of a half-dozen miles, I wind my way down 1600 feet. The canyon is narrow and the hills so steep I cannot always see their tops from the pavement. The angles are severe enough that every time I see the cattle and game trails that skirt the curves, like topo lines on a map, I marvel at the feats of faunal engineering, certain that there must be scores of skeletons littering the gully below, the result of one misstep or a fatal gust of wind. The road traces Wawawai Creek until it pools at the bottom of the hill into a small pond in a county park, which leaks out beneath a railroad bridge into the Snake River.
During the thirty-minute drive, fast-food restaurants and car dealerships yield to farms and then to ranches and then the empty banks of the Snake, which pulls me like a current—not only downstream but also into a past.
All places contain ghost landscapes when you see them as a historian does, which is to say, how I do. Buried beneath today’s scenic vista lies all of the yesterdays, layered one upon another, accreting with passing memories and moments. I obsess over this interplay of place and time. It is where I live, where I think; it is how I chart the world. And I wonder how anyone could plot their universe otherwise. Even if it does mean being constantly confronted by loss.
***
Adam M. Sowards is an award-winning environmental historian, writer, and former professor. His most recent book, Making America’s Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands, appeared in April 2022. His work explores democracy and nature across time. You can find more at www.adamsowards.net or follow him on social media as @AdamMSowards.
Alison Hicks
Channel
The lamp sends down a cone of light,
lifting me from night.
I require nothing
of myself, my mind.
No one awake to make demands.
No work lists, trying
to remember, scheduling, cross-checking.
Nothing assigned, reading nothing I should.
Watery eyes, pages blurring,
the world’s bewildering ways.
Injustices remain, unspeakable.
I step into the current.
Little fishes, spots of bioluminescence.
My finger touches their backs.
Hope
How we came to it, we did not know.
We were a long way from the ocean.
We walked for a long time.
We could not say why we kept going.
Lack of alternative, possibly.
We drank from a deep hole,
water cooled in earth.
There were tall trees with thick bark.
Needles softened our steps.
Then mountains, snow.
We descended to a coast.
Fish and fruit were plentiful, and we ate.
How we came to any of it less than clear.
We told stories that pretended to knowledge.
Everything we saw was full
of meaning beyond us.
Alison Hicks was awarded the 2021 Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Press for Knowing Is a Branching Trail. Previous collections include You Who Took the Boat Out and Kiss, her chapbook Falling Dreams, and her novella Love: A Story of Images. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Gargoyle, Permafrost, and Poet Lore. She was named a finalist for the 2021 Beullah Rose prize from Smartish Pace and nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Green Hills Literary Lantern. She is the founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.
Bronwen R. C. Evans
Apologue prevention
I keep my eyes open. Leaning forward staring hard
into the mist and through the dark, carried in a fast car
flying with eagle’s sight
just in case any animals appear at the roadside,
constantly checking the mirror to see what is behind us
to know if it would be safe to stop or swerve to save a life,
to save the grief.
Sometimes I’ve predicted them,
seen them running through my mind first.
We laugh when I get the creature, its colour, correct.
So far we have been lucky
envisioning golden circles around the car,
sending blessings when we see one
who is already gone.
Bronwen R. C. Evans is a writer living in Somerset. Her main inspirations are found in nature, memory, and magic. Bronwen has been published by Black Cat Poetry Press and has previously won Folklore Publishing’s Poems for Trees competition. She has also been published by Hermes Magazine, Blood Moon Poetry Journal, Juno Magazine, and The Teller Magazine.
Coralie Huon
Coralie Huon is a multidisciplinary artist, illustrator, and muralist. Her work is inspired by natural landscapes, highlighting the beauty of the outdoor world and the interaction of people with these places. Using elements of nature as metaphors, her artwork explores the themes of interconnectedness and our relationship to the earth, our inner beings and others. Crisp lines, whether in black and white drawings or colorful acrylic paintings, translate into unique graphical and bold pieces. Born in 1982, Coralie Huon had a decade-long architecture career in London before dedicating herself full-time to her art in 2020. She exhibited in the Roy’s Art Fair and in Brick Lane Gallery in 2021. She now works and lives in Grenoble, France, close to the source of her inspiration.
Lilian McCarthy
Elegy
Elegy to her hands,
Tentacular, paper-like
Glistening
I remember the scent of red rubber,
Black coffee,
A window cracked to let in
New England air.
Sagging bookshelves, my cervical
Support a pile of gluey spines.
It is a wave of hurt,
The boulder forever returning to the
Base of the mountain.
An elegy to her hands
Lilian McCarthy is a disabled, queer, nonbinary woman who lives in Boston, MA and Dublin, Ireland. She is a Master’s candidate in Comparative Literature at Trinity College Dublin. She enjoys fabric arts, painting, playing with animals, writing, and translating French and Italian work. Lilian works primarily in free verse and short fiction, and her writing attempts to capture how it feels to exist in her disabled and queer body. She has been published in The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Matter Press: Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Ricochet Review, and others. Website: www.lilianrosemccarthy.me
Joshua Kulseth
Fort
It came any way but naturally for me,
this compiling of old logs, gathering from where:
downed trees halfway moldered,
haven of hibernating ants; scavenged branches
by the rim of the woods; some few chainsawed limbs
left half-stacked beside the more neatly
cut hefts of trunk—hauled by the armful, or dragged
double-fisted through pasture stubble, strapped
to the back of the ATV—however we could.
We sorted each into categories of stability.
The utility of a piece determined by brother or cousin,
older in the weight of these matters.
I would stand apart, maybe in mock helpfulness
gathering fistfuls of twigs, offering my collection
on the altar of lumber with a deferential nod,
met with indifference or occasional mhmm
of their reluctance. I’d eat up the sight,
slow coming together of our yearly fort,
newly built at Christmas or Thanksgiving
like the harvest of what, habit maybe? Imagination?
No, more like, for me anyway, assurance.
Assurance like yearbook photos, report cards,
or a wall pocked with pencil marks
charting growth—not like a monument,
which stands against time like a bastion of memory,
but something in cahoots with time, made to decay
and be replaced. A way of saying
I was here, in such-and-such a year—only 10, now 13,
and look how the roof’s all collapsed; a cow grazing lazily
has disemboweled such and such a wall; remember
when we put this relic together. I sat just there.
Remember, when we were all together?
Joshua Kulseth earned his BA in English from Clemson University and his MFA in poetry from Hunter College. He is currently a PhD student in poetry at Texas Tech University. His poems have appeared and are forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, The Emerson Review, The Worcester Review, Rappahannock Review, The Windhover, and others. His book manuscript, Leaving Troy, was shortlisted for the Cider Press Review Publication Competition.
T.B. Grennan
Visions
[1]
A dark shape swirling there underwater. Looking like a slow leak from a submerged pipeline—an inky cloud, a black, viscous plume—then revealing itself as something else, something simper. An expanse of brunette hair, rising from a submerged head. Moving and twisting with the current.
Blinking slow, the Regents Club carpet blurring in front of me. Knees liquid, free drinks sloshing in each hand. Staring at the knot of classmates on the far side of the room, surrounding this week’s visiting writer like shelter dogs waiting to be fed. His laugh braying, his goatee asymmetrical. Wearing his success with the self-deprecating confidence of a writer who came of age in another era, a time when you could send stories to the New Yorker and expect a fair hearing.
Last month’s boy is at the writer’s elbow, leaning in close. Like maybe some of that 1970s fairy dust will rub off on him. But then he’s white and smart and bookishly handsome—so who knows, maybe it will. The boy laughs affectionately as I crash into the circle, as I bang into his arm and spill his white wine across orange and blue carpet. Nuzzling his jaw as he asks the writer about a book of his from the early eighties.
The writer sighs, says, “Must we dredge up old mistakes?”
And then I’m falling backward. Unaware of the fingers thrust through the belt loop at the back of my jeans until I’ve landed squarely in someone’s lap. His breath hot in my ear; his dick hard against my ass. Calling me Kid and Babe and Little Lady, mouth fragrant with Jager.
Across the bar, the guy I really like plays with another girl’s curly blonde hair, kisses her softly beneath one ear. Summoning up a distant flash of jealousy. Making me wonder what I’m doing here, why I’m subjecting myself to this. But before I can wrangle my feelings, choose a better path, my body decides for me, pressing backward with all its weight. Reminding me how good it can feel to be wanted, to have someone crave my touch—even if it’s just a handsy douchebag in some divey student bar.
Trudging up from the basement on carpeted stairs, my hair smelling of cigarettes. Looking over at two girls seated together at the kitchen table, watching something on a phone. They laugh uncomfortably, then look startled, horrified. I duck past, take another beer from the fridge. So close that I can almost feel their anxiety, the nervous silence thick around them.
I glance up and see my face fill the tiny screen. See my boobs from an unfamiliar angle. And shudder long and deep, like I’ve just seen a ghost.
T.B. Grennan was born in Vermont, lives in Brooklyn, and once read the entirety of Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus while stuck on a delayed plane. His writing has appeared in The Indiana Review, The Seventh Wave, TIMBER, and Spaces We Have Known, an anthology of LGBT+ fiction, among other publications.
Sherry Killam
Mojave Desert artist Sherry Killam explores both internal and external landscapes, inspired by the surreal shapes of boulders and prickly plants around her home in Joshua Tree. She attributes her passion for vivid colors and abstract shapes to her childhood study of the impressionist masters as well as her own nearsightedness. After a career of public school teaching and arts advocacy, she focused on her art, both painting and writing, until a serious eye injury brought the loss of sight in one eye and a chronic state of impaired balance and depth perception. Killam learned to make digital paintings with one eye and one finger on an iPad. Website: sherry-killam.pixels.com / Instagram: @sherry.killam
Corinna Board
Burial
She buries it under the roots of an oak;
fingers carefully working the soil,
you can tell she’s done this before;
the ground yields to her touch.
She digs until it’s just the right size,
each time, she chooses a different tree.
There’s been nothing for weeks,
but today she carries the corpse of a vole:
the still pip of its heart, the pink twig legs,
body still warm in her hands as she lays it
onto a cushion of moss; sends it back to the earth.
She doesn’t pray; the dead don’t need prayers
and the woman has learnt not to trust any god,
so she scatters her words over the grave:
I’m sorry, so sorry
and the words are enough.
Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in Oxford, UK. She is particularly inspired by art, nature and mythology. She has poems published or forthcoming in the6ress, Black Cat Poetry Press, Wild Roof Journal, Humana Obscura, Green Ink Poetry, Anthropocene and others. Corinna can be found on Instagram @parole_de_reveuse and on Twitter @CorinnaBoard.
Joseph Grice
Joseph Grice is a wildlife illustrator currently working in Jamestown, NY. He earned his BFA from SUNY Fredonia in 2010 and has taught art at Infinity Visual & Performing Arts in Jamestown and at Holt School of Fine Art in Charlotte, NC. He began painting watercolor birds as his primary subject matter in 2016, a tribute to his childhood growing up watching birds and spending time studying Roger Tory Peterson Field Guide books. He has since developed his bird series as well as his appreciation for all wildlife. After relocating back to Jamestown in 2019, he developed his use of other media to include oil, gouache, and digital painting. His current work pushes his techniques and explores light and dark, limited color palettes, and movement. The common themes of this work are nature and wildlife. Website: www.JosephGrice.art / Instagram: @joseph_grice_art
