Cover image: "worldings" by Holly Willis
Gallery 3
Gather what I can
Mitchell Untch
American Summer
I sleep on your side of the bed,
befriend your absence,
feed space where your right hip lay.
When I press my ear against your pillow
I hear your voice.
I want to articulate missing.
That photograph of you
at the foot of the stairs.
The way your laugh tipped
the frame of your interior.
Your favorite red stripe
pullover two sizes too large
balloons over my wrist into a sink
of dirty dishes—plates, forks,
knives, spoons. The coffee cup I gave you.
Serrated cans of soup clutter
the countertop.
The hands on the kitchen clock
move the day forward.
I miss your body leaning
inside the doorframe.
Not being able to see around you.
Your coat over the back
of the chair.
You told me you’d be
right back, didn’t you?
When the orchards are empty of McIntosh,
of American Summer?
The last thing I remember.
Mitchell Untch is a two-time Pushcart Nominee, author of Memorial with Liminal Space, and winner of the Driftwood Press Poetry Prize 2023. Partial publications include Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, North American Review, Confrontation, Nimrod International Journal, Natural Bridge, Owen Wister, Solo Novo, Knockout: Baltimore Review, Chiron Review, Massachusetts Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Telluride Institute, Silk Road, and Wax Paper.
Liza Wolff-Francis
Powdered sugar on strawberries
I want to say powdered sugar is an inheritance,
the way it clumps together in your mouth like chalk.
My words, truth like rising heat, my grandmother
in the kitchen, oven on, strawberries sprinkled
white. I bring one to my lips. Sugared fruit.
Soothe any unsureness about the way voice
emerges from mouth, from tongue, from lungs.
It’s a breathing that chokes when truth is blocked,
too much sugar in the larynx. Tastebuds tangled
into shrugs, into gasps. All she had to say, even
in the last days of being able to talk, began with
dear, like a letter. Do you have something to say,
dear? Don’t we all have something to say? Not
if the sugar chalks up your mouth, not if it isn’t
prescribed like the things we learn every day,
with every inhale, every cross of leg, calf over knee.
There are ways to be a lady. Speaking up isn’t one
of them. Manners and sweet, all sugar, no protein.
I am jumping. I am screaming. No one hears.
No sugar. All I want to say inside me.
My grandmother’s hands warm over mine. Dear,
there is a sweetness fed you that must be ignored.
Liza Wolff-Francis is the 8th Poet Laureate of Carrboro, North Carolina and she has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She is an ecopoet who facilitates ecopoetry workshops and has taught creative writing workshops for over a decade. Her essay “Exploring Ecopoetry: Changing Definitions” was published by Valparaiso University. Her writing has been widely anthologized and her work has most recently appeared in The Phare, Silver Birch Press, Wild Roof Journal, and Indelible. She has also written poetry book reviews that have been published on Adroit, Compulsive Reader, and LitPub.
Nicholas Trandahl
Offering of Blackberries and Pine
for Father Christopher Szarke
Here,
alone again,
sweating
and breathless
in some silent mountains
of the American West,
ascending
to a lonely alpine lake
alive
with leaping trout,
sundered reflections
of lofty summits
so near,
shining
their snowfields
with the purity
of Tibetan prayer scarves
given
in greeting
and in parting.
Sky
scrubbed blue
and clean
as blessings.
Aspens gathered
near the timberline
in their saffron robes,
waverly crowns
good
and rusty
on the butternut edge
of October.
My own sort of pilgrimage
to these mountains
I know
so well,
to these saintly bones
of the earth.
At this moment,
my cousin Christopher
is in Norway,
having just completed
a pilgrimage
to the bones
of kingly Saint Olaf
in Trondheim’s Nidaros Cathedral.
I wonder
what Christopher felt,
if thick pious words
drifted
like curls of smoke
into the vault
of his dreams
when his journey
was over.
I wonder
if at the end,
he lit a votive
in the cathedral,
an offering
for Saint Olaf,
a flickering light
burning
lower
and lower,
luster
fading
from the gold
in an age of decadence,
suffering,
and fury.
Now, the wind
blows cold
down
from snowy summits,
aspens whisper
in their crisp language,
whisper
of what they’ve seen
from the neon green
of spring
until now.
I taste things
I can’t explain,
see colors
so beautiful
they hurt.
Holiness
burns so heavy
in everything.
I’m so grateful,
but what remains
to give?
I’m threadbare.
After what I’ve been through,
after
what I’ve done,
I don’t believe
there’s much of a soul
left
within me,
but still,
I gather what I can
from the tatters,
place it
in this sacred place
like a bundle
of blackberries
and pine.
I’m seeking
something.
There’s a place
in all this
I’m trying
to return to,
some inward fragment
thrumming
with pulsar music,
a mother’s first kiss
to tender flesh,
the warm breath
of God.
Nicholas Trandahl is an award-winning poet, journalist, outdoorsman, and veteran residing in northern Wyoming, where he currently also serves as mayor of his community. He has had five poetry collections published and has also been featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Trandahl has been awarded the Wyoming Writers Milestone Award and has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Additionally, he works as poetry editor for The Dewdrop literary journal and as a regular contributor for The Way Back to Ourselves literary journal, while also serving as chairman of the annual Eugene V. Shea National Poetry Contest. Instagram: @nicholastrandahl
Tracey Dean Widelitz
Tracey Dean Widelitz is a published writer, poet and photographer. She is the author of the published children’s book A Heavenly World, based on her personal experience of pet loss. 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, My Sanskriti in Teal, and Rhapsodies of Rhyme, and she was the Grand Winner of Wingless Dreamer’s Dreamstones of Summer Poetry Contest and one of the top finalists in their Field of Black Roses Poetry Contest 2022. Her photographs appear in Months to Years, Camas, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Burningword, Poet’s Choice’s anthology A Taste of Reality, Wild Roof Journal, and several Las Laguna Art Gallery photography exhibitions. Website: www.traceydeanwidelitz.com / Instagram: @traceydeanwidelitz and @aheavenlyworld / X: @tracey_author
Whitney Schmidt
My Heart Is a Greedy Thing
You are applesauce and corn chips, secret
runs to the bakery for long johns and apple
fritters. You are things other than food but not
much else satisfies my heart, that starved beast
who calls for more of you. More Johnny Quest
and Star Trek reruns. More radio songs when you know
all the words. More trips to the co-op for seeds.
More days when you came home on time and made
missionary dinners: mac ’n’ cheese with hot dogs
sliced in warm circles. More stories of Mexico
where you baptized whole families, learned
to make horchata and chilaquiles and how to sew
buttons and hems. I want you to ask me ¿Entiendes?
so I can answer Si, Entiendo. I want you to leave her
finally, fully, forever. I want you free to read all morning,
to carve magic wands that really do obliviate
and levitate. Plant your tomatoes and even
squash if you want instead of dutifully watering
her unplanted annuals so they don’t die. But
wands are only wood, beautiful and mundane.
I left the church long before I dared tell you.
And you made up those lyrics. Next summer
she will buy more flowers and forget, and you
will have to save them or let them starve.
Whitney Schmidt is a teacher and amateur lepidopterist with a passion for poetry and pollinators. She founded the first student-led secondary school Writing Center in Oklahoma and co-sponsors an LGBTQIA+ affinity group. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Harbinger, So to Speak, and Wingless Dreamer. She lives near Tulsa with her partner, two pit-mix pups, and various moth and butterfly guests.
C.E. Oldham
Personal Inheritance
After Major Jackson
A golden watch that slips from wrists and never ticks,
holed hoodie from Sacramento, doused in bonfire,
the knowledge of a wedding ring lost in a hotel room;
A love of the microphone paired with a chasm of embarrassment,
an expectation of roses after retreating from every stage,
the comfort that comes from sober karaoke;
An overstuffed bookshelf and an immovable hourglass,
a cuckoo clock that asks too many questions,
the regenerated stump of that crabapple tree;
Salami, brie cheese, and jam on a cutting board,
a serrated spoon, to dissect sweet from bitter
the jar of capers to eat plain and alone;
Ashes kept in a gift bag, never unwrapped, never talked about,
always thinking of the present,
barrage of birthday cards signed love, love, love, love;
A talent for air guitar, an understated appreciation for Aerosmith,
a Ford F150 rotting on the blacktop in San Jose, still blasting 1973,
gas station chicharrones stuck in the fabric upholstery;
The lighter that still needs butane,
the hoarding of broken, to not light for more than a moment,
until the flame fades blue, suffocating its own smolder, gone to gas again.
C.E. Oldham is full of curiosity and a love for poetry, speculative fiction, and fantasy. They graduated from Long Beach State in 2023 with a BA in English Creative Writing. Oldham currently lives in the Bay Area, and is a creative writing MA student at San Francisco State. You can follow their misadventures on Instagram @c.e.oldham.
Tracey Keilly
Tracey Keilly’s work is a complex, elegant study of the political, social, and psychological, used to create a wordless conversation. She taps into the vulnerabilities in our culture and illuminates their connectivity.
Ryan Russell
My Name is Lavinia
I call the facility and ask for a list of things he can bring.
I pack the sticky flannel shirts—crusty socks—coffee mugs and whiskey glasses with cherry lipstick on the rim. Newsboy caps, boxer briefs. Dingy photographs with curled ends, once valuable, now undefined.
He calls me Lah because he cannot remember my whole name. I spell it for him everywhere—on birthday cards and sidewalks and mirrors. I whisper it while I brush and braid my hair. I paint my name in red on the door to the shed, hoping somehow, his favorite color would help him remember.
He removes the door. I ruined his space.
I call him Rock, short for angry man. My mother called him a friend until she called him a husband until she called him Daddy so I wouldn’t be confused. She called him honey to remember she loved him. She called him an asshole and a liar until he was asleep. She called him an addict hoping he would change. She called him nothing when they divorced.
He calls the police when he sees things. He runs into empty fields at night, his flashlight shaking the trees. He points at different shapes speeding between stars, connecting dots in the sky. He shouts at the aliens, throws beer at the lights. He calls himself American.
He calls for help when the rent is late. It’s been three months since he last paid and he knows the landlord is coming. The landlord is the devil. The landlord is the last person to see him fight for something he needs. The landlord wins. The landlord gives him 30 days to find a new life.
He calls his twin sister for a new life. She’s Rock II. She breaks herself open to be family. He thanks her. He promises not to be a burden. He lies. He parties with people he doesn’t know and calls them friends. He meets them at Lowe’s and 7-Eleven. They talk about sports and women and kids and work. They hate them all except the sports.
His friends are children at this house. They play hide and seek and disappear into people they don’t recognize. They reappear in different parts of the house. They play again and again and again and again. They play with Rock II. She doesn’t want to play. They fill her tiny space until it’s full. Her tiny space is hell. His hell is too big to contain. She asks him to find another life.
He calls me to pick him up, to start over. He says he’s done—with the liquor, and the parties, and the women. He promises to buy other things, to be different.
I call a place to ask for help. He accepts it every time. He leaves every 30 days. It is a game of red light, green light. He is the car that barrels through. I am the pedestrian that never sees him coming.
I call my mother for help. I ask if I am being stupid. I ask if he will ever love me back. She tells me yes. She tells me fools love the wrong things.
I ask her what happens to people when they die—when the life they live is too much for them to stay alive. I ask her to help me. She cries. She hangs up.
He calls in pizza when he is hungry. He forgets when they come. He makes his own pizza, with bread and moldy tomatoes and calls himself a chef. He forgets the oven is on. He sleeps while he is forgetting.
I call out of work and buy him things: toothpaste and toilet paper and water and soap. I buy him a rotisserie chicken with yams and mac ’n’ cheese and greens and yeast rolls. I spend money I don’t have. I spend money on hope. The food smells up the car, making my mouth water. I do not remember to eat. I am a shadow of a person.
I call Ree to talk. I rub the oil from my nose on my jeans when he answers. I ask him how is life, how the job is going, if he has traveled anywhere. I don’t ask him about Jenny, if she’s the one, if he is happier now. He tells me he is good, that her parents helped with the house—that things are so different from before. I say congratulations. I have more to say, but his kids are screaming.
He has to go. We hang up.
I call another place. The man tells him he’s not alone—that he understands. He goes to the man for thirteen days.
I am dreaming. I am calling him a hero. I celebrate each of the thirteen days like a birthday, with cake and ice cream and board games and movies. I smile at him for the first time in thirty years. I watch him sleep on my couch, under clean blankets, bits of blue sprinkles buried in his beard. I turn off the TV and ask if he’s okay, if he needs anything, if he wants me to call him Dad.
I wake up. I call out of work again. I turn over switching sides, my arm numb from the weight of my body. I ignore the missed calls. All twenty of them. I pull up the blankets. I think about the Dad from my dreams. I go to sleep and find him eating cake.
Ryan Russell is an emerging contemporary writer based in Central Virginia. She is an English professor at Randolph College, teaching undergraduates the importance of fiction, and is currently working on her first story collection. She lurks but hardly posts @Rynopages.
J. D Goodman
Water Tower
As a child near this hour of night
eight of us, all tense, not old enough to
drink, but old enough to go outside alone
in late summer.
The sky was our cradle.
Sean and Jim unbound their pants in a fit of pique and
let their wills out. I looked away, but heard the
sound of rain on gray metal. I was suddenly
afraid
but the clouds did not revolt
at the pagan fluid release; barely fourteen. Autumn
closing in. And now, aging; see me
on a dérive, shocked at the sight of the
old target, now
rusting, and far shorter than it was then.
A stray cat runs across the road. Wind scrapes
a few leaves across the pavement, a single star pokes
out the clouds and a car door slams
three blocks away.
The pissers insisted
we walk through a graveyard, next. I escorted Sean’s
sister home—she feared ghosts and
I feared sirens, so we walked and
in the quiet night,
still so warm we wore shorts, I had
a joke and I know it made her laugh, but can’t for
the life of me remember how it goes.
J. D Goodman is a writer from rural Maryland currently pursuing an M.A. in philosophy from Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University. Previous writing has appeared in Wild Roof, Litro, Lighthouse Weekly, and The Belmont Literary Journal.
Michael Moreth
Michael Moreth is a recovering Chicagoan living in the rural, micropolitan city of Sterling, the Paris of Northwest Illinois.
Julie Benesh
Wrongful Sentence
Picking me up from my office
Friday afternoon, you saved
it up to tell me through hours
in traffic on I-80, and days
marveling over your modest-
but-significant spiritual epiphany:
when that anti-capital punishment
nun visited your campus
you never go to those events:
to think you almost didn’t go!
made you, professional cynic
and beyond lapsed Catholic,
desire to be a better person.
Tunneling through the dark
on Lower Wacker Drive,
my flesh weak after two weeks
apart, I ask, fingers brushing your leg:
Was she the one who had
an affair with the priest?
Your jaw clamps shut and I see
my error. I’d listened to employee
grievances all day, all week long,
my whole life, it seemed, a fount
of pious empathy, St. Julie of HR,
run dry when I get to the one I love
in every way, which is to say
that when I tell you, twenty years
too late, I owe you, that is not exactly
what I mean. I mean to say my love
is not a tithe, nor book of rules,
but rather the contour of that memory,
that opportunity for communion, dead
yet walking.
Julie Benesh is author of the chapbook About Time published by Cathexis Northwest Press. Her poetry collection Initial Conditions is forthcoming in 2024. She has been published in Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Florida Review, and many other places. She earned an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and received an Illinois Arts Council Grant. She teaches writing craft workshops at the Newberry Library and has day jobs as a professor, department chair, and management consultant. She holds a PhD in human and organizational systems. Read more at www.juliebenesh.com.
Caroline Polich
Caroline Polich is an artist from New Hampshire, based in Washington, DC. She received her BA with honors in Studio Art from Drew University. Caroline’s work has been exhibited at Gristle Art Gallery, dodomu gallery, Second Street Gallery, Rhode Island Watercolor Society, and The Korn Gallery. Her paintings and mixed media works reinterpret the traditions of botanical illustration to examine contemporary environmental issues such as invasive species, plant disease, extinction, and habitat loss. These works explore themes of beauty and vulgarity, growth and decay, and the natural and synthetic through the world of plants. Website: www.carolinepolich.com / Instagram: @caroline.polich
Charles Weld
Friendly Adirondack Peaks
His last months, my father read one book, cover
to cover, and—done—opened it again to start over.
He called it “Wickham”—the author’s last
name. As in, “Have you seen my Wickham
lately? I must have misplaced it.” The story—a 1923
backpacking trip—dad, dog, & son—told in a low-key
way by the father. Day-to-day trail-breaking,
tent raising, collecting balsam tips for sleeping,
cutting wood, cooking rice, eyeing sky to forecast
rain. Routine and ritual—their results come
reliably, I think, and can change dread, if not quite
to delight, then to something less disquieting. My father
read a little each night—descriptions of familiar
tasks he’d loved—and seemed content, despite
evidence that the end was fast coming into sight.
Charles Weld’s poems have been collected in two chapbooks, Country I Would Settle In (Pudding House, 2004) and Who Cooks for You? (Kattywompus, 2012), as well as a full-length collection, Seringo (Kelsay Books, 2023). A retired mental health counselor, he lives in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.
Holly Willis
Holly Willis is a hybrid artist/theorist working primarily in film, video, and still photography. Her work often examines the materiality of the image within a broader context of new materialist philosophy and the histories of experimental film, video, and photography with the goal to design encounters with media that spark an embodied sense of curiosity and wonder, alongside critical reflection about our relationship with the matter around us. Her images and essays have been published in numerous journals, including River Teeth, carte blanche, Ponder and The Normal School.
