Cover image: “Close Fit I” by Moriah Hampton
Gallery 2
A Light Step
Robin Neidorf
How Forgiveness Arrives
With the scent of lilacs igniting
your limbic system. With the soundtrack
of a retired love beating in your ears
at the end of a long run. Fleetingly
in the minutes of descent from therapist’s office
to parking lot before the noise of traffic
drowns her signal. Her simplest incarnations
arrive with a deep foot rub
chocolate-flavored
in the ebb of orgasm.
One morning sunlight jumps the alarm clock’s cue
and there she is and then
she goes. One evening exhaustion
softens your clenching throat until it’s only you and
god and the clear rap of her knuckles on the gate
you’d swear you’d locked:
Here I am when you are ready.
When your forehead belatedly ungrips three minutes
into savasana and the pool of your sweat dwindles
to salt — strange salt it is that slakes thirst.
Savor it with me now.
Robin Neidorf started a love affair with poetry via (of all things) a sestina, after more than two decades of focusing primarily on creative nonfiction. Her work has been published on the blog of Best American Poetry, Cleaver Magazine, TC Jewfolk, Postpartum and Matter Press. She lives in Minnesota and actually prefers its winters to its summers.
Esther Sadoff
September
A thousand adjustments.
The chirr and crackle of birds in trees,
twittering as if a mass of seeds were being pecked,
shells husked into the wind.
Clouds scud by, sharply etched as by a painter’s blade.
Crickets whir in the hedge,
a song of cool metal and damp earth.
My fingertips are cold as stones,
rivulets seeking a river’s flow.
This is what it means to live between a rock and reason:
to brush away yellow leaves, close doors
against the smoke’s prying fingers,
to pluck petunias at first wilt,
snap pale stems regardless of the season.
Clouds fill in, graying over pale yellow and blue.
It could be dusk again. It could be day.
The birds quiet.
A mass of clouds banks the fire of dawn,
the joy of wings and a light step.
Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Santa Clara Review, Drunk Monkeys, Roanoke Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Wingless Dreamer, Parhelion Literary Magazine, Passengers Journal, SWWIM, Wild Roof Journal, West Trade Review, and River Mouth Review, as well as other publications.
Hanna Pachman
The Final Sting
I held my back up
against the sacrifice
of being nice to you.
What was your favorite album of the week?
Did you sleep with anyone last night?
We looked away, scraping
the connection of our feet
to the asphalt.
But our mouths stood still, frozen
on the fight about smoking weed
and how quickly you gave up,
as we emptied out a gallon of sighs.
Crawling back into each other’s senses,
we tempered the strokes of falling leaves,
letting our chests open to the hives
to be torn apart by love one last time.
My voice trailed inside you
as you turned off your ears,
a bee that wouldn’t stop stinging.
I pretended to still have eyes,
lifting my face to get lost in the hustle
of smiling for the passerby flies.
No time to ease conversation through,
my tears hummed more loudly in place.
Both of us crunched down
looking for branches to hold,
for each other to be anything
but still alive.
Hanna Pachman is a poet whose work has been published by The MacGuffin, Wine Cellar Press, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Indolent Books, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. Originally from Connecticut, she currently hosts and curates the monthly poetry event “Beatnik Café” in Los Angeles, which has been running since 2018. Hanna was an Assistant Editor for the poetry magazine Gyroscope Review for two years. She has been a featured poet at the California Poppy Festival, the KGB Bar, Cobalt Poets, and the Poetry Circus.
Sheetal Gupta
Sheetal Gupta is a hotelier from Mumbai. She is a globetrotter and travels as often as she can. Besides being passionate about her work she is inclined towards photography and writing poems. Some of her work has been displayed in exhibitions held by the National Institute of Photography in India. Being in the hospitality business, she often meets people from all around the world and enjoys learning about their lives and local food and culture. She was born and brought up in Mumbai, and as much as she loves her city, she loves New York and Istanbul. You can see her work on Instagram @stayeternaltravel.
Nicholas Trandahl
Dreaming of Saint Hildegard
Her fingertips,
stained black and green
with ink and herbs,
hold a lantern
of soft yellow light.
Follow it down
into an ocean of dreams.
Church bells.
Sacred chant.
Descend,
until the notes fade—
ghostlike.
Northern lights—
green and ethereal
above snowy hills,
a dark frozen creek.
Nicholas Trandahl is a U.S. Army veteran, poet, newspaper journalist, and outdoorsman. He lives in Wyoming with his wife and three daughters. He was the recipient of the 2019 Wyoming Writers Milestone Award and was nominated for the 2021 Pushcart Prize. He has had three collections of poetry published and his work has appeared in various anthologies and literary journals.
Kiana McCrackin
Aerial
The best way to call in the wolf is to make the call of the raven.
I learned this from my grandfather who learned this from a trapper.
I learned this before I learned to fly.
My bush plane has skis beneath her feet. Red painted on her sides. She wobbles beneath me, a wave to the mountains, a nod to the snow.
I describe flying as quiet despite its cacophony. In actuality, it is rumbling and vibrating and whirring. What I mean is, I am so high, making so much noise, that I do not hear the wind howling. What I mean is, my mind goes quiet.
People who have always known me are surprised to hear that I have grown to fly. That I have grown into a craving to call in wolves.
Anxious Anna. Anxious Anna gets out of bed. Anxious Anna brushes the clouds. Anxious Anna, falling off tongues in the school pickup line where snow machines line up, 20 of them to pick up 20 children who waddle out in snowsuits. A topic again because am I Anxious Anna anymore?
Much of Alaska is just like anywhere else, but not when you come up Norther than North.
My plane and I are driftless out here. Untethered. Once I’m 3 hours out from home village and in the foothills of the Brooks Range, all land sings to me. I look for a place to land, an iced river or marsh. I need 300 feet for her skis. Enough room to land, enough to take to the sky again. I look for places without too deep of snow. Yes, fathomless snow helps my plane to stop, but the leaving again, the abundance is not good for that.
No one else sits within her belly. It is just me. No electricity. I have a compass, but it doesn’t point me the right way. It is 18 degrees off, the angle of declination, up Norther than North.
When I first came here, I looked for a place with no sign of fauna. I knew animals were there, but I wasn’t looking for anyone; I wasn’t even looking for myself. After landing her skis, then landing my boots on the white, white, white, I breathed like I had never breathed before.
I was born knowing I must breathe. My mother has told me that even though I knew, even though my eyes were open and alert and looking right into her dilated pupils, I didn’t inhale. I just looked at her.
Like you were trying to decide if you wanted to be alive after all.
But I guess it seemed ok, the living, because I did surrender to my body’s intrinsic hunger for oxygen.
I was born knowing I must breathe, but I’ve always loved shallow things. Except where my plane takes me. Where she takes me, I allow my lungs to fully inflate and deflate. My belly rising and falling. A soft, creature music. If any other being breathed with me that first time, I didn’t know it.
The next time I come I look for caribou herds; it is early spring, and many have calved. In silence and from a distance I see a mother licking a stilled fawn on the frozen tundra.
Breathe. To live you must breathe. I will movement to unsettle the low air. But I never see any, just mother licking, licking, licking. I don’t come back for a while after that.
Another time, I find sheep. Dall’s with curling horns and hooves that slip through the tops of the crunchy snow. I try to count the rings, the annuli, on the nearest ram. Count its years like I would count a cut spruce. Its horns are still small, and here he is with the lambs and the ewes, so I stop looking for his rings and call him young.
I come and go. Never to the same place. Always somewhere new. The Arctic is immense, though it has been traveled; wherever I stop, I know this place has never seen footsteps before. I am where no one has been. I am on untouched land. No man has stepped where I tread.
Though often I see no one, I come enough that I find many beings. Small animals: ermine, hare, signs a fox has been there, though I never see him. Big animals, too, mostly moose and caribou. Once I saw a few muskox. I didn’t land there. I like the sheep best. I observed them often. Pretending I have found the same ones I gave them names: Oliver, Lucy, Breve.
But I won’t look for them again. Last time I found them, I found red. A herd hamstrung. Left uneaten. In my retreat I find prints of the wolf, never falling through the snow’s surface, arching in a wide semi-circle that disappears behind a slope.
I think of that red, red, red in the white now as I look for them, for the wolves who slaughtered Oliver, Lucy, Breve, the others. I’ve been here many days looking. And there now, below me, their string. One with her tail up high and proud. The others running with tails low.
All I need now is a place for my plane. I circle until I find a place with just enough space. I bring her down. Put on snowshoes, triple check the gun instead of my normal double check. The snowshoes pad quietly on the surface of the snow. I think of walking on barren wood floors as a child in my unclothed feet; it was the same sound.
When I’m a ways away from my plane, I stop. I make the call of the raven, just like he taught me. Not the sound of a ravenous raven. But the soft call of a raven to his mate, an attempt to alert no other bird, no other prey.
I wait and wait.
The wolf’s face appears. Alluring. Sullen. Full of knowing. The wolf looks right at me, right at my un-raven face. My finger twitches on the cold gun in my hands. The red on the mountain face that spilled like scattered poppies pumps through me, but it pumps through her, too. Then, like smoke—dissipated, swallowed smoke—the wolf is gone.
Breathe. To live you must breathe, I echo to myself. But the deep easiness the mountains habitually bring me is gone. Like smoke, like the wolf, it is gone. And I am shallow-lunged again.
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 Wild Roof Journal, Pif Magazine, Sky Island Journal, Moonlight Magazine, Words & Whispers, After the Pause, and The Sunshine Review.
Ronda Piszk Broatch
Even the Night Ocean Seems Like a Small Universe
The bowl on the table’s got nothing to show.
Planted planets of peas have all flown off,
consumed by towhee, or my dear friend’s Douglas
squirrels. My heart womb, dizzy and wisteric.
I meant what I said, spell what I can’t describe.
Every day the moon rises later, fatter.
Honeybees thwap the glass behind which sorrel
and borage pop their limbs through potting soil.
I don’t always know what women keep
in their pockets, nor the percentages
possible, the power of patience needed
to paper the politics of pockets.
The bowl holds problems personally.
The heart, the moon in the sun’s womb.
Sometimes fire nourishes the ocean deep.
Sometimes I disappear for many billions
of microseconds, and sharks never sleep.
The bowl agrees not to hold those sharks.
Moon scythes a cherry blossom sky, and stars
coat the ground beneath my tree. Mackerel
scad undulate in bait balls through which sharks
thread. My heart is volcanic glass, a blown
bowl. All my atoms lean together in
appreciation, rearranging fish-
like, and like fish, I mean to tongue your every
barnacle. Sometimes lovers’ pockets fill
with laughter, lovers losing themselves on
library ladders, literature and late
spring ladybugs limitless as galaxies.
My heart is a tiger shark, Hawaiian
monk seal, the mouse crossing my path.
Tonight, the clock that is my heart misses
a minute. A bowlful of fish scales, planets
where what we wish to plant always takes root.
Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press). Ronda’s current manuscript was a finalist for The Journal’s Charles B. Wheeler Prize and Four Way Books’s Levis Prize, and she is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Fugue, Blackbird, 2River, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and NPR News/KUOW’s All Things Considered. She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.
Moriah Hampton
Moriah Hampton received her PhD in Modernist Literature from SUNY-Buffalo. Her fiction, poetry, photography, and photopoetry have appeared in Wordgathering, Quail Bell Magazine, Brief Wilderness, The Sonder Review, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the Writing and Critical Inquiry Program at SUNY-Albany. (Thanks to Denise and Jeffrey Stringer for permission to photograph their barn.)
Emily Boshkoff
Predator
I am suspended with my son in the hammock
on a languid summer morning. A red-shouldered hawk
glides silent and low, passing
at eye level. If I extended my arm, I would graze
her wingtip. She slices the air effortlessly, unaware
of her own grace, her perfectly barred tail, the precision
of each carefully zipped feather.
Sometimes she perches
on the stump in our yard, glistening wide eyes
always watching, hunting. Sometimes she is trailed
by her mate. I watch them ascend
into the oblivion of green with fistfuls of vole
until they disappear. I hear their young keening in the nest, distantly.
The forest erupts with screams and alarm calls, a thousand
voices joining into a single shrieking siren. The bravest birds
encircle and divebomb her as she alights on her nest. I try to imagine
her reality, being feared and awed, the apex of her domain.
Does she know what she is?
Does she see herself as the hunter or the hunted?
I point her out to my son, who babbles contentedly in the crook of my
arm.
“Bird,” I say, naming her.
His tender heart, no bigger than a small, ripe plum
is too tiny and fragile to understand the word “predator.”
Emily Boshkoff is a psychologist by trade and writer by necessity living in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her work has been previously featured or is upcoming in Awakenings, Sepia Quarterly, 3Elements Review, Cathexis Northwest, and Please See Me, among others. When not writing or providing therapy, Emily loves adventuring with her wife and newly-adopted son in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Fleur Lyamuya Beaupert
On the Mudflat Swell
What is required of worm, of fruit?
the bay’s mauve skims seasoned walk edges
draping garments around the wetland bird force
How many scars bloom on bark?
patterning mangrove spine or lung tending river
people along sweet nectar of coastal soil
Tell me the names of tree upon tree.
giving food as roots gather foreshore ecosystems
as sun silvers waves pulling from the Arctic
I inhale the pungent smell of seed.
carbon storage system ousts aquaculture shock
to the sound of replanting, sprouts shooting towards
How can we stitch matter back into itself?
metallic sheen of outstretched sand trajectories
flicking their tails where molluscs wander
Slowly, beginning with wolf and leash.
slowly on the forest floor of someone summoning
the bar-tailed godwit’s epic flight, still landing here
Levelling and rhizoming the chiming wind.
Fleur Lyamuya Beaupert’s poetry has been published in Cobra Milk, Pedestal Magazine and Anomaly, among others. Their short fiction appears in the 2020 Afrofuturism issue of Speculative City. In 2021 they received the Charles Rischbieth Jury Poetry Prize for their poem “Why were you taught the piano? Why not the drums?” Fleur is a graduate of the University of Sydney, where they studied arts and law and completed a PhD examining the sociolegal context of forced mental health interventions.
Adriana Stimola
Lemons, Seen
I don’t know why I watched you
losing color, loosening hold.
I could have held
a glass to your mouth, made the bed
around you, stopped long enough
for it to hurt. Was it just
the other day you opened up
a door for me, made a gesture,
named our future? And now
at the altar, I quietly offer
your promise to fruit for hopes
of harder skin, better ways
to say, I do not want lemonade today—
tell me, is it cold?
Adriana Stimola is a non-fiction literary agent, mother and ever-aspiring poet. Her poetry has most recently been published in The Santa Clara Review, Harbor Review, Beyond Words, House Journal and Juke Joint. Website: www.adrianastimola.com / Instagram @adrianastimola
Tyrone Johnson-Neuland
Oswego, NY-based artist Tyrone Johnson-Neuland has been creating art for 35+ years. His process is always a battle of the chaotic vs. the introspective, using any painting medium that is at his disposal. The subject matters vary from the figurative to the pure abstract but always with the purpose of finding depth within an object, space, and soul. His art allows him to free himself while questioning, challenging, and even contradicting a world of uncertainty and unpredictability. Tyrone was born in Norwich, NY and received his BFA from Syracuse University in 1990 and an MA from SUNY Oswego in 1999.
Virginia Watts
Prism
By the time I ordered the prism, my older brother Mark had been gone for decades. I did it on a whim. The prism arrived in a royal blue box with a polished copper snap. I flicked open the snap. Then shut it again. Unsnapped and snapped. The same way I would unsnap and snap the bottom of my windbreaker as a nervous young girl.
Eventually, I opened the box, lifted the lid as ceremoniously as a coffin. The prism was tucked firmly inside a well of pale pink satin. I was surprised by the elegance of the packaging for a twenty-dollar prism. I could have been opening a string of genuine pearls. I placed the prism in the window frame above my desk and hoped for a sunny day.
What happened to Mark’s possessions, including his extensive collection of prisms, is a long, sad story, but I do have his slide rule and the oak sideboard that was in his basement bedroom. He used the sideboard for science experiments. I remember the top overloaded with microscopes, Bunsen burners, flasks, glass slides, eye droppers. The surface stained with dark circles of various sizes, beakers Mark set down, bottoms sticky with chemical mixtures. On one end of the sideboard, permanent indents where he clamped a vice grip. Two dark brown furrows he left behind.
Mark arranged his collection of prisms in the window wells of that basement bedroom. Often, I’d reach up to take one down. Glass, cold and smooth. Corners, exact and sharp. It was impossible to replace the prism without leaving a few fingerprints no matter how much I polished it with the bottom of my t-shirt. At certain times of day, the prisms placed rainbows around Mark’s room, on his bed pillow, desktop notebooks, a lumpy rainbow over the laces of his white sneakers next to his closet door.
He did try more than once to explain the science of prisms to me, as he did all things scientific, but somehow the genetic mix of what I got from our parents and what he got dwelled in parallel universes. Even though he didn’t care about the books I begged him to read, I did long to step inside my brother’s magnificent brain and see the other sides of all the walls inside my brain.
“Triangular prisms are optical prisms,” Mark explained. “They break up white light into all the colors we can’t see.”
“Why can’t we see the colors?” I asked.
“Usually, all the colors are all mixed up.”
“Then why doesn’t white light look grey or muddy then?” I pressed. “How can all the colors mixed together look white in the end?”
“It has to do with human vision and the frequencies of different colors of light.”
I sighed, opening my palm so a rainbow would rest inside it.
“I am holding a rainbow,” I said.
“I see that.”
“So, you are telling me that this little rainbow in my hand was actually inside that clear glass prism and now it has escaped?”
“No, white light has traveled through the prism and the prism has bent the white light so that we can see all the colors that comprise white light.”
“It doesn’t even seem like light is a real thing,” I said. “It comes and goes. It vanishes.”
“Light is not matter. It is electromagnetic radiation.”
“Please,” I groaned, rubbing my temples. When a disappointed frown passed over Mark’s mouth, I thought quickly and said, “I do remember Roy G. Biv.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“What’s your favorite color?” I asked him.
“I don’t have one. I like them all.”
“I like violet,” I said. “Or blue maybe.”
“Blue light travels the slowest inside a prism. Red light travels the fastest.”
“Maybe that’s because red light is afraid of being bent in half and so it’s trying to get out of the prism as fast as it can,” I suggested.
“You have just given frequencies of light brains, Ginny.”
“Well, since we see white light as nothing but white when it’s actually full of many colors, maybe I’m right.”
The rainbow I’d been holding in my palm had run away. It was creeping up the opposite wall of Mark’s bedroom toward a window cracked open to a spring day.
Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in CRAFT, The Florida Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Pithead Chapel, Sky Island Journal, and Permafrost Magazine, among others. Her poetry chapbooks are available from Moonstone Press. She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Visit her at www.virginiawatts.com.
Byron Wilson
Precarious Build
Trillions of cells
Arrange themselves
In such a way they
Become a machine
That must consume
Any air it can find
Automatically.
Regardless of quality.
Byron Wilson graduated with an English literature degree and currently lives in Oregon with his lovely wife and three rambunctious dogs. You can find some of his creative work in Paddler Press, Zero Readers, and Humana Obscura. He is working to complete his first collection. You may find him on Twitter @olddelusion.
Stephen Abban Jr.
Stephen Abban Jr. is a Ghanaian illustrator and contemporary mixed-media artist currently working and living in Sekondi-Takoradi, and is a native of Mankessim in the Central Region of Ghana. Abban studied visual arts in high school and holds a Higher National Diploma (HND) in commercial arts (painting) from the Takoradi Technical University. He went on an international exchange program in Hungary to study visual representation (Fine Art) at Eszterházy Károly University in Eger, Hungary, and is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Technology in painting (studio practice) at his mother institution. Instagram: @stephenabbanjuniorfineart
Sophia Falco
To Break Dreamland
I broke dreamland in two no longer a dreamer
this land not of the free not tangible right out
of the gates no longer stands continental drift
drifting into sleep slipping survived over
10,000 nights never touched a mare even
with the claim these beasts are friendly.
I’m in a grassland stargazing to extract
the light, but they would vanish sky turned
pitch black a demon just flicked a switch
of the celestial bodies unable to pinpoint the
herd until they start sprinting towards me
hearing their hooves hitting the ground.
Jolted awake with my sheets soaked in sweat
despite the threat of death by horses I gravitated
towards those big eyes knowing they’re wise
putting up posters on my bedroom walls.
I’m on an endless haunted merry-go-round
that was vandalized riding on the last
plastic horse standing with only one googly eye.
Unable to calculate the future I subtracted
merry from go round so all that was left
was go round I tried to go round the earth
in search of meaning knowing the whole time
I must step away to see clearly in
order to birth new dreams.
Sophia Falco is the author of Farewell Clay Dove (UnCollected Press, 2021) and her award-winning chapbook The Immortal Sunflower (UnCollected Press, 2019). She is the winner of the Mirabai Prize for Poetry, and she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Falco takes pride in being a dedicated volunteer blogger for The International Bipolar Foundation (IBPF) since April 2020. Furthermore, she graduated magna cum laude along with highest honors in the Literature Department at The University of California, Santa Cruz. Falco will be attending a highly regarded Master of Fine Arts program for poetry with a teaching fellowship in Fall 2022.
