Cover image: “Tangled” by SJ Hunt
Gallery 1
Waiting for a Signal
Kelly R. Samuels
Light Moving Unscattered
North, where the dust content is close to zero, light moves
in this way and everything far seems nearer.
You’d call and we would try
and make a connection. Talk of our children only then just asleep.
What view? How long before—?
There’d be a map I sometimes referred to—here, now. Now:
here—
you, north-inclined, speaking of snow
like others spoke of shore.
Sometimes I would fill in the words
you were slow to say.
There are days now when not only the light but my thoughts
scatter.
Outside the window,
the birch’s leaves in noon sun clamor and dazzle.
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of the full-length collection All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books, 2021) and two chapbooks, Words Some of Us Rarely Use and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, RHINO and The Pinch. She lives in the Upper Midwest.
Mary Salisbury
He Returns as a Chickadee
You are back
at the birdhouse, fluff in your beak.
Back and forth you go,
I, at the window, watching.
Sometimes you see me and give me a look.
Our eyes lock.
You have a nest to build;
I’ve yet to be a chickadee.
Sunlight—
Daffodils and tulips dance.
But I have this house to make a life in.
Readying my nest for sleep,
I stretch your shirtsleeves
over me
and picture us,
in pink rhododendron.
Mary Salisbury’s poetry has appeared in Spry Literary Journal and Calyx. Two chapbooks, Come What May and Scarlet Rain Boots, were published by Finishing Line Press. Salisbury was a finalist in the MacGuffin poet hunt and the Orlando Poetry Prize. Mary Salisbury is an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship recipient and a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA writing program. Salisbury’s short fiction has been published in The Whitefish Review, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Salisbury’s essay on writing was featured in Fiction Southeast.
Carey Taylor
Smoke and Fire
she sends me news of stricken hills
bleeding pots of peonies
bluebottle flies
bees shipwrecked on the shore
screech of scrub jay
lovers trapped like lobsters
closets crammed with pitchforks
trowel in the medicine cabinet
how she misses her mother
braiding her autumn hair
and only cashmere
keeps her warm
as she circles
the corrugated moon
with mockingbirds
and crowbars
Ode to the Satellite
You look steamy
with that tall highball in your hand
black dress fringed in pink crinoline
your edgy cigarette ready
for any overflowing ashtray
smoldering around
the room.
I want you. Like I
wanted a paper boat
as a kid, maybe the old
Buick, maybe as needle and thread—
stuck in the gravitational divide
between coming and going.
I want you. Not as trick. Or sleight of hand.
No, I want my thumb
to scoop that immaculate shingle of hair
from the back of your
neck, inch my face between jaw
and ear
static fuzz of your temple.
But I catch on fast
watch your eyes scan
every corner of the room.
Once my ex
had the same influence—
a scintillating
satellite
and every
body in the room
waiting for a signal.
Carey Taylor is the author of The Lure of Impermanence (Cirque Press, 2018). She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the 2022 Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published both in the United States and Ireland. She holds a Master of Arts degree in School Counseling and currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where you might find her snapping pictures in her neighborhood, then writing small poems about what she sees in this community she loves. Website: www.careyleetaylor.com
Kamakshi Lekshmanan
Kamakshi Lekshmanan arrived home through her forest and mountain trails. Poetry and Kamakshi became inseparable. Memories became Paperboats and Puliinji (her debut memoir), and her love for poetry is a constant work in progress. She continuously looks for opportunities where she can contribute her experiences from the wild to art and poetry. Her photo essays and poetry can be found in Zoo’s Print Journal, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and The Hopper Magazine.
Ellen Skilton
Yarn
Yarn can be both friend and foe.
A miracle when loops lead to something —
a scarf, baby blanket, fingerless mitts.
An un-miracle when stuffed in the darkness
with other abandoned skeins of possibility.
I ripped it all out yesterday —
so fast to undo, so slow to re-start.
To begin again without shame
takes resolve, weaving the scent
of last night’s fire into new rows.
When the cat plays with yarn,
his focus makes me jealous,
but also the playfulness.
He doesn’t care how it ends,
un-responsible for any outcomes.
I know how to make some things,
but not how to unmake a total
tangled mess. Joyfully errant
rows of fuchsia at night wake up
a blob of awfulness in the morning.
I ignore flawed ribbing, pretending
this path is possible until it must
(again) be completely unwound. Hope
still lurks that a single strand can transform
into something warm, crafted, and whole.
Ellen Skilton is a professor of education whose creative writing has appeared in The Dewdrop, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Scapegoat Review, Dissident Voice, Philadelphia Stories, and The Dillydoun Review. In addition to being a poet, she is an educational anthropologist, an applied linguist and a Fringe Fest performer. She is just completing her MFA in Creative Writing at Arcadia University. She is also an excellent napper, a chocolate snob, and a swimmer, and lives in Philadelphia with a dog named Zoomer, a cat named Katniss and some lovely humans.
Virginia Laurie
Baileys and Sonder
You’re sitting at the hotel bar when he says something, setting down the lager with surprising gentleness. “Do you want to see my backyard?”
You are taken aback. Neither clear threat, nor come-on, nor wily, elderly anecdote, the question mark’s authenticity surprises you. As does your “yes.”
He pulls up Google Earth on his phone, Android not Apple, and you wonder if this is a British thing. You only know about London culture through your parents’ favorite soap, which is to say, not at all. This is the countryside.
But it doesn’t seem like a cultural ritual a search bar would finish filling in for you. He types in his address, and you worry more for his sense of stranger danger than your own. You are still two barstools away, and the bartender is keeping an eye on you because he thinks you look too young to drink. He’s right. This is your first one.
The man zooms in with nicely square, doughy fingers on a modest patch of green behind a supposedly typical, suburban home in the UK. You smile politely. “Nice.” You nod for lack of real opinion. You wait for the rest of it. He simply kills the screen, stows it away, returns to his beer.
He sees you’re still waiting for something, so he nudges his glass your way. “Want to try?” He lists the make and model, but it’s just a beer, so it tastes like the grimace you give after a curious sip. You were told not to accept drinks from strangers, but most strangers don’t type out their address in front of you without asking your name or where you’re from. The accent took the mystery from that one. Besides, who’s going to roofie themselves too at an empty hotel bar outside of Cambridge?
He laughs a bit at your expression and returns to cradling it himself. He seems content without anything else from you, even as he discreetly, but not imperceptibly, tells the bartender he’ll be covering your tab. The bartender looks between the two of you skeptically, and you try to stop swinging your legs like a grade schooler while you finish a chocolatey liqueur.
Two of your travel companions arrive to break the quiet peace of airy glass clinks and breathing, and the talking increases. The two bar stools are filled, and the old man is easily absorbed into the mid-ground of a well-played scene. Your friend gets what you’re having, but won’t finish it of course, because she didn’t stop to ask what it was.
As you begin round two of the now nauseating syrup on the rocks, the others share riddles around you. You don’t know any, so you listen in bemusement, chiming in enough to be good audience. She excitedly recites, “A bus driver was heading to town. He went right past a stop sign without stopping. Then, he turned left where there was a no left turn sign. Finally, he traveled down a one-way street opposing traffic, passed a policeman, and waved hello. He didn’t get a ticket.” She finally breathes to posit, “Why not?”
The set-up makes the old man smile, but she has to repeat it again for everybody. She is blue in the face by the end. You give the answer a shot, “He has the cops in his pocket.”
You think it’s a good joke, but everyone’s thinking too hard and taking it too seriously to appreciate it. You take another sip. The answer is finally confirmed. “He was walking, not driving!” You like your version better.
Eventually they leave, back to their rooms, because it’s another big day tomorrow. But you linger to savor the watered-down malt and burn it has left. The bar is quiet again, which must be its default state out here, halfway to the place people want to be.
Nothing more is said until the man in the herringbone hat, who you now place as your tour bus driver earlier, gets up to leave. He nods to you, mouth half lifted, then exits out the lobby where the bus is still parked.
So you imagine him returning the bus to wherever he works, then taking his own smaller car back to that average home. Maybe with a well-loved armchair and a well-loved wife. Probably a dog. You remember the feel of the hops and up it to two dogs, but only lap dogs. The yard wasn’t so big. And certainly, that home had a nice den since he had watery blue eyes made to reflect firelight under reading glasses with a too-thick brim.
Maybe that was the point of the backyard. For the dogs. Or maybe it’s just for him. Maybe he was proud of what he’s grown, though the pixels leave that to your imagination. Maybe he’s proud of potted tomatoes which he cuts up with avocado to make a fresh salad to enjoy with his wife. Or husband. And their daughter, or daughters. And son. Nieces and nephews when they visit.
He might tell them about how the plants are coming in as they nod dully, scrolling on their phones. You bet he wouldn’t mind that. Wouldn’t begrudge them their distraction. And now you see his whole imagined family standing around him in his squashy red (you decide) armchair. You don’t even know his name, but you have plenty you’d love to assign, all of the stereotypically mundane Anglican variety.
Finally, you walk across the hideous whorl design on the brown and beige carpet, back to your shared room to crash. You cash out ballet flats and church clothes for shorts and a tank top. You imagine how nice the crisp, perfect sheets will feel, while imagining yourself tipsy off gifted spirits and exhaustion. And when you do finally hear the satisfying crunch of your tired head against the perfect pillow, you realize you were glad you saw your bus driver’s backyard.
You are glad you could imagine this man, a stranger behind the wheel, previously unseen to you, pruning the leaves of his herbs and gladiolas. Glad you could imagine the way those liver-spotted hands might fan open a newspaper. Glad you could imagine his head hitting his own pillow tonight (in every version, he still wears the herringbone hat).
You are glad that, however briefly, another stranger could become less strange. Grateful to be given the chance so simply as to sound odd, without strain or agenda. A genuine question:
“Would you like to see my backyard?”
“Would you like to see where I live?”
“Would you like to imagine my life?”
“Would you like to acknowledge, for this moment, before we both disappear, I have a life that’s monumental, and I am as real as you?”
Virginia Laurie is an MFA candidate at University of North Carolina Wilmington. She earned her BA in English from Washington and Lee University. Her writing and visual art appear in Apricity Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, Phantom Kangaroo, Cathexis Northwest Press, and more. Find her online at www.virginialaurie.com.
Trapper Markelz
Negative Land
Take this shovel & dig your hole in the ground,
pretend it is an excavation filled with bones & broken pots.
Take the rocks and stack them into a wall, mark the hole
& all that might fall in or be placed with petals.
Take the dirt & form it into bricks to build a home
filled with the pots & bones that have yet to un-mend.
Take the kettle from the stove that burns the wood,
burns the roof of your mouth–burns all the way down.
Take the hole in the ground & fill it with your ending,
a place for family to return & rest a flower upon your stone.
Trapper Markelz is a poet, husband, and father of four, who writes from Boston, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in the journals Baltimore Review, Stillwater Review, The Moving Force Journal, Greensboro Review, Passengers Journal, High Shelf Press, Dillydoun Review, and others. You can learn more about him at www.trappermarkelz.com.
Anna Pikos
Anna Pikos was born and still lives in Poland. From her childhood she’s been creating surreal art because her everyday surroundings have never been enough. Her solitude is joy and love to art and nature. She loves mountain hiking or walking in woods and meadows. She keeps searching and keeps rediscovering herself all over again. Currently her most preferred creation is traditional painting (acrylic or mixed media) and sometimes digital art. See more of her work at annapikos.com or Instagram @anna_pikos.
Rachel Lauren Myers
Emergence
caught up in fusion speculate space that contains me
& open fixed pattern
of behavior animal response to stimuli semiosis
have you seen with mine eyes
inertia of bloom reaction to space that contains me
respond to stimuli & open
mitosis is daughter cells the unjoining space that contains me
Rachel Lauren Myers is a poet and writer from Reno, Nevada. Her poems and prose appear or are forthcoming in The Moving Force Journal, Wild Roof Journal, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She recently showcased her poems as visual pieces for the collaborative show “Pictures and Poems” with artist Dale Slingland at The Depot Gallery in Sparks, Nevada. Rachel participated in the 2020 Community of Writers Poetry Program and is currently working on a chapbook.
Chloe Ford
Here’s How
Two women at a small table, opposite sides
of the perfect circle, knee to knee. One
says to the other, “I haven’t killed your orchid
yet. It’s amazing.” They bump their mugs
to a little victory—evading, somehow, death,
which is always in the forecast. Like rain,
which was supposed to douse us every day
this week, but every day I wake to an orange
inhale at the blind’s edge. The women laugh
morning into afternoon. I watch them, learning,
again, as I do, again, again, how to live
through each precarious hour.
Chloe Ford is a poet based in Portland, Maine. She received her undergraduate degree at Smith College and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in Library & Information Science in hopes of bringing more youth-focused creative writing programming to public libraries. Her poetry has been published in a few small journals.
John Tessitore
The Second Law
I’ve wasted so much time
beating back the vines
that threaten to take
our home,
when tiny
tendrils always seem
to find small cracks
and widen them.
So much of my brutal
effort suddenly seems
so futile.
I had forgotten
that I too am part
of the system,
that I will spill into
the irreversible,
sooner than later.
I had forgotten that neither
of us would hold
forever,
that change always follows
the transfer of air, water,
energy
from one body
to another.
I should have been better
prepared for the inevitable.
It’s so hard to watch things
crumble now
after so long a struggle.
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 directed national policy studies on education, civil justice, and cultural policy. Most recently, he has had poems published in the American Journal of Poetry, Canary, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Wild Roof Journal, Magpie Lit, and the Sunday Mornings at the River anthology, and forthcoming in The Closed Eye Open and Boats Against the Current.
Website: www.johntessitore.com / Twitter @JohnTessitore2 / Instagram @jtessitorewriter
SJ Hunt
SJ Hunt is an archaeologist, writer, photographer, and seasoned traveler. When she’s home, which is rare, she is based in southeast Iowa. Her work focuses on experiences in the backwoods and her relationship with plants. When practicing photography, she uses mediums of both digital and film. SJ Hunt’s photography has previously been published in Humana Obscura.
Lisa K. Harris
Forager
Ten packages of Banquet Brown ʼN Serve Vermont Maple sausages elbow purple tomatoes, rainbow carrots, lacinato kale recently freed from shopping bags, the Day-Glo yellow and red boxes like weeds among my heirlooms.
“You’re in luck,” I say to my teenage daughter Ava. “The Processed-Meat God has answered your prayers.” Nearly a year into home-delivery, with impulse purchases a memory, the Safeway deliveryman’s mistake is a boon to carnivore Ava stuck with a vegetarian mother.
Ava reads a box’s ingredients, stumbles through multi-syllable words, then clutches the package to her chest, knowing her chances of eating its contents dwindle with each preservative uttered. She makes a deal with me: two links a day, one box a week; can’t ingest too much badness over the course of two and a half months. Although it’s dinnertime and they’re breakfast links, I transfer half her salad helping onto my plate and make room. It’s a Friday, might as well have fun.
She wants to like them in spite of me, but can’t, she’s too much of a foodie. The Brown ʼN Serves are too greasy, too salty, too Vermont-Maple chemically. “Give them to the dog,” she says. Nine boxes? The terrier is on a diet: slow-cooked beef, carrots, green beans, brown rice, black beans. No junk food. “Then pitch them,” she says. Fighting words in my family.
“Eat them,” my mom said, of the over-cooked liver, the grapes with rotten spots removed, the brown mushy banana. On liver nights, my ten-year-old self sat at the table long past bedtime, Mom at the counter watching, a dog at my feet, knowing I’d toss her a morsel when Mom’s back turned. If Mom was onto my tricks and hovered, I swallowed the bite with a swig of milk made from powder.
We foraged at day-old bakeries, discounted bruised-produce racks, front-yard dandelion patches, neighbors’ apple trees. I developed an eye for roadside plums verging on ripeness, ebony blackberry thickets at road’s end, watercress bobbing streamside. “The world is your oyster,” Mom said. “You just need to look.” Together, we put up plum preserves, whipped up blackberry pancakes, crafted cress salads. I became an expert at deciphering the contents of canned goods missing their labels from the price-reduced bin. Creamed corn, dog food, hoped-for sliced peaches. A hungry child of the Great Depression, Mom treated waste as the eighth deadly sin. Turned cottage cheese was meted out with sugar. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized cottage cheese did not naturally taste lemony-sweet.
By Ava’s age, I had shrugged off Mom’s scavenging. One of the many ways I revolted was paying full price for bananas, organic at that, and then tossing a bruised one into the compost; Mom was horrified at my extravagance. She’s dead now, so there’s no one to make a statement to by tossing the Brown ʼN Serves.
Turns out I can’t throw them away. I am my mother’s daughter, worshipping at the altar of waste-not.
The boxes hunker on the freezer shelf, reminders of failure: to use them, to have been a kinder daughter. As if poison ivy clambered around my kitchen door frame, I must rid myself of them. I post an ad on social media, on a free household items site where I’ve scored honey, gluten-free flour, backyard grapefruit.
A mom, a camera-shy activist, a musician, and a university German professor respond. I stalk them, judge postings to determine who deserves the links. All seem worthy. Perhaps instead of gifting the lot to one, I spread them around, but nine is not divisible by four, so who receives extra? I lean toward the activist. The world needs more female world-changers. The mom ghosts during pick-up negotiation, though, so each remaining raised hand receives three boxes.
Only the professor rings the doorbell. He is thin; an unruly beard pokes from a black face mask. He arrived by bike and a fancy Nikon loops his neck. I side-step Shin-Dagger, an overzealous agave plant I fight with every time I use the front door, to hand him the boxes.
He clutches the Brown ʼN Serves to his chest, like Ava had previously.
“May I photograph your agave?” He spreads his arms wide. “The world has so much beauty; we just need to pause to see it.”
I follow his gaze, to Shin-Dagger’s curves, the gray-green sweep of its leaves, sunset shimmering from opalescent spines. It is beauty.
Like biting into Mom’s pancakes, purple juice bursting from the hedgerow blackberry bushes we foraged on.
Lisa K. Harris is a Pushcart Prize-nominated author who writes about growing up, outdoor adventure, and coping with speed bumps. Her essays have appeared in Roanoke Review, Passages North, Whitefish Review, Orca, and Miniskirt, among others. She co-authored an environmental policy book (Cumulative Effects, Krausman and Harris, 2011). Lisa splits her time between Tucson, Arizona and Whidbey Island, Washington. She works as an environmental consultant and is in search of an agent for her latest novel. Website: www.lisakharris.com / Instagram @harrislisakim.
Laura Voivodeship
Venn Diagram
I drive straight into
a Venn diagram
and call it fate.
The second question
is an excuse and
it does not attract attention.
I had a vivid premonition
of my life as
a single fact.
Laura Voivodeship writes mainly erasures, sestinas, and odd bits of prose that go nowhere. Her work has been featured most recently in Assisi Journal of Arts and Letters (2021) and in the poetry collective Steel-Tipped Snowflakes (2020), from which one poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first full-length collection, Redactions, is forthcoming from Stairwell Books in the UK in early 2023.
Tara Barr
Tara Barr began pursuing an art career after spending over a decade working in the technology field. She is an oil painter who creates nostalgic pop art inspired by her passion for history, technology, and design. Most recently, she was part of a four-person exhibition at the James Oliver Gallery in Philadelphia. Tara maintains a studio at the Torpedo Factory Art Center and serves on the board of the Torpedo Factory Artists’ Association. She has a strong interest in engaging the public in the creative process and encouraging everyone to dedicate time to creative pursuits, is an active member of local arts organizations, and holds a B.A. in Art History from George Mason University. You can find her online at www.tarabarrart.com, on Instagram @tarabarr.art, and in person in the Torpedo Factory Art Center Studio 8.
Florence Murry
September
I escape & head south along the 55 Freeway.
A blaze-flamed sky reflects in my window.
This is late summer in Southern California.
I leave the backyard squirrel & seeds spilled.
Leave golden finch hordes clinging
to sock-like feeders,
leave the cracked cement
& tattered bamboo fence.
I hold my family’s shredded parts together.
They escape lightning strikes
& fire storms,
a new life taken away, again.
I head for Crystal Cove
in the late afternoon.
There is nothing to be done
but grow older than the deep sea coelacanth,
disappear my worn life,
& let it slip on its chartered path.
I walk the cool sea breeze
that lets me know it is almost fall.
I hold on through mid-October until
high pressure stagnates.
I hold on until
I taste the sea on my tongue.
Florence Murry’s poetry has appeared in Slipstream Press, Hole In The Head Review, Stoneboat Magazine, Rockhurst Review, Bluestem Magazine, Off the Coast Literary Journal, Amethyst Review, Southern California Review and elsewhere. She studied poetry with Jack Grapes and the Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective, and with Tresha Faye Haefner and The Poetry Salon. Her book Last Run Before Sunset is scheduled for release February 2023.
