Cover image: "Golden Hour in Taos, New Mexico" by Nicole Bethune Winters
Gallery 2
Give me your hand
Kelly Gray
Resurrection
The barn is collapsing
into shafts of light, wooded beams, collarbone.
The nettle rises swiftly each spring
while I am slow to undress
in this abbey of spiders. You pull from
the wetted earth to braid
my hair with grass
a knot of tulle to tie me to this moment
before I befall the sunshine,
dead in the bright light of an old dairy farm,
the creek having been abandoned to do creek things.
Meandering at last, the hands of men removed,
water rising.
Restoration
When my throat disappeared
I painted all the missing posters
to hang along old roads
and gates swinging towards cattle.
I offered a reward,
but when the townspeople called,
I could not speak
to say yes that is mine.
I have learned other ways to speak now,
to balance in the back of pickup trucks;
my dress, my wave, my imaginary parade.
Kelly Gray lives with her family on unceded Coast Miwok Land in a very small cabin nine miles and seven fence posts away from the ocean. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Witness Magazine, Passages North, Permafrost, Rust + Moth, Lake Effect, Wild Roof Journal, and Stonecoast Review, among other places. She is the recipient of the Neutrino Short-Short Prize from Passages North and was runner-up for the Witness Literary Awards. Gray’s collections include Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press), and Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (Quarter Press), and Quag Daughter (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press). She’s thrilled to have been selected to teach with California Poets in the Schools and is hard at work creating a curriculum based on edges and lore.
Hannah Rodabaugh
Daguerreotype, 1832
Alexander Wilson, a failed poet & Scottish immigrant, painted each line carefully in American Ornithology, a landmark of naturalist painting, our first representation of wild birds. Wilson caught and killed his models, held them still in lifelike poses, once drew from a live bird, an ivory-billed woodpecker he shot near his home in Wilmington, North Carolina. He tried to tame it, left it in his room. When he returned, it had drilled through walls in a flurry of desperation, fist-sized chunk of plaster missing, white clouds over the bed. The bird was a weatherboard from freedom, a wet green storm of leaves, bellows of humid green, our future and our history tied to it with string. Wilson admired its energy, wouldn’t release it; eventually it died of starvation. Naturalists rarely keep an animal before using it for some reason; the bird that broke his walls, bit his hands when he would try to paint, became a series of episodic images noted for their listlessness, missing spit & breath. What’s left is the story, a traveler’s yarn. The bird’s restlessness, its unconquerable American spirit as Wilson called it (a desperation we couldn’t conquer), is somehow missing; his words can’t breathe life into it any more than his images. Only its crest (alarming red) carries any flint.
Hannah Rodabaugh holds an MA from Miami University and an MFA from Naropa University. She is the author of three chapbooks, including We Don’t Bury Our Dead When Our Dead Are Animals, a collection of ecological elegies. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Indianapolis Review, Camas Magazine, Glassworks Magazine, Blueline Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, Horse Less Review, and others. She has received grants from the Idaho Commission on the Arts and the Alexa Rose Foundation and has been an Artist-in-Residence for the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. She teaches at Boise State University and The Cabin, Idaho’s only literary center.
J. Maak
J. Maak is a writer and change-maker in urban Los Angeles. Her ecopoetry has appeared in several literary journals. She teaches environmental sustainability at a private college as well as to the general public. Her creative nonfiction and other writing can be found at www.change-making.com/jmaak.
Barbara Mosher
Barbara Mosher’s art is eclectic, colorful, energetic, and an organic expression of the beauty and intricacy of how she experiences this unpredictable world. Without expectation, Barbara is captivated in the experimentation of the line and the meshing of form and color. She approaches each work of art as a journey from within, letting the canvas tell her where and how to proceed. Her work draws your eye in, allowing the observer to see her perception of the collective realities. You will find her art in collections throughout the US, Canada, and Europe. Website: www.barbaramosher.com
A. Pikovsky
Pastoral Blur
(moved by a moving train)
all that vast beauty emptied me
& split from the holy root
of my spine /\ so i knelt down
by the light for prayer
& i felt the bones
of an old woman’s house /\
resting within me
beside a blanket of plush burden /\
i was soothed in clotted cream
[[suffered]] i bathed each wish
in the fire &
filled each mouth /\ with
ash
crusty earth /\ stands alone
in its shadow /\
time like skin — torn & wrinkled
watching the fade of light
over the face of life’s unborn child /\
rising then falling
& falling then rising /\
in the garden overlooking
nightshade is a monster weeping
sitting in silence too generous for the taking
& in the corridor of laughter
eternity /\ is a pastoral blur
grazing over the bath
of humanity’s last hope
waiting to play in the crevices
& noisy bones /\
of an old woman’s
house /\
A. Pikovsky is a poet living in Philly who is the child of Jewish Soviet immigrants.
Jeri Lewis Edwards
Your name no longer matters
9500 feet,
night glows white on pumice terrain,
the old stands of conifers emerge,
escarpment spires canopy like webs of orb spiders,
The snow melt creek, by which I always camp, is
running like hair on fire.
It is in this place
I am wanting nothing.
Some mornings I feel your presence
but I can’t comprehend what you say.
It’s in my imagination you’re staring through
me down to the glacial lake.
That hollow where they took your eye
resembled an exhumed tree stump.
It was second nature, you once told me,
that you felt you could still see with it.
My attention begins again at a raven in flight,
say, or with a marmot scurrying across the bridal
veil precipice where I turn back to you
and you’re gone.
I’ve lost count of the times
you’ve visited — you leave no trace.
Maybe you come to interrupt the wind.
Nothing else could box with it like you could.
Sometimes traveling back down the scree
I hear the metallic scrawl
of a Clark’s Nutcracker
announcing to other souls
I’m just passing through.
Jeri Lewis Edwards is a mixed media artist and poet residing along the Central Coast of California. She includes time every day outdoors in nature with her two rescue dogs, work in her mixed media art studio, reading and writing. She has been published in various literary journals such as Poet Lore, Worcester Review, Naugatuck River Review, Quiddity, and others.
Nicole Bethune Winters
Feral Joy
We are lake-drenched driving 55 miles per hour down a country highway in the bed of a rented Tacoma. The sky is angry, but I decide to believe she’s on the verge of laughing herself to tears instead. The ocean grey darkens to charcoal and the clouds have volume now. Enough that you can begin to decipher shapes, like a whole separate universe of constellations. And just like the stars, they begin to glisten. But then she blinks the glistening into tears. Tears that turn to ice. Tears that turn to hail.
And so now, I’m not lake-drenched, but hail-battered. And there is nothing left to do but squeeze my eyes closed, throw my head back and laugh along with her. The wind whips through wet hair and colors my shoulders and there’s no point in cowering because it is what it is. And the tires roll faster, and the tear-hail pelts harder, and I am almost crying now, too, and the smile of it is a stretch that cracks my sundried lips.
Isn’t it funny how quickly she can change her mind, how she can go from sunny and 85 and cloudless to the kind of storm you can feel before it starts. The kind that saturates the air with static, that raises the wisps of hair on your wrists.
Nicole Bethune Winters is a writer and multi-faceted artist. Her first collection of poetry, brackish, was published by Finishing Line Press, and her work has appeared in Backlash Journal, Wild Roof Journal, Novus Lit, Seaborne Magazine, and others. When she isn’t writing or wheel-throwing, Nicole is likely at the beach, climbing, or exploring new landscapes with her dog. She currently resides in Southern California.
Kiana McCrackin
morning haibun
The sky burns, hueing from blues to pinks to golds, and so the world does, too. The coffee on the windowsill watches all on the other side warm. The coffee cools. Steam evaporating. Air melding with the chirps of songstresses. Nothing is stillness. Everything is touched by wind under the gaze of sun. Is gravity voyeur or participant? The birds fly up, but not so far that the coffee can not see their flight. Shadows shorten.
And the stubborn moon
loses her noble fight, fades
to nothing at all
Kiana McCrackin is a writer, a photographer (with a BFA from The Brooks Institute of Photography), a cloud gazer, and a mama. Kiana is eternally inspired by the emotions of the human experience and the landscapes she has called home: Alaska, California, and Washington. She currently resides in South Dakota where she is learning what the wind has to say and translating what the trees tell her. Kiana has work published or forthcoming in Wild Roof Journal, Lilac Magazine, Sky Island Journal, The Remington Review, and other literary journals.
Tawnya Gibson
Healed By the Sea
There are a lot of romantic things written about the ocean. Most have dipped into the cliché and, because of the sheer volume of words that exist, it can sometimes feel there is nothing new to say. The power. The spray. The vastness. All of it feels done and incredibly overwrought. I thought about all of this as I looked down to avoid the wind, my focus off of the waves and studying the sand. I thought of how small one grain was and how insignificant that one grain could feel among the other pieces of sand, if only sand was cognizant of its existence. But, as I said, it can become cliché, that line of thinking.
Standing on the sand with the wind and the waves and the clichés, my back is to our rented home for the week, the forested cliffs, sharp, to my right. The waves lap at a big enough distance I won’t need to move immediately. Lost in a haze, I shift and start to think about the natural rhythms the ocean brings. Since getting older, sleep is getting trickier. Except at the coast. Whenever luck finds me there, I fall asleep easier and wake without issue, all while being lulled with endless lapping of the waves from the shortest of distances. I wonder about the timing of the tide and how it affects my internal systems. If one were to live in the shadow of waves permanently, would it always affect the same way or would it become background white noise to daily stress and real life and would mid-life insomnia take over just the same? I want to think not. I want to dream that life by the ocean — real life — would be more kind and stave off the difficult. I need to believe that.
Building lots in this favorite vacation coastal town are going for fairly reasonable prices. Until you start figuring in building costs, bringing roads and sewer and all the other involved expenses, that is. I sit. I think. I send links to my husband with wistful notes. Back in our landlocked existence, we dream. We talk. We wonder if we should buy now and sit on it for later. Night creeps in. Wondering stops. Rational thinking once again reigns. I clear the cache and history on my computer; better to erase the dream than have it crushed.
The next day, sitting in my office, the distant hum of a lawnmower the closest thing to the roar of the ocean my desert home has to offer, I pull up the real estate site again. Just to look. It never hurts to look, I say. I stare at the photo of the piece of land so close to the town we love and so close to the ocean we need, and tucked away, behind the brush and emptiness, I picture a cottage. Small, definitely. One level. Navy blue. Orange door. Big windows looking west and heated floors. A desk, pushed up to those windows, overflowing with papers and books and hopes facing the sea. I can imagine every time I sit down, pulling out something to work on, watching the waves lap, feeling boosted. Healed. Energized. The time and tide rearranging my cells and my muse, rendering me prolific. I imagine content, putting my work away to walk the beach or walk into town, visualizing the place in the tiny bookstore my book will go, where I’ll stand to do a reading, where I’ll sit to host a book club. I will fall into a routine and my body will naturally slow. Stress will surf out with the tide, never to come in again. And sleep. I will sleep.
I don’t remember the last time I slept well on a consistent basis. If I could remember, I would wish to go back in time and repeat it. It seems that’s the way of lasts, you don’t know they are lasts until they are well and truly over and only fondness of ‘before’ reigns supreme as you try to pinpoint the exact last. I want to say it was pre-motherhood, but I don’t think that is true. I’m certain I’ve slept well since, but memories muddle in a haze of months and years and growing up humans and life. What I do remember is bemoaning my sleeping fate for several years and being told, time and again, that it’s a matter of age. A matter of hormones. A matter of biology breaking and betraying. Welcome to your new normal.
I think there needs to be a better answer.
Especially since once every other year we spend vacation time in a small cottage where you can hear the waves from our rented bed and while there, I sleep the sleep of my youth and the answers of age and hormones and biology seem to not make any sense at all. And then I curse my anxiety or life or whatever is close and convenient and think it, actually, must be to blame. If only I could get rid of that, then, then I could sleep without needing to hear the waves break so close. Sleep as I did in the before. Sleep and rest and forget I’m aging.
I never thought I would be one of those people who curse the aging process. I secretly held them in contempt and willed them to just let go and accept. It’s natural, I thought. It’s life, I mused. Be graceful, I thought. Show your maturity, show us how it’s done. Then I found myself actually in midlife with all the trappings of midlife and while I rarely rend my clothing or gnash my teeth in any public way, I find myself doubting this process and cursing grace and wishing I had enjoyed, more, my youth and knees that didn’t creak and hair that didn’t feel like wire, twisted and bent in odd ways. I want the grace aging people wax poetic about and I silently wished people would embrace, but instead find myself crying for years wasted. I wonder if that is the exhaustion. I wonder if it is simply life. I wonder if it is lack of sleep.
In. Out. Waves crash. Repeat. Methodic. Predictable. Readjusting every cell every minute of the day. Time and tide and internal adjustments. Back on the coast, this is what is going through my mind as I watch the sand and the waves and feel the wind at my face and hear the clichés roil. It’s difficult to not romanticize the ocean while contemplating your place in relation to it, but really, I stop. Stare. Let the wind whip me numb and realize I would just like to sleep every night like I do for this one week every few years. And, clichés be damned, to be healed by the sea.
Tawnya Gibson is a freelance writer who grew up in the high desert of southwest New Mexico. She received her degree in journalism from Utah State University. Her work has appeared or will appear in Sky Island Journal, New Plains Review, under the gum tree, The Blue Mountain Review and Zibby Mag. You can hear her monthly in her essay column for Utah Public Radio entitled She Goes On. She currently lives and works in the mountains of Northern Utah, but her New Mexican roots still occasionally bleed through her work.
Bonnie Matthews Brock
Bonnie Matthews Brock is a Florida-based photographer, as well as a school psychologist. She loves hiking the urban and woodland trails of “anywhere” (and pausing often to shoot photos) with her very patient husband (and often collaborator), Ted. Her images have been featured on the covers of magazines such as Ibbetson Street, Wild Roof Journal, Poesy Magazine, Humana Obscura, and Arkansas Review; as well as on the pages of publications such as Oddball Magazine, Ember Chasm Review, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Beaver Magazine, and Lateral. Her works are archived at institutions such as Poets House NYC, Brown University, and Harvard University. You can view more of Bonnie’s images on Instagram @bonniematthewsbrock.
Bruce Parker
Whale Watching at Depoe Bay
1
Like a circus rider on the back of a ponderous horse
galloping over the waves,
my legs flex to absorb the deck’s rise,
I lean against the boat’s rail,
pull in a lungful
as the boat barrels into
the path whales take on their journey north to feed.
We see a juvenile roll, roil the sea-surface,
spew its exhalation, take
a prodigious gulp, its back a brief shine before
it pulls under, aswim, curling
toward all the mysid shrimp it can hold
and I, unable to stand longer, fold
myself into the cabin to sit with a young mother and baby,
after the whales we follow in Spring.
2
The boat climbs the swell and slides upon
an ocean of slippery slates
pimpled with whitecaps,
it grins through its bow-mustache, its wake breaking behind.
The whale watchers stumble, in hoodies and quilted coats,
their smiles in reserve against a capsize,
their eyes
expect to see a wet flash of exhalation their quarry lets go
before it inhales, dives deep
to pursue its own goal,
still private, though people pry.
Bruce Parker is the author of the chapbook Ramadan in Summer (Finishing Line Press, 2022). He holds an MA in Secondary Education from the University of New Mexico. He has taught English as a Second Language and been a technical editor and a translator (Thai, Mandarin Chinese, Urdu, Punjabi, and Turkish to English). His work appears in Triggerfish Critical Review, The Field Guide, Blue Unicorn, Cerasus (UK), and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is an Associate Editor at Boulevard.
Alexander Burdette
Alexander Burdette is a multimedia artist whose work explores kindness, liminality, and the mundane. Eir photography often highlights everyday objects and their existence in space.
Kathleen M. Heideman
Kathleen M. Heideman is an artist and environmentalist, and the author of Psalms of the Early Anthropocene. She is the recipient of artist residencies with refuges and research stations, the National Park Service, Anderson Center, Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico and the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program. Drawn to wild and threatened places, she works to defend them. Curious woman. Learn more at www.orebody.com.
Susan Michele Coronel
is this the part where i start again without you?
give me your hand you said
but i didn’t know that the command
was a request to feed song sparrows
& black-capped chickadees
with sunflower seeds
i also didn’t understand why you answered
more to mezcal & martinis
each smoky drop an answer
to questions you resented
how i wanted you to rise from your worm-body
be released from the burden
of half-inebriated sleep
beach roses pulsing with slow heavy beats
as the wake from distant boats streaked
across cobalt waves whipped by wind
we were broken shells
smooth oval stones
perfectly curved shy eggs
how you surprised me
when you found a speckled gray stone
with a small carved heart on its underside
how rare i thought to find this in sand
but why here & now?
i lived in the claws of fall’s finish
beating against the wings of tree swallows
& white-breasted nuthatches
that nosedived from cedar trees
in the field we passed
frayed milkweed strands that
floated like ghosts from cracked pods
i tried to grasp them
but they slipped through my fingers
i wanted to hold on
to what i could not keep
Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Spillway 29, TAB Journal, The Inflectionist Review, Gyroscope Review, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Verse-Virtual, Redivider, and One Art. In 2021 one of her poems was runner-up for the Beacon Street Poetry Prize, and another was a finalist in the Millennium Writing Awards. She has received two Pushcart nominations. Her first full-length poetry manuscript was a finalist for Harbor Editions’ 2021 Laureate Prize.
Charlene Stegman Moskal
yet some early signs
yet some early signs dissolve
some leaving the dark behind
they are called blest
others sleep beneath a shroud
blackened like a distant singularity
with moth holes that separate lives
allow the music to disappear
down damp tunnels into dissonance
seep out shedding their notes along the way
without anything new we are alone
desire dulls accepts things as they are
as today’s waters dissipate in drought
or as ice melts floods cities too hot to handle.
Charlene Stegman Moskal is a Teaching Artist for the Las Vegas Poetry Promise Organization. She is also a visual artist, a performer, and a voice for NPR’s Theme and Variations as well as a writer. She can be found most days at home with her two dogs, Scruffy and Rags, in her studio where they nap and she writes. Charlene’s work is published in numerous anthologies, print magazines and online, including TAB Journal, Humana Obscura, Calyx, Gyroscope, and Sandstone & Silver, an anthology of Nevada Poets (Zeitgeist Press). Her chapbooks are One Bare Foot (Zeitgeist Press, 2018) and Leavings from My Table (Finishing Line Press, 2022), with a third forthcoming from Kelsay Books in fall 2023.
Dave Sims
Dave Sims makes art and music in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. His paintings, comix, stories and poems appear in dozens of tactile and virtual exhibits and publications, with recent work landing in Red Noise Collective and Sunspot Lit. A grandfather of several beautiful children, he’s also the primary companion to a three-footed jazz turtle named Turk. See more at www.tincansims.com.
