Cover image: "Thumb Print Series " by Eri Sawatzky
Gallery 2
My Kin
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
Hanging Clothes in the Not-Yet Dark
The line shines holy as milk in moonlight.
I take another wooden clothespin out of my pocket,
try to clamp the thick waistband of jeans on,
stop at something in the grass. A rabbit? A beetle?
Outer space, starting at the ruins of zucchini
vining across the curious dirt, inhales everything
while vials of hours spill across the cold grass
where my feet land, lift, try not to trip while reaching
above my head to hang a nightgown, a button-down shirt,
two socks that don’t match, my fingers already cold.
The wind catches my back, reminds me to turn toward
the horizon, the one the moon climbs long before
any planets or constellations burn through enough to see.
Each life clothespinned to a line between now and the next
windfall of light or hard freeze, no luck or jubilation
although nothing is happening but a hard bowl of oatmeal.
I stand there and ask the obvious: Where do I not belong?
What’s in Your Window?
Streaks along the edges. A small dead grasshopper.
A crest of white paint. Branches so vertical
rocking the cradle of wind. A fleck of turquoise.
The bent window blind among the obedient ones.
A knock on the glass—a song sparrow dead or stunned.
The glare of green indoor plants wanting out.
The floral curtains, pastels of their former selves
because of how much light ages us.
A black-capped chickadee, then another
hopping the deck railing for black sunflower seeds.
The wind, the wind, the wind turning over rocks,
your reflection, the thumbprint of your words.
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate, is the author of 24 books, including How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems; Miriam’s Well, a novel; and The Sky Begins at Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body. Founder of Transformative Language Arts, she offers writing workshops, coaching, and collaborative projects. Her poetry has been widely published, including in Terrain, Half and One, Poets & Writers, Negative Capability, Mockingheart Review, Two Rivers, The New Territory, Louisville Review, and dozens of other journals.
Nicole Farmer
drift
you might wish yourself from somewhere
the truth is you’ve got no roots to hold you steady
in this life of drifting, moving
starting over & over in another new place
you might toss & turn as you dream of people
you’ve known and wonder upon waking where
it could have possibly been now that you
find yourself in the southern mountains, where
you will never talk about or write about
grits or grandpa’s fiddle or the front porch swing
you might float & break all kite strings as you drift left
or right over treetops to the east, lakes to the north where
your parents hailed from — couldn’t wait to get away from
never knowing even at the age of sixty where
you might land where
you might feel at home.
Nicole Farmer has published two books of poetry, Wet Underbelly Wind (Finishing Line Press, 2022) and Honest Sonnets (Kelsay Books, 2023). Her poems have been published in over forty magazines. She was awarded the first prize in prose poetry from Bacopa Literary Review in 2020. She lives in Asheville, NC. Website: www.nicolefarmerpoetry.com
Julia Gaskill
two truths, no lie.
Julia Gaskill is a poet and professional daydreamer from Portland, OR. Her work has been published through Pine Row Press, Pile Press, FreezeRay Poetry, Vagabond City Lit, and more, and her poems have been featured on the YouTube channels SlamFind, Write About Now, and Button Poetry. She was included in the anthologies A Shape Produced by a Curve (2023), Excelsior! (2022), and In Absentia (2020). Julia is the author of four chapbooks, runs the poetry mic Slamlandia, co-created the Bigfoot Poetry Festival, and is the creator of the spoken word album Stouthearted Bitch. Her debut full length collection, weirdo, is out now through Game Over Books. Find out more about Julia at @geekgirlgrownup or at www.juliagaskill.com.
Winslow Schmelling
Winslow Schmelling is a writer and maker from the Sonoran Desert and a recent graduate of Arizona State University’s MFA program. Her work appears in Welter Review, Tempe Writers Forum, The Tunnels, Hayden’s Ferry Review Online, and elsewhere.
Margo Griffin
Tumbleweed
Dotted with petalless, pink-veined translucent flowers and puffs of creamy fur that looked as soft and sweet as cotton candy pillows, Mother shook her Russian Thistle limbs with pleasure as the Goldfinch couple flitted about her late spring desert dress, tickling her with each tug of her fluffy white crown. The cottony pieces pulled from Mother’s tuft would soften the nest for the babies, who were busy developing inside fragile shells. Mother welcomed their company. But as summer came to a close, the birds moved on with their young, downy brood, and Mother’s flowers withered throughout the fall, and by early winter, her limbs dried and crackled with every push and pull of the desert wind.
One breezy winter morning, a depressed Mother wondered what point there was in hanging on, so she broke herself off from her dried-up roots and rolled away with my sisters and me, the tiny thistle seeds she cradled in her arms. But Mother’s arms stiffened and soon gave way as the desert breeze carried her lifeless body from place to place, where she abandoned my sisters and me along old Route 66.
Left alone on the desert floor, I screamed and begged for help, but with no mouth, my cries remained buried inside until I burst open at the first breath of Spring air. Thin green blades sprouted up from my head like hair, and soon after, I took firm root in the dry soil as stubbornly as a child planting her feet in defiance. I noticed familiar hues of pink and white decorating my shoots, and memories of Mother brought me comfort and yet sadness, too. Through Spring, I grew taller, and new textures covered my expanding limbs. I thrived, matured in the desert’s arid air, and soon discovered I was no longer alone. Prairie dogs wandered down trails and nibbled on my tender leaves, and young cattle wandered off ranches and suckled on my tasty shoots. But I belonged most to a local Goldfinch couple, who nested in my arms and trusted me with their eggs. Dressed in prickly armor, I guarded the eggs with my sharp limbs and shielded them under my rough green skirt, dissuading prey who took up swords and sought battle for the tasty contents incubating in the tiny nest.
Summer passed, and my flowers wilted while my skirt turned dull and brown. My crown depleted its soft white puffs by fall, and my branches hardened. Finally, my bare limbs emptied of their nourishment and the fine-yellow-feathered family moved on in search of a more suitable home for quelling fledglings’ squawks. Winter closed in, and my body transformed, so I made haste and uprooted at the next storm. I carried my babies in my arms for miles and dropped them off where they could take root throughout the desert. And I knew, no matter where my orphaned children landed and grew, they would find comfort in the tumbleweeds, the mothers and ghosts of Russian Thistle.
Margo Griffin has worked in public education for over thirty years and is the mother of two daughters and the best rescue dog ever, Harley. Margo’s work has appeared in interesting places such as Bending Genres, HAD, Mom Egg Review, Twin Pies Literary, Maudlin House and Roi Fainéant Press. You can find her on Twitter @67MGriffin.
DeAnna Beachley
Joshua Tree/Yucca Brevifolia/Desert Dagger
If there is magic in this planet, it is contained in water
— Loren Eisley
Why do you bulldoze my kin?
I stand beside this
freeway see you humans
go and go and go
in a haze of exhaust
watch as my kith my kin
my kin my kin
disappear
replaced with a vacant lot
we have such a fragile hold
crave rain at just the right time
a winter freeze to bring a bloom in spring
treat me as a succulent
watch me flourish
all I ever want
a yucca moth to visit
a red-shafted flicker to nest
Do you ever want to stay
in one place and just breathe?
DeAnna Beachley is a bird watcher, hiker, teacher, historian, poet, and essayist. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Red Rock Review, Sandstone & Silver, Thimble, The Ekphrastic Review Challenge, Slant, Blue Earth Review, Gyroscope, L I M I N A L, Anatomy of an Essay, The Book of Life After Death, and Awakenings: Stories of Body and Consciousness. Her debut chapbook, The Long View, is forthcoming by Kelsay Publishing. @DeAnnaBeachley (X); @deannabeachley (Instagram); and @deannabeachley.bsky.social (BlueSky Social).
Sara Sasani
Sara Sasani was born in 1985 in Tehran. She is a graduate of Art and Sociology. She has collaborated with local and foreign newspapers, news agencies and publications for more than 17 years in news photography and social documentaries. In addition to holding six solo exhibitions, she has participated in more than fifty group exhibitions and festivals in Iran and countries such as Austria, France, USA, Italy, Belgium, Georgia, Germany, England, India, South Korea, etc. She achieved the first ranks in three domestic festivals as well. She studies and works in women’s issues and environmental problems. Her portfolio includes collaborating with the Austrian cultural group X-Change, publishing two books titled My Yazd and Iran: A Winter Journey, and working as a co-curator and collector. Also, she works as a teacher assistant in Art University. Website: sarasasani.com / Instagram: @sarasasanee
Kathleen Calby
Returning Home
How reduced everything feels here,
so little measure of story.
I miss those columns of flowering papyrus
waving above my head, the images
of pharaohs, invincible and immortal.
How surprised to find Anubis
riding shotgun in my Corolla now, taking
Thoth’s place:
the god of death, replacing
the one of wisdom. Maybe
it should alarm me, but it doesn’t.
What do I recall now?
Gold, gold, all gold there,
Egyptian blue, lavender,
then dark opens—blooms.
Kathleen Calby lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains and hosts writer events for the North Carolina Writers Network in Henderson County. Her work appears in San Pedro River Review, New Plains Review and The Orchards Poetry Journal, among other publications. Named a 2022 Rash Award Poetry Finalist, Kathleen published Flirting with Owls with Kelsay Books in 2023. Her Sufi background and other mystical associations contributed to a recent full-length manuscript she is completing about ancient and contemporary Egypt and the Pharaonic Era landmarks she was privileged to experience. Back home, Kathleen enjoys fried chicken, biscuits and fresh donuts a bit too much and long, strenuous walks not enough.
Bracha K. Sharp
Supplication
I would like to write about quiet.
More specifically, how to
unlearn the noise.
Always, I think,
they are hurrying and running—
saying, “Do! Do!”
And this world becomes
a cacophony. So busy with sound.
I do not mean insulating, I mean craftsmanship.
To lean on birdsong, wind, my feet walking the pointed rocks.
Listen—this too is sound.
Once, I walked out of my apartment and saw bursts of blossoms
in the long terra-cotta pot, on the high stone wall. Long and lonely
it looked, but I heard it, as I passed by.
Singing, I mean, slow, and methodical, and unbending and full of such joy.
Red, and pink, and white, burning with color.
Round and open.
I flew.
Nobody heard them singing,
rounded and with pointed tips.
They stretched tall, to reach above the soil.
I heard them singing.
And look—I, too, can learn to sing away that distant noise.
I, too, can sing in their infinite choir.
Bracha K. Sharp was published in the American Poetry Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, ONE ART: a journal of poetry (where she was nominated for Orison Books’s Best Spiritual Literature, formerly named The Orison Anthology), Wild Roof Journal, The Closed Eye Open, Rogue Agent, and Thimble Literary Magazine, among others. She placed first in the national Hackney Literary Awards—the poem subsequently appeared in the Birmingham Arts Journal—and she was a finalist in the New Millennium Writings Poetry Awards. She received a 2019 Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards Silver Medal for her debut picture book. She is a current reader for The Baltimore Review. You can find out more about her writing by visiting www.brachaksharp.com and @BrachaKS_writes.
Thomas John Hurley
By Heart
We worked together in the meadow tonight,
cutting invasive grasses before their seeds dropped,
careful to leave the native grasses untouched.
Mostly we worked quietly, companionably,
sharing news. Your conversation with Sara,
plans for next Saturday. Or calling the other over
to see the smaller lives threaded through the leaves:
a gold and rose-colored grasshopper, a box turtle,
burrowed in. As dusk deepened, we paused to watch
bats zigzag in the indigo sky as they hunted. Most birds
had gone quiet, except for cardinals and first-year wrens
still learning their songs. Feeling for another
clump to pull, I suddenly found I could easily tell the grasses
by their stalks, native broomsedge stiffer and thicker
than the crabgrass choking it. I started to work
as much by touch as by sight. Master woodworkers
must know wood the same way — the density, hardness,
and grain of walnut or oak, speaking to them as friends.
The way I know your shapes and the textures of your skin.
What wakes in us when our boundaries grow thin, through
surrender, communion, or passage into liminal spaces?
I remembered stroking the stubble on my father’s
rough, weathered face when he was close to death
and could not speak. His blue eyes filled with
light from beyond. No artifice or need of any kind
in that moment, only silence and the pull of the still-point,
as he called it, where all is forever perfect and in its place.
Now I sit on the porch in darkness, looking out
at the meadow where we knelt in the grass together.
All light has fled save a small sliver on the horizon.
I no longer see what I am writing yet
still keep the pencil moving.
Thomas John Hurley is turning his focus to poetry as he completes his work as an executive coach and leadership consultant. He is a dual citizen of the United States and Ireland and his Celtic heritage manifests in a deep love of nature, a gift for story, and a passion for the unseen dimensions of life, soul, and spirit. He and his wife are rewilding land in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Eri Sawatzky
Eri Sawatzky is a multidisciplinary artist with a broad range of work consisting of fibre arts, murals, paintings, and soft sculptures with a multi-medium twist. Working without limitations, and with many mediums, is what evolves and inspires their work. Their goal is to play and stay forever curious. Creating began as a means of release and has evolved into a desire to express one’s obsession with the dream state, skepticism of what is deemed reality, and the blueberry-eyed wonder of the infinite. By putting Eri’s creations out to the world, they hope to inspire a little bit of intrigue, inspiration, and a few abstract thoughts, and also to bring calm to the chaos. As much as the unknown can be terrifying, it also brings peace. Eri tries to bring that into every medium they dabble with and hopes that someone, somewhere, can genuinely find some wonder through it.
Emily Greenspan
Ascend
Before me was a swirling white cloud. It looked like snowfall when wind whips around itself. A powdery tornado. But here the elements were different: water in place of air, plankton in place of snow.
Currents are the wind of the water. An invisible force that disrupts what just was, transforming the seascape with each moment. Like hurricane winds that sweep cows from their pastures and peel roofs from houses, the force of a current captures whatever it wants. A sea slug whose sticky bottom is stripped from its rock. A crab who ventures from her anemone at the wrong time. A jellyfish who has no choice but to be swept away.
When the gale hit my body, I felt I’d just opened the door to a fierce winter wind. I feared it would carry me away. My breathing piece, my regulator, pulsated in my mouth. I clenched my jaw, and my teeth sunk deeply into the silicone mouthpiece. My fingers grasped at porous volcanic rock. Nerves fried, I held on tightly, my body frozen stiff. Rigidity was my custom under pressure.
***
Two generations before my birth, genocide severed many branches of my family tree. That harrowing number six million — six million Jewish people murdered by the Nazis — includes at least twenty-six of my relatives. My maternal grandparents survived by a series of miracles. Miracles, plus astute behaviors.
Don’t scream. Don’t cry. Don’t ask questions. Don’t defy. Your humanity invites attention, not the good kind. To persist, appear mineral, not animal. Do what you are told: toil. Become machine.
On the surface, my grandparents’ lives in the 1940s had nothing to do with mine. I grew up in an affluent suburban town, my body sheltered from most of the world’s troubles. But trauma was literally written in the fibers of my being. Indeed, scientific research shows that trauma is imprinted in the DNA of Holocaust survivors’ descendants. This is perhaps why the colic of my infancy never truly subsided — it just morphed into something else: childhood fussiness, insomnia, anxiety.
As a child, long before I knew the word Holocaust, I knew there was something sad about my warm, loving grandparents. Their words were thickly accented by the tongue of some faraway place. They spoke little about their origins. When I finally asked my mom for details around age ten, she obliged, staring at the wall.
“Well, Grandma’s whole family was taken to Auschwitz on cattle cars. Right when they arrived, her mom and her little brother and sister went on the line for women and children.”
She swallowed, her voice shaky.
“That’s the last time Grandma saw them. That was the line to the gas chambers.”
This story didn’t take me by surprise, and not just because I’d never heard anyone say anything about my great-grandmother before. My blood knew mother loss. The thought of losing my mother had always been my paramount fear. As a toddler, when my mom was leaving for work, I wrapped my limbs around her calf like a koala hugging a tree, begging her to stay. On the first day of kindergarten, the teacher had to pry me from her when the other parents left. At age seven, if my mom was a few minutes late coming home from work, I panicked. In my mind, she lay in the middle of a Manhattan sidewalk, struck dead.
Craving a semblance of control against Murphy’s law, I eventually began to follow two of the basic rules my grandparents used to survive.
1. Work like your life depends on it.
I delayed sleep in favor of study, sitting in uncomfortable positions to stay awake, obsessively checking my 4.27 GPA for any minute slippage. That number was everything — it meant I would have a future.
2. No matter how horrific things get, never show weakness.
I turned my agita inward. I chewed my inner lip until it bled. I had chronic gas pains and diarrhea, no matter what or how much I ate. I became numb and stuffed myself with food until I could feel again. All my struggles were invisible, and for that I was proud.
There was one more rule that came from my grandparents’ survival stories, but this one I had trouble with:
3. Trust in the goodness of others.
***
I came to SCUBA a year after finishing college. I’d loosened up in the company of stoner musicians, dreamy activists, humble intellectuals. Still, I was obsessed with my GPA. My mind was beginning to understand why my excessive ambition was problematic, but my sick body had long known I needed to try something radically different. My old dream of learning to SCUBA dive made sense now — the water had always been a soothing realm for me. With the privilege of some money largely from my dad’s parents, and after failing to convince my friends to join, I embarked on a solo trip, with a one-way ticket, to Southeast Asia. I booked the basic level dive course for the first week. At the urging of a few well-traveled friends, I didn’t book anything else. An open-ended itinerary. A fuck-it, let’s just see what happens agenda.
Despite convincing myself I had experienced every major dive injury possible during my Open Water training, I managed to earn my certification. Afterwards, I relaxed on the lush jungle beach and asked around about other dive spots. A Malaysian dive instructor enthusiastically recommended a remote island in Indonesia. “You have to go there,” he said. “You’re going to love it.”
I had been steeped in this new environment — this tropical climate with fun-loving divers — for only one week. Yet much of my anxiety had already diffused from my body. I immediately trusted this zealous stranger. I did not scour the Internet before committing to the island. I did not even consult a single SCUBA website where I could have easily learned that the island was known for its strong currents (had I known, I would not have gone).
Shortly after arriving on this island, I took a yoga class with a teacher named Romi, a smiley Italian woman with round hazel eyes. I mentioned I was curious about more dive training to boost my confidence in the water, and she said that she had been teaching SCUBA for ten years. Her experience, the fact that she was a woman, and her bubbly, warm nature made me feel safe enough to attempt the advanced course, even though it involved a deep dive.
***
The dive boat zipped us toward a pinnacle of black volcanic rock that erupted from the blue surface. My anxious stomach grumbled inside my wetsuit — not long ago, I told myself I would try out SCUBA but never go deep — too dangerous, and for what? Same creatures, less light?
I looked to Romi, who scrunched her face in an excited smile at me.
“You’re gonna be great, Emily! This site is spectacular, especially in the deep parts. You will love it.”
We did our equipment check, backrolled off the boat and descended down the side of the pinnacle, or the “wall.” On our left, the water column was a darker, deeper blue than I’d ever seen. On our right, the wall sloped down steeply. That should have scared me, should have made my breath hitch, but I didn’t even notice. My attention was captured by massive flat, lacy pink fan corals adorning the seascape below. They were even bigger than the fan corals my frantic eyes had skimmed over during my Open Water course. This time, because I wasn’t convinced I was about to die, I could appreciate their delicate intricacy.
At thirty meters (100 feet), Romi raised her hand: stop. I suddenly noticed the loss of light. It was like dusk, all color muted. The pink corals had turned purple. Even the sand seemed darker. Nitrogen narcosis, the intoxicating effects of SCUBA in deep water, was said to begin at this depth. It could impair judgment and concentration or even cause anxiety. But I felt fine. My lungs expanded with full breaths, and my eyes traced my visible exhales: dancing, voluminous bubbles. They shimmied and grew and coalesced as they climbed skyward, disappearing into the soft blue blanket above us. I felt like I could spend the rest of the dive watching my breath.
Okay, maybe I was feeling slightly narc’d.
Romi unclipped a white plastic slate and a pencil from her jacket to have me answer some simple math problems to test my narcosis. The pencil worked underwater! I smiled in my regulator, a droplet of sea bubbling into my mouth. This sensation was now familiar. My breathing stayed normal, relaxed. I handed the slate back to Romi, who scribbled 100% on it. She clapped, her eyes squinting through her mask. Warm pride thrummed in my sternum — even under this completely new kind of pressure, I could abide by my first rule:
Work like your life depends on it.
We ascended immediately per the instructions of Romi’s computer, which was programmed to keep us safe from decompression sickness. Scaling the pinnacle, mauve-colored Moray eels swayed their necks playfully to and fro, their bodies nestled in the rock. One here, two and three there, four five six…there were so many that I lost count after twelve. Around twenty meters, we reached a plateau, which we began to traverse when Romi pointed downward. Two shimmering gray-skinned sharks with black dorsal fins swam below our fins. I gasped in my regulator — my first sharks! They seemed to have registered our presence but weren’t looking our way. Their elegant bodies glided through the water, their movements like a figure skater’s delicate yet powerful strides across ice. My heart pitter-pattered, a tingly electric charge rushing through my core. My skin prickled up with goosebumps against my wetsuit. To my surprise, this wasn’t fear, no — this was thrill. Salty tears of wonder pricked my eyes.
Just as quickly as the sharks came, they were gone.
Romi signaled that it was time to ascend to five meters for our safety stop. That’s when I saw the plankton snow and felt the blustering force. Those sharks had left us alone, but this sea had become hostile.
No matter how horrific things get, never show weakness.
My teeth bit hard into my vibrating regulator, willing my air source to stay connected to my face. My fingers clamped down on the rocks, willing my body to stay in place.
I begged the sea not to smell my fear, not to swallow me.
When Romi flashed me the “OK” sign with her fingers, I didn’t want to respond with an OK because I didn’t feel OK. The body I’d felt so intensely with the sharks became deadweight, divorced from feeling. An external force to control.
I was frozen, my body an extension of the island’s volcanic rock, anchored to that piece of land in the sea. Becoming inert, unfeeling as stone, often kept me safe on land. It certainly helped my grandparents. But this was a new realm, and there I was, grasping for the old one, the familiar one.
Romi sensed my distress and signaled to go another way to ditch the whipping current, but there was no escaping it. It was too strong to fight and too chaotic to follow. We hung onto the rocks, scaling the pinnacle as we climbed upward. My heart beat fast, and my breath quickened with exertion. What the hell was happening?
I was just a little winded, yes, that’s all it was. I paused and reminded myself to breathe. Dry inhale through the regulator (yep, still in my mouth!), slow, bubbly exhale out. Two times. Three times. As the granddaughter of survivors, I knew better than to indulge in panic.
***
Trust in the goodness of others.
My grandparents did not survive alone.
My grandmother’s older sister pulled her out of the line to the gas chambers, that line where they saw their mother and younger siblings for the last time. The two sisters survived Auschwitz and a labor camp before they were taken on a death march. My grandma’s sister planned their escape toward a barn. The owner housed and fed them until they were liberated.
My grandfather escaped brutal forced labor in the Hungarian army. Emaciated and badly bruised, he wandered the streets and met a woman who gave him a liter of milk. He returned to her a few times a week after that. She gave him milk every time. He said it saved his life.
***
I settled my eyes on the tiny blue-eyed fluorescent orange fish beside me. They faced the current head-on in one big school, moving to and fro in response to each fluctuation. These creatures, no bigger than my thumb, did not hide. They braved the force together.
The violence of the sea had made me feel vulnerable, isolated in my fear, but the miracle of these fish taught me that I could also be part of a larger whole.
My body finally understood what my mind had long known to be true: to be alive was to depend.
Romi gave me a thumbs up — ascend. Though slow to release my terror-fueled grip on the rocks, I obliged. I trusted her. I let go. She grabbed ahold of my tank and kicked us upward.
When we broke the surface, the boat was right there waiting for us. We scurried up the ladder, panting. The other divers gazed at us wide-eyed.
“Did you get caught in that washing machine?!” one asked.
I looked back toward the pinnacle and saw a swirling circle of water, white foam churning around its edges. A confluence of opposing currents. A whirlpool.
“Yes, we did,” Romi said, still panting, smiling a little. “Emily, how’s that for your first deep dive?! That was not normal — whirlpools are rare. You got a little scared but you stayed calm. Great job.”
She took a long gulp of water from our communal water bottle and sighed. Her eyebrows perked. “Oh, for next time — if you feel the current coming, don’t be so stiff. You will waste energy like that. Just hang on to the rock and then bend with it.”
My body knew it was safe to release as the boat zoomed back to the dive center. Feet planted into the rumbling floor, my knees shook, discharging my fear. Whatever just happened I never, ever wanted to experience again.
Yet, gazing over the boat’s edge at the sparkling azure, I did not think about quitting diving. I did not think about what could have happened in the washing machine. Only in retrospect did I really consider all the possibilities. We could have been smacked into the rocks. We could have been sucked deeper by a down current. We could have run out of air.
On that boat ride back, what I couldn’t stop thinking about was the sharks. They reminded me of the improbability of my existence in that deep place. Me, a young woman, traveling alone, diving with sharks thousands of miles away from any lands my family had ever inhabited. I had to have been the freest woman to exist in my bloodline. Free to be an “old maid” at twenty-three. Free financially, able to leave office work behind. Free from genocidal laws that nearly claimed my grandparents’ Jewish lives. After the war, they wandered as refugees. I wandered by choice.
No, I would not quit diving. The corals, the eels, the sharks were too wondrous — I felt too alive in their home to abandon it. In that place with no air, I felt more like myself than I did throughout so much of my life on land. Down there, I could take some of the deepest consecutive breaths I had probably ever taken. I had no dramatic brain chatter, no thoughts of death, not even when faced with sharks and a violent current. Just six weeks prior, my anxiety had me convinced that diving was going to kill me. Now here I was, just having had a potentially near-death experience in the water, looking forward to going back in. Who was I?
I peeled back my wetsuit, ran my hands over my arms — soft, unscathed, but the goosebumps were back.
The current, it was clear, was trying to teach me something.
My policy of strictness had to go. The ocean held no respect for any rigidity I brought to it. I could not fight its flow; I needed to flex with it. Anchor down alongside reef critters and let the current catch my body and spirit. Let it ripple through me like a white flag surrendering to the breeze.
In the turquoise shallows, our captain shut off the rumbling engine. Now quiet, we floated toward the beach. Palm trees whispered in the wind, children’s playful giggles in the distance.
The hull nestled in the sand.
My knees were still.
Emily Greenspan is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Ashland University and is the lead nonfiction editor for Ashland’s literary magazine, Black Fork Review. She is a graduate of the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop. Emily has been published in Black Fork Review and Humans of the World. Website: emilygreenspan.com
G. R. Bilodeau
G. R. Bilodeau is a peripatetic cook and music journalist from New Jersey. Author of Notes from the Parking Lot of Lost Hopes and Dreams (Alien Buddha Press, 2024). Their work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Burrow Press Review, TIMBER Journal, Tilted House Review, HASH, the holon project, and elsewhere. Find them on Instagram @grbilodeau.
Robb Kunz
Robb Kunz hails from Teton Valley, Idaho. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho. He currently teaches writing at Utah State University and is the Art and Design Faculty Advisor of Sink Hollow: An Undergraduate Literary Journal. His art has been published in Peatsmoke Journal, Fauxmoir, Hole in the Head Review and Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine. His art is upcoming in Closed Eye Open and Glassworks Magazine.
