Cover image: "Framing Nature" by Judy Bales
Gallery 1
Heartplots
Mikaela Stiner
Although I Tend to Make Myself as Small as Possible, I Love Big
Purple-green cacti in the desert, like faceless
aliens or upside-down, thick-legged & hairless
tarantulas, insides slick with medicinal goo
Plates of makloub on the table & there will be
leftovers even though from what I can tell
there are a hundred people in this tiny apartment
Hot air balloons hovering over Warren County
during the farmers’ fair, promising some magic
above & beyond these warehouse-eaten cornfields
Inkwells that won’t run dry even after
eleven-hundred-and-nine love-turned-heartbreak
notes scrawled & hidden in the back porch grill
Bright office windows that get so much sun
we press tinfoil against them in the summertime
to keep out the creek-shimmering heat
Percussion solos, when the marching band rolls
the drum kit to the center of the football field
mid-show, taking everyone by surprise
Highways of bluebonnets, the bigger and bluer
the better, and I’ve only lived in Texas for ten months
so who knows how bad this bigness-wish will get
Gusts of wind, when everything scatters,
hair flying and car swaying and the wind whispering
to the whistling trees press me, press into me
The Way to Identify Your Throat
after Matthea Harvey
Become a squirrel and spring between branches narrower than
Yourself airborne thirty feet above the cracked sidewalk you
Think nothing of the gap, your tiny bones don’t betray your
Hesitation among the leaves that wave their crinkled edges
With delight you become a map and never have anyone to
Follow only the fingers that trace along your skin searching for
The bizarre and transcendent vein of the sunflower brightening
White walls rough underneath your knuckles sliding floor to
Ceiling fan rattles making sleep impossible so you climb
From your mattress and hear someone call out Wanna Date? and
Turning to an outstretched palm with only sweetness to offer
You accept even the pit knowing you are guaranteed only the
Slowing down whip of artificial wind unsettling the spun air,
Scattering every word you know along the grain of treehouse
Beam beneath toes smudged with mud — even in the sky there is
Dirt from which to grow a bed to hold all the softness you need
To speak as you tumble.
Mikaela Stiner lives, works, and writes in Austin, TX, and is an MFA candidate at Randolph College. She has been published in the lickety~split, Chariot Press Literary Journal, and Wild Roof Journal.
Johanna Magin
The Barn Swallows Take a Pass at My Sister’s Purple Hair
Whose hair only a month ago was green.
And whose breasts have arrived from another ancient spell.
We gape and duck, comparing their nests to bulging swaths of rope.
Then, cursive missives written into the wet roof.
My sister’s hair is a sign of luck, she tells me.
It turns roseate in the setting sun, then bluish-orange.
How many ways of saying the same thing, in different colors?
Would the swallows know where to look if we said woman?
You still treat me like a man, she quips.
I still treat myself like your shadow, I say.
The swallows are a sign of luck, I tell her.
We are a sign of luck, if you look closely.
Raindown
It would be nice to speak
Of the rain in the present tense
Taken by surprise
Of its sudden color
Mapped out over
The region’s brown body
If we’ve been left to
Futures other than this
Let’s fold our hands
In darkness, at least,
And wait to see
If they will grow
Johanna Magin is a researcher (PhD in French Literature) and writer living in Paris, France, and is currently finalizing her first book of poems. She has taught literature and poetry at the university level since 2009. When she is not chewing on a poem, she is taking B&W photographs (johannamagin.com) and practicing improvisational dance.
Liz Femi
milksleep
my fool flesh will gather next to you now,
graze on fresh roasted groundnuts in folds of warm Agege bread
and look out onto the road bearing dented buses
carrying worrying minds far flung to their destinations
of mangled hope, parched hope, hope that runs
amuck on ground too hardened for frightened roots,
lays bare on the hardearth, loose jawed, eyes flushed, unfurls
his tongue for some invented rain,
a “slow child,” as a villager once hurled at you.
and
yet
you graze on furrows in unseen heartplots
in timetrenches that steep glorious silence.
i once saw you bake a naked truth from dead words
a man that does not dazzle is gold
and days as plain as cupboards carry comfort
that outlasts our lives.
i recall your hollow voice in a dream shout: master the art of anonymity!
yet i did not know why you should shout
till i saw crowds chasing soda cans billowing behind me and ahead and then suddenly above and
i
sunk
in to
a peaceful milksleep.
i have not awoken
but i know i am inside the stark hallway of a question
i have long forgotten
Liz Femi is a Nigerian-American writer, actor, and NAACP Theater Award Nominee for her solo play, Take Me to the Poorhouse. A recipient of Writeability’s Right to Write Award, her work has been featured in The Harvard African and performed at the Rogue Machine Theatre’s Rant and Rave. She’s based in Los Angeles and Atlanta and has forthcoming publications in Streetlight Magazine and West Trade Review.
Savina Ražnatović
Savina Ražnatović is a fine artist based in Budva (Montenegro). Savina graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sculpture in 2021 from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje. Unfulfilled love and talent for philosophy have found their way to fuse her art. Her main inspiration goes way back to the formation of the world, the mysteries of the cosmos, and the eternal questioning of our origin and existence. She searches for such answers in the teaching of Jewish mysticism, but her ideals of expressing her understanding are visually influenced by Japanese philosophies.
Andrea Janelle Dickens
Red Rock
The last of the desert riparian areas dried up last summer.
Here there are only rocks now, red rocks, boulders that no plants grow near.
They loom across the landscape. Left in random patterns by winds and water millions of years ago.
They litter our blank stare that squints against the sun even when we’re facing away. My eyes have become a permanent squint.
I no longer feel upright. Red rocks in an iron-rich landscape, the wideness cut only by these round ghosts that rise.
The challenge of wide open spaces is how we cannot measure things. We cannot tell how big the rocks are, against each other. We cannot tell what size we are. We cannot tell what age we are.
The heat, the sun distort our senses.
The sun rises red and large in the eastern sky, then shrinks to brilliant yellow-white. It dries us all out, leaves us in a dried-out riverbed.
Andrea Janelle Dickens is originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains and now lives in the Sonoran Desert, where she resides among the sunshine and saguaro cacti. Her work has appeared in New South, Ruminate, and The Wayfarer, among others. When not writing poems, she’s making pottery in her ceramics studio or tending hives of bees.
JC Alfier
Brief Footnote to Butterflies in May
Swallowtails cling to blossoms
of wolfsbane wildly purpled
in their toxic namesake: Greek
and feminine: Aconitine —
a sorcery to slow any heart to silence.
Labial petals leaning in wind,
scoured cold by night rains,
loving the soil that gave them birth,
just seeds in my hands, now juice rumored
to kill wolves: bitter,
like loners in the dusky reek of basement wine.
Like whoever keeps wisteria nurtured
and bright beside a burned-out house,
colors they don’t want lost to darkness.
JC Alfier’s most recent book, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include The Emerson Review, Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work.
Grace Freedson Ribeiro
Grace Freedson Ribeiro’s multimedia work is concerned with ecology: the way we relate to each other and the environment. What she hopes most of all is for her art to give a little breath back to the world.
Luke Levi
Flowers Big Enough to Sleep In
In a world where blue stars shine at night, the flowers are big enough to sleep in. The mountains are full of fruit of all colors and the sun is so close you can pluck it like a lemon. Still, nothing burns and the rivers are clear as morning dew. Strange birds sing day and night, but under the blue stars, they sing softly to not wake the others who prefer to dream. Under a night of roaming clouds, the flowers laugh while growing in delight.
Luke Levi’s poems can be found in Humana Obscura, Presence, Tiny Seed Journal, Haiku Commentary, Akitsu Quarterly, Narrative Northeast, and elsewhere. He lives in the Texas Hill Country. His poetry book, So Fragile Are the Beautiful Things, was a finalist for the 2022 IAN Book of the Year award in poetry and the 2022 SPR Book Award.
travis tate
Time
Time measures experience, measures how far you’ve moved,
how slowly & quickly the distance you’ve made. Time measures
who is here & who is gone, how quickly they’ve gone or how slowly.
Measurement is value, value put onto the body, the mind, the sea.
I try to drink every liquid that has been created. Besides water.
Here are the things in my room (I am playing a game my therapist suggested):
a name plate with my name on it, a metal water bottle, a coffee cup, a seltzer,
an empty bowl with remnants of salad, a candle, a candle, pens, my feet,
most likely a ghost as I’m sure someone has died in this building
(because it’s an old building), these gray floors that collect dirt quickly,
two lightbulbs, the window, the light, the white car passing, the van
passing, the biker passing, the feeling of excitement about working from
home, alone, the excitement of four months from now, the sun warming
my hands as I type this, the way the host of this podcast talks,
a quick dip in the stomach that reminds me I’m alive, that I’m in love,
that maybe I should eat a little bit more dinner with a friend, or me,
thinking of all the places in the world that I want to go to, want to
be absorbed by, or how the weather warming reminds me of last
summer, reminds me of falling in love, dancing in the streets,
drunk on rooftops, passing my own hard expectations of myself,
to be reminded of the feeling of rooting down into the ground,
to sharpening my tongue but also laying out love for everyone I know.
There are more things here. There are more things here than time.
travis tate is a queer playwright, poet, and performer living in Brooklyn. Their poems have been published in Southern Humanities Review, Vassar Review, and The Boiler, among other publications. Their first collection of poetry, Maiden, was published in June 2020 by VA Press. Their first collection of short stories will be published by Stanchion Book Press in early 2024. They were a fellow in the Liberation Theatre Company’s Playwriting Residency and currently are in Theatre East’s Writers Group. Their plays have been produced by Dorset Theatre Festival, Victory Gardens, Theatre East, and Breaking the Binary Festival. They earned their MFA in playwriting and poetry from Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Website: www.travisltate.com
Maria Provenzano
Another Train Poem
At the last station before the city, a metal heron perches on the roof of the railway platform. On this side of the water, the roads are painted with arrows to let the cars know where to travel next. Here, this morning, a man is feeding the white birds. A small beach opens to a dock, then the river. Sometimes, we stop at the North Philadelphia ghost station to let the ghosts on and off. I watch the water as we cross the bridge. Today, it’s crystal—a perfect mirror. Rowers slice through glass with their oars, as precise as scalpels—the skin wouldn’t even bleed until it realized it was cut, a few seconds after the incision. The river is wide and bright and strewn with jewels under the early sun. White birds float luxuriously on their diamond carpet. Something is unmade as we cross the bridge. The white birds wade in mud and rocks. There is no defined border between river and bank and brush. On this side of the water, the abandoned U-Haul in a grander stage of deterioration than last month. New emblems glow in pink and white spray-paint against its advancing rust. I wonder what percentage of its body is still its body and what percentage has become the dirt. Maybe the ghosts would have something to say about this. I wonder how much of my own body is metal and plastic and so indigestible. Planted, would I grow into powerlines or rusted scaffolding or perhaps a metal heron? Later, commuters will travel home with their cellophane-wrapped flowers on the seats beside them. The ghosts will carry nothing. A plastic bag is stuck in the barbed wire fence, glinting in the sun, fluttering like a bird.
Maria Provenzano is a poet based in southern New Jersey. She writes about nature and identity and her work can be found in October Hill Magazine and First Wave: A Beach Bards Anthology. She is currently an MFA candidate at Randolph College and serves as a poetry reader for pidgeonholes.
Judy Bales
Fiber artist, fashion artist and creator of public art, Judy Bales’ 35 years of experience covers a multitude of artistic endeavors. Approaching her fiber art with a choice of materials and techniques that approach abstract painting gives her work a unique perspective. Relying on improvisation and painterly techniques in all of her work, Bales creates work that is vigorous, alluring and nourishing to the imagination. Bales has exhibited her fiber and fashion art in more than 100 group or solo exhibitions throughout the US and abroad and has completed 10 permanent public art projects for highways and trails in the US. Website: www.judybales.com / Instagram: @judybales_field_of_view
Kathleen Tighe
Saving Lucy
Pippa spotted the goose first, straining on her leash to peer over the edge of a small bridge that spanned a canal. I pulled the golden retriever back and leaned over the handrail to see what had caught her eye. There, in a tiny pool of dark cold water flowing unfrozen beneath the bridge, paddled a lone Canada goose.
“Well, hello! What are you still doing here?” I said aloud as the goose scrambled to the furthest point in the open water. Her answer was apparent: her right wing jutted out awkwardly, askew, instead of folding neatly over her back. Injured, shot during fall hunting season perhaps, or targeted by an overly-zealous property owner.
“Dirty birds” is how I often hear my neighbors describe the gaggles of geese that summer here along Lake Huron’s eastern shore.
I look forward to their return each spring, calling raucously to announce their arrival, pairing off and nesting in the cattails and lake grasses that emerge as the ice recedes. I watch for the first hatchlings, endearing fuzzy goslings trailing after a mother goose in the lead, while their father takes up the rear, ready to prompt a wayward young’un back in line. Or does the father lead, and the mother corral? Some goose families are large, eight, even ten offspring. Others seem to have only two or three. Perhaps unhatched eggs or feeble babies had been lost to hawks, scavenging foxes, or the carp that swim up from the murky lake bed to swallow unsuspecting goslings. I wonder if parents of larger broods take pride in their production. Do those with only two or three feel incomplete? Do they mourn their losses?
My neighbors, meanwhile, tsk-tsk at the sight of the growing goose families and busy themselves by putting up stakes with wires to prevent the birds from soiling their walkways and driveways or poking among the grass seed spread across yards. Plastic coyote decoys stand sentry on manicured lawns, an effort to scare geese away, but always within a day or two gaggles waddle knowingly past the decoys, undeterred.
By midsummer the young geese have grown strong enough to spend hours in the water, and I detect a type of childcare system. Lines of 20 or more young geese sail along the canal, led by an adult. Another adult swims nearby, sometimes trailing the group, sometimes paddling alongside, coaxing slowpokes with an extended neck and a harsh honk. Large groups of adult geese congregate a distance away, heads dipping into the water for lake grasses, wings flapping, or just serenely floating in the summer sun. This continues for weeks, throughout the warmest days of summer, until the young have grown large and strong and a shift in the breeze signals it’s time for new lessons. Early fall, the geese rise to the sky, racing back and forth over the canal, seemingly practicing V-formations. Gradually their range extends across the island, over the lake, and the Vs grow larger.
And by Thanksgiving, the geese are gone.
But here it was, early January, and a lone goose sheltered beneath the bridge, the only spot for miles with free-flowing water.
The next day, the goose was still there, paddling in an even smaller pool as ice had formed closer to the culvert that allowed the canal’s water to run beneath the bridge. I wondered what she could eat. Do geese fish? There was nothing else for her this time of year. I asked my husband to stop in at one of the local shops that sell hunting supplies. “Maybe they still have bait corn?”
Dan came home with a small bag of dried corn cobs and we husked them. I filled a brown paper bag with a cupful of kernels. We leashed Pippa and walked to the bridge.
The goose eyed us as we leaned over the handrail. I swung the bag out and tossed it, aiming for the edge of the ice. It split open as it landed and kernels fanned out. We watched for a few moments, but when the goose did not move toward the corn, we left. “Maybe she needs some peace,” I said.
I repeated the routine the next day and was glad to see that the previous day’s corn that had speckled the ice was gone. I texted my friend Carol who lived on a small farm a few miles inland.
“Any idea where I can get some corn?” I asked. “I’m feeding an injured goose.”
“We have all the corn you need,” she replied. “Let me know when you’ll be coming.”
A bit later Carol texted again. “Jim left a feedbag of cracked corn inside the shed for you.” She said her husband thought the cracked corn would be easier for the goose to digest.
“The door’s open. Pick it up whenever.”
I continued to feed the goose each day. She would emerge from beneath the bridge as my boots crunched the snow underfoot, and one morning she craned her neck, turning a bright eye up toward me, clearly watching.
The goose came up in conversation one night while we were having dinner with friends. They listened with bemused expressions.
“I just don’t want to see her starve to death,” I offered.
“But how are you going to fix her wing?” Remona asked.
“I can’t.” I shrugged. “But maybe I can keep her alive until her family returns in the spring, and she can enjoy another summer season with them.”
“Well, sounds like a pet,” Remona concluded. “You should name her.”
I considered that.
Temperatures dipped into the single digits, and the wind roared down from Canada more days than not. Still, the image of that lonely goose beneath the bridge drove me out each day to feed her.
*
A neighborhood group on Facebook lamented the appearance of coyotes this winter, sparking a discussion of hunting rights.
“Yep, you can kill coyotes any time of year,” one poster confirmed.
“How about foxes?” another queried. “Can I shoot them, too?”
“Why would you want to shoot foxes?” someone else countered. “They’re so beautiful.”
“Not so beautiful if you’ve got chickens,” came the reply.
“Out here? Who has chickens here?”
“Here” is one of Michigan’s many lakeshore communities, this one occupying a four-mile peninsula that juts into Saginaw Bay. It is made up of mostly vacation homes but a growing number of us now live here year-round.
“Well, your small pets then. Foxes will kill cats and small dogs.”
We sometimes spy foxes running through the woods near our house, and in winter their tracks in the snow cross the yard and line the driveway, mapping their nocturnal treks. One afternoon a fox ran across the road directly in front of Pippa and me. It paused as it got to the tree line and looked back at the dog with curiosity. It was smaller than the retriever, and beautiful, its feline face intelligent, its red tail luxuriant. I held tight to Pippa’s leash as she trembled in excitement, and I whispered to her, “That’s a fox, Pip. He’s your brother.” From the distance came a high-pitched bark, almost a scream. The fox turned away from us, heeding the call from its mate, and dashed silently into the woods.
“Foxes keep the rodent population down,” I added to the posts. I wanted to ask if it was legal for folks to shoot in our neighborhood, but I stopped myself. I am not a hunter, which puts me squarely in the minority. Not long ago, a deer died on the beach of our property. It had been shot by a poacher.
This neighborhood was once covered in forest, trees growing on sand dunes: oak, birch, white pine, poplar. Eventually fishermen’s shacks and family vacation homes built from knotty pine dotted the shore, and in time the entire shoreline was plotted and developed, leaving few stretches of woods. In recent years, two-bedroom cottages have given way to towering new builds, a trend begun with the retirement of baby boomers and exacerbated by the pandemic. Small beach homes have been replaced by 6,000-square-foot glass-fronted suburban-style mini-mansions surrounded by stone patios, landscaped gardens, and multiple-car garages.
People come here to get away from the congested urban centers, yet many eye the indigenous wildlife uneasily. Dwindling woodlands mean the plentiful herds of white-tailed deer are viewed as pretty but pesky, “large rodents,” foragers of flower gardens, hazardous for drivers. Dead deer are common along the side of the highway leading to the lake. Wild turkeys run through driveways, and trash must be carefully enclosed in impenetrable containers or wily raccoons will tear into it. Pest control experts are kept busy removing skunks, possums, groundhogs, bats. Perhaps the only wild animal to escape human rebuke are the bald eagles who nest in the tall trees near the shoreline. An eagle soaring over the lake always evokes awe.
In the two decades I’ve lived here, I’ve watched incremental changes, as small cottages were razed and replaced with starter castles and empty lots purchased, trees removed, foundations laid. I wonder what the next 20 years will bring, as better telecommunication services increase the appeal of working from home in more far-flung areas. What will this mean for the hapless wildlife, the populations who’ve adapted to human incursions and survived thus far? Will the woods where my sons adventured as boys still stand for their children to play in? Will future grandchildren also chase after chipmunks and snakes, or scan the treetops at dusk for owls, or be stilled by the bark of a fox or the sight of a majestic buck? Or will they only watch from the comfort of their living rooms, on streaming devices, viewing wildlife as existing only in exotic places, or worse, as relics of the past?
A few nights ago, just after sunset, a pair of foxes ran through our yard, sending Pippa into a barking frenzy. We watched through a window as the two dashed onto the ice, toward the bridge just 400 feet away. I worried about the goose, who I now called Lucy, paddling in the dark pool. Surely foxes won’t venture into cold water? I thought of my defense of the animals on Facebook, and wondered about my daily feeding of Lucy. Was I simply fattening her up for slaughter?
The next day was grey and bitterly cold. I did not see the goose when I walked to the bridge. I dropped a bag of corn onto the ice and waited, but she did not emerge. Later that evening Dan and I walked back again. Still no Lucy.
“It’s too soon to mourn,” Dan said as we quietly returned home. I nodded. I wasn’t sure mournful was the emotion I was feeling. I think it was guilt.
But the next day, Lucy was back on the ice, preening in the sun.
By the end of February, she is still alive. The light in the sky is brighter, and the days have grown noticeably longer. Despite the hard-packed snow beneath my feet and the brisk 19-degree temperature, spring is approaching. By March, the earliest of the migrating birds will return, and while fresh snow may still fall, it will melt more quickly in the stronger sun. Snow crocuses will push up through the frozen earth, followed by daffodils. The annual renewal of life will continue its cycle.
Lucy got to her feet as I approached and this time she did not wait for me to leave after dropping the feedbag. I watched as she pecked at the kernels that had splayed out on the ice, and then she dipped her beak into the bag.
Kathleen Tighe is a writer and educator based in Michigan. She writes primarily creative nonfiction, flash fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Collateral, The Write Launch, Dunes Review, Still Life, Qua Literary and Fine Arts Magazine, Writing From the Inside Out, and The Purposeful Mayonnaise. Her passion for travel influences much of her work.
Stewart Taylor
Devon-based Stewart Taylor is currently in the third year of his ongoing Tree Portraits series. Initially inspired by the street trees of his former neighbourhood in East London, these moved outwards to the parks and the wilds nearby, quickly becoming a conversation about our lack of connectivity with the natural world. There are now well over 300 monoprints in this collection. This series will continue to help raise awareness for protecting our environment, including through donating prints for various conservation and rewilding fundraisers, both in the UK and USA. Stewart has been a Printmaker for over 30 years and was recently in the 16th Graphica Creativa Print Triennale, where the Jyväskylä Art Museum acquired his work from the exhibition.
Suzannah Watchorn
Educational Séances
Miss Friday acknowledges that she failed
to follow academic protocol,
and that her actions succeeding her
Study Away Séance were
Madness, I mused, I’m the picture of it,
two o’clock in the afternoon, beneath
bed covers. When I emerged, I had the
conviction that I had to abandon
my writing project. All summer I had
researched the Victorians, first with the
idea to retell Vanity Fair,
reckless,
dangerous and unbecoming of
the novel by William Thackeray,
then to write a time travel novella
about a young woman, July Friday,
student due to undertake her Study
Away Séance (modeled somewhat on my
junior year abroad). Of course she goes to
Victorian England, finds Thackeray.
a student of our University.
However, Miss Friday’s insight into her author’s life,
her courage and compassion
Only she’s so upset from sexual
shame—I slipped into autofiction here,
maybe—that she causes chaos…somehow.
Like I said, I could not finish the draft.
The research, though! The best kind of madness.
At parties, I’d share my Victorian
knowledge: the clothing, the disease, the drugs,
in the face of challenging circumstances,
are to be commended.
—Dr George Thistlethwaite Jennings-Jukes,
academic advisor
the start of our traditions like trees for
Christmas. At home, I read about women,
spiritualists conducting séances,
and felt not just curious, but also
vaguely thankful—that men cannot send me
to the asylum, not so easily,
anyway. So I feel safe to tell you
July had organized all her books on the Victorian period,
every novel by Thackeray, and the objects she had collected
so far:
I did a séance of my own, began
during the witching hour with candles lit
and poems surrounding my cross-legged
repose. Welcome to Pennsylvania!
I imagined greeting Thackeray, but
instead I met him at home, in his streets
of Victorian London. (I suppose
a sewing kit, diagrams of calisthenics, a small porcelain
chamber pot, brass hair combs, and four pale,
bonnet-clad Victorian dolls.
it is relevant to add that I had
also imbibed a highly spiritual
concoction, i.e. magic mushrooms were
part of my night.) Both of us wore black clothes.
Together, Thackeray and I rode in
the carriage, horse hooves clinking against
stone. We were not lovers, nor were we friends,
July knew that when her friends saw her collection
they would mock her, just as they did
every time the topic of her Study Away Séance came up.
However, she liked waking up to
nor even mentor and student. Simply
two near-strangers stuck in the same locale
like passengers on a delayed route, stopped
and glancing at the next person over.
Okay, sure, I was hallucinating
and yet it feels like a real memory—
and even my more secular friends want
this physical manifestation of all her hard work,
and everything that was ahead of her as a scholar,
as a wanderer through time.
to know what I saw in the spirit world.
Thackeray shed many tears—he wanted
to be a better writer, a bigger
legend in the future. I rolled my eyes.
I guess his needing pulled us away,
because a moment later we were in
the twenty-first-century St Pancras
His longish hair, arms and legs splayed out
like flower petals,
Tristan had fallen asleep right in the middle
of July’s bed. She removed her corset and put it back on
International station, walking by
the fancy souvenir shops, bakeries,
cafés, flower stalls, the platform where I
once stood to go home to my family.
Someone was playing the piano, and
distracted, I lost him, Thackeray—then
I saw flowers overturned and ran to
the mannequin, then grabbed her new, long white
Victorian nightgown, a pillow and blanket,
and went to
catch him again. Outside the station, we
ate Chelsea Buns and Victoria Sponge
and I said sweetly, “Stanley Kubrick made
a movie based on one of your books! Guess
whose favorite novel is Vanity
Fair? Michael Palin! And do you know who
played Becky Sharp? Reese Witherspoon! That’s not
sleep in the other room.
The corset had dug into her waist, and combined with the motions
she and Tristan had made as they had sex, she knew she was
going to be uncomfortable tomorrow.
failure.” That did not seem to console him
so I said, “Your legacy is in our
hands, our words, our love of reading, writing…”
He nodded and said he had to visit
his blood descendants. As the sun came up,
and the drugs wore off, all I could say was
no one, in any century, real or
“You are so incredibly beautiful, July,”
she replayed for herself as she drifted off to sleep, like the chime
for a train she was about to catch to a wonderful destination,
imaginary, escapes pain. Spirits,
humans, characters—all are giant voids
of unsatiated desire. Madness—
was this my fuel for creativity?
I left this question unanswered and stopped
making the maddening project, instead
writing poems about nature and peace.
and the skin of her upper body
began to erupt with itchy, red welts.
Suzannah Watchorn is an English-Irish writer who grew up outside of London, UK. She now lives in the United States, where she works as a writing coach and freelance editor. Her current project is a hybrid collection about selves, identity, intimacy, dreams, and imagination.
Nadia Arioli
Nadia Arioli is the co-founder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine and a multi-disciplinary artist. Arioli’s poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net three times and can be found in Cider Press Review, Rust + Moth, San Pedro Review, McNeese Review, Whale Road Review, West Trestle Review, As It Ought To Be, Voicemail Poems, Bombay Literary Magazine, and other publications. Essays have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Hunger Mountain, Heavy Feather Review, Angel Rust, and elsewhere. Collages and scribblings have been featured as the cover of Permafrost, as artist of the month for Kissing Dynamite, and in Poetry Northwest. Arioli has chapbooks with Dancing Girl and Spartan and full-lengths with Luchador Press and Kelsay Books (forthcoming).
