Cover image: "A Quiet Walk" by Lena Neris Gemmer
Gallery 1
conjure phantoms / conjure light
Ann E. Wallace
Flashpoint
Some years, spring’s greatest
deceptions are daffodils
and cherry trees flashing
their gaudy colors
before a blizzard,
sparking benign outrage
among the lucky
who don’t know to hush
and hold hope
that we might pass
through these weeks
of growth and tumult
unscathed.
Ann E. Wallace, Poet Laureate of Jersey City, New Jersey, is an English Professor at New Jersey City University. She is author of the poetry collection Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag) and has published work in Huffington Post, Wordgathering, Halfway Down the Stairs, Snapdragon, and many other journals. She is online at www.AnnWallacePhD.com and on Instagram @annwallace409.
Ellen Girardeau Kempler
Apparition
Even an old rose,
long thought dead,
can return to bloom.
You size up
the gray wood
and study the green.
Then you stand back
to see the plant’s ghost-
shape emerge like an apparition
from days you a dug a hole, sliced
through wrapping, freed and stretched
the roots around a mound of soil,
covered them with earth and compost,
then watered until the bare canes sprouted
and flowered. There are no blossoms now.
You conjure their phantom colors,
so real you can almost catch their fragrance
on the air—spicy, with a citrus twist.
The familiar flowers fountain
from tall bushes along a path
you’ve walked before. Dressed
in satin, you peer through a veiled hat,
shearing the best apricot roses
for your bouquet, with purple violets
and ageless sprigs of green.
Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s poems have appeared in the Mindful Poetry Anthology, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Narrative Northeast, Writers Resist, Phoenix Rising Review, Gold Man Review, Orbis International Poetry Quarterly and many other small presses and anthologies. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” her chapbook Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press.
J. Alan Nelson
The power is out
and won’t come back for weeks.
despite the age of tech wonder.
We burn nonessential things
for warmth.
The metal that holds the slats
in the old baby cradle reddens
like romance words.
I drink coffee
warm from the baby cradle fire.
I turn over a penny
found in the cradle,
study Lincoln’s profile
and see same year our child was born.
My wife puts our absent son’s dog
in the bedroom
away from the cat’s food.
A text ticks on my phone
I keep powered with a solar charger.
“I’m an observational poet. Be my friend.”
I erase it. Out the window
the oak older than me waits
through the hard freeze
in the side pasture.
I remember when longhorns grazed
in its shade.
I sense tree soul quiet
with roots that stretch
under the house
as a giant hand
to cradle me.
I toss the penny in the cradle fire,
feel my face redden.
I drink coffee,
but nod off to sleep.
J. Alan Nelson has work published or forthcoming in journals including New York Quarterly, B O D Y, Conjunctions, Stand, Acumen, Pamplemousse, Main Street Rag, Texas Observer, California Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Adirondack Review, Red Cedar Review, Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, Kairos, Ligeia, Strange Horizons, Illuminations, Review Americana, Whale Road Review and North Dakota Quarterly. He has received nominations for Best of the Net poetry and Best Microfiction. He also played the lead in the viral video “Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay?” and the verbose “Silent Al” in the Emmy-winning SXSWestworld.
Yuko Kyutoku
Yuko Kyutoku was born in Aichi in Japan. Having grown up both next to the mountain and rivers, her love of nature and the outdoors grew tremendously. Throughout her life, Yuko has always been fascinated by images and how the world is represented through the eyes of others. The interest was further developed when she opted to take her bachelor’s degree in Fine Art, painting, drawing, and printmaking at SUNY Purchase College in New York. After completing her degree, Yuko delved even more into her art practice and discovered a new field, art therapy. She then graduated from New York University with her master’s degree in art therapy. She is currently working as a therapist at the children’s hospital in the city where she offers art therapy to support children with mental issues and severe disabilities.
Steve Fay
the birds
there is no
bird
with a human body
but there are
sparrows
trapped amid your
ribs
or are they
orioles
in your
ventricles pecking
pulp from
your pulse
or crows
or crows calling
other crows
saying look at
all
this suet here
and all
these
birds retreat
to bushes to
brush piles
when it rains and under
bridges
where birds will
always go
where birds can never
be escaped
Steve Fay’s work has recently appeared (or is forthcoming) in Comstock Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Menacing Hedge, Spoon River Poetry Review, Temenos, and TriQuarterly. His collection what nature: Poems was published by Northwestern University Press in 1998. He lives in Fulton County, Illinois.
Joel Barker
River Tells
We could just go to watch, maybe in the afternoon.
In the years since we have been there The Metolius has shifted its hips in the forest as all rivers do.
But we find it the same way that we did before, walking from a pullout off the road run roughly parallel.
Find a steep dirt place and sit. As time passes the clearness tinted blues and greens that tells of every fish and foot
will become blackness to us,
spattered with short-lived stars.
The river is nothing, no place.
It is at a hundred places that know nothing of each other.
Each leans against the river, setting themselves into the river’s persistence.
The water we watched is already gone and does not return. The river is not water.
A memory, a nothing. Lethe turns and bites herself.
The water rolls across her knuckles like a trick. Everything we see might
be a trick of memory.
We could finally sink into the ice water, forget and be rinsed to honesty.
But even trapped in memory, held just on the hips of forgetfulness, there is an appetite to stay still while whatever is the river continues to stitch and tear.
Remember all the ages that did come and all the ages that could not come
To the bridge, the market, the hatch of flies and fish rise.
We can return to a river and it will return to us
Eddying and engulfing old ghosts of old trees.
It’ll be dark when we leave, wending ourselves back through the trees to the old road.
That forgetfulness would give us honesty and understanding if we were willing to finally sink into the ice water.
Bear and human and kingfisher and kokanee. We eye the water and know of the river. The river does not creep after us, just shifts hips, spreading wide one bank to crowd ponderosa and filling silt in at the other.
Joel Barker lives in Central Oregon where he submits himself to the desert and the rivers. He publishes occasionally to joelbyronbarker.medium.com. He is proud to have been one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of Clandestine Urban Scribes (hocus.ink).
Raquel Reyes-Lopez
Not My Garden
Mother grabs at fresh bought produce. Tosses kale,
carrots, and cilantro into trash bin. She cannot trust
vegetables, fruits, or herbs today.
I show her a receipt. Time stamp states my purchase
was made three hours ago. Mother calls me a liar.
She thinks I arrive only to plot medicinal traps.
Not even olive oil is spared. She breaks its seal,
pours all of it out into sink, and yells, “Buy it again!”
I cannot. I have no money, not until my next paycheck.
Mother walks to laundry room, pulls out a gallon
of bleach, and places it by kitchen counter. She fills
a pot with water and keeps a flame on high.
She grabs chicken from freezer. It has yet to thaw.
She throws it into the pot, plastic wrap still on it,
but I cannot take it anymore, and I turn off fire.
She gets upset and asks, “What are you doing?”
I grab the bleach and walk to my bathroom. I lock
door behind me. This is a mistake.
My action triggers her. She runs towards door.
Would she hit me if there was not something
in between us?
Mother screams, “I was going to do your laundry!”
She kicks and kicks at the door, suddenly silence.
Mother whispers, “This home is not your garden.”
Raquel Reyes-Lopez is slowly reawakening from creative hibernation. She welcomes you to join her in this rebirth. A gentle reminder for her audience, she is carving a no-pressure journey. Pack your survival kits, extra batteries, and flashlight, because sometimes you have to wait, until she’s ready to share. Instagram: @raquel4poet
Leslie Lindsay
Leslie Lindsay’s work focuses on deteriorating architecture. These structures, designed to be forces of permanence, are continually being challenged, destroyed and forgotten. Among the shards of wood, layers of rubble, chipping coats of paint—there remains a gentle resolve. These buildings, often on the brink of ruin, possess an energized present as they attempt to escape their fragmented reality. Her photography and writing have been featured in various online and print publications, including The Millions, Brevity, CRAFT Literary, DIAGRAM, Brushfire Arts & Literature, Mud Season Review, Invisible City, Another Chicago Magazine, and Tiferet Journal, and shortlisted in The Manhattan Review. Leslie can be found on Twitter and Instagram @leslielindsay1 as well as at www.leslielindsay.com.
Brandyce Ingram
All the doing we’re doing
After Ama Codjoe’s “Etymology of a Mood”
My hands are mazes spanning across
possibilities of what they could be doing.
The first, lifting and lowering a tea bag,
The second, gripping a wheel,
The third, thumb-typing a device too big for it
The fourth, blindly feeling for a pen in my purse
The fifth, pressing an elevator button
The sixth, plugging an ear from sirens
And so on
There are only six for me
the other six disobeyed the rituals
set out for them
and my nervous system crashed.
They are not amber-dipped
but made of fibers, pre-programmed
to type the same stories over and over again.
The ones who don’t work fall away,
expanding away from the limbs that bore them
until they’re waving goodbye to Earth
and kerplunk onto a planet, singed,
bearing wrinkles that tell the tale
of human existence: feverish doing.
One particular planet, inhabited by fallen hands,
castaways, rejects, orphans
claps so loud the galaxy plugs its ears
and all the hands turn to fists
the veins of the universe pop and stars giggle
because they’ve seen it all before.
But one star cries
and, fully steeped, I drink it in.
Brandyce Ingram is a writer, tutor, and jazz-head in Austin, TX. Her work has appeared in High Shelf Press, Sand Hills Lit Mag, OxMag, Wingless Dreamer’s anthology An Evening with Emily Dickinson, and elsewhere. She is currently researching 20th-century lunatic asylums for a special project.
Alli Mancz
Describe Your Pain (1)
There are bees in our ceiling. It’s the mid-heat of summer, and my parents and sisters and I are younger than we are now. The nest is located in my sisters’ ceiling (they share a room) and it’s Jess who first discovers it, her bed bunked on top. She notices a scratching sound all day—like a squirrel’s trapped in the attic—where the ceiling has begun to sag and stretch down. It lays thin, imitates tissue paper.
She shows me one morning, grazing the bump with her fingernails, how the scratching stops. Then, on cue, it starts up again. And Jess repeats the process, both of us giggling.
***
Now 23, a set of degenerative discs forms a swarm of bees in my right foot, some days threading themselves up my calf, other days softly humming near the base of my toes. Some days I don’t feel them at all. But I know they stay, the nerve quick to buzz with the wrong bend in my back, the slouched posture of a tired spine.
They’re more like hornets actually—they seem too menacing to be honeybees. They expand, cause a tightness and compression in my foot, but they never break through. I’ll never get to see them working, busy as the day fades.
***
Hive distance matters. Bees are social creatures, only departing five, maybe six, miles away at most from their hives to scavenge for food, water, and mates. The smaller the radius, the happier the bee because they know to stay close to home.
***
The bulging wallpaper and scratching above my sisters’ bunk bed encourages my father to call an exterminator. The man on the other end says it’s too hot for most things to live day and night in that tight crawl space; he’ll come take a look. We know something’s there.
***
Be patient be kind be attentive be cautious be safe be kind be careful be strong be wary be cautious be kind.
***
We’re walking in Ohio and my mother confesses, “If it was just closer, I would have flown out there on so many weekends. I would have driven, would have flown—it’s just so far.” She hugs me and I understand, having just flown the 1,700 miles home from Arizona myself. A busy bee with a death wish. And I’ll be flying back again soon; it’s just this week I have here until a return to living alone. “I know, Mom, I know. It is just too far.” I hold her a little tighter after that.
***
Honeybees don’t have long lifespans. Workers last about a month, a little over that if they’re lucky, while queens can live several years. Metaphorical bees, however, may be chronic. Prone to last.
***
My uncle Ben raises honeybees as a hobby. He’s harvested jars of their labor over the last couple years, made chapstick with the wax. But he’s also gravely allergic, baseball-bumps swelling with each sting. Ben could easily suffer from anaphylactic shock and there I remember him standing one day, intentionally trapping himself in my grandparents’ garage and letting all his bees hover above him. Happy.
A child at the time, I watch from behind the screen door in fear as he watches too, hundreds of these winged creatures floating above his bare, thin skin. Confident they’ll never break through.
***
If the bees go, we all go. My bees go and I might wish they’d stay. They’ve become my private stress gauge, scratching at the skin whenever I feel followed on the street, while walking by myself downtown. And they’re quiet as my mother and I cook in the kitchen back home, us drinking red wine, me threading marinated mushrooms and onions and peppers on wooden skewers. Her butter frying and sizzling side-to-side in the pan.
If they went silent, I don’t know how I’d respond. I’d probably just worry over when they’d come home again.
***
My father watches the window near my sisters’ bedroom, observing the constant influx of bees processing in and out, and realizes. When the exterminator comes and evaluates our attic, he says we’re lucky. There were over a thousand bees humming above my sisters’ heads, the ceiling somehow holding strong. The wallpaper about to burst.
Describe Your Pain (2)
Even before my diagnosis, my mind otherwise blank, grasping for metaphor, I have always referred to the numbness and tingling in my body as shooting stars. It’s the phrase that’s always felt accurate, all-encompassing. Within my body, I hold a galaxy of stars.
***
Recently, I’ve discovered their presence concentrated in my right foot, the webbing between my big and index toes sparking during almost every movement in my day. Dawn and Cheryl are convinced such flares arise from the specific compression of my L5-S1 lumbar disc. Textbook case.
But we should all know better: origins are as elusive in healthcare as they are in the galaxy.
***
Meteor showers diverge from the definition of a single shooting star, often predicted and cascading in groups—perhaps then mine are more like showers: I know generally what movements will trigger their response, brighten their anger. And they’re never alone, one pulse and done. It’s more like passing through a trail of them, each colliding within my body at different speeds and places and times.
***
When the numbness begins, I won’t fly for months, fearful of what it means to be closer again (just barely) to the stars, 40,000 feet in the sky. In early spring, I decide I’m ready. No, I have to be ready; I have to go home.
So I drive the two-something hours from Flagstaff to Phoenix, only to re-commence sitting, boarding a delayed flight bound for Ohio. We do (eventually) take off, and in the next four-something hours, my right foot will swell, skin pressing and creasing against the inside of loosened New Balance sneakers. It will tingle as well, numb and throbbing as I raise myself for the first-second-third-fourth time and stand in the bathroom, leaning against the door, nerves reorienting.
It creates a kind of empathy as I reconsider:
This is what it must feel like inside my spinal canal.
***
As a child, there were summer and autumn nights I remember waking up to watch meteor showers. Dad always knew when something of the sort was happening, a devoted Dayton Daily News patron and voracious reader on all things nature. These showers were scientifically predicted, though sporadic, and my parents would set midnight alarms and spread out quilts on the backyard lawn or basketball court. And we’d all lay there, gazing; me mesmerized.
***
Less than three months from now, I am set to fly across the Atlantic. I am set to defy time. I will know when my body will swell, why my right side will numb. And I will watch as day becomes night becomes day, and I will feel again so close to the stars. For eight hours straight, I’ll want to swallow them.
But I am terrified, terrified of what my future galaxy might have to say, if the pain will veer off its expected course.
***
At an earlier time—more likely over several years—this galaxy was still forming, still building up gas and dust and plasma yet to converge into my body’s effervescence. But now it’s frequently pulsing, vibrant. A sky full of distant fires, buzzing and stirring like city nights watched from above the jet stream.
And I can’t stop crying, can’t stop thinking I’m too small. I’m too small. To carry that universe, a whole universe, a Milky Way inside me whenever I rise to stand or lift arms too quickly, too high overhead.
***
As I walk beneath flickering lampposts in Flagstaff one night, I see a shooting star. I’m looking up at the sky, contemplating my size, import, value, and it gleams past me. A tail of radiance, then gone. I’ve never seen one so clearly, so elegantly arced, and I tell Michael over FaceTime that night. You’ll never believe this—I saw a shooting star!
He asks, what did you wish for?
I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting this response. Nothing, I say, and he playfully chides me, that’s the one thing you’re supposed to do.
Describe Your Pain (3)
I am volunteering alongside our group of students in Scotland at the Water of Leith—a river choked by greenery, lined with stinging nettles sprouting upwards and outwards this time of year. We’re clearing this city walkway (one of my favorite greenways) with shears, shovels, and scissors: anything to open up the path for a daily hiker’s or biker’s commute.
Nettles, much like the other species of flora here, are plants of prolific overgrowth (think mulberry trees in the Midwest), but they remain hidden to me in the morning light. I don’t notice their unextraordinary green and pointed leaves, and so I hack away uninhibited at any and all overhanging foliage until it’s time for coffee and tea biscuits.
Only later that afternoon do I realize the plants’ presence on the trail, my exposed ankles having racked through them for hours. Their scratching—in the moment imperceptible—now produces a constant, heated pricking deep into the evening. A residue which envelops the fronts and sides of both shins.
It’s the closest sensation to nerve pain I will ever experience in nature:
It thrills me.
***
Urtica dioica, known as the “common” or “stinging” nettle, is a fertile and ample flowering perennial, often found in damp environments and temperate climes. When picking real-estate, nettles mirror their human counterparts: they often root and bud near our homes and in our gardens.
What protects this plant—what bestows its name—are not the “toothed” leaves themselves but their tiny, piercing hairs which cover each leaf’s surface. These hairs, trichomes, inoculate us (human) irritants with histamine and acetylcholine every time we venture too close or manage even a soft graze. And this combo of chemicals activates our nervous system, produces inflammation, and results in the “stinging” we disdain. The hairs snap, causing our skin to rise and itch and warn us: back off.
***
Before my twenties, I had similarly been “stung” by nettles, though the exposure was only as brief as taking a piss. A group of us were hiking through the Eildon hills near Melrose in Scotland, and after a couple hours out on the trail, I realized I couldn’t wait until we reached town to pee. The pressure above my pelvis was increasing in intensity and frequency; I was becoming desperate.
I asked a friend to wait behind, and she, to no surprise, had to go, too. We didn’t meander more than a couple of feet off the path, quickly tugging down shorts and squatting over the brush below. The release was euphoric but the following pain, unexpected. Readjusting my clothes, I felt a slight—then empowered—burn crawling up both sides of my glutes. I scratched at the skin, placed more and more pressure on each spot. But the buzz only glowed, spreading further in what seemed like seconds.
A flame beneath layers of tissue began taking root, feverishly turning from orange-to-red-to-blue.
***
It is rumored that crushed dock leaves—Rumex obtusifolius—can help ease the symptoms of a stinging nettle’s touch. Dock and nettles are often found growing together, placing the natural pairing in proximity, but there exists no scientific evidence to back the claim. Perhaps it is the cooling touch of a dock leaf’s sap or just placebo that allows the myth to live on.
You’re more likely to find healing in alkaline substances: soap, milk, a diluted baking soda mix. Each counteract the nettle’s (needle’s) acid and act as antihistamines, calming the irritation from scream to murmur. These can help, but bottom line, you’ll have to wait it out. The rash can only heal with time, as the cure rests in decreasing inflammation. Much like a spine.
***
Now into my twenties, having felt the fiery fingers of nerve pain, I study these nettle-stinging ankles with a new kind of curiosity. I think, thank God I didn’t wear shorts. And remembering from the Melrose hike years before, I knew the tingling would eventually pass, fade with my memory of the hills. I just had to be patient, to keep hanging in there, no milk or baking soda on hand.
But there was a strange joy in this ache, too, the way it moved and mimicked what once was a normal course for my body to produce (sans needled plant). Weeks before our Water of Leith clearing, a similar soreness had crept into my legs as my bulging discs became provoked from so much travel. The sciatica beat like a pulse, rhythmic and unrelenting.
This batch of stinging nettles offered much of the same pain but affected both legs rather than just the right. What surprised me most: that’s the only way I could tell the difference.
***
I must concede it’s not fair to only paint this painful picture of nettles; many laud its host of ecological and medical benefits. These plants provide habitat for their fellow (nonhuman) beings, a steady food supply for others. They can be used to make and color clothing, to fashion twine. They’ve fed our livestock and flavored our tea and soothed our joints for centuries.
And they’ve reminded me, personally, of how pain can be transient:
Can return time and time again.
Alli Mancz is an emerging writer, essayist, and advocate. Her work is forthcoming in bioStories and prose.onl, and has also previously appeared in Scribendi, merging matters of a Midwestern self and meditations on sexual assault with surrounding ecologies. She currently studies as an MFA candidate at Northern Arizona University, teaching English Composition and Creative Writing while serving as the Editor-in-Chief of Thin Air Magazine. Her portfolio contains pieces that intertwine research and medical memoir in a hybrid format, combining lyrical prose with scientific data and self-reflection. Mancz lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, and can often be found hiking amidst the ponderosa pine.
Fiona Vaughan
How you feel (Triboniophorus graeffei)
As the sky fades, a red triangle slug sails
across the wide expanse of window
that separates garden
from living-room.
Their yellow foot becomes a silhouette
against a tree-laced sky
before I close the curtains
and conjure light.
On smooth-barked eucalypts
meandering chains of spooning arcs
mark where the slugs have eaten algae
and dance with my eyes.
I want to know but don’t know how to ask…
do you sleep?
do you like the feel of cool tree-skin
against your flesh?
do you sense the leaves in canopies
conversing with the wind?
do you have names for moss, mucus, rain,
fear?
does the air that enters you feel warmer as it goes?
do you, as I do, like
how eucalypts soften the sun?
Fiona Vaughan is a photographer and writer living on Darug and Gundungurra Country in the Blue Mountains in Australia. She has worked as a photographs conservator and a bush regenerator. Her photographs have appeared in group exhibitions in the Blue Mountains, Sydney and Melbourne and in award finalist exhibitions including the Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture and the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award. Fiona took part in the post-bushfire ‘Recovery’ eco-arts project, run by the Blue Mountains World Heritage Institute, and her photos and poems appear in the resulting online exhibition. Her creative practice is inspired by the beauty and intricacy of nature and a desire to communicate that to others and spark a sense of wonder and connection. Instagram: @fionavaughannature
Jillian Hanson
High Summer
The house opened a seam
and a wasp leaked in.
Thread-waisted, it
disturbed the air
in the bathroom
like a bad thought
unsettles an empty mind,
so I closed the door.
Beyond the window
summer strutted.
Neon blades bearded
the skin of the cove.
Leather birch leaves
rotated on a breeze,
like a queen’s hand
slow and important
working a crowd.
When the wasp lay
dark and quiet on
the tiles, I sucked it up
with the hand-vac,
offered its segments
to the bin, and walked
out—into the swank
of high summer. As if
I too cared only for heat
and show. The crabapple,
knuckled with hard fruit,
pretended not to know bees.
Hungry
Some days
are so hungry
I can’t be
satisfied.
I devour
solid hours,
slurp day-
light thru
a straw.
Drain the sky
without
getting
drunk.
I snack on
salted memories,
on my own
organs,
on Insta
reels and
old novels
and bitter
grapes.
Spit seeds.
I go online
and order
everything,
the whole
internet.
Wait by
the mailbox,
all teeth
and fork.
I lie on
the couch
exhausted
by my want.
Famished,
but for what?
When I was
pregnant
I craved
the smell
of lavender.
Carried a tiny
stoppered
pot in my
pocket to
take the
searing
edge off
of making
someone
new.
I haven’t
learned much
but I know this:
the shape
hunger takes
is a body.
The action
of longing
fills and
empties,
fills and
empties.
Stomach,
womb,
lungs,
ocean. I’m
dry as
driftwood.
Light as
a bobbing
cork at
the mercy
of strange
tides.
Let them
have me,
then. I’ll
throw
myself in.
Won’t
even try
to hold
my breath.
Jillian Hanson is a poet, collagist, and creative consultant with Blue Sky Black Sheep (www.blueskyblacksheep.com). She lives on a lake in Maine and is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.
James Engelhardt
Candles
they fret
rolling around in drawers
stacked in cardboard in linen closets
jammed onto metal spikes
and they yearn
to be touched with fire
and it feeds, the fire does
on air, on wax, the slow food
of the cotton wick
so you can see or cook
or bewitch a thousand moths
and they will die
like a thousand small suns on the back deck
as the moon winks at you from clouds
and the night asks
where you keep the candles
because it will be dark a long time
and the air is cold
and the hunger you feel
is all the hungers of a long life
fed a little wax, a little cotton
a spark of wanting just a little more
James Engelhardt’s poems have appeared in the North American Review, Hawk and Handsaw, ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, Terrain.org, Painted Bride Quarterly, Fourth River, and many others. His ecopoetry manifesto is “The Language Habitat,” and his book, Bone Willow, is available from Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press. He lives in the South Carolina Upstate and is a lecturer in the English Department at Furman University.
Christine Scanlon
Light Play Trinity
Kisses call up humility
Of their life in the daytime
They thought
So sweetly
One mouth without was fine
(On this face. Improperly opening. Shutting)
The one who had been seen
That face held
Little dignity anymore
& opened up with ugly burning
Untiluntil it did not please
Watchful eyes
He had them
(Opening. Shutting)
Domestic scenes
He made them out to be
Dwarf moons circling
His fantasies
Drifting as so many words from his mouth
Untiluntil a change of fantasies
In cool damp
As morning sank.
Christine Scanlon has a book of poems, A Hat on the Bed (Barrow Street Press), and work published in Adjacent Pineapple, Black Sun Lit (digital), Dream Pop Press, Flag + Void, La Vague, and Prelude. She is currently a poetry reader at The Adroit Journal and lives in Brooklyn, NYC.
Lena Neris Gemmer
Lena Neris Gemmer is originally from the quiet foggy town of Montara, CA where she began her love of writing on her grandfather’s Remington Rand typewriter. Before deciding to pursue her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at UNH, she received her BA in English and History at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. As a nonfiction writer, she believes in connecting to her readers on a visceral human level by experimenting with structure, form, and voice.
Marcia Arrieta
sometimes
she thinks she’s a poem or a railroad
there are many destinations stops
poem railroad camellia
she arranges the sun & the moon
calibrates wonder
in the Hebrides the skies are in flux
she has forgotten the time
she the keeper of trees of small spaces between
Marcia Arrieta is a poet & artist whose work can be found in Word For/Word, Otoliths, The Inflectionist Review, Osiris, Anastamos, The Meadow, DASH, Cloudbank, Otis Nebula, Sylvia, Pensive, Spectra, and Borrowed Solace, among others. Her recent books are within sky (BlazeVOX, 2022) and through time waves (Arteidolia, 2022), with a chapbook thereof forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She edits & publishes Indefinite Space, a poetry/art journal.
