Cover image: “The Seal” by Tajla Medeiros
Gallery 3
The Benefits of Mishap
Emily Moon
First Light
A chill wind blew through
every hall, up and down
stairs, out the door
into the cool autumn evening.
A tempest in the kitchen.
I tried to think. Frozen
thoughts hummed like
a refrigerator in summer,
iceberg in the crisper,
peas in the freezer. Sky
barred orange and scarlet,
purple along crenellated edges.
Stormy Weather
played in my mind.
First light would be dark.
Emily Moon (she/her) is a transgender poet from Portland, Oregon. She is Editor at First Matter Press. Her book It’s Just You and Me, Miss Moon, was published by First Matter Press prior to her taking on an editorial role. Her work includes appearances in or is forthcoming from Pile Press, Firefly Review, Mulberry Literary, Labyrinth Anthologies, Brazos River Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, en*gendered litmag, Ethel Zine and elsewhere.
Cassie Premo Steele
We Look to the Stars
They came from the sky
and left us here. We look
to the stars in awe and
fear like babies who cannot
yet use a spoon, we depend
on the night to bring us
rest and what we need
to feed ourselves and soon.
We feel the urgency of
time that keeps us awake.
We are terrified it might
be too late. We pray. We
pace. We make tea or coffee,
poems and paintings, beer
and coding that might
not save anything but
ourselves, and alive.
This is the new age of faith,
hands to the earth saying,
Teach us how to go through
long days and hard
nights, show us how to
grow from soil and seeds,
give us a sign of what
this womb of pain creates.
Cassie Premo Steele is a lesbian, ecofeminist, mother, poet, novelist, and essayist whose writing focuses on the themes of trauma, healing, creativity, mindfulness and the environment. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia; she has published 16 books, including 6 books of poetry, and her poetry has been nominated 6 times for the Pushcart Prize. She has also been awarded the John Edward Johnson Prize and the Carrie McCray Memorial Literary Award for Poetry. She is a recipient of the Archibald Rutledge Prize, named after the first Poet Laureate of South Carolina, where she lives with her wife.
Michael Brosnan
Night Elegy
Lantern light flickers variations
of my hunched form on the thin walls
and sagging ceiling of a borrowed tent.
This is where I’ve landed.
Divorced after fifteen years of marriage.
No direction home. No home.
Lying inside my sleeping bag,
jacked up on one elbow,
I read words in a book, drift off
to think about the children
scrubbed and comforted, paddling
the canoe of dreams toward morning.
Here among the trees,
earth’s dampness seeps through
the ground cloth, whispering cold truth.
Outside the tent, a raccoon shuffles
leg-loud in the fallen leaves.
As always, it knows
there’s something here,
some odd morsels, crisp and sweet.
The benefits of mishap.
Michael Brosnan lives in Exeter, New Hampshire. His first book of poetry, The Sovereignty of the Accidental (Harbor Mountain Press), was published in 2018. A second book, ADRIFT (Grayson Books), is due out in 2022. His poems have appeared in numerous journals in the U.S. and elsewhere. He is also the author of Against the Current, a book on inner-city education, and serves as the senior editor for the website Teaching While White. More at www.michaelabrosnan.com.
David A. Goodrum
David A. Goodrum is a photographer and writer living in Corvallis, Oregon. His photos and poems are forthcoming or have been published in Ilanot Review, Willows Wept Review, Spillway, Star 82 Review, The Write Launch, New Plains Review, and other journals. He has showcased his photography at several regional art festivals. He hopes to create a visual field that momentarily transports you away from hectic daily events and into a place that delights in an intimate view of the world. Additional work (both photography and poetry) can be viewed at www.davidgoodrum.com.
Jack Christianson
Life, also
There are alligator junipers
deep in the canyons of the desert—bark ruckled and puckered,
teeth bared in the broad fan of their needles—but these
are not them.
These are another species—
members of the great community of anguish
who daily throw their hands to the skies
and wail.
They are brothers in burn—pinyon, lodgepole,
ponderosa. The still-standing, skeletal remnants
of a scorched earth whose infinite generosity was outmatched
only by a sweeping power to recall all her progeny
to dust. Who,
reptilian, lies with sparks in her eyes
before flashing out violently across the hillsides,
decimating all
that her steady sediments have built up.
And so I stand here with them, as if
at a wake,
and smear the dark charcoal of their skins
across the ringed tips of my fingers—
pick apart burnt bark
where the woodpeckers have plied.
(A flash of waxen white—milky as a mouthful of fangs
and aromatic with the schemings of silently rising sap—
writ like resurrection)
Here, hidden among a million glittering shades of midnight,
dressed in death’s own robes—
Life, also,
lurking with sparks in its eyes
just below the surface.
Jack Christianson was born and raised among the many lakes and tributaries of Minnesota’s Mississippi River Valley. Upon completing undergraduate degrees in English and Education in the Spring of 2020, he moved to Colorado’s arid Western Slope where he now lives, works, and writes. Christianson’s work has previously appeared in The Freshwater Review. Instagram @jack.chriskianson
John Brantingham
Paul Klee’s Aged Phoenix
The phoenix, moving into the advanced
age when phoenixes are denuded
of feathers, when their lives are concluded
with fiery explosions, readies for his last
moment by nailing down that olive branch
with arrows, by propping himself, one hand
on a war staff, complete with skeleton head
and inviting destruction with a fighting stance.
We all are (or maybe just tyrants are)
the phoenix, Klee seems to be telling us,
pushing ourselves toward immolation,
daring, nearly begging, enemies to fire
on us. What a thing it would be to just
burn, we seem to think, in devastation.
John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines. He has nineteen books of poetry and fiction including his latest, Life, Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press). He lives in Jamestown, New York.
Adrienne Ross Scanlan
My Garden Speaks for Itself
My Shoreline garden is a stronghold of non-native flora, unwilling immigrants once welcomed, since abandoned. Years ago, another gardener walked concrete paths now cracked, placed bird feeders now rain-rotted, and planted trees, shrubs, flowering plants from distant places now rooted deep in western Washington’s once strange ground. If I were to listen, what would they say of their fortune and their fate?
Cherry Laurel (Prunus laurocerasus)
She planted us first, that long-gone gardener. She planted us first, in this corner, and around us she planted European ash, English holly, bamboo lined with rows of arum, daffodil, false forget-me-not straight as the edges of the patchwork quilts she used to hang in the sunlight. That old gardener opened hand shears and snipped and snapped our branches and boughs to make of us a boxy hedge. Snipped; snapped; cracked; shaped as she wanted us to be shaped. Now she is gone, and her garden frays along its many edges. We are here now.
We are here, and here is our place. One tree by seed or shoot or root sucker begat a daughter tree, a daughter begat another daughter, and daughter to daughter to daughter, a sisterhood of us in the garden where the sun sets last, and in the garden where the sun shines least, and in the garden where all of us are thick-bodied and strong-boughed. We pummel to the ground the fence made of metal and sunlight. We punch holes through the fence made of long-dead trees. We are here now. We weave a labyrinth of limbs for sharp-clawed squirrels, a haven for sharp-shinned hawks. Cut us, and what remains re-shoots with stems and leaves, stems and leaves, stems and leaves, but what’s beneath us dies. We gulp rain. We swallow sunshine. We bring darkness to dusty ground where our old leaves fall and brown and shrivel, where our young shoot up like emerald swords in a graveyard to fight off a horde of English ivy.
In our shade is another shade. Even those of us who cannot remember that long-gone gardener who left behind planting boxes and brick paths now buried under brown leaves, dirt, dust, disregard can still glimpse her ghost thin and lost in the shadows we cast. We did not ask to be planted here. We did not, at first, call this home. Who can bend us to their will now?
English Ivy (Hedera helix)
There is a homeland. Our homeland. We will find it again.
That known but never touched, beloved but never seen home hauls us outward, ever outward. This ground, any ground, too warm, too cold, too wet, too dry, never the right ground, the true ground, the home ground. Our root will be fibrous and hidden deep in this wrong ground, our rootlets will be supple and sticking atop this wrong ground, always the wrong ground, always, always the wrong ground, yet we are our own mothership birthing new explorers, new conquerors. We shoot out vine, we clutch the ground with tendrils thin as a spider’s legs, we thrust our evergreen tri-tipped leaves forward like shovels clearing the way. Our roots are here, wrong-grounded and innumerable, our anchors as we crawl over lawn and castaway pine needles, as we smother torn shoes and scotch bottles, conifer stumps, seed cones and cedar seedlings, as we swarm the broken benches and Himalayan blackberry, as we summit the fence, as we strangle flower, fern, the forest beyond. Rip us out. We resurrect. We return. We return. We return.
Will we ever return home? No place is ours; all places are ours; one place is ours, one place that is a refuge from our restlessness, one place that is a dream, one place that is ever so distant, one place that is a destiny to be discovered. We will find it.
Kwanzan Cherry (Prunus serrulata)
I am rooted in this old home’s old garden. There is no other like me here, no matter how far I looked or how hard I hoped. My companions are wet grass, fallen laurel leaves, winter-shriveled sword fern and maiden fern, crocuses pushing green stems up cold, black earth. My lichen-mottled trunk is no thicker than the grip of the old gardener who planted me so long ago. I should be larger by now, so much larger; I should tower over fence and house and trees, I should look for others like me, but I am rooted between giants of laurel, holly, Pacific rhododendron, Garry oak. My branches are sun-starved and flare over the wood-slat bench where the old gardener would sit, and I would give shelter.
Cold and the long dark now. My leaves have dried and fallen to the ground. Now raindrops glitter on my twigs, and in the crook of two branches is an emerald and ebony mound of moss soft as the fur of kittens that used to rub against me. My branches are grey as the sky, thin, strong, supple enough to hold a suet feeder suited to the claws of juncos, winter wrens and robins, brown creepers, bushtits, and black-capped chickadees, those small, ordinary, unnoticed birds. Come warmth and long light my branches will bud and hang over grass that gives no cover to marauding cats, and my leaves ruby red as an Anna’s hummingbird’s throat will unfurl to shelter the bench from sudden rain and sharp sun.
Birds are short-lived and flighty, and my companions are ghosts. The house across from the bench has been dark for so long. Who remembers when I was young? But now the house has lights. Human voices. I cannot hope. I will not hope. But I do remember I am rooted in a place that was once well loved.
Adrienne Ross Scanlan is the author of Turning Homeward: Restoring Hope and Nature in the Urban Wild (2017 Washington State Book Award Finalist). Her nature writing and other creative nonfiction has appeared in City Creatures, Bluestem, the For Love of Orcas anthology, The Fourth River, Hevria, and many other magazines. She is a reviewer for the New York Journal of Books and a freelance developmental editor. Her website is www.adrienne-ross-scanlan.com.
Ronald Walker
Ronald Walker is an artist living in the Sacramento area of California. He works in a style that he calls “Suburban Primitive.” This style combines his interest in the origins and functions of art along with life in the suburbs. His work has been shown in more than 45 solo exhibits over the years and he holds both an MFA and an MA degree in painting and drawing.
Addison Hoggard
The Shakes
I deserved to become the earthquake
And all the vertigo that it brought,
I deserved to bleed from my front teeth
For months, the soft tissue tearing,
Faulty fault lines opening, closing;
Friction, I deserve friction, I crave
Friction, the void between
Yawns, teethes trembles as I do
But I do not teeter on the edge,
I dive. To find an edge to teeter on,
I dive to give meaning to the dizziness.
Have you ever heard the groans
Of the Earth? Listened to the plates plead
Against each other?
Tectonic tempo, trembling whisper like a
Thunder trumpet in an April shower;
I dive to live in that sound,
Enter into him to understand
Why the quake crawled up into my bones
And burrowed in the marrow.
I dive to ask him take it back,
Take it out, take it away, take it. I give.
I want to rub up against myself
I want to burn my skin against skin
I want to be still.
I deserved this body and its shakes.
Addison Hoggard is a language teacher and writer from rural North Carolina. He currently lives and works in Fukushima, Japan.
Patrick T. Reardon
Saint Baby
Saint Baby, pray for me.
You faced my mother and turned away. You
faced my mother and blanked your face of
sadnesses and angers and desires and
joys and fears and wilds and injuries and
satisfactions and yearns.
She could not read you and reached the belief
that you were a mirror of her requirements,
knowing you weren’t and having no evidence
but needing not to speculate on my alien
planets and swamp waters.
She did not trust me because you squirmed in
her awkward hands and because,
when she offered
no shoulder,
no breast,
no cheek,
no ear,
I opted out at 42 days — look at the photos —
to leave behind her and her husband, your father,
and took first steps on the road away, to me.
I pray for you, Saint Baby.
Patrick T. Reardon, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, has authored ten books, including the poetry collections Requiem for David (Silver Birch Press), Darkness on the Face of the Deep (Kelsay Books) and The Lost Tribes (Grey Book Press). Forthcoming is his memoir in prose poems Puddin’: The Autobiography of a Baby (Third World Press). His website is www.patricktreardon.com.
Anthony Afairo Nze
Anthony Afairo Nze is a graphic designer and artist from Indianapolis. His works consist of mainly digital art and hand drawn illustrations. For more of Anthony’s work, visit his Instagram @afairosgallery.
Hari B. Parisi
Nothing Remarkable
Nothing remarkable today
The sky might argue otherwise
Had a brief affair with vodka
Checkout at cashier #5
Out on the street
Morning Glory twined in aloe
Floodgates about to burst
The drought goes on
Fitbit tracks my steps
Dead cockroach in the stairwell
The scale of life eludes me
No one is all magic
I’d club God if he showed his face
There I said it
A symphony on paper
I scribble notes in a circle
A mosquito pulses the window
When will I know I’m out
Hari B. Parisi (formerly Hari Bhajan Khalsa) has had poems published in numerous journals, most recently Poet Lore, New York Quarterly and Chapter House Journal, as well as upcoming in Ponder Review, Atlas and Alice and Peregrine Journal. She is the author of three volumes of poetry, most recently She Speaks to the Birds at Night While They Sleep, winner of the 2020 Tebot Bach Clockwise Chapbook Contest. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband. Her website is www.haribpoet.com.
Noah Salamon
Dirt Mulholland
“And the river keep a talkin’
But you never heard a word it said”
—Robert Hunter, “Easy Wind”
At some point, the Drive gives out
into wildness, somewhere
between Canoga and Encino Hills —
the rest is dirt
The light, the heat, baffles
understanding, the landscape
seems suddenly primal —
as old as Earth
And if you pause, and stay
very still, you can almost hear
the birds talking —
one to another
Noah Salamon is the English Department Chair at Sierra Canyon School in Chatsworth, California, and he received an MA in English from Loyola Marymount University. His chapbook A Series of Moments was published in 2020 by Finishing Line Press, and his poetry has appeared in such journals as Cathexis Northwest Press, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Stillwater Review, New Limestone Review, and HCE Review. His essay “The Transformative Effect of Color in the Poetry of Tomas Tranströmer” was published on the World Literature Today blog.
Tajla Medeiros
Tajla Medeiros is an artist from Brazil. Her work is inspired by her self-awareness investigations.
Catherine Jefferson
Cultivating Wildness
Twelve by five metres
of wildness in suburbia,
meticulously tended to:
an autumn cut to add vigour
to this mini meadow project.
Secretly, I am rooting
for seeds carried by winds…
stray calendula,
purple tansy unfurling,
powder bombs of blue and white nigella –
untamed splashes of colour
interloping
on neat and stripey lawns.
Catherine Jefferson is a researcher, writer and animal welfare campaigner based in West Sussex, UK. Her recent work has appeared in Literary Veganism: An Online Journal, The Field Guide Poetry Magazine, Tiny Seed Literary Journal and Plants & Poetry Journal.
