Cover image: "Antheridium and Archegonium" by Greg Feinberg
Gallery 1
We landed here
Dawn Leas
How to survive as a houseplant if you live with a beginner
Stretch every day until you touch
the ceiling. Befriend neighbors
with fast-growing vines. Spend
afternoons on wide windowsills
flirting with the sun. Invite first
blasts of heat to kiss your leaves.
Be patient, but ask for water
before you need it. Change. Welcome
the breath of the beginner tending
you. Listen. Keep her secrets.
Cultivate dreams of a successful
green thumb. One she didn’t inherit.
Hold her fears. Change again.
Be slow to outgrow your home.
Dawn Leas is the author of Take Something When You Go (Winter Goose Publishing 2016) and I Know When to Keep Quiet (Finishing Line Press, 2010). Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, San Pedro River Review, The Pedestal Magazine, SWWIM, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Her work won an honorable mention in the 2005 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In past lives she has been a copywriter, independent-school admissions director, English teacher, and assistant to a university president. Currently, she is a freelance writer, editor, writing coach, and teaching artist. She also received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. For more information, please visit www.thehammockwriter.com or follow @thehammockwriter on Instagram.
Judy Mathews
Wolf Bordered by Sheep
Upend me,
my words fall out in a howl
ricocheting off mountains,
How can I speak for you to understand?
You place me into Yellowstone boundaries
where all I know are the
points of Earth and sky.
You are less than
groveling sheep thinking
I will stay your fences,
even bleaters know, their
throats pump instinctively—
withdrawing their bodies from
my shadow;
we contest each other pivoting, a dance
between predator and prey,
at a distance you look out—
my howl is the shock wave
a throw down
diminishing lines
others answer back—rejoining howls
Our paws imprint this land
dyeing it with our blood—our veins—the water,
Earth takes us in, feeding grass who nurtures bison;
We were here before you; our bones tell
stories of our pups’ pups,
our songs echo—
eternal molecules
on wind. . .
Judy Mathews received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Spalding University in their Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. Her writing has appeared in The Tau, The Badlands: Winter 2019, The Avalon Literary Journal, and The Round Table Literary Journal. She recently received a Pushcart Prize nomination for a poem published in The Round Table Literary Journal. Judy is an online adjunct English instructor for Hopkinsville Community College. She is currently working on a collection of linked short stories, and a novel inspired by four generations of strong women in her family and how family stories are interconnected to place.
Sarah Wolbach
Cyclone
What are cyclones called
when they stand still? —Pablo Neruda
No name for existence after it ceases
to matter, to be matter.
Like you. Impossible
to pin down that butterfly
thrashing in the wind,
a mirage of wings.
After the whirl and the water,
there is nowhere to be.
The land has been scoured,
swept to sea, and the wind
is still. In a dream,
I heard your voice,
calling my name, only my name,
just once. I think it was a dream.
I was afraid to get out of bed,
to follow your voice,
your vanishing voice,
down that hallway.
I wish this unrelenting grief
were spent, dissipated,
allowing another storm
to blow itself into being.
But you are still standing,
still in my way.
With a postgraduate fellowship from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, Sarah Wolbach moved from Austin to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she led poetry workshops for expatriates and taught English to the employees of a mushroom factory. Her work has been published in several journals and anthologies, including Artful Dodge, Birds Piled Loosely, Borderlands, Cimarron Review, Comstock Review, Fixed and Free Poetry Anthology 2021, Malpaís Review, Manzano Mountain Review, Peregrine Journal, Pilgrimage, Southwestern American Literature, and Yalobusha Review. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Alan Clark
The warring wonders of the world
became no moments you could miss.
A castle scaled the sky, featured
princess at a window much too high
to clamber to, so then you must
and wonder-death’s the thing you’ll dare.
And there she was, leaning out to see
the shadow-place in which you stood.
Her hair the wind blew wild was gold
and you by shadows all unblessed
thought life from such a rare ascent
might mean at least her arms and bed.
A bird called out, and so you climbed.
The shear of it, the stone and moss
all somehow became sublime but
now you dare look only up; the lure
of her small hands she’s reaching out
was psychic plain: there was no chance
of turning back. The wall and you
must close agree in cut and seam
and yet they do, until you’ve pulled
yourself to where you’ll stand, you two.
And all the rest will be what’s next,
a life of castles and a queen
who’d called you from your life below
you’ll not for years begin to miss,
or all the ones you’d left behind
who on the clearest days call out:
“Come back to us one day!” Or have
you only heard them in your dreams.
Alan Clark is a poet and artist. He has two books: Guerrero and Heart’s Blood, set in pre-Conquest Mexico, and Where They Know, poems. His work has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, Little Star Journal, Evening Street, Iron Horse, Ekphrastic Review, About Place, and others.
Jennifer Phillips
For the Friends of the Pleistocene on Cape Cod
The boulders in my wall are glacier dropped
where the Laurentide ice transmogrified to ocean
unshouldering its load like a swimmer, clothes,
left onshore in this terminal gritty heaping
called the Sandwich Moraine on which I’m sitting
under an umbrella with a martini next to that same sea.
My garden’s beach-stone edge, my mother collected
over many holidays up the mid-Maine shore,
and Dad, protesting, squeezed in among the luggage.
My perennial border’s cobble rim was chiseled out
from the selfsame granite laid for Boston streets,
until displaced by modern plastic surfaces.
The gneiss in my terrace was schlepped in by truck
from a quarry somewhere in New Hampshire mountains
then gently laid like broken bone-ends together.
The bluestone grit in which it convalesces,
and binds aesthetically, though it will never join,
came by dumper from the central Hudson Valley.
Stone points dug from our field, cleaned, and labeled
in the historical museum, were ported East
by PaleoIndians from the inland woods.
Astronomers say we are knit from the dust of stars
in a cosmic housecleaning. We landed here.
The mineralized flesh of the ancients is laid in our bones
stratified like streambeds from placental blood.
So we all wear one another, and in turn
will be worn by descendants largely unaware
of all the ways stones get from there to here.
Jennifer Phillips is a bi-national immigrant, gardener, and painter, and has been writing poetry and prose since the age of seven. Phillips spent a chunk of childhood in upstate New York and has lived in England, New England, New Mexico, St. Louis, and Rhode Island, and now is back in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Phillips’ spiritual/metaphysical sense and writing life have always been rooted in landscapes and their infinite changeability. Phillips has published poetry in over fifty little poetry journals and has published a chapbook, Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (iblurb.com, 2020). Her second chapbook, A Song of Ascents, was published in the Fall of 2022 by Orchard Street Press.
Philip W. Walsh
Western Meadowlark, in memory and (out of) time
I have written this narrative in my head so many times now that it is starting to fall apart, much like the bird’s nest I found while wandering in some meadow long ago. I keep the nest in a box in my desk; the years, and my fingers, have not been kind to it, but it still retains its shape, texture, and smell after all this time. At least, I think it does.
This story starts in the feral garden space where I had the good fortune to grow up. My father worked for many years for a local builder who had bought a bankrupt housing development in southern California in the late sixties. The streets had been laid, the plots had been graded, and about half of the houses had been built. When I was about five or six, my father bought an empty lot in one of the less populated portions of the development and built a house there. From my bedroom window on the upper floor, I could see for miles—I looked out over the fields, the lots where houses would be built, eventually, many of them by my father’s company, but which for many years turned green every spring with Spanish grass in which I could play, retreat, and daydream. It was a good neighborhood to grow up in, and the scent of growing or freshly cut wild grass, or of mallow, still brings up pleasant memories for me.
I was doubly fortunate in that our house was on the edge of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by a golf course, which increased considerably the green space available to me. That space wasn’t just my home, of course; it also appealed to songbirds, birds of prey, and ground squirrels. And within five square miles, there was also chaparral that was home to lizards and snakes, an earth-lined channel where I would later hunt for tadpoles and tree frogs, and the bluffs where, I had heard, fossils could be found.
The different bird species that lived there were all memorable to me for a number of reasons. The hoo-hoo-hooo of the great horned owl, perched on a dead tree nearby, its call travelling through the dusk; the rattle of the burrowing owl that piqued my curiosity (an owl that lived underground?), the melancholy inspired by the coo of the mourning dove, were all parts of the soundscape of my childhood. I also remember one morning when, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, I threw open my bedroom window at 2 or 3 a.m., my head full of unfulfilled fantasies about the young women at my high school. I heard then the song of a mockingbird declaring his territory and calling out to his potential mates, and I knew in that moment that at least one being in my neighborhood understood exactly what I was feeling.1
As important as those bird calls were, and are, in my life and in my memory, none of them stand out now as clearly as the call of the Western meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta). This bird’s song travels further than most—or at least it seems to. It is likely that natural selection played a role in this matter—males with louder songs were more likely to find mates, and so were selected for breeding. Acoustically, they not only sing louder than most of their relatives, but their songs are also lower in pitch relative to other birdsongs, which means they travel further than most. They also tend to sing while perched above vegetation that might scatter sound. This all helps explain why their songs stand out in my memory, ringing over the fields where my childhood lay.2
I remember that the appearance of meadowlarks in those fields was an occasional thing only. I remember also that they appeared singly and sang solo. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the bird sitting on a dried mustard stalk, its song ringing out over the mostly empty lots still full of wild Spanish grass, mallow, and filaree, over the neatly-clipped golf course, the chaparral, the nearby creek, to the bluffs about a mile to the north. The days, the years, like the space into which the call went forth, seemed to last forever. Or so it seems to me now that it seemed to me, then.
I may have had these thoughts when I was young, but I suspect that I have merely fit my memories of the song and image of this bird to my own sense of self in the present. And that bird’s song was probably something that occupied my mind much less then than it does today, in my memory. I spent my time in those fields doing something other than actively listening to birdsong: daydreaming, playing hide and seek, fighting battles in which my friends and I used clumps of grass held together with a ball of damp earth as weapons—cherry bomb fights, we called them. And I still remember my tenth birthday, when I was between friends, if you will, and I spent part of that late winter morning—it may have been fifteen minutes, it may have been several hours—wandering in the field right next to my house, catching painted lady butterflies with the net that my mother had bought me. Such was the life I had, then. It is possible that I heard the meadowlark’s song during any and all of these activities.
My days listening to the meadowlark couldn’t last forever, of course—what does? Ground was broken for a house on that field next door when I was eleven or twelve, making it less convenient for me to visit those spaces, and also blocking the song of the meadowlark. By the time I was fourteen, all but one of the empty lots on the cul-de-sac had been filled with houses, and in any case, by then I had lost interest in birds, having decided on herpetology as my future career.
I rediscovered the Western meadowlark sometime in the 1980s, after I had graduated from college, about the same time that I rediscovered the pleasures of hiking. In a park in the hills about ten miles northeast of the place I grew up, I heard again for the first time in over a decade—though it seemed much longer—the call of the Western meadowlark, and it brought back to me those memories I have described above—not in a flash, but in the manner of someone who has amnesia, and who is deliberately trying to piece together the story of his life.
Part of that rememorization has included finding the exact song that I heard as a child. Like human languages, the songs of some bird species show geographic variation, producing what are essentially regional dialects, and this is indeed the case with the song of the Western meadowlark. I can still recall perfectly—or so it seems to me—the call of the meadowlarks that frequented the neighborhood where I was lucky enough to grow up. I have not deliberately sought out the songs of this species, but in my travels in the Western United States, I have taken advantage of opportunities to seek out that exact dialect again, with limited success. I have found that the songs of the meadowlarks of the Santa Rosa Plateau are close, but not identical, to those that I heard as a child.
The entomologist E.O. Wilson once wrote, “Most children have a bug period. I never outgrew mine.” For me, too, it is true that the child of the father is the man. Though I did not become a biologist as I had hoped, I am a practicing ecocritic, writing about the intersection of nature and literature, and so I have found a way to combine my passions. And my family and I have a lovely garden space surrounding our house. It is full of life: plants attractive to hummingbirds, and to butterflies, bees, and other insects; sparrows, goldfinches, and towhees drawn to the birdseed I scatter on the patio; squirrels, jays, crows and ravens that feed on the peanuts I provide. It’s a wonderful space, and it gives my mind a lot of room to play in—and my mind is better able to appreciate its wonders than my mind was when I was a child. These days I mostly spend my time naturalizing by watching, through a microscope, critters not visible to the naked eye, but I am still thrilled by the sight of clouds playing over the mountains to the north, a juvenile alligator lizard darting out from its shelter, the volunteer tomato vines, with their flowers, creeping up a wall, and the return of the white-crowned sparrows every autumn—and my family and I discuss these matters, frequently, and derive much happiness from that.
But still—no meadowlark has ever sung in our yard since we have lived here, nor is it likely to ever do so.
I do occasionally find ways to spend time by myself in the green spaces that are afforded me, however. Beginning the year I turned fifty, I have spent every birthday hiking in the hills, stretching my legs, taking photographs and scribbling about my experiences there. This past year, I was sitting beside a creek when I heard what sounded like a couple of dozen sparrows all twittering, and didn’t pay it any heed—just sparrows, you know, in a tree—until I realized that I was in fact hearing an entire flock of meadowlarks.
I crossed the creek as quickly as I could; the flock took off as I pursued them, but the meadowlarks and I eventually came to an agreement regarding the space between us, as I settled down under an oak, about a quarter mile off from the tree they perched in. I have a recording of their songs—it is full of wind sound, the noises of my brisk walk and my settling in beneath an oak to listen to the meadowlarks, but the meadowlarks are there.
This experience could not have been more different from my memory of hearing the meadowlark in my childhood. The two dozen birds each sang their song—I am assuming that it was the same song, but I did not try to figure it out then, and the quality of the recording does not allow me to decipher the tune—but asynchronously, chaotically, independently of the others. The effect this produced was not one of infinity and eternity, but rather as if the birds were creating a closed bubble, from which polyphony escaped, but which excluded me. It formed a wall of sound, in which each song had meaning to its singer, but a meaning which was lost to my ears. Or perhaps that was the meaning, for me. I listened to this delightful cacophony until I decided that it was getting late, got up from my seat under the oak, and headed back to the parking lot in the late afternoon.
And so time goes, or, at least, so we construct our memories. One moment we are listening to a bird’s song extend itself over time and space, forever; a few years or moments later we are listening to that same birdsong overlaid upon itself. Without our noticing, our worlds seem to collapse in on themselves, so that the infinite and eternal spaces in which a single bird sang become a closed bubble echoing with the calls of individuals within a flock, singing over each other.
As I write this, I have been interrupted by calls from telemarketers, and I can hear the sound of my neighbors making sure that every last millimeter of their yard is covered with concrete. I am currently listening to a rainfall video to block out the vacuum of our cleaning crew, which has set off my tinnitus again.
And if the meadowlarks of my childhood, and the space and time in which they sang, are gone, and my efforts to recapture my memories have led me to a very different experience, to a very large but limited number of meadowlark songs laid one upon the other, in a few hours stolen from my day labors—I’ll take it.
1 And still there are new—at least to me—species of birds to discover in my old neighborhood, which I visited recently. I was graciously given a tour of the golf course by Ruben, who started working there as part of the groundskeeping crew about the time I moved there when I was five. As we drove over the course, we spotted several Western bluebirds—birds I had never seen in all the time I lived there as a child.
2 I would like to thank Professor Donald Kroodsma and Professor Andrew Horn for assisting me to understand the acoustics of the Western meadowlark’s call, and its possible origins.
Dr. Philip W. Walsh teaches for the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies and Liberal Studies at California State University, Northridge. He is writing In the Beginning, All the World Was America: An Ecocritical History of the Literatures of the Western Hemisphere, 1491 to the Present, under contract with Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield. In his free time, he hikes, writes haiku, raises insectivorous plants and protozoa, and spends time in his garden with his family.
J.F. Merifield
Evelyn Cameron Exhibit:
EC 2
pair the children
in front of the ladies
post the group
a pose disconnected
but rooted
beside the unworkable field
the hills & mountains
so distant
the horizon even farther
Evelyn Cameron Exhibit:
EC 3
chalk cliffs
hawk’s nest
all before the open sprawl
of air & grass
leading uphill-ward
over cut bank creek canyons
the sky the same
J.F. Merifield, a poet living in northwest Montana with a Poetry M.F.A. from George Mason University, has poems published by High Shelf Press, Sheepshead Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, La Picciolette Barca, Neuro Logical, Verse, and Rust & Moth, among others.
Elizabeth Schoonmaker
Elizabeth Schoonmaker’s work evokes the formal vocabulary of the surrounding landscape. In them, the physical process of mark making and the intertextual play of gesture, shape, line and tone solicit a charged emotive content. Elizabeth Schoonmaker lives and works in the Town of Plainfield, NY. Website: www.elizabethschoonmaker.blogspot.com
Kevin Patrick McCarthy
Exposure and Expression
In the west of Ireland, you can walk out the front door of many a cottage, cross a narrow road, and enter a pub stuffed with neighbors and sojourners in the mood to socialize. Or you can walk out the back door and walk for days across open tundra without seeing a soul. This seems a perfect balance of solitude and community.
I believe Homo sapiens are driven to experiment with that balance. We define ourselves by our points on the continuum. The extremes are bound together by the sampling and sharing we engage in as we trace wobbly orbits around our nests. Our movements often have less to do with covering new territory than with finding fresh patterns.
I seldom understand an experience until I try to convey how it has changed me. And I can’t truly connect with others without using natural touchstones. Contact with species not our own and with landscapes unaltered by us unlimbers expression as nothing else can. But out of fear alone, or fear of being alone, as a culture we relentlessly choose community over solitude. In artists, I know, the impulse to audience is so strong that wild apprenticeships are often cut short. But the wilderness informs us. It’s where the art of life is taught.
Non-attachment is a sacred idea, but it applies more to managing our desires than preserving wilderness. Fleeing to the next ridge or hemisphere as our personal asylums are breached is a counterproductive habit. If we’re lucky, somewhere a natural idea or horizon becomes too important to abandon.
In any case, exposure and expression are dependent corollaries. If I listen outdoors, I earn a responsibility to speak indoors. In this way I am fully engaged as actor and audience, atom and aggregate. In our talky, burgeoning culture, we persist in referring to nature as a thing apart — something we can choose to have little to do with. But we are no more apart from the natural world than we are apart from each other. Few are true hermits, and we’re running out of sanctuary. No thing is “unnatural,” and we’re running out of extrapolations. Due diligence is the task of our age, to track the particular all the way to the universal.
It comes down to this: the role of shaman is too important to delegate entirely. Nature, including humans just as we are, is a teeming assemblage of exposure and expression. It’s perfectly manifest in the precious shambles we find in limestone: each organism caught in some act of learning or teaching. These intricacies help us puzzle out trajectories of our own. The wild changes me; in turn I distill the wisdom for exchange. I don’t know whether salvation lies in this barter. I just know that when I enter a pub and tell a story about a puffin-strewn cliff above the boiling Atlantic or a tundra gorge etched with snow, a new thing is born — a child of the original experience. Like all children, it is full of promise.
The Ego Experiment: Individual Resolve
The pest of society is egotists. There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. ’Tis a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. … One of its annoying forms, is a craving for sympathy. The sufferers parade their miseries, tear the lint from their bruises, reveal their indictable crimes, that you may pity them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Culture” (1860)
Everyone has an ego — and you must believe in yourself to accomplish anything. As usual, it’s all a matter of degree. True narcissists are considered untreatable because they cannot admit imperfection and are expert at projecting their issues onto others. If directly confronted, a narcissist will immediately accuse the accuser — which can lead to useful self-examination. Just remember that unless you actively scheme to cause harm — and derive real pleasure from the misery of others — your ego is probably manageable.
I’ve learned that the only way to deal with a narcissist is not to deal — to absent yourself. I have five minutes and best wishes for everyone. If you want more of me, don’t blather on, noddingly, with false sincerity, about who I must hate and why. Don’t spin bullshit narratives about being ever hard-used, your own ruthlessness notwithstanding. I’m sorry for your pain but will not descend with you into the abyss.
However, it’s also important to question the trope that narcissists are lost souls. I’ve come to believe that at least some are treatable, but only if they themselves are the therapists. Holding out that hope for others means holding it out for ourselves, as we’re all afflicted, to some degree. It’s heroic for a deeply self-absorbed person to face up to the scope of his or her selfishness. But once that’s accomplished, the nano world of the vast ego can be steadily enlarged from the inside out. Others may be helpful, but expansion must come from within.
A primary difficulty is that narcissists are adroit at propagating their bullying behavior. If you grew up under the thumb of a toxic ego, you are a veteran of bully bootcamp. You know how the manipulation is done and have resorted to it, at least now and then, as a means of survival. All developing persons try on various ways of being and it’s natural to first try what you have been assiduously taught. However, you might well move on to another set of behaviors. It’s just a matter of emulating the right people.
If your egotism has festered to the point at which you get a thrill out of wounding others, you have a litany of loathsome habits to work on. The only hope is to condition yourself somehow, hardwiring your pleasure to the pleasure we can each generate so easily for others. A breathtaking transformation is always possible — at least, in theory. Fortunately, many bullies are moderately civilized and some, of every age, are still just mimics.
Living in a more humane, less bullying society begins and ends with the individual. The only way to recognize your own enabling behavior is to continually ask yourself if you’re acting out of kindness. Directly confronting a narcissist is a waste of time, but you can always find a creative way to avoid doing his or her bidding. If your boss is a narcissist, start looking for another job. He or she is not likely to change, as you keep hoping.
Self-examination is always necessary. If you find yourself ever eager to express disdain, if scorn is your go-to reaction, you have a problem. If you habitually make threats and stage drama, you have a problem. If you’re easily slighted and relive every slight, you have a problem. If you are hyper-competitive, you have a problem. You crush others as a matter of course and will find yourself, sooner or later, wondering why you can no longer find a hiking partner. At least you’re getting valuable feedback. If you are cursed with enormous wealth and power, an army of enablers will carry out your executions and service every delusion. Self-examination will never occur to you.
The great pastime of narcissists — hating others — is singularly profitless. It’s the ultimate expression of ego because it depends on the arrogant assumption that you know everything about a person. There’s something to admire in everyone, but an inflamed ego won’t look for it. And hatred blots every ledger. You might determinedly bankrupt someone, but at the cost of your own soul.
How might we find our way back from shallow, egotistic bluster to the greater good? How do we heal ourselves from the inside out? Our national conscience, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had some ideas about that. One of the fascinating things about Emerson is how often he anticipated Darwin. In “Culture” he uses evolutionary theory to deduce the function of self-love.
This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such necessity, that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which each individual persists to be what he is.
He goes on to establish its galling ubiquity.
… if a man seeks a companion who can look at objects for their own sake, and without affection or self-reference, he will find the fewest who will give him that satisfaction; whilst most men are afflicted with a coldness, an incuriosity, as soon as any object does not connect with their self-love. Though they talk of the object before them, they are thinking of themselves, and their vanity is laying little traps for your admiration.
What’s the antidote? Culture.
Culture is the suggestion from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities, through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses his balance, puts him among his equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.
Before examining various types of culture, Ralph Waldo returns to the over-arching context of natural selection.
Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them. To wade in marshes and sea-margins is the destiny of certain birds, and they are so accurately made for this, that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.
The antidotes against this organic egotism, are, the range and variety of attractions, as gained by acquaintance with the world, with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with eminent persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and religion: books, travel, society, solitude.
In other words, become cultured. Climb outside yourself. Be humbled by things not created or even touched by you. Feel awed by human genius and the atomic intelligence of nature. Praise everything deserving — and forget yourself in the process.
Each of us is absorbed in our own ego experiment. We’re saddled with it at birth. Ego is the concentrating force that enables us to succeed. But it’s also a distortion that can prevent us from recognizing the great potentialities beyond ourselves and the great souls that make life worth living — including our own. The best we can do is learn from each other. If we work tirelessly at turning outward — checking in with the cosmos, the muses, our fellow travelers — we might occasionally escape the shadow of the all-encompassing “I.” Our glimpses beyond ourselves might become loving looks. We might stretch those looks into meaningful lifetimes. There’s even the possibility of finding one true friend along the way.
Kevin Patrick McCarthy’s published work includes two nonfiction books, about 35 poems, and 60 essays. This work has been recognized by Bridport, The Poetry Society (UK), New Millennium, Common Ground, Steam Ticket, Southwestern American Literature, Writers Resist, The Chicago Tribune, The Mountain Gazette, The Bloomsbury Review, and others. “Porterhouse Jive” won the Vonnegut parody contest sponsored by the Denver Mayor’s Office in 2007. Spirit Rocks won a Silver REMI Award for dramatic screenplay at the 2008 Houston International Film Festival. Mortal Weather, a novel, placed in the 2020 University of New Orleans Press Lab contest and will be published by Top Reads Publishing on 26 September 2023.
Inga Piotrowska
Flight
Moving to another country
is learning to walk without a mother.
It’s getting used to a hole in your sock
’cause you’re scared of a needle prick
and mismatched thread would bring back
the times you didn’t fit in.
You let your toe out,
step on the dirty carpet,
with crumbs and dirt reminding you
it’s not home.
The sock will rip at the heel,
you’ll have to disinfect the wounds.
There will be no mum.
Inga Piotrowska is a Polish poet and translator currently living in Manchester, UK. Her first poetry book was published in Poland in 2018. Her English poetry was chosen to be published in harana poetry and Academy of the Heart and Mind. She received a BA in Psychology from Wellesley College, USA and an MA in English Literature from the University of York. She can speak four languages.
Ginnie Goulet Gavrin
That Kind of Morning
where daylight did not wait for dawn
but shattered the bedroom with light —
unwelcome intrusion as if sleep
had lost its place as sacrament
and dreams were invented to be interrupted.
The kind of morning my father
might appear in our bedroom doorframe,
his voice lowered from tenor to bass —
Look what God has given us — A New Day!
Spoken like a Baptist preacher,
lakeside before the palm press
to the forehead, the backward shove
into the cold and wet of saved oblivion.
Sleep was not allowed to have its way
with us. Dream-ridden daughters
sung to at night as if the allotted hours
of lull and drift were already spoken for
and did not have our names on them.
Instead, we were exhorted to slip
into a drowse just long enough to taste
dark’s forgiveness for languor. The eyes-closed
savoring. The sinking, solitary and unspoken.
To this day I prefer winter mornings. To rise
in the dark. Silence broken only by the first
stair creak. The kettle’s whisper of steam.
Unrepentant dim stirs, with its wordless
vocabulary, its own kind of mercy.
Where the dog weights the floor.
The children remain weightless in their beds.
The return to their bodies will be slow
and sweet, a promise kept with all
that remains unseen and forgotten.
What Makes You Happy?
Fragments. Spare, like an inverted miracle. I grew up on porch steps. Tricycles and hopscotch abandoned on cracked sidewalks in front of patchy lawns. White sheets smelling of sunlight in the back yard. Popsicles melting sticky on stubby fingers. We all went by a nickname, one or two syllables, ie on the end, as if formality could be ditched with a sigh at the bus stop.
Two story houses
rows of exclamation points
Stray happiness
Maples receive their sap buckets in the spring. I live in an old New England farmhouse. Hand-hewn beams chiseled by Amos, Abel, Thaddeus — long ago names fallen out of favor. Out in the field, the red fox pretends he doesn’t know us. In December, we leave candles in the windows in case a stranger gets lost, traveling the dark and wind, no starlight to tell one hill from another.
Happiness stranded
Wolf moon
entangled in snow clouds
Who is telling this story? Home, a category of joy, the out-breath when the door closes. The entryway holding onto its silence, its catalogue of boots and coats. Kitchen sink full of abandoned soup bowls, soaking. Heat clicking in pipes. Or windows open to bird calls and dewed summer stillness, the way presence recognizes presence, wordless after so many years.
The worn path
to hidden apple trees
Shaded happiness
Ginnie Goulet Gavrin worked as a massage therapist for over twenty-five years. Currently she teaches meditation and writing workshops at the Monadnock Mindfulness Practice Center in Keene, New Hampshire. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in The Literary Review, The Worcester Review, THEMA, Primavera, Slipstream, Oyster River Pages, Leaping Clear, The Greensboro Review, Rewilding: A Split Rock Anthology, Cold Mountain Review, Tar River Poetry, and Silk Road Review.
Greg Feinberg
Greg Feinberg is a professional naturalist from Minneapolis, MN. He has been a naturalist at Westwood Hills Nature Center for 23 years. He lives with his wife, two teenage children and two cats (who also occasionally show up in his work as observers of natural phenomena). He does all the things you’d expect of a naturalist and is as interested in a remote woodland as a patch of weeds in an abandoned urban lot. Greg is also a musician. He currently plays bass in the progressive death metal band Ysilik and creates experimental music and lo-fi animations under the name Salamander Key. Website: www.distractednaturalist.com / Instagram: @distracted_naturalist
David A. Goodrum
David A. Goodrum is a writer/photographer living in Corvallis, Oregon. His poems are forthcoming or have been published in The Inflectionist, The San Antonio Review, Spillway, Star 82 Review, The Write Launch, The Closed Eye Open, and other journals. Additional work (poetry and photography) can be viewed at www.davidgoodrum.com, on Twitter @goodrum, and on Instagram @goodrum.
John Paul Caponigro
Talk
The doorbell rang six times before my mother figured out it was the mynah bird. “Hello, my name’s Zebedy, what’s yours?” Someone left the kettle on the stove again. The cat meowed, sleeping. Later the baby cried, but there was no baby. We swore the feathered mischief could imitate the sound of a toilet flushing.
His timing was impeccable. There were wolf whistles at all the wrong times. Minutes before the evening news, he’d grow agitated and start inquiring. “Is it half five?” After the television was turned on, the static dispersed, and the test pattern faded, he’d change his tune. “The world’s destroyed!” Then the bird whistled a slow descending lament. Finally, he’d cluck. When we laughed, he laughed. When we sighed, he cried.
I wondered, did he do all that just to stay in play in a constantly changing game, where no one knew the rules, much less the point, but never wanted to see the end of? I asked him repeatedly. Did he really understand? His reply was always the same, “Give us a kiss.”
John Paul Caponigro is an internationally collected visual artist and published author. He leads unique adventures in the wildest places on earth to help participants creatively make deeper connections with nature and themselves. View his TEDx and Google talks at www.johnpaulcaponigro.art/poetry.
Nadia Ramoutar
Nadia Ramoutar is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. She is heavily influenced by the wild world of her home in Wicklow, the Garden of Ireland. She is an advocate for authentic connection with our natural selves in a world that distracts us with doubt and commercialism. Website: www.freemymojo.com
Sandee Gertz
Transplanting the Rose Bush, Pennsylvania to Nashville
“Don’t give up a rose for dead because canes are leafless, black and dead-looking.”
—“How to Save a Dying Rose Bush,” Home and Garden Care
My son digs the hole at midnight
on his 31st birthday, after 12 hours at work,
in hard shoes, no gloves to protect against
the thorns of the dying rose bush
my late father planted in 1972.
He’d kept it alive for 40 years in an impossible
slip of dirt and gravel we were given
by the milltown’s zero lot lines.
“It’ll never grow there,” the old neighbors warned.
“Nice things should be in a garden.”
But they bloomed in the Old-World soil of
Dale Borough, a place of magic immigrants
all placing their hands around steel like
winter people around a fire.
And my father tended to them as he did every shingle
of the house, measuring and nailing, next to mother’s mopping
of every floorboard where three boys wrestled
to adolescence and a girl dressed Barbies.
Until she nursed babies in its attic bedrooms
and wedding showers were toasted with the goblets
from mother’s China closet with the heavy doors.
I went back to find the house a ruins,
the Bavarian iron numerals of the cellar
door “191” now a 6 hanging upside down.
I stood at the gate of it all, though nothing
held me back, except my parent’s bedroom window
open to rats, the gas shut off notice on the porch
next to a welcome mat that still said “Home.”
They say this place is blight, yet some neighbors
still hold up painted balustrades and hose
out their trash cans with lavender soap.
I think back to how my mother told me not to
cross to the house on the corner where Jackie
smoked cigarettes and didn’t go to church.
The “Condemned” sign the talk of the tidy
borough then, the dust the only thing rising
that day the bulldozers pulled out and drove away.
So I carried the branches of the rose bush
in the backseat of my car – under a tree of weeds there were
still pink blooms. Two 80-year-old neighbors dug them
up for me the next day, saying “we saw your face fall”
seeing the house: “This’ll last you until you get there.”
And yet it’s been a week, too hot in the South
to go outside, no garden tools, a list of excuses,
until my son comes over to clink glasses and eat cake.
And we talk about how it’s my Dad’s birthday too
and laugh about how last year he was shoveling
for buried treasure using a note his grandfather
had left in his papers.
“We have to plant it now.”
Somehow I know it has just one day to live.
We put down our glasses and he digs
as I think about all the things one can kill
with action or inaction.
My father would have never traveled to Tennessee
and yet I stand there expecting the shallow soil
to receive the roots, that they will take like
the branding of his Western Pennsylvania
work ethic and the shared roots of teeth
that never managed to grow an incisor.
If it blooms, I imagine giving each brother
a cutting of this ancient past.
I hold the flashlight as my son digs
for my father, for their shared names
and hidden fears, though neither of us speaks.
I am thinking about the girl who grew up with roses
jutting out from the cracks of sidewalks
and how she never knew that the difference between being
blessed and condemned is a thin, fine measurement.
As the thorn spikes lower into the earth
she sees they are both green and brown.
And in her past, she remembers how Jackie’s house
became a garden.
Sandee Gertz is a poet and writer from Western Pennsylvania, now living in Nashville, Tennessee. She is the author of The Pattern Maker’s Daughter, a collection of poetry published by Bottom Dog Press in 2012. Her poems and other prose have appeared in Poet Lore, Gargoyle, Green Mountains Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Northern Appalachian Review, and more. She has been a PA Commonwealth Fellowship recipient in Poetry, was the winner of the Sandburg-Livesay Award, and has been a finalist for the Porch Prize in Fiction and Poetry. She is currently working to complete a novel and teaches Creative Writing at Cumberland University.
