Cover image: "Coral Reef" by Alexey Adonin
Gallery 1
Embark
Devony Hof
The Will
I have decided to donate my last possessions to the ocean,
Each one buried in the sand, a mussel shell to mark its grave.
The gold watch will grow claws and follow sand crabs
scuttling into the foam, winking along seabeds
tick tick ticking away the deep black centuries.
My mother’s glass vase will grow tentacles
and join a jellyfish colony, a bloom in blooms.
She would admire the camellia pinks, the lupin blues.
The desk will crack and splinter, its compartments
collapsing into a horizon of sailor-less rafts.
Mermaids will squeeze out my toothpastes and face creams
into forests of brilliant white coral. Their lipless maws
swallow my lipsticks whole.
The toenail-eating fish will eat my toenail clippings. That’s what they do.
Individual octopuses will harvest ink from my books
Their tentacles move like poetry, grocery lists, signatures.
But no one will string my bones for a cruel song,
No one will mold my face with clay or code or interpret
words from my parted lips. I will float on an oil-stained wave,
into a red sun, the birds crying out nameless pain.
Devony Hof is a poet and playwright from Palo Alto, CA, currently based in Chicago. She has a BA in English Literature and Theatre from Northwestern University, where her poetry was published in Helicon Magazine and she received the Edward Shuman Award for Best Honors Thesis for her work on W. B. Yeats’s and Eavan Boland’s doll poems. Instagram: @devonyhof
Megan Lynn Hall
Transplant
a new head voice sounds in dropped
r’s and low o’s
says scoop the melon season the
pot with this shifty lizard clung to a
porch screen I am taken
to blend against her willful wild
overgrown shears forgotten and
eating what pongs
around me
spores string loose hours of deep living
until my blood condenses under linen
sheets I feel like sticking
yeh lawd
into fermented muscadine from up the
block I am fading skin turned oak bark
sloughed into ferns like salted head hair
fanned
above unmown blades I bud
in pattern
then drain
with the canal murk
rising to ovulate
red
sliders dip shy under
rain pounding out ideas
sluggish to hatch those brown
frogs cupped in hand boiled
thunder
at dusk my bicycle is a flying
dragon over tomatoes mulch fat
with duty
past machinery
sinking and rusted
the lonely rectory
lofted
over long dead LeBlancs
Vicknairs old bricks at rest
and rot the fertile thrive of here
streaking with that street cat no plan
ahead
roach in the bathtub crow in my ear
Megan Lynn Hall strives to sharpen the bones of womanhood with poetry that speaks of humanity, empowerment, and generational progression. She is currently a PhD student in creative writing at Georgia State University, and her work has appeared in Yalobusha Review, Inkwell Journal, Sheepshead Review, Soliloquies Anthology, and elsewhere.
Bridget Hayes
Flowers 2
I seek out my protection in your hiding places. You, the rare gems of the woods. Uncut, unpolished, skin-thin petals of color tucked away. Under branches, camouflaged in the leaves, mimicking the scarecrowness of the next tree. You are dollops, morsels, lozenges of relief. You don’t announce your space, but let yourself be found by those who are trying to see. Really trying to see. And when our gazes meet, I breathe again. Almost a small whimper escapes my lips. Our love long lost is here again, though our moments left together are fleeting.
Bridget Hayes lives in Sonoma County, California. She is a tech librarian who helps people overcome their fear of technology. When she is not reading or writing she is likely outside. She lives with her wife and two orange cats. Website: bridgethayes.carrd.co
Léni Paquet-Morante
Léni Paquet-Morante is a New Jersey-based artist whose work addresses shallow water systems as metaphor and for driving her artistic inquiries across painting, drawing, sculpture, and print media. A recipient of the 2024 NJ State Council on the Arts grant and 2023 Peters Valley Guest Artist Residency Grant, her work has been featured in solo and group exhibits in the northeast region since 1984, including the 2022 and 2023 NJ Arts Annuals. Instagram: @lenimakespaintings / Website: www.lenimorante.com
Kelly R. Samuels
Walking to the Square, to the Harbor
What meandering route?
The map argues too much time
for what we wish, too many crossings of busy streets.
It is my fault: this lack of under-
standing of distances in miniature.
The scale confuses, Earth’s curvature
mattering as we flew, but lost, here.
Lost is the church’s stone eruption—its spire and wings.
I can only see it
from that one place if I keep a fixed gaze.
Never mind the bay.
I cannot sense its nearness. It must be
too far, wetting other stones, the black sand caught
in the corners of our eyes that morning
of indefatigable wind.
Diamond Beach, Dusk
Nothing is of stasis. Certainly not the sky
which has flared and now softened, everything
growing dim and bluish.
The bergs tumble and roll and list down the channel.
Even the smaller chunks crack like fire.
Black, blackish, glass—
one: bleached coral.
A pocked stone. A fang.
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of two full-length collections—Oblivescence (Red Sweater Press, 2024) and All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books, 2021)—and four chapbooks: Talking to Alice, Words Some of Us Rarely Use, Zeena/Zenobia Speaks, and To Marie Antoinette, from. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, RHINO, River Styx, Sixth Finch, and Court Green. She lives in the Upper Midwest.
Cerid Jones
The Old Ways Still Breathe
The fresh bite in the wind carried with it a promise: that soon, the chill would be joined by the sweet scent of chimney smoke. Yes, the season had changed. Faces nuzzled into woollen-coated necks, and fingers cupped the warmth of steaming teacups. It was autumn. As the sun drifted to its distance, low lipped in grey painted skies, so too did the stories rise against the thoughts of firesides. Still ingrained in human bones from the days of old, the days of small societies who knew each face by name, days where family was forged by the ash of a village’s survival, when evenings were made bright by burning embers and the stories the flames inspired. People here still believed in the magic of things unseen, able to coax the tales from beneath the moss and the stone.
What is your fireside like?
Man’s victory of survival is still held in the mastery of the flames. A primal thing, fire, it speaks to us. A voice from a deep-seated nature, ingrained in ancient history, a subconscious thing.
Watch their eyes as they stare into the flames, there are secrets there, things that don’t have names. Reflected in the iris, the flames find the only space they can show their truth in. The depth of a soul is told by the way the light licks against their eyes. Some see only flame, but some still feel it in their bones — a history held in every leap of life that blazes from the dead branch. Some still know there are stories there, even if their tongues will never speak it, it’s sung in the reflection.
A Wood King knows what lives in the flames when the sun dies.
If you ask him to tell you what it says, he will shrug and simply say, things. It’s not for you to know what rests between him and the flame. It speaks to him, in its own quiet way, things made only for him to hear. But watch the lines at the corner of his eyes, the subtle flex in the crease at the edge of his lip, and if you are lucky enough to feel his knee, worn from the leather of dirt and wood, brush against your skin, you may be blessed enough to feel a little of what the flames have to say. But do not belittle him by asking.
The magic weaves itself to mystery. Beauty rests in the space suspended there. Do not call it forth, do not strip it of its honesty in its speaking. Too often prods and pokes provoke the opposite of the desire; fire dies with too much air. We think, to hear it said in words will give the meaning depth; instead, we strip it of its truth. We forget, to be a witness is a rare and golden gift. Tales unfold themselves in the rightful time and with the proper shape, like a fern that learns to curl in again and as it does, so, too, does its matter grow. Try to pull a frond from the form, the beauty and shape — both will break.
The Wild Woman leaps like the flame, her long hair licks the wind, and her soul sings out to the sky.
Her mouth moves, too quickly, and her hips are always humming in the movement of the moon. As the sun dies, she is hungry for secrets that only come against the shadows, and all too often, she eats too soon. Aligned against the flames, she thinks she alone knows how to summon life from a sawn-off log. At the surface of her skin, she remembers too quickly all that was before the lamppost lit the way home. She is too ready, too bold, too willing to begin. The Wild Woman watches a Wood King, eyes full of questions, lips full of lessons, fingers drenched in silver, she’s tugging too hard at the threads, and he is not ready yet.
Wild Woman, when the Wood King nuzzles his face against your neck, you know what beats in his soul. It is in the way he rests his cheek upon your knee that you know how he holds you in his mind. Scarred by false kings, Wild Women have been conditioned to hold too much faith in words. Words fall from the tongue as easy as the leaves in a rough wind. Too hungry for solutions, their questions echo the wind, the leaves that fall are not a Wild Woman’s to take. Seasons, take time. We cannot rush their coming; in doing so, who we are is made undone.
Scarred by false kings, faith is put into the wrong things, we become blind to the truths we are given and mislead by the truths that are kept hidden. Ignoring the wisdoms of the flames, favouring instead to try to explain away the pains that are buried too deep inside hearths. We lose sight of the right way to read hearts.
Wood King, know Wild Women are often too lost in the pull of the way they have been shown who it is they are meant to be. They have been hungry so long, fed only scraps, taught to believe they have to fight to win a feed. Fed scraps so long they have been left always hungry, learnt to believe they must battle hard to win a feed. Worn down by heavy hands that aim to tame them, and failing that, seek to shame them into staying small.
Wild Women, know that Wood Kings are too often hidden under the pull of the way they have been shown WHO it is they are meant to be, left hungry so long they have learnt to suppress it, learnt to survive — alone. Worn down by heavy hands that aim to shame them, they have learnt to dream — less. Learnt to protect themselves, learnt to be kept separate.
Nightly, the phosphorescent light bulb whispers. It tells the story that we can redefine our nature, that we can be limitless to shape every part to bend to our will. It tells us our society is vast and limitless. That we can bend and break to our will alone. But at the fireside, we remember simplicity, the root. We do not have to be bound to light bulbs. At the fireside, remember what it was to be before anyone flicked the switch on you. The seasons turn, and the tides of time pull on. The fireside reminds us of what our nature needs. We were not born to be so big that we were to forget the small things that bind us. Do not forget our fireside. It’s in the wood, it’s in the flame. Please, old ones whose bones still remember where our makers defied the stars but still gave thanks to their graces, don’t lose your way under the streetlight. Dance, naked, beside the flames, be bold enough to be bare, brave enough to take the moon in your footsteps, trust the waters in your belly and love, love without fear of sacrifice.
Cerid Jones is a life-long closeted writer only just learning how to be brave enough to share her musings. A lover of folk tales and myth, she hails from Aotearoa (New Zealand). Growing up in a house where there were more books than wall space and fae at the bottom of the garden, she has always been a creature with a passion for the arts and literature. Reading anything that transports her elsewhere or delves deep into the psyche of human nature, she redirected a career in art and has now found a home working in the publishing industry, teaching people how to throw axes on the side. Find her on Instagram and Facebook under CuriousCerid or at her website curiouscerid.com.
Kelsey Britt
girlhood
dear america, hours on the olive couch reading
sunlight streaming through the wooden panes
sliced hot dogs expired ketchup soaking
through paper plates Barbies bashing
their bits plastic forks and spiked Doritos
mosquito bites and warm Gatorade
my mother’s jewelry drawer opened
amber pastures grazed
count the thunderclaps how many miles away
is the Indiana rain titanic, an unexplained feeling
our father who art in heaven
hallowed be an absent ghost
white ribbons hung from two-inch nails a ceremony
nine years old and somewhat saved
leather oil caked in the cracks lifelines pressed
together bridles, never made of sterling silver
hooves breaking each bone of my toe.
Kelsey Britt is a queer writer and sexuality educator based in Seattle. They are a graduate of the MFA in Writing program at the University of San Francisco, where she received a post-graduate teaching fellowship. Their work has appeared in Hairstreak Butterfly Review, Lumina Journal, and Delicate Friend. More of her work can be found on Instagram @embodiedwithkelsey or at thecuriousclit.substack.com.
Matthew Fertel
Matthew Fertel is a Sacramento-based abstract photographer who seeks out beauty in the mundane. He has worked in the Photography Department at Sierra College since 2004. Before that, he was a fine art auction house catalog photographer in San Francisco for over 10 years. He takes long walks every day and uses the details of his surroundings to create imaginary landscapes filled with the strange characters that live inside his head. Website: mfertel.wixsite.com/matthewfertelphoto / Instagram: @digprod4
Samuel Gilpin
Through the Years
full dusk beginning to unravel,
the orange brown of dried pine needles,
every so often speech fails me.
bone spur
bare branches
barrenness leaving but a trace
I feel so passive, so powerless.
flowers wilted in the patio pot.
a few voices in the street.
the black bark, wet and broken.
the world does not conform to your description.
when I awake you are still sleeping.
Samuel Gilpin is a poet living in Portland, OR, who holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which explains why he works as a door-to-door salesman. A Prism Review Poetry Contest winner, he has served as the Poetry Editor of Witness Magazine and Book Review Editor of Interim. A Cleveland State University First Book Award finalist, his work has appeared in various journals and magazines, most recently in The Bombay Gin, Omniverse, and Colorado Review.
Alexey Adonin
Alexey Adonin began his artistic journey at the age of nine and pursued art as a career, passing entrance exams for Art College at 15. Alexey’s interests include science fiction literature, history, biology, paleontology, geography, and astronomy. His work has been displayed locally and internationally, earning him multiple awards and recognitions. Website: www.alexeyadoninart.com / Instagram: @otherworldlydream
Roberta Senechal de la Roche
Ebbtide
I tried to memorize the color of her hair
and of water like dichroic glass
in the late afternoon light on the verge,
each on a granite stone as though
alone, quiet while seagulls keened
their day-end dirges to each other,
as lowering waves exhaled in whispers,
And how she moved on the path back
where a dead thrush lay with folded wings,
how she walked around it, hushed
trying not to see its hooded eyes,
or yours as she rushed, you now recall,
to get where flying fast could still be found
and never wordless go to ground.
Roberta Senechal de la Roche is Professor Emerita of history at Washington and Lee University, and a poet of Micmac and French-Canadian descent, born in western Maine. She now lives in the woods outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Vallum, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Blue Mountain Review, Sequestrum, Catamaran, and Cold Mountain Review, among others. She has two prize-winning chapbooks: Blind Flowers and After Eden, a third chapbook, Winter Light, and her first book, Going Fast.
Painter
Embark
this couch / its scent / brown
as in earth / mud / river stones / bark
as in dog / tree / peppermint / or suffix to em–
me / mine / not as tired as i could be / i was
just upstairs in a different town / in the hall
(what of so many miles traveled / so few minutes
no wonder we all have sore necks)
whips and whips / blink / lashes / whips
inconsistent / perpetual
tugs like / the anchor
of a ship
.
Painter is a musician, writer, visual artist, and multidimensional being having a human experience. Originally from Bar Harbor, Maine, they are currently studying in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
Sean Stiny
Cacti in Caliche
At 4 am the desert wind beguiles me. The stars above scream silent and the coyotes cool their yips, but the wind blows through like a steam engine who’s lost its track. The snake-proof gate squeals open as we pack the midsize rental for Phoenix and a Southwest flight back to our by-the-bay airport. But the wind grinds the desert down, lets loose dust from rock, shakes leaflets from mesquite, flutters plumage on the spotted owl. It whips past the saguaro that’ve stood since the Civil War, the younger ones who’ve stood since Desert Storm.
The battle of Antietam yielded twenty-three thousand Navy blue and English gray souls on September 17th of 1862. On that late summer day, the reddest in U.S. history, the oldest saguaro cactus in the southwest was already a hundred and fifty years old, and would live another hundred and fifty. It plainly ignored the bloodstained zeitgeist and germinated in Mexico, grew tall in the New Mexico Territory, and sprouted fifty-two arms in Arizona.
The sheer volume of cacti in the Sonoran Desert is astounding. The outright tonnage of green flesh that peppers the landscape, staggering. They, like Roman columns in the cracked earth, exist in decades and centennials rather than our days and minutes. The young adults with knobby arms look like mothers cooing their babes while the pubescents take cover under mesquite and brittlebush where they germinated. And the diminutive round ones giving it a go in these badlands, the one or two inchers, they’re already ten years old. A paltry ten years. The commonplace centurions, fifty to a hundred years, easy. They stand sentry while the wool hiking socks bake our feet and sweat dampens our shirt back. The desert is where we go to bathe in sweat, cleanse ourselves of the turgid world, like a Navajo sweat lodge or Russian steam bath. Release the toil and toxin that accumulates from our septic institutions.
Saguaro skeletons blink the landscape with their ribs exposed next to cacti pups budding their inaugural arms. Their spines and meaty green stems are given structure by a vertical skeleton. You couldn’t make a coffee table or tv stand from their fibrous ribs, but you could certainly kindle a flame, maybe sand one to smoothness for a bookmark.
Late in the day, the desert sunset spreads its sheen and yawns as it goldens the landscape and wrestles awake the crepuscular critters. The songbirds whoop and whir and an antelope jackrabbit slings ahead through the brush, so large you’ll think a fox sprung from the tamarisk. A final roadrunner snips by and the coyotes howl in the early night while the mindless house dogs bark a return into the blackness. And the desert breeze funnels upward a faint balmy aroma, Eau de Prickly Pear.
The Sonoran surely doesn’t care about any living thing, least of all its mammals. It cares only about dust. Reducing all to dust. Rock, cacti, javelina, song bird, all of it. How many saguaros have lived and died out here and leached into the scabrous caliche? It wants to grind us all away, dust unto dust. Though for some reason inexplicable, humans persist undeterred.
The shoulder season, a hotelier turn of phrase, is the only time to visit the southwest at present. Perhaps for the foreseeable future. Maybe the unforeseeable future. That is, the months just out of reach from the shotgun blast of summer. The heat is unsteadily becoming more inhumane. The local newscasts show their homeless seeking water and what little shade is to be found next to some downtown monolith. But no one seems to bother with the whys of the thermal blast. The newscasters simply frown, then move on to the Powerball winner and local Lions Club barbeque. We are garrulous about the heat, yet not its root.
No matter, I suppose the hard questions are best left to the dark crevasses of repression. Who wants to think about the cinders of the natural world when the Cardinals are playing the Falcons at home in their pigskin cathedral this Sunday?
A timber forest in Rainier may be crisp and lush, but the desert reveals the true measure of a creature. Every wayfarer who treks a day in Yellowstone or Yosemite or Glacier should require a day in Saguaro and experience the rugged difference, the thirsty heat, the deft landscape. For every talus peak, a spindle of cholla cactus, for every high mountain brook, a dry wash.
A few miles away in the arid metropolis, humans have descended into modern madness, bulldozing every horizon and overpowering every Luddite. But in these wastelands, out here still the quiet takes hold in the dark, the stars flame above, the coyotes yip and stammer, drunk from the evening redness, and the desert is as calm and resplendent as the day it was formed. The humans may be on their way out so the exhausted land lies in wait for when it will again be silent and chaste and free of foolishness.
Thoughts of Ed Abbey, buried someplace out here, likely a bit south, dance in my head, as do a deluge of rattlesnake fever dreams. The decaying cacti look like Coyote blew them to smithereens with an Acme rocket just as Road Runner made a quick escape.
In fact, Abbey is in every saguaro, a thorn in the eye of whomever may look past the silent splendor of the parched wilderness, to anyone who may think a coiled rattler is somehow less than a bugling elk. Abbey was, probably still is, the Lincoln of the west, the William Tecumseh Sherman of the wilderness, administering scorched earth on the rubes in Washington making decisions about land they’d never seen and earth they’d never touch.
When Lincoln was addressing Gettysburg, many of these barrel-chested saguaros were in their cacti cradle on the way to becoming behemoths. Long before humans took breath, the flora began sprouting thorns and spines to keep critters from eating away at their flesh. Brush up against one and this season’s trendiest REI joggers will be woefully thorn-punctured. Whisk the spurred shoots away carefully, or transport them a few dozen feet down the trail where they’ll release, germinate, and grow for the next hundred years, the assured intention of the non-sentient saguaro.
Just as the bodies that fell at Antietam have long turned to ash, the ancient cacti have duly turned to dust. The soil digests the ribs of each saguaro and the hardpan lets loose the next generation of ribbed Cactaceae. Each its own character, some many decades and centuries old, reaching back to when we took up arms against our brothers and they reached up arms to the blue desert sky.
Likely the saguaros have the same ennui as humans at present, at least myself at present. They peer down and echo T.S. Eliot’s “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” They see the waste land that we cannot, the one waiting for our return, the star dust of which we began and the earth dust where we end.
For now though, the sun is taking its set and animates the cooling desert. Each creature chases the light as it abides and surrenders to eventide. Will the southwest still be here the next time it beckons me, or will Arizona Bay be the launch point for a kayak or fleet of cruise ships to the swelling Pacific Ocean? Perhaps a trilobite or tortoiseshell fossil will turn up in the Sonoran Desert ten million years after the seas have risen then subsided and revealed an ancient desert of spindly verdure in the caliche earth.
Sean Stiny grew up in the American West. A writer, woodworker, and owl box maker, he lives in Petaluma, California. His work has appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, The Los Angeles Review, True Northwest, Bend Magazine, and Kelp Journal.
Cynthia Yatchman
Cynthia Yatchman is a Seattle-based artist and art instructor. A former ceramicist, she received her B.F.A. in painting (UW). She switched from 3D to 2D and has remained there ever since. She works primarily on paintings, prints and collages. Her art is housed in numerous public and private collections. She has exhibited on both coasts, extensively in the Northwest, including shows at Seattle University, SPU, Shoreline Community College, the Tacoma and Seattle Convention Centers and the Pacific Science Center. She is a member of the Seattle Print Art Association and COCA. Instagram: cynthiayatchmanart
Ellen June Wright
Tangerines
On a January day overlooking the island’s
green hills, Mom at 98 enjoys her tangerines,
fist and lap, on a sunny afternoon. The tree nearby
boasting fruit from top to bottom—
bright orange globes. I phone and say,
why not sell the fruit. Call people to pick
a dozen and give you some money.
She laughs her dismissive laugh
at me as though the idea would never
occur to her to charge for what the sun
and the rain and God had given her freely.
She’ll call neighbors and church folk, let them
come with ladders and long sticks, pluck
the fruit until the tree is clean and know
the gift she was given was shared and shared
again, something like small loaves of bread
and fish among a hungry crowd of hearers.
Ellen June Wright is an American poet with British and Caribbean roots. Her work has been published in Plume, Tar River, Missouri Review, Verse Daily, Gulf Stream, Solstice, Louisiana Literature, Leon Literary Review, North American Review, Prelude, and Gulf Coast, and is forthcoming in the Cimarron Review. She is a Cave Canem and Hurston/Wright alumna and has received both Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations.
Candice M. Kelsey
Candice M. Kelsey is a poet, essayist, and educator living in both Los Angeles and Georgia. A finalist for Best Microfiction 2023, she is the author of six books with another forthcoming. She mentors an incarcerated writer through PEN America and reads for The Los Angeles Review. Website: www.candicemkelseypoet.com
