Cover image: "Door" by Jeannie E. Roberts
Gallery 3
so beautifully here
Rachel Baila
to connection in the yucca mesa sand
what crows lie here, licorice feathers
speckled by death and sand?
wings weighted by brimstone
and too many i don’t knows
and maybe laters. who followed me here?
this solstice sun and a man
with tobacco-stained lips ride the wave
of sweat and crimson firelight
with fierce, euphonic sweetness.
goat mountain vibrates a thousand secrets,
but all i feel is breathe. breathe. breathe.
Rachel Baila is a writer, holistic-healing practitioner, educator, and editor based in beautiful East Tennessee. Her poetry, articles, and travel-writing have been published in numerous journals, but her soft spot is with Fauxmoir Lit Mag, where she serves as chief editor. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and a Master of Arts in Teaching, as well as further education in literacy studies. She can be found on Instagram @baila_rae and @fauxmoir_lit_mag and on Twitter @baila_rae and @fauxmoir.
Karen Keefe
While in the Woods
My sister sent me an article, “Walking in Nature Will Help You Heal.”
Today, late September air hums with heat and dry leaf dust.
Mid-way up the water tower path
I wish for a hat and sunglasses
and start to fall.
You are not here to lead the way.
You know the dangers
of drought, steep paths, rocks, and my frail state.
I think about being with you.
How it all went wrong.
That short hike.
Unexpected storms catch us on a steep hillside.
The air is wind, rain, thunder, lightning,
the whole deal,
we try for safety but
I slip in the mud and fall.
You stop to help me up and fall too.
Before we get down that slope
we are a mess dead bugs
moss sticks and stones
all melded together
all clothed in thick skunk-soaked mud
we stand there laughing at each other
each looking like a sci-fi monster, a creature from the ooze.
Before we make it home to the shower
the itching starts.
Two nights later you wake up with a fever so high
you don’t know where you are.
You don’t know who I am.
All this because you turned around to help me.
Today I stop moving
get on my hands and knees
crawl straight across the path
into some brush and tree cover
I let the ground take me.
Leaves, twigs, and dirt dust blow over me,
caress my face, cover my legs, and bring tears.
Karen Keefe was one of the editors of The Parlor City Review. Her work is published or forthcoming in Anima, Anti-Heroin Chic, Silver Birch Press, unstamatic, Poetry as Promised, and POETiCA Review. She lives in Vestal, NY. She can be found on Twitter @karen_keef and on Instagram @dragonkkg.
Rachel Richmond
you can’t remember which friends are dead
You’re all sharing sandwiches,
the kind of sandwiches you
used to pack in your backpacks
to bring to the creek after classes,
and you’re at that very same creek,
and Will’s lighting your cigarette
for you (you never used to smoke,
and you can’t remember why
you started, but it doesn’t matter
because you are all here,
so beautifully here),
and you step into the water
and it feels like a summer that never
happened (why didn’t it happen?
You can’t recall),
and you can’t remember
which of your friends are dead,
and maybe none of them are,
maybe you’ve all been here all along,
at this creek, eating these sandwiches,
maybe you’re still
fifteen, and maybe you’re twenty-two,
and maybe you’re seventeen,
and maybe you’re every age you’ve ever
been all at once,
and maybe none of them died.
Will’s lighting your cigarette for you
and he says, pretty girls don’t
light their own cigarettes
and Shea says, but sexy bitches do
and you’ve missed their banter
(why did you miss their banter?
You’ve been here all along)
and you can’t remember
which friends are dead,
and Bert’s playing his ukulele,
he’s playing your favorite song
that he learned just for you,
which he prefaces with
God you’re so emo, and you hug him
and you breathe him in deep,
his smell all honeysuckle and safety,
and you realize you’d forgotten
what he smells like (why did you forget?
You’ve been here all along)
and Marcus skips a rock
across the river and Sofia takes a sip
out of a bottle of Smirnoff without
grimacing and Jonathan points
at the way that the golden sunlight
filters through the foliage
and says, look how beautiful
and the sunlight looks like home,
like Christmas lights strung up
on your family’s old fake tree,
and Em is peeling clementines,
not minding the way that the grit
of the peels gets stuck
underneath their fingernails,
and Kate and Ali are eating the citric
slices and Nat is giving himself
a stick-n-poke of a bandaid
on his knee and Becca’s
dipping her toes into the water
and saying, holy fuck it’s cold
and everyone you ever loved
is here, all your friends
are here, and you can’t
remember which ones are dead.
Rachel Richmond is a senior at Hollins University majoring in English. She is an editor for Gravel Magazine, and spends her time writing and spending time with her dogs. Her work has been seen in American High School Poets: Just Poetry anthology, as well as a Hollins University anthology about mental health. She writes as a form of healing, as well as a passion.
Jeannie E. Roberts
Jeannie E. Roberts’ work appears in online journals, magazines, and print anthologies, including Anti-Heroin Chic, Blue Heron Review, Braided Way Magazine, Bramble, The Poeming Pigeon: A Journal of Art & Poetry, Portage Magazine, Quill & Parchment, Silver Birch Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, Synkroniciti Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s worked as a freelance fashion and professional portrait photographer. She’s also the author of eight books, six poetry collections and two illustrated children’s books. Her most recent collection is titled The Ethereal Effect—A Collection of Villanelles (Kelsay Books, 2022). She serves as a poetry editor for the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs.
Brittany M. Brewer
Towards Softness
When I follow the line of follicles
from my ankle down across my foot
I feel warm. I hope it looks like fur.
I hope in the summer when I strut
in sandals, my thick strapped docs,
that my little brown hairs thrive,
that they sprout through and trail up
and around and across my feet freely
not unlike the distinct pleasure derived
from friday nights in eighth grade that
include hot tubs and slick secrets and
cool cans of mountain dew—your friend
crack-snaps one open and the moment
shutters itself into some body-crevice
where you tuck memories. You hide/hug
this unexpected moment as he gets in
close, like the words that slipped from his
tongue as they traced their way down
the warm brown fuzz of your, what,
happy trail, he named haughtily, nice.
Two days ago I stopped clearing the bristles
of hair near and below my navel; now, they
emerge unevenly and without care, unsmiling,
tangled, taking the terrain anew and marking
a growing season all their own. They are not
soft but, nevertheless, they caress the curves
of my stomach sensually, soothing the burning
bumps that pervaded my skin prior, and claiming
its own.
Brittany M. Brewer is a queer [theatre] artist, writer, and educator who has lived and grown across eight states. Brittany’s plays have had readings produced by the Indiana Repertory Theatre, Elephant Room Productions, and Allens Lane Art Center, as well as productions by Revolution Shakespeare, Elephant Room Productions, Theatre of the People, and the Going Viral Festival. Her poems/flash fiction are forthcoming in Rougarou: A Journal of Arts and Literature. Brittany is also the producer and host of the podcast no small parts. She is an alumna of Indiana University, Brown University, and the Arden Professional Apprenticeship program. Currently, she lives in Michigan where she writes, makes art, and is a doctoral student in Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education at Michigan State University. Website: www.brittanybrewer.com
Nancy Haskett
A Rare Sighting
The photo won’t win any prizes —
an overexposed foreground of brittle, curled leaves
scattered among granite rocks, small branches, pinecones —
and the animal is moving away from us
out of focus,
yet undeniably this is a bobcat in the wild,
her mouth open, the regal profile of a lioness,
ears pointed, upturned,
her fur colored like the landscape
in shades of golden tan, dirty white,
splashes of faint black spots,
darker, defined stripes on hind legs.
Her short tail curves upward
as she steps carefully over thin pieces
of painted wood, left on the forest floor,
probably once part of a tent cabin
like the one where we stayed last night,
the one where we stepped outside this morning,
startled her to scamper back up this path to the high country
where she hunts and hides, shy and solitary;
but before we took the picture, when we froze,
amazed at what we were seeing for the very first time,
there was a moment when she turned and stared directly at us,
as if to give us one, perfect look —
the one we didn’t capture with the camera —
a gift she bestowed with fearless confidence.
An educator for over 30 years, Nancy Haskett retired in 2011 and is an active member of the poetry community in Modesto, CA. She is a member of the Ina Coolbrith Circle and a member of MoSt (Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center), as well as a small, private writing group. Her work has appeared in more than 40 publications, including the anthology More than Soil, More than Sky; Stanislaus’s Connections; Penumbra; Homestead Review; Iodine Press; Song of the San Joaquin; The Pen Woman; Miller’s Pond and more. A collection of her poetry, Shadows and Reflections, is available to purchase on Amazon. In her spare time, Nancy enjoys reading, traveling, walking/hiking, and spending time with her family.
Dotty LeMieux
Autumn Leaves
That old song, old chestnut, on the car radio, when you pass the man selling chestnuts warm on the corner of the Common where the subway comes out of the ground. You can see his breath, smell the sweet fresh, the heat.
Late autumn in Boston, going to snow, to freeze, to be early winter this year says every forecaster on every channel of the new Smart TV. No, there are no Monarchs left, no milkweed, spreading seed in autumn gardens. When you lived here, autumn was a bright place, reds and golds, autumn leaves. It’s colder now, hotter in summer, nothing in between. It’s close to end times. Ha, what if the Bible was right all along and we are reaping the wages of our sins. Well, there’s a nuclear power plant for that.
On the where to buy your milkweed page, when you click the “click here for a place near you” button, you get “404 — page not found,” again and again, 404, no milkweed here, so bye bye little butterfly.
You remember, when you lived here, in the doorway to Filene’s basement, as customers streamed in and out, scarves and down jackets, mittens, bright bags clutched tight, the white-haired man, his outstretched arm supported wrist to elbow on a metal apparatus, shouting, “Give me all your money! All your money!”
Spittle flying
broken sky, angels
wrapped in raggedy wings
black snow falling
Dotty LeMieux has published four chapbooks, with her fifth from Mainstreet Rag Press recently released in the spring of 2023. In her younger days, she edited the once-iconic Bolinas literary journal Turkey Buzzard Review. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, twice previously in Wild Roof Journal. She lives in Northern California, where she writes, practices environmental law, and helps elect progressive candidates to office.
Emily Buchalski
Emily Buchalski is an interdisciplinary artist with a strong fixation on perceptions predetermined by societal standards and the enchantment of the macabre. Buchalski’s work has currently been focusing around the conceptual interpretations and literal developmental process of how a frame is formed. Her self-portrait series explores digital imagery, questioning how we perceive individuals through a lens that is developed by the stigmas and standards of pop culture norms. When adjusted in size (viewed on or off of the digital screen), viewers have the opportunity to take a more careful look at the layers that these images frame and represent.
Judith Mikesch McKenzie
Slippage and Spillage
I. Slippage
Grandma would slip through time while playing pinochle,
holding the cards in one hand while watching the
fingers of the other rub together, over and over
she’d watch, trying to create feeling in the tips, which,
she told her daughter, were filled with sand, and
while she watched she’d slip to other times —
times more clear than the kitchen in which she sat, both
distant and distinct, tangible, tactile, the table
rough under her fingers, the scents ice-crystal sharp
against nostrils, the faith of those aromas
carrying them in orbits around her, woodsmoke, yeast
and dough, cinnamon and sweet cream frosting,
all moving on currents in her daughter’s kitchen
and in time, propelled by the sound of her daughter’s
voice as she talks to dough she is kneading,
urged on by the smell of her father’s pipe as it
buries any possibility of other sounds in its smoky
trail — and then a child sneezes
and she says by rote, by habit, by the force of culture,
her voice ringing “hauf gott ele de schon, danke
schon schnooter!” and begins to laugh, pinning
herself to this time, this kitchen, her daughter
and children turning to look, and she explains again
how it is to be grateful no damage was done to
the beautiful face, thanks to the very large nose
but the laughter is instead just a tepid smile, and she
looks down to see the cards fallen face down
in front of her, and watches her hand sweeping
back and forth over the grey-white of her
daughter’s table, seeking in its smoothness
anything she might feel in fingers filled with sand,
and remembering the cards, murmurs to no one
in particular “ve vill shoot ze moon”
II. Spillage
…and across the table whatever child had been
corralled into being her partner for this game groans,
wondering whether this time Grandma would be here, sliding
the correct cards across the table on the way to victory,
or slipping through time to some other place, where she
would be playing some other game
in her own language, playing games with childhood friends who
were now all either gone, or, like her, slipping through
time without warning, without volition, while we watch, our
own cards a blur in front of our faces, an irrelevant
smear of red and black on gloss white, shifting and changing
into a galaxy of color in spades and hearts, swirling
away towards some invisible dark matter.
She was gravity, unseen but strong enough to pull us in, or
if we resist, keep us in orbit, her sheer mass of seasons
the weak force that held all the energy of the seasons
we still have to come and the mass, the matter, the
force of the world we will create with them.
This was perhaps not a fearsome terrible thing, but a gift
from the weight of many seasons. In the days when our
energy wanes, and most of us live without anchor,
something that is part of us outside of time,
knowing that energy can never be destroyed, uses it
instead to return us to times when we were
lighter than the cards sliding across the table, when we
were the faces on the cards, were the elements
that spent our whole energy on one world, set it spinning,
and happily danced away our time.
Judith Mikesch McKenzie loves change – new places, new people, new challenges – but writing is her home. Themes important to her work are place, nature, and science, and the impact of these on the lives of people. Her poems have been published in Wild Roof Journal, Halcyone Literary Review, Plainsongs Magazine, Elevation Review, Scribblerus, Cathexis Northwest Press, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, and many others. She is a past winner in both the Cunningham Short Story Contest and the Tillie Olsen Short Story Contest. She is a wee bit of an Irish curmudgeon, but her friends seem to like that about her.
Catherine Cullen
As a Leaf Falls
I saw my own death in
the turkey vulture scissoring open
the possum carcass
as I hung out the wash
I imagined my sculpture vanishing
and in that my own
unraveling
I stand, allow
my innards, too, to be exposed
death the ultimate
unsafety
the spirit
altogether abandons the
flesh
the flesh
altogether abandons the
bones
Oh! numbed
by forgetting, winched by fear
skeptical of the
jewel
Catherine Cullen imagines humans on a continuum with the natural world — its wonders, terrors and mortality always near. A sculptor, her occasional writings on art + film have been published in Hyperallergic and Afterimage. She lives on a bird migration flyway in Staten Island, NY.
Kim Farbota
Kim Farbota was born in Chicago in 1988. When she was 17, she dropped acid every Sunday for nine months. She earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience at the age of 24, studying psychoactive drugs and brain injury at the state universities of Illinois and Wisconsin. She went on to attend Yale Law School, and spent five years working for a top international law firm and two years as a solo practitioner. Today, Dr. Farbota resides near Joshua Tree, California where she devotes herself full-time to artistic pursuits.
Jackie McManus
The Executor
She is on my mother’s lawn, feet firm on the grass
facing the lake where she is just about to throw
the sack of kittens. My mother has died and left us
alone with her, a bungee cord around our necks.
We are new and fuzzy and mewling in the dark
but she can only hear the lapping water
where she wants to drown any last good thing.
I wish I could claw my way out of this grief
but I am at the bottom of the burlap
tangled in paws pressed against my mouth.
She looks at us, and past us to the lake.
Got any gripes, she said, tell it to the water.
Her heart at the bottom, its mud and stumps and
weeds, all so subtly cruel.
Once we knew a cove brimming with lillies,
how they bloomed outward toward an island
and past the island to a dock, and then a yard
with petunias and fuschia, hummingbirds, a stray
yellow tom that would wait by our door.
Headlights from a dirt road would flash
across the water, blinking off and on like fireflies.
But that was long ago before the lake
became just another lake.
Jackie McManus is the author of The Earthmover’s Daughter (2018) and Related to Loon: a first year teacher in Tuluksak (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Her work can be found in Sky Island Journal, VoiceCatcher, The Inflectionist Review, Rattle, and many more publications. She is a teacher who resides in Washington state.
Peggy A. Rothbaum
The People Living in Our Houses
When it was time to head back to our houses for dinner, one of the moms living in a house on our block rang the large bell riveted to their house by the side door. By the time the second mom rang her higher pitched bell, similarly situated on her house, it was time to be back at our houses.
Our playground was our short block-long street, plus several adjacent houses. It extended to and included the school yard at one end of the street. Back in those long gone longed-for days, we kids ran around outside completely unfettered and played for hours. There were enough of us kids for everyone to always have someone to play with. The adults did not worry where we were, who we were with, or whether or not we were safe. We went back to our houses, from wherever we were at the time, when the bells rang.
Those were, and forever will be, our houses. Most of us were their first occupants. As mine was being built, I painted my name on one of the naked, yet unpainted, walls, “so it will always be there.” Because it is, and will always be, my house. One of the kids, as an adult, showed up at her house, rang the bell, and said, “I grew up in this house. Can I come in?” And the people living in her house always let her in, invited her to walk around, and told her to come back whenever she was in town. And she did. And they did. Until she was taken, too soon, by a horrible disease. One of us kids made friends with the people living in his house and often visits them. Some writing on the wall in the basement from long ago is still there. Years later, I had a patient who was living in one of our houses, and I often visualized her walking around inside as she was talking about it. Some of the moms still live on our block in their houses.
A few years ago we had a reunion. It replicated our much-beloved annual block parties. Many of us live locally. With a bit of effort, we were able to locate most of us who live elsewhere. We walked over to our block from where one of us kids now lives nearby. At the school yard, we played the same games that we had played as kids. Three-legged race, egg toss, bubble blowing contest, relay. Then we sat around a fire pit and reminisced. Most of us had spent our lives trying to replicate what we had on our block as kids.
I sometimes get asked, “Do you remember when we came to the hospital with signs and waved at you in the window because they wouldn’t let kids in?” My reply is always the same: “How could I forget something like that?” Or his sister with her arms folded, resting on the bars of my hospital bed, never abandoning me. Or the night that I came home in an ambulance, flashing lights illuminating our houses, and was greeted by people who came out of their houses to welcome me back to mine.
Was it perfect? No, of course not. There were some tragic deaths, some alcoholism, some divorces. At the reunion, there were some slights and hurt feelings. But somehow, what was created for us as kids was idyllic for us, and there is a thread that still binds us together.
When I was forced to leave my house, I pleaded for it to be kept until I could be an adult, buy it, and live in it again. Recently, after decades, it came on the market for the first time. I was asked by one of the kids if I wanted to buy it. I said, “No. Because it wouldn’t be the same without you kids.”
So the people living in our houses live there. But our houses know that they are our houses. They do not forget and we do not forget. The people living in our houses hold our memories for us and also seem to understand that they are, and will forever be, our houses.
Peggy A. Rothbaum Ph.D. LLC is a psychologist, writer, researcher and consultant in Westfield, New Jersey. She also does community service, creates art and is a passionate advocate for non-human animals. She uses her art and writing to benefit the causes that matter to her. Website: www.drpeggyrothbaum.com / Instagram: @belovedworldllc
Spencer K. M. Brown
All the Twilight Country
Morning sky soft as wolf’s fur after a
Night storm, after everything’s been tossed to
Hell on the lawn.
A break in clouds in the north by northwest,
Blade-thin, shimmering all gilt-veined,
A little heaven smiling like it knows something
We never will.
And we won’t either.
It’s a virtual world, not for the virtuous,
Wright wrote.
And he’s more right than we know.
Still, such hubris lingers, as if we could touch
That soft fur and not lose a hand,
As if we could put two fingertips in the
Spear-wound of heaven and have our fingers
Come out clean again.
Spencer K. M. Brown is a poet and novelist from the foothills of NC where he lives with his wife and son. His poems and fiction have won numerous awards. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast.
Tracey Dean Widelitz
Tracey Dean Widelitz is a published writer, poet, and photographer. She is the author of the worldwide published children’s book A Heavenly World. She has been interviewed and has an article in The Coral Springs Talk and The Parklander Magazine. Her poetry has been published in Wingless Dreamer’s anthologies Dreamstones of Summer, Dawn of the Day, Whispers of Pumpkin, My Cityline, Field of Black Roses, The Black Haven and My Sanskriti in Teal, and she was the Grand Winner of Wingless Dreamer’s Dreamstones of Summer Poetry Contest. Her photographs appear in Months to Years’s Winter 2022 edition, Camas’s Winter 2021 edition, Tiny Seed Literary Journal’s July 10th, 2022 and October 4th, 2022 blog and print anthology edition, and Burningword’s April 2022 literary journal. Visit her website at www.traceydeanwidelitz.com.
Lori L. Udall
Things to Do While Locked in a Chicken Coop (on the coldest night of the year)
After Dan Albergotti
Talk to the chickens. Sing to the chickens. Learn to speak chicken.
Measure your sleeping area. Write a bluegrass song about chickens.
Plan recipes for chicken stew. Imagine the best omelet ever. Count the squares
in the coop wire. Look for the last streak of light in the western sky. Praise Jupiter’s beauty.
Question why you have chickens. Curse your cell phone battery for being on 0%.
Erect a wind block out of nothing. Find a piece of straw strong enough to open the latch outside the coop. Give thanks you are locked up with chickens and not warthogs.
Pray when your husband gets home, he will notice the garden gate is open.
Think of all the people you tried to love and then start loving them. Think of everything
you’ve done that you are ashamed of and then forgive yourself. Write your memoires.
Review the friendships you’ve ruined. Try not to be cold. Dream of lying in the sun at the beach. Remember more uncomfortable places where you’ve slept. Listen for the coyotes’ howls on the river. Be carried away, away with their songs and yips, float out into the night
and join the Milky Way.
Lori L. Udall works in international environment and human rights policy. She writes poetry, creative non-fiction, and memoir. Her work has been published in Sidewalks, Phoebe, Travelers Tales, World Rivers Review, and SANDRP. She has a BA in English Literature from George Mason University, and an LLM from Cambridge University, England. She lives on a farm in Virginia with her husband, horses, and dogs.
