Cover image: "In Search of Luck" by Kristin Entler
Gallery 1
layer and layer and layer
Ellen June Wright
At Four In the Morning
Across the highway, the hum of small planes
flying in and out of the local airport, closer…
the whirr of the oscillating fan, and the glow
of the bedside lamp warms a favorite book.
At four in the morning, the day is between
ending and beginning. The bed is strewn with
magazine clippings and clothes. July nights are not
for sleeping but for rummaging through the past,
gleaning mind fields in search of the forgotten.
It is a time to dream under the soft-white light
with eyes wide open, a time to sound words together
like cymbals, a time to remember and discard memory.
Ellen June Wright was born in England and currently lives in New Jersey. She has consulted on guides for three PBS poetry series. Her work was selected as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week in June 2021, and she received five 2021 Pushcart Prize nominations.
Matthew Kohut
Vines
These woods are knotted
with crisscrossing vines,
honeysuckle, bittersweet,
and two kinds of ivy
that creep in a corkscrew
to the tops of the trees.
Then soft shoots turn woody,
and the vise starts to close,
a ’30s B-movie of murderers masked
as travelers seeking a quiet night’s rest.
It’s a daily struggle to pull, cut, and clear
and I never succeed in killing the root.
I admire the gardener
who sees beyond weeds,
but order seduces me,
tightening its grip.
Matthew Kohut has worked as a writer, teacher, and musician for twenty-five years. His poetry has been published in The Dewdrop, Leaping Clear, and The Ekphrastic Review, and two anthologies by Beautiful Cadaver Press. He is the co-author of two books of nonfiction. For the past decade, his work has focused on helping people communicate more effectively in high-stakes settings.
Bracha K. Sharp
Waiting for the Gift
When the hand of rain is reasonable,
when from the static I can tell that
a storm is imminent, when air and
leaves and sparrows pause, readying themselves,
for lightning, too,
This is the expected journey of the rain—
but yesterday, the storm brought with it
the pause before the fall, the gasp before the
start and with it, the need to
Fall into the storm, to flow, to stand at the
opened door, hands outstretched and face
tipped up.
Now I am ready to receive the wind, the slap
of wet, the vibration—like prayer,
like praise. And this was why I liked the rain—
adagio of luminescence, beauty of expectation—
And when the storm came, I watched the bubbles form on the
deck and burst there on the spot and I,
alongside the sparrows—
all balanced in wet, dripping trees—
bent my head back
To encourage this gift.
Bracha K. Sharp was published in American Poetry Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, Sky Island Journal, Trouvaille Review, and ONE ART: a journal of poetry, among others. She placed first in the national Hackney Literary Awards; the winning poem subsequently appeared in the Birmingham Arts Journal. She was a finalist in the New Millennium Writings Poetry Awards and received a 2019 Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards Silver Medal for her debut picture book. As her writing notebooks seem to end up finding their way into different rooms, she is always finding both old pieces to revisit and new inspirations to work with. She is a current reader for the Baltimore Review. You can find out more about her writing by visiting www.brachaksharp.com.
K.L. Johnston
Bone Hunting in the Badlands
Trekking in dust enclosed by bare
and layered hills beneath vivid
azure, too hot to be a sky
but a blue flame entity in
its own self. Sweat evaporates
before it can roll salt into
our eyes. The ashen land, fallen,
compacted, carved by hands of wind
and water, cradles the dry bones.
Crawling rock walls in canyons
of dust they re-emerge into
the light, hungry, unhurrying.
Ancient earth worn away gives up
more newly awakened spirits.
Slowly the bones drag themselves up
roaring. In spite of the science
they hunt, shake off the sediment
of their passing to prey on those
proto memories we still carry,
doing what they have always done.
Ghosts of primeval predators
sniff, scarcely acknowledge flesh.
Beautifully bare and grinning,
they dream they could eat us alive.
K.L. Johnston is a photographer and poet whose favorite subjects are whimsical, environmental and/or philosophical. Her poetry has appeared in journals ranging from Small Pond Magazine in the 1980s to work recently appearing in Humana Obscura and Pangyrus. She is also a contributor to the anthologies Botany of Gaia and South Carolina Bards Poetry Anthology 2022. Her photos have appeared in literary magazines such as Camas, Burningword, and Kelp Journal, as well as travel journals and online galleries. She is a self-taught and nonacademic artist with a degree in English and Communications. A former art and antique dealer, she is passionate about art, the environment and 85% dark chocolate.
Julia Wendell
August Outro
A pestering two-beat chirp—
a sound my mother warned
was the beginning of the end.
I was a young girl then,
long before I learned
the portent applied to me,
and what comes achingly fast,
then lingers.
My throat catches
on nectar drunk, decades eaten.
I jitter my legs, rub them together,
spread my human version
of a leathery wing.
I aim to have
ten thousand children.
I aim to attract you,
to pierce your ears
with my outro
and not let go.
Julia Wendell’s sixth poetry collection, The Art of Falling, was published in 2022 by FutureCycle Press. Her forthcoming book Daughter Days will be published by Unsolicited Press in 2025. She is also the author of two memoirs, Finding My Distance and Come to the X. She is the founding editor of Galileo Press. She lives in Aiken, South Carolina, and is a three-day event rider.
Caylee Weintraub
Clearing
My older brother Laine punches me on the arm and tells me to stop being a nerd and come steal clearing tags with him in the forest before all the trees are gone. I stop working on the family tree assignment for my summer social studies project and rub my arm where Laine punched me.
“All right,” I say. “You don’t have to hit so hard.”
In truth, I was looking for any reason to abandon my family tree. I had made it through three generations of my family easy enough. I had my grandparents, my mother, my brother Laine, and my little brother Alphie, but I couldn’t decide what to do about my father, if I should even write his name down at all.
Laine and I run out the back door of our trailer, past our mother as she sleeps on the couch, the divorce papers my father had mailed sitting in an envelope in front of her. About four months ago, my father had left in the middle of the night, uprooted himself to live with a willow woman another state over. Now, I only hear from him on the weekends, or when he calls to ask if the forest is still there.
Laine and I aren’t supposed to be in the forest, which has been designated an official construction zone to make way for a new housing development: Crystal Springs, Million Dollar Homes!! That’s what the sign says, at least. All the trees have been marked with orange clearing tags that show which trees are going to be axed and hauled away and replaced with houses.
Pulling the tags off the trees is more Laine’s favorite hobby than mine, but I always go with him because I worry about him hurting himself and nobody knowing to come and get him. The first time Laine and I pulled all the tags off the trees, the foreman knocked on our door and told our mother that if we didn’t knock it off, he was going to call the police and have us arrested for trespassing.
My mother told him she had no idea what he was talking about. Somehow, he ended up following her into her room. Since then, Laine and I don’t get in trouble for taking down the tags anymore.
After Laine’s pockets are stuffed full of orange tags, we race each other home and he wins. Later that night, I send an email to my father, telling him the trees are still there, for now, but they’ll probably all be gone soon once construction starts. I refresh the inbox, waiting for his reply to light up my screen, even though I know it’ll be days before he answers. While I wait, I sit back down and stare at my family tree that I’ll turn in tomorrow on my first day of seventh grade. I write my father’s name. I erase it. I write it again. I sit there until the trees cast long shadows across my page. Eventually I write my father’s name on a branch and then tag it for clearing.
Caylee Weintraub is the Editor in Chief of the tiny journal. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, Terrain.org, Polyphony Lit, and others. She is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers Conferences, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Yale Writers Workshop.
Mon Malanovich-Gallagher
Untitled (As Your Plants Grow)
as your plants grow
the bugs will eventually creep out
from the soil you brought home
from the forest
to get pounced on by the cats
and extinguished
like the words in my mouth
that used to be
untamed
overgrown with ferns and weeds
crawling and decaying
you brushed the leaves out of my hair
and cut the webs between my toes
so I can walk between men and not hide
in dark wet places
but when I watch your hands plant bulbs
carefully
in the yellow bird pots
your smile is the one thing I need
to return me
to myself
Mon Malanovich-Gallagher is a non-binary queer poet, based in London, whose work has been published in a variety of chapbooks, anthologies, and magazines, including Powders Press, Allegory Ridge, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, and Out on the Page, and is forthcoming in a number of other publications, both online and in print. You can connect with Mon on Instagram @mxmonmg.
Dana Rivera
Dana Rivera received her film degree from Ithaca College and began her career making documentaries at nonprofit organizations, such as the Innocence Project and Legal Services of New Jersey. In her late 20s, she began experimenting with various art forms from water marbling and bookbinding to poetry and digital art, which became her greatest tool for self-exploration and self-expression. Her art is an effort to remember (re-member) her self, through a spectrum of topics from reclaiming the spiritual practices of her Latino ancestors to nurturing mental, physical, and emotional health. Dana is currently working on a collection of poetry and abstract art in Washington DC, where she resides with her husband and dog. Instagram: @danariveracreative / Website: www.beacons.ai/danarivera
Jai-Michelle Louissen
apple tree
as the wood widens
there is a wayward luminance,
fairy heat
unshackled
pulled from the veins of roses
from the earth’s insides, let me
let me be
daughtered here
I leave my hand on the loom
miranda out on the tide
her voice low and breathless
musky in sweetgrasses
I whisper to her the language of birds
wrest symbols from my collar bone
there is light enough for apple seeds
sorceress I am
Jai-Michelle Louissen is a Scottish poet living in The Netherlands. Writing in hypnagogic, meditative states yet rooted in her Celtic culture, she writes of early loss and trauma through an imagist, mythic, and natural lens. Her work has been published in various journals and her first chapbook in July 2022 by Sunday Mornings at the River.
C. Heyne
i’ve been spitting
on twigs again weaving
grass gathering kindling
for kin that exist
in feathers far far
from here. the bedroom
reeks of coffee rot molded
mugs and pots. i’m living
in your filth, lover. the nest
is a survival the nest is
an apartment the nest is equipped
coping i am a mouth filled
with dirt trying to
speak. can you follow
me home? home is where
the mud is, i’m the house
wren with wishes of pterodactyling
the midnight. i’m sorry i’m broken
-winged. it was cold in
the winter, it’s been a long
winter, it’s been a winter this
july, it’s been a time trying
to remember where to
follow and where not. i spit up
time like tequila, often
alone and down a drain of
sorts and sorrows with ’morrow’s
distance brimming up the
sink, i’m clogging up the reality
i promise i’m making room
for something worthy. time
moves a lot like you, lover.
against all
C. Heyne is a genderqueer poet from Sunrise, Florida, and resides in Hoboken, NJ. C. is the recipient of the William Morgan Poetry Award and has poems featured or forthcoming in Muse/A Journal, Dream Pop Journal, The Oakland Review, Identity Theory, The Bullshit Anthology, and Kiss Your Darlings, amongst others. Their chapbook my room (and other wombs) is forthcoming (Bullshit Lit, 2023).
Mikaela Stiner
I Stand in the Gallery, Look
when I ask, she asks me back
what I see in her overcast
figures and soft-edged strokes
I guess outstretched arms
a crucifix, someone kneeling to pray
or begging for mercy and realize
my tendency to spiritualize
to make black and white out of gray
good and bad out of what is
On the train home I think
of my dad’s sister and my mother
both of them dark-haired and kind
the wooden snake I won at Bible school
the body that twisted mechanically
with every bend of my wrist
behind the turn of its gaze
hurt daughters turned gray
by attentions too big and too small
how layer and layer and layer
builds monster
Mikaela Stiner is a journalist, bartender, and poet from New Jersey. She is interested in the intersection of religion and culture, and loves live music, Spanish wines, and weeding and watering her garden. Mikaela currently lives in Austin, Texas, and is an MFA candidate at Randolph College.
Sarah Giragosian
Spider!
Next to running at ill-considered speeds in the house and shadowing his big brother, my nephew Kyle’s favorite activity is exploring my insect field guides. He’s utterly gobsmacked by spiders: wolf spiders, tarantulas, widow spiders, crab spiders, banana spiders, you name it. I imagine that his interest seesaws somewhere between curious enthusiasm and absolute horror, the kind of passion that roots itself in the gut and is felt in lurches and kicks.
He sees spiderwebs everywhere, including among the far-flung corners of my apartment’s ceilings, the ones that I’d be hard-pressed to dust away. Scooting around spaces that only a three year old can navigate, he borrows my flashlight and points them out in the most neglected corners of the apartment, hollering “Spider!” each time he spots a web. One might think my apartment is swarming with them. I’d be embarrassed if any other house guest were visiting, but the sightings seem to excite him, and his spider safaris are less dangerous than the other things he could be doing, like discovering the location of my cached Swiss Army knife or practicing martial arts on his brother. Or chasing my cat around the house. Or dangling from the exercise equipment. Or playing with matches. Or testing the sharpness of the cactus needles. Or locking the bathroom door.
My general knowledge about spiders has blossomed in the last year or so, thanks to Kyle’s help, but I was shocked when I learned that the horseshoe crab, the primeval creature that studs the beaches of eastern coasts, is an arachnid. With their clacking armor, horseshoe crabs look more like crabs than spiders, but these water-dwelling arachnids have neither antennae nor mandibles, as crabs do. Moreover, they’re nearly identical to their earliest ancestors, their bodies being so effective at survival that they have hardly changed since their origins on earth, which exceeds 445 million years, longer even than dinosaurs. They’re minimalists in their evolutionary journey.
“Can you believe that horseshoe crabs are considered arachnids?” I ask Kyle and my wife Elise.
“I thought that they were related to Darth Vader,” Elise said. True: they do have an uncanny resemblance to the iconic helmet worn by Luke Skywalker’s father. Horn-like, they’re mostly carapace, which is made of chiton and is so hard that only sharks and sea turtles can penetrate through them. But cast off, molted by the creature, they’re remarkably light, paper-like, yet tough. They also have an abdomen and tail or telson, which looks like a weapon, but is instead a rudder that helps them to flip back over when tourists or the tide upturn them.
While peculiar creatures, they’re familiar sights on Cape Cod beaches during the summer. Tossed like dice along the shores, they recall the cast-off shields and armor of an ancient battlefield. I imagine a medieval blacksmith hammering out their carapaces and forging them into being with anvil and bellows, using raw materials both crude and beautiful.
Up close, they’re even stranger, with two semicircular eyes and spines outfitted along their convex carapaces. In all, they have five simple eyes, as well as two eyes on their undersides, near their mouths. Nine eyes through which to see the world. Five pairs of legs to scrabble across the sands. And they can regrow lost limbs, like sea stars.
Not too long ago, they were thought to be destructive to fisheries. Freighted with an unsavory reputation, they became nuisances to locals, who believed that they were slashing into and killing off the region’s most vaunted industry. When my mother was a child, her brothers bagged them for a bounty. Five cents shelled out for every dead horseshoe crab. I didn’t ask how they killed them. Horseshoe crabs cannot bleed to death since their blood, a lovely powder blue (thanks to the copper-based molecules in their blood), clots and blocks off injured areas. It’s probably better not to ask.
It’s hard, I suppose, to be tender to a creature that looks so spidery, that lurches along the sand, ungainly and drab-colored, perhaps even dangerous. What incubates under the armor, the fortress of their bodies? What shade of green, what ultraviolet hue, is the ocean in their dreams?
Next time I visit the ocean, I will spider-crawl in the sea with them, reciting poetry underwater. I’ll bring Kyle so he can see their spider-affinity in person and touch the creature for the first time. Like so many other life forms on our planet, they are under threat, and I want Kyle to be acquainted with the creature. How else do we cultivate care?
Humans have developed a vampiric relationship to horseshoe crabs in recent years. Deemed to be medically useful, horseshoe crab blood has been mined for its coagulating potential that can ward off infection (Fortey 13). Researchers and medical professionals engage in bloodletting the creatures for various functions, such as scanning that medical equipment is not contaminated with bacteria and ensuring that IVs, injections, and medical devices are safe for human use (Fortey 13-4). With a dramatic demand for horseshoe crab blood increasing, conservation groups have dubbed horseshoe crabs as vulnerable. But as a survivor of the ancient past, the horseshoe crab has a fascinating evolutionary history that situates its origins at the Paleozoic era and provides us with a glimpse of deep time, a rarity of a creature that has survived several mass extinctions.
I try to explain their significance to my nephew, who is poring over my spider book, half-listening to my clumsy attempt to explain evolution to a three-year-old audience. He flips through the pages that showcase spinnerets and fangs, close-up photos of eight-eyed faces that don’t quite resemble faces. Like me, he has an appetite for bizarre facts and strange creatures, but I’m not quite sure what’s penetrating. Blitzing him with information might be overwhelming, but then again, his tempo is supersonic, his currency is pandemonium, and I try to squeeze in what I can while I have his attention.
Kyle helps me to think through a question that I’ve been considering for some time: how do you create conditions for affection, tenderness for creatures that are mostly carapace? Or do not quite have a face as we think of a face? How can we engage in conserving creatures radically different than ourselves?
Kyle seems to sense that difference can be compelling. And he has a taste for creatures with superpowers. His new superhero? The horseshoe crab, who can swim upside down and whose ventral eyes are able to scan the world of the sea from underneath their bodies. He seems to like the fact that their muse is the moon, their life cycles synced up with lunar cycles. And he understands that while spined and equipped with a weapon-like body, they pose no real danger to humans. He understands the deliciousness of being creeped out by a creature wilder and weirder than himself.
Work Cited
Fortey, Richard. Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind. Knopf, 2011.
Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collection Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017), and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). The craft anthology Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, which is co-edited by Sarah and Virginia Konchan, is forthcoming from The University of Akron Press. Sarah’s writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.
Kristin Entler
Kristin Entler was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at 6 months old, and first came out as LGBT+ several years after her diabetes diagnosis at 12 years old. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for NELLE and lives with her service-dog-in-training, Azzie, whose name is short for the Greek God of Medicine. Entler can be found in publications such as The Bitter Southerner, Hobart, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, and Poet Lore, among others, as well as on Twitter @findmycure.
Katherine Matiko
Old Friends
The Twins always see me coming.
They break out in applause:
ten thousand glittering hands
clapping and waving.
I’ve done nothing
to deserve it, I tell them,
but they ignore this,
showering me with praise
and spontaneous twigs.
The Three Sisters grow from one root.
Beneath they are entwined;
above they find their own way
to the sun.
We’ve grown apart
over the years, I say to them,
but they ignore this,
fling their heads at my folly,
dig deeper into our common ground.
The Spruce Stand is a storm shelter.
Rain falls like ugly tears but I am safe
inside their almighty arms.
I can’t go out there.
I’m afraid, I scream at them
but they ignore this,
poking me with sharp fingers,
reminding me I will find
the path home.
Katherine Matiko lives in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada, where she finds daily inspiration for poetry.
Ginny O’Brien
Ginny O’Brien, a mixed media artist, received her MFA from Syracuse University and BFA from Buffalo State College. She experiments with cloth and heightened color combinations and is interested in the healing properties of color. She will be exhibiting new work in a two-person 2023 exhibition at the Carnegie Art Center in Tonawanda, NY. O’Brien was Education Curator for University at Buffalo Art Galleries, using her expertise in the arts, education, and healthcare to develop programs for diverse audiences. She is Resident Artist for the Kathleen and Joseph Curatolo Pediatric Visual Arts Program, making art with young patients at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. Instagram @ginnyobrienart / Website: www.ginnyobrienart.com
Kathleen Kimball-Baker
Color the Wind
I want to dye
the winter wind, maybe
violet, observe how it sidles along my house,
changing
its shape
as it rushes an obstacle—empty doghouse,
air conditioner still
hanging in
a window, Christmas balsam on its side, bare.
If I photographed
the tinted wind,
would I see a slip-stream
flurry of color
encircling
the tired sack of my house, with its back door
flung open,
mouthing
a prayer for rescue?
Kathleen Kimball-Baker is a writer and editor in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is a three-time finalist in the Loft Literary Center Mentor Series for fiction and creative nonfiction. Her poems appear in Welter, Cold Mountain Review, MockingHeart Review, Lines + Stars, and Red Wolf Journal. She is happiest in the winter, at -20°F, in a boreal forest on the back of a sled pulled by huskies.
