Cover image: "open a window under my feet" by Francesca Willow
Gallery 3
Rays of distorted light
Jesse Curran
Marigold
On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I thread forty marigold blossoms
through a thin wire, sewing a simple list
each blossom, a short letter of thanks
I write to D for staying with me
I write to L for fire and fierceness
I write to V for soft cheeks and heart
and to my dad, not yet gone a year
for showing me how to forgive
for teaching me how not to scorn
the sentimental
I slide forty firecracker heads
along the wire—and then
I thread some more
so I might hang the garland
so I might adorn the party
so the path might be crowned
so to create a portal of color
so to behold such yellow-orange glory
inside them the matchstick seeds
sense the soil of spring
swelling round them
here at the end, at the beginning
my hands smell like marigold
my heart smells like marigold
October tastes like marigold
perhaps I too
am marigold
Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in a number of literary journals including About Place, Ruminate, After the Art, Allium, Blueline, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. She teaches in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury. Website: www.jesseleecurran.com
Frank Carellini
Experimental movies
i am nervously splicing together film,
getting fingerprints on everything my face smudging
into bleached redundancies, a Hitchcock zoom into void—
how life
accumulates as a stack of images, each
borrowing photons to approximate
realities—
i try to cut and paste
as to ensure continuity that each scene
starts with the same color t-shirt that the stain
from your lipstick remains in the same place
but i keep rendering
this alternative ending and end up with experimental movies
called memories each, from a manic
photographer, blurring into
abstract static—
they whir in a carousel
on a shivering projector, splay
rays of distorted light onto this backdrop called days of
days—
the crowd is lining up
two thousand anxious versions of me all claiming
to know the plot and ready to trash
the screen if it doesn’t end as anticipated
as i piece each still, collapse each frame—
Frank Carellini primarily publishes poetry, with work appearing in Meridian, Wild Roof, Rabid Oak, and other gracious journals.
Aley Schiessl-Moore
A Scream
More land is being swallowed by developers and businesses hungry for expansion, claiming to be in the red while they scatter the cranes into dry hills, freeway medians, pristine green golf courses, and in a barren patch of space, two mounds of dirt are pushed up and away to make room for a strip mall or manufacturing company, who knows what, but right now two cranes stand silently, holding vigil over their lost space ripped open like a bloody scab. My home is uphill from a lake once revered for walleye and muskie, where independent cities of ice shanties cropped up every winter on the gleaming blue ice but last winter it became a ghost town and come summer my neighbors compete for the title of Greenest Lawn while the chemicals marketed as clean and safe for the whole family make their journey into the lake water and we find notices in our mailboxes that the lake isn’t safe for swimming. When I walk past the beach it’s teeming with bodies frolicking in the stagnant water and there are no lifeguards; the job doesn’t pay enough and no one listens anyway so why bother, and above me to no one’s notice herons pass through an electric blue sky; I see them more often these days when once they were a rarity, you see when I was young my Girl Scout troop was named for the bird and I wondered why because I had never seen one so they couldn’t exist if I couldn’t make them tangible. Now I see them overhead, distinguished by the soft S-curve of their necks, as often as the planes from the nearby airport. The county I live in that was once heralded for the healing powers of its spring water will now divert water from Lake Michigan, some fellow recently said to me that this is progress somehow as if water scarcity is a figment of my imagination and besides, who’s worried about water, there’s plenty of it, the problem is right now smoke is rolling in from Canada and we all weep for some place far away while we burn trash and host bonfires with endless bottles of beer as signs with Smokey the Bear declare high fire alert today. And what I want to know is how do I salvage hope here and how do I keep the scream inside because screaming is impolite and distributing pamphlets is rude and telling people what to do with their own property is selfish, really, people should live as they want, but what happens when there’s nothing left because it’s all been sapped away and we didn’t notice until it’s too late? It’s too late, I say as I sit on my balcony, insistent and drowning in my own misery until a lone firefly comes to rest on my arm and I think how long it’s been since I’ve seen a firefly, since I’ve seen that warm fairy glow, how long can I hold this moment.
Aley Schiessl-Moore is a writer, occasional painter and ceramicist, and amateur soapmaker working in non-profit animal conservation and education. She graduated from Mount Mary University with a degree in Art Therapy. Much of her work incorporates her Catholic upbringing and the wildlife and ever-changing landscape of Wisconsin. In her spare time you can find her in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, pushing for wolf conservation, hiking, biking, or trail running, and listening to Dinosaur Jr. and Adolescents on repeat.
Francesca Willow
Francesca Willow is an artist, writer and climate justice activist based in Cornwall. Her work aims to take a holistic approach to climate justice, culture, and regenerative futures. At the same time, her activism focuses on campaigning against oil and gas expansion and the fossil fuel industry’s involvement in arts and culture. She believes in radical liberatory hope, with the understanding that the systems in the world today were built by people, and therefore we can create something better. Her creative practice is interested in ecology, place-making, and forms of connection between living beings. From intimate relationships to ephemeral ideas and expanding ideas of ecosystems, we are one organism and many, communal and unique. We are the biosphere and we must save ourselves. You can find Francesca’s work @ethicalunicorn everywhere on the internet, or follow her campaigning with Clean Creatives, BP or not BP?, Equity for a Green New Deal, and the Stop Rosebank campaign.
Jessica Ballen
The caregiver solves for Y in her diet log
she (the mothers) placed a cut peony next to my bed / I (the mothers) found an ant (the baby) on the stem / its fragile legs inched closer to a sweetness it couldn’t have / she (the mothers) kept a diary next to her bed / she (the mothers) toasted whole loafs of cinnamon and sugar bread / fed me (the baby) until I (the baby) was plump and overgrown / until I (the baby) weighed the same as a matured adult / I (the baby) cared too much / watched her learn to crawl / she (the mothers) held her hollowed out stomach / Daddy (the ant) made a hole with his fist / my diary remembers when I (the baby) wish to forget / I (the baby) never studied past algebra / but I (the baby) drank all the formulas she (the mothers) fed me /and then I (the baby) spits it all up
Jessica Ballen is a chubby, queer, Jewish, neurodivergent poet who is currently working on their MFA in creative writing at Antioch University. They serve as the Managing Editor of Submissions for Lunch Ticket. Currently, they reside in Eugene, OR with their husband, three cats, and Clyde, the guinea pig. Their book Kosher was released in early 2023.
Judith Mikesch McKenzie
Canning Applesauce (With The Book of 7 Thunders)
A lightning storm rolled over the hilltops and into the valley and
I thought of you, sitting in my once-kitchen at our round
wooden table, sunshine streaming
over your shoulder,
the cards you’d just set out in a clean diamond pattern in
front of you, your hand moving over them,
feeling for the meaning
When you removed all the 7s from the deck before you started
I asked you why, but you shushed me and shuffled
the cards slowly, removing one at a time
from the top
your small fingers with their squared-off tips could make
each card click and snap as it was placed, without
bending them at all
I think you would have liked a storm that day, with dark and
low-hanging clouds spitting lightning at the ground,
better suited to the mood of mystery you
were building around you
Perhaps we should have hung dark draperies and wrapped
ourselves in dark and heavy robes, but the
heat would not allow it
shorts and tanks were called for in a steamy kitchen
during a late-season heat wave, the window open,
sunshine streaming over your shoulder
as your gaze moved
over the cards, and I waited, watching the pot on the
stove across the room, steam rising out
as the jars heated,
building pressure towards sealing. I waited while you
thought out the meaning of each card, and
finally told me some of what you saw
that I still do not
remember, except that you still would not tell me
why you’d removed all the sevens
before starting.
We finished our canning that day, several batches, each
putting our share neatly into our separate
pantries, serving them up in days
to come until
all were gone, and now I sit here, at the same round
table under a different roof, no cards in front
of me as cool breezes blow
in my sheer curtains, and I have all but forgotten the
taste of that canned sauce, with that sharp
snap that tickles your nostrils like
bubbles you did not
expect from champagne, but which fades quickly,
like a lightning bolt that slaps the air with
its sting and is gone.
Judith Mikesch McKenzie is a teacher, writer, actor and producer living in the Pacific Northwest. She has traveled widely but is always drawn to the Rocky Mountains as one place that feeds her soul. She loves change—new places, new people, new challenges—but writing is her home. She has recently placed/published in two short-story contests, and her poems have been published in Pine Row Press, Halcyone Literary Review, Plainsongs Magazine, Closed Eye Open, Wild Roof Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, and several others. She is a wee bit of an Irish curmudgeon, but her friends seem to like that about her.
Gabriel Welsch
The Concrete Barriers that Inspire Thoughts and Prayers
I.
Can sediment stacked be anything but dumb?
On a horizon little moves and the wind is a distant aria.
Now the sun stretches a wall while a cloud passes over,
Coiling atmosphere, its shape made by a beholder.
Record the wall a failure, a reach that ends well before the cacti
End around or under. Dig and push asunder. Mount and leap where safe.
Tell the others about weakness. About strength in knowing that power
Erodes even in the thinnest air, atmosphere hissing as it passes.
II.
The people’s house is a trap,
However you enter.
Odds are greater you will be shot than provided any power—
Unless you hold the gun, in your star spangled aura.
Gather compatriots, gather signatures, and fling them against money.
Humility takes many forms. Sometimes just a breeze
that follows you out the steps, to the street’s bitter
shrug, bullhorns, faith ugly on placards.
Gabriel Welsch writes fiction and poetry, and he is the author of four collections of poems, the most recent of which is The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse. His first collection of short stories, Groundscratchers, was published in October 2021. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his family and works as vice president of marketing and communications at Duquesne University.
Tyler Barton
Policy Mirrors: A Memoir
“It’s often been my experience that if no one is happy, then you’ve done a good job.”
—village resident to the board
Everywhere has slid
Maybe the climate listening?
A bell and hope
you can’t unring
Open to the public:
Musk’s brain
The region as
a whole 2008
Pay more,
same goes
Dream of a pose
to halt the face
To get a permit
for a new Monday
Membership in the book of
open fear
—feral
On a tour bus, do a listening tour:
A home is…
make no more
At the end of the last sea—
ripple effects across the country
The houses that
the homes could never be
Tyler Barton is the author of the collections Eternal Night at the Nature Museum (Sarabande, 2021) and The Quiet Part Loud (Split/Lip, 2019). With the artist Erin Dorney he co-curates the ongoing literary art installation “The Hidden Museum,” currently on view at the Susquehanna Museum of Art in Harrisburg, PA. His visual poetry is forthcoming in Northwest Review, Pinch, and Sprung Formal. He lives in the high peaks of the Adirondack Park, where he leads creative writing workshops for older adults in prison and in assisted living facilities. Website: www.tsbarton.com / Instagram: @tylerbartonlol
Karen Luke Jackson
Ushered
In the wind-chilled North
where White Buffalo and majestic Oak reign
where Hummingbird ferries
prayers to spirit guides and green streaks
singed with purple fringe
float in luminous skies
a door appears between here and elsewhere
through which souls enter this world of form
and then return
a threshold guarded by Ancient Ones
who monitor the comings
the goings
so perilous the passage
and we, blinded by not knowing,
find ourselves ushered
forth and back,
back and forth
clothing for each arrival
disrobing to rest.
It is not ours to touch
the how, the why
but here in the somewhere
we are sometimes blessed
with a glimpse of others crossing—
the door ajar at births
during deaths, in our dreams.
Karen Luke Jackson, winner of the Rash Poetry Award and the Sidney Lanier Poetry Contest, resides in a cottage on a goat pasture in western North Carolina where she writes and companions people on their spiritual journeys. Karen draws upon oral history, contemplative practices, and nature for inspiration. Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, One, Susurrus, Salvation South, and Redheaded Stepchild, among others. Karen has also authored three poetry collections: GRIT (2020), chronicling her sister’s adventures as an award-winning clown; The View Ever Changing (2021), exploring the lifelong pull of one’s home place and family ties; and If You Choose To Come (2023), paying homage to the healing beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Website: karenlukejackson.com
Liz Baxmeyer
Mitosis
I wonder about the alternative universes that stay hidden when we let them. I don’t mean the kinds that are direct parallels of the lives we live like in Star Trek, or The Twilight Zone, where the people are mostly the same but with different roles or clothes, or personalities. I mean the liminal spaces of the world in which we live; the streaks of light that sit between moments or thoughts, or the spaces in time just before a fall or a dandelion loses its last seed. The parts we feel, but do not see; the parts that engage the senses and teach us to brace, pivot, or hope; the spaces in which time slows, like in a vacuum, milliseconds into seconds, just long enough to see what could be, or could have been. When there is just enough time to know, for a moment, that the sky might be another color, that the blue it displays might just be one way of seeing things; that it could be green or purple through a different part of the brain in another moment.
When a drunk driver hit my car on the way home on July 4th, I felt a liminal space envelop me in its flesh. It poured down my spine to my hips and through my sacrum; it’s what kept my young daughter asleep and grounded through it all, through the whirlwind of metal and plastic shards, the specks of light fragmented in the rearview mirror darting around like fireflies exploding into cinders. I knew right then that it was the liminal space that had kept us from terror by slowing down time just long enough to breathe one extra breath, see the colors inside it, prepare ourselves before we landed upon the oleander-laced metal fence that stopped our kaleidoscope spinning.
It is assumed much of the time—because we are not fast creatures in the scheme of things—that when events happen so quickly, they cannot be caught in time; cannot be slowed to a halt or molded somehow—except in movies. But I don’t think that is true. There are moments to see within moments, just like glass that shatters into a million pieces creates new reflections, new spaces to see, holding many more moments within. It takes time for that kind of destruction, perhaps more of a dismantling, and if we only pay attention to the spaces we can see them break apart, bit by bit; we can see how something that now sits in smithereens looks before it turns to sand. And we know because we break apart the same way; it is how we become multi-dimensional and tender and more pieces than we were in the beginning of things.
Liz Baxmeyer is a writer, musician, artist, and composer living in Sacramento, CA. She holds an MFA in writing from Antioch University and explores themes of folklore, nature, and trauma, especially where these things intersect. Her poetry, art, and prose are in Beyond Words Literary Magazine, The Examined Life Journal, Luna Station Quarterly, and more. Instagram: @lizbaxwrites
Jodi Balas
Jodi Balas is a neurodiverse poet and artist based out of Northeast PA. Her poetry has been featured in River Heron Review, Wild Roof Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and elsewhere. She has been a poetry session leader for the Think Center in Wilkes Barre, PA and is in the process of creating her first chapbook (TBA). Instagram: @jodibalas_
Ann E. Wallace
The Anatomy of a Storm
The way Minnesotans know snow,
deep, intimate, without fear,
is a lesson on living through
the squalls of these middle years.
Some decades are winter through
and through. But after a spell
we build a home within the storm,
nestle under the crystalline shards,
light a match against the too-early
dark, and stop waiting for the sun.
Ann E. Wallace is Poet Laureate of Jersey City, New Jersey and host of The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants. Her second poetry collection, Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in February 2024. She is author of Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag) and has published work in Wild Roof Journal, Halfway Down the Stairs, Gyroscope Review, Wordgathering, and other journals. You can follow her online at AnnWallacePhD.com and on Instagram @annwallace409.
kerry rawlinson
kerry rawlinson is a mental nomad. She left Zambia decades ago to explore and landed in Canada. Fast forward: she’s still barefoot, tiptoeing through dislocation & belonging. Awards: Glittery Literary and Edinburgh International flash contest winner; notable poem Best Canadian Poetry; Pushcart nomination; honorable mention/finalist for several contests, e.g. Proverse Press, Fish Poetry, Canterbury Poetry, Room, National Poetry Society, and Palette. Recent work: Grain, Freefall, Rochford St. Review, Prism Review, Event Poetry, Prairie Fire, Wild Roof Journal, and more. When not challenging established norms, kerry kayaks and drinks too much (tea). Website: kerryrawlinson.com / Instagram: @kerryrawli
W Goodwin
W Goodwin is a writer and a visual artist bound by blood and experience to salt water, and directed by mixed genetics to explore uncommon themes. W graduated from UCLA (biology and English), studied scientific photography at the Brooks Institute, traveled through multiple continents and oceans, taught high school and university-level sciences, raised two excellent children, and founded two so-so businesses. W’s photographic art and short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, news sources and websites. Website: wgoodwin-syzygy.com
Joan Mazza
Kalpa*
A bright crescent moon in a clear winter sky,
the porch light illuminates stray cats who come
to eat, their water bowl frozen to the deck.
In my small world, it’s twelve degrees, another
snowstorm in the forecast. 5 AM and I’m cooking
chicken thighs two ways, thinking about parents
who report teachers for their lessons about slavery,
the legacy of family separation. Perspective
is everything. I try to take the long view, remind
myself of the size of the universe, the insignificance
of this blue-green planet in a tiny solar system
in a galaxy among billions. We are in one
kalpa cycle of many. Big bangs followed by big
contractions. For now, the universe is expanding.
I know that’s none of my business. I build a fire
in the wood stove for backup heat, keep
my focus on the roasting time, portion and label
food for future meals in my freezer, hope
I don’t lose power or the long view of my small
and precious, simple life. At the end of a kalpa,
the world is annihilated by fire. My atoms will
disperse and recombine in other beings without
my guidance or knowledge.
*noun. (Sanskrit) The passing of time on a grand, cosmological scale. A duration of time in Hinduism covering a complete cosmic cycle from the origination to the destruction of a world system. From Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World by Ella Frances Sanders.
Joan Mazza worked as a microbiologist and psychotherapist, and taught workshops on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam). Her poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Potomac Review, Prairie Schooner, Slant, Poet Lore, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia and writes every day.
