Cover image: "Owls of the Winter Woods (II)" by Brad Robert Benford
Gallery 2
Words pinned to your coat like feathers
Kate Gough
Kate Gough is a Californian writer and artist living in North Wales. She is wildly in love with the world and stokes that love with words. Kate has written and exhibited for newspapers, lit mags, galleries, spoken word events, and touring exhibitions around the UK and the USA, and has been teaching a writing class for a youth charity since 2019. Her work can be found in Wild Roof Journal, Peregrine Journal XXXVI, Kith Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine.
Christopher Hammond
Counter 18
Tuberose, crushed caffeine pills; I wake at your own
risk
naming this, that, the old rope.
I steal from a good man naming his window
yesterday,
tomorrow I plan to sing all day; the south makes its
play.
A prickly red rose unravels before me asking
me of its name.
Silent, I begin plucking all around to leave the great
ache with its solemn thought —
haunted by all it knows
Christopher Hammond is a poet and photographer whose work explores the intersections of identity, memory, and the ephemeral nature of experience. His poetry often draws on visual imagery to capture the tension between the personal and the collective, using language to illuminate both the mundane and the profound. He is currently working on Voices of Modern American Poetry: Reimagining the Lexicon, an anthology examining the evolution of American poetic language. He is an Aries.
Laura R. McCullough
And They All Fall Down
Weak.
Brown bag coward if
the wind is wrong,
work went sour
or the line too long;
words pinned to your
coat like feathers.
Fair-weather faithful
and cracked ice, all
tied in the end.
Thin blue hem
of her denim scraped,
scufftscuff on a sidewalk
braced for the thaw. Where
one new hymn between
her and the concrete
might have kept,
you filled a cup
with mantra that
broke her jaw.
Faded flowers cried
out line upon line and
her frame wept, knowing
it was the earth’s own
iron. Your fallen
trees in the path only
launching her skyward.
What was made to
build wings won’t be
used for a plow, when
the spine of a man
sets low in the ground.
Laura R. McCullough is an artist and writer happily nestled with her family in the North Georgia mountains. A “lover of faith and believer in what is beautiful,” she and her husband work in ministry and music in their community. Laura uses her writing and mark-making to explore how the lyrical power of language can express things we are unable to say. Her work has been published in journals such as Rattle Magazine, The Blue Mountain Review, Right Angle, Solum Press, Vessels of Light, Wild Roof Journal, and The Way Back to Ourselves. Her artwork is featured in several regional museums and galleries.
Mirka Walter
Mirka Walter is a visual artist and illustrator from Cologne, Germany. It was here where Mirka got in touch with surrealism, as Max Ernst was born in Brühl, a small town next to Cologne. But what especially has been influencing Mirka’s work and worldview is the feminist surrealism by artists such as Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington. Mirka’s favorite materials are watercolor and ink in all its expressions. She also holds a great love for papercut artwork.
Sean Stiny
Gneiss Dragon
The dragon bellows a lantern of fire into the dark gneiss. Plates of schist reach devilish depths. The swifts with white throats kite through the updrafts. The two of us burn every second of daylight on the trail. And the Black Canyon is cut by the Gunnison River like a knife cleaved into earth.
Western colorful Colorado is but a dream. Mountains upon mountains upon willows and streams. A moose’s delight. Canyon walls melted and formed a billion years ago. Gneiss and schist and quartz and granite. Layers upon layers upon epochs and eras. Hues of rock play tricks on the eyes. Minerals that exist here as they do on Mars. Trails that hike back a billion years. Each step down a million years, each foot forward a Mesozoic. Our bootprints on the rock, a single drop of rain over billions of years prior and to come.
We dip into the Gunnison River, the wife and I, filled with brown trout torpedoes. It jolts our tootsies to near spasm. The water so cold it bypasses muscle and cuts right to bone. Ninety degrees out and my toes damn near icicled as soon as they hit the drink.
The junipers twist and crack on canyon edges and sprout songbird berries. Water flows below at 2.75 million horsepower, dwarfing a 110,000-horsepower aircraft engine. White-throated swifts by and large never cease flying. Eat, drink, sleep, copulate while aloft and jettisoning through the brittle air.
The Swiss Guard of this Black Canyon are its ravens. Cawing their way around the park, they warn of trespassers and interlopers and murderers in their midst.
Indeed, I killed a bird today. A beautiful violet-green swallow. Hardly a thump on the car’s front grill. Makes me the villain. I’m sorry. I did my best to swerve but he or she didn’t veer. We went back to move the body off the road, the tightly plumed violets and greens, the dapper whites and blacks on its little avian corpse. But it was no longer there. Perhaps I just concussed the little creature, and it recovered and flew off for a drink of river water and a story on the wing to its fellow swallows. What luck!
A hundred years past, miners scattered to the quaking wind and swarmed these ridgelines. Chief Ouray of the Colorado Ute tribe ambled the Ouray perimeter trail and whispered to himself in Ute, “Got a feeling for a spectacular day, coming into Ouray.”
Ouray, Colorado denotes arrow, red. Despite its thunderstruck beauty, the river runs mustard (sulfuric Dijon), the burning brake odor from downshifting semis makes one wince, and a cell tower disguised as the poorest looking spruce looms on an outlying escarpment. A blight to this serene bowl of a town.
And Butch Cassidy is nowhere found. He and Sundance roamed these ranges and flung themselves from these ridges to the below waters to escape the law. Sundance couldn’t swim, but no matter. No lawman was going after them in these icy summer streams.
Deer are the color of chestnut here, unlike their drab golf course cousins. The iron that flows from the mountains to the streams must turn their impressive coat. And the scarlet toadstools need be found to be believed. They meekly dollop the forest floor like something only a cartoonist would conceive.
Though rousing, these mountains have no core, these streams no virginity. All mined away the last two centuries. The most magnificent township in the lower forty-eight was blown apart and patched together to what it is today. The million-dollar highway is not for beauty. It’s for silver.
Seedy red foxes trotted across the twilight of the highway. Billion-dollar highway in today’s economy. Gray and dingy, they’d been taking a dirt bath and refraining to flaunt their exquisite red coats until this winter’s snow.
My wife and I, the druids of day hiking, approached the Morrow Point Dam and got quickly shooed away by the Feds. A young kid Fed apologized to us that we had to turn tail back to the trail. A trifold family of Canada geese bobbed gently down the river. Mother, Father, adolescent. While every creature is so rich with offspring, we remain poor.
The gneiss dragon breathes fire and melts the Black Canyon walls. Let the river begin its task yet again and carve stone for a billion years.
Sean Stiny grew up in the American West. A writer, woodworker, and owl box maker, he lives in Petaluma, California. His writing has appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Los Angeles Review, Grit Magazine, Bend Magazine, True Northwest, Kelp Journal, and Wild Roof Journal.
Kurtis Ebeling
Aubade
Light spills
through an airplane window
unravels against
the backs of seats
in long rippling
lines yellow
against the curved
walls of the cabin
—leaves
or koi under thin ice.
A few rows ahead of me
a child small enough
to stand on her seat reaches
toward the cool air
above her. A violent
hum and the whispered
breath of the AC
washes over everything—
I think of snow.
We are all tired here
except for her rotating
a hand like a thrush
as something invisible
brushes between her fingers.
Kurtis Ebeling is an MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English graduate from Eastern Washington University. His poems have been published with 86 Logic, Beyond Words Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Dewdrop, Dreich Magazine, Duck Head Journal, and others.
Maggie Rue Hess
Saturday Daisies
To Sarah
I am not saying I’m sorry. There are no
apologies for numbered days,
for the liquor mistakes or covered windows,
none as true as saying you deserve
a daisy every afternoon
and a kiss every Saturday. I am saying
I was never sorry enough.
You were always allowed to refuse
and yet bound to remain.
I am not saying it was easy.
I am saying that Sunday mornings
are unscheduled and punctual;
the grounds crew will continue to plant
daffodils for March or April, depending
on the cold; these are things
more constant than I.
Pink-lipped and prickly, tousled or curled,
because you shiver giddy for puddle-jumping
and cry over the laughter you miss,
I am not saying goodbye. I am saying
you are beautiful.
Maggie Rue Hess is a PhD student living in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her partner and their two crusty white dogs. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Connecticut River Review, SWWIM, and other publications; her debut chapbook, The Bones That Map Us, was published by Belle Point Press in February 2024. She likes to share baked goods with friends and can be found on Instagram as @maggierue_.
Cristina Sanchez
Cristina Sanchez is an NYC-based mixed media artist who has recently rediscovered her passion for creating art this past year and can now never go back. When not creating art, Cristina is a speech pathologist and a solo world traveler, an animal lover, a literary nut, and a passionate gardener who loves nature. Instagram: @artbymecristina
Note: This piece was first published in The Hemlock Journal.
Kasey Butcher Santana
Collecting Fabulous Trees
As we sit down for music class in the park, my daughter and I look up at the tree that shades us from the intense Colorado sunshine. It towers over houses across the path, and a skirting of basal shoots circles the trunk. The tree’s limbs provide a patch of shade approximately fifty feet across, giving toddlers plenty of space to run and dance. I take a photo of the tree and save it to the collection on my phone.
Six months earlier, I started a collection that I called Fabulous Trees, photographing beautiful or unusual individuals I encountered on hikes or in parks. One of my favorites is a tree that got struck by lightning, leaving just a frayed trunk. Someone made a sign labeling it a “Colorado Palm Tree.”
The park nearest our home is lightly managed grassland with dirt and paved paths snaking past soccer fields and houses. A canal runs through the middle, and where the dirt and paved paths cross, a row of twisted old trees grow, their roots reaching for the water that sometimes runs past, flowing out of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. When I look up at just the right spot, I can take a photo of the mountains framed by branches of the trees. One afternoon, autumn light trickled through the leaves, creating a glowing, amber backlight behind their branches. I first realized I was creating a collection under these particular trees. As I jogged behind a stroller, the trees provided relief from the afternoon sun and drew my eye away from tracking my miles. The effort to push the stroller pulled my mind toward worry, and, more than anything, I worry about climate change. The trees’ beauty testifies to their endurance, and just looking at them calms me down.
***
Trees are foundational to the health of our planet. We know this. They sequester carbon, produce oxygen, cool off urban communities, provide shelter, and lower our blood pressure. In Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard explains that trees have wisdom and communicate with each other, as dying trees use fungal networks in the soil to transmit resources to younger trees. Meanwhile, various species of trees exchange nutrients to achieve the balance best for each member of a diverse forest. The Mother Tree anchors the web of fungi and trees. Simard writes, “Plants are attuned to one another’s strengths and weaknesses, elegantly giving and taking to attain exquisite balance. There is grace in complexity, in actions cohering, in sum totals.”[1] Maybe, as I observe them, trees could counsel me through my climate anxiety to find a balance of my own.
Recently, a study warned that by 2080, Colorado will have lost half of its snowpack and may resemble Arizona more than it does the ecosystem we know today.[2] I feel anxiety catch in my throat, thinking about what it would mean to the plants and animals for a transformation that big to occur. I remind myself that by 2080, I will be ninety-three years old. My toddler daughter will be sixty. Although the problem urgently calls for attention, there is time along the way to adapt and change. Some days, as I look at the afternoon sun finding its way through the towering trees around the house next door, I wonder how old they are and if they will survive. I wonder how we are supposed to grieve heroes such as these.
Plans to draw down carbon emissions often emphasize the role of reforestation. The notion that if we plant enough trees, the planet will heal itself is popular, but the question of how forests will adapt to a changing climate looms. Numerous arborists study the impact of drought on specific species of trees. In the Amazon, a 2020 study found that young trees, sheltered by the ancient canopy, adapt to drought conditions by using more sunlight and less water to photosynthesize.[3] In the United States, a 2019 University of Buffalo study on junipers and conifers found that some tree species survive drought by developing deeper roots, reaching for groundwater further beneath the surface.[4] The scientists assert that some models on coniferous forests and drought conditions may overestimate tree mortality by not accounting for adaptations human eyes cannot easily see or study.
Aridification has been a driver of plant evolution, as evidenced by the development of species such as succulents and tillandsia.[5] Evolution, however, takes many generations, and plants’ temporary adaptations to the weather are not the same as the long-term intergenerational changes they may need in a hotter, dryer climate.[6] The trees are struggling.
Trees move water around their bodies through a vascular system, drawing it from their roots to their leaves via small cylindrical vessels. When less moisture is available, air bubbles may form in the vascular system, and, like humans, trees develop embolisms. In trees, they block the flow of water, and if water cannot reach its leaves, the tree will die.[7] Dying of thirst is not the only threat to trees in a warming world. The stress of drought can also make trees more vulnerable to disease and pests such as bark beetles and emerald ash borers. Trees can adapt to difficult conditions over the short term, but if good conditions never return, how will they cope? Will they be able to pass the ability to survive down through their generations fast enough to adapt to the warming world? The changes projected by climate forecasters are not likely to play out at the usual speed. I wonder if the trees have climate anxiety too.
As our skies darken from wildfires burning two states away, the smoke makes my husband, suffering a recurrence of childhood asthma, feel cagey. The smoke is an obvious cause for concern, but I wonder about the loss of the trees themselves and how they factor into the emotional calculus. Rebecca Solnit writes of how trees create a sense of time:
There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.[8]
Do the forest fires make me feel so anxious only because of the consequences for the climate, or is there something deeper—the loss of these old trees disrupting my understanding of nature and time, a clear marker that I can look to as an indicator of security?
***
Nervously, I watch the trees in our yard. It has been an uncommonly windy spring, and the trees are in a near-constant state of motion, the fluttering of their leaves soundtracked by the wind rushing past my ears. I start to think about those pioneer women driven mad by the wind. In May, the wind came in so hard that it screamed through the doorframe to our patio all night. The wind brought five inches of snow, falling on branches that had just started to leaf out. Under the weight of leaves and snow, branches sank, reaching toward the ground. Some snapped. I went out the next morning with a broom and shook as much snow from the branches as I could, dodging little avalanches as they fell to the ground. Relieved limbs stretched back toward the sky. The beginning of our garden survived the snow, tucked under blankets and tarps, and, because we had just had the trees trimmed, our backyard did not look entirely like a tornado had blown past.
Ahead of the storm, I fussed over the patio garden that I lugged inside, snuggling the plants as best I could under a grow lamp for two days, complaining all the while to any fellow gardener I encountered. The trees had neither a forecast nor a tarp to use. Chilled leaves drooped, and smaller limbs continued to fall under the force of the wind nearly two months after the storm. Weather and climate are not the same. These storms could be singular events, not reflective of a long-term change, but the trees struggling with the wind and snow illustrate another climate challenge—changing seasons putting plants’ internal calendars and ideal weather conditions out of sync.
Weeks later, my Indiana hometown experienced a derecho with 98-mile-per-hour winds. Perhaps the strength of the storm had nothing to do with a changing climate. Summer storms are not unusual for the Midwest, but, at least in my memory, Northeast Indiana usually misses the worst of them. The following morning, a nearly twenty-year-old willow tree was on its side in my mother’s backyard. She and my father planted the tree when my sister was a baby. The last picture taken of the tree was at that baby’s high school graduation party the previous weekend. Around Mom’s house, mature trees were splintered or torn up from the roots. They looked like toys that could just be set back upright, the circle of grass around their base smoothed neatly into place. Drone photos of a local nature preserve showed sections of the forest knocked over as if by a bulldozer. I could not believe what I saw. We get winds approximately that strong every winter in the Front Range, and even our baby apple trees stood up to the 100-mile-per-hour winds that sparked the Marshall Fire. My husband pointed out that they take that wind year after year. Strong winds; strong trees.
***
Mature trees look like they can withstand anything. They adapted, growing strong and durable through wind, frost, and drought, and made it to full-sized trees, providing shelter, habitat, and food for the ecosystem around them. A well-cared-for tree provides stability, perhaps outliving every human and animal around it. Some animals, such as owls, can only build their nests in old-growth trees. I think it is a mistake to believe that if we lose the mature trees and the owls, we will not lose ourselves as well.
On the day the Supreme Court handed down its decision in West Virginia vs. EPA, my daughter and I went to the Denver Botanic Gardens with our friend Rachele. Much of the garden contains flowers and smaller plants, and we enjoyed looking at the colors and watching the bees at work. At the garden’s edge stands a three-story greenhouse where tropical plants and trees live. From the outside, it looks like some future utopia, a tall, beautiful glass structure, with the shadows of the large trees hinting at the forest housed within. On the inside, it looks like Eden. “Can you imagine growing that tall?” I asked Rachele, looking up at the palms that reached from the ground to high above our heads on the third floor.
The diversity of the trees’ colors and textures works together, across the glass haven, to create a seemingly impenetrable canopy.
I looked up at these trees on the day that six powerful people decided
that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot regulate the emissions from power plants. The major headlines hinted at how disastrous this ruling could be for the fight against climate change. At that point, it seemed impossible that they would upend the Chevron Defense Doctrine, as they did in the Loper Bright ruling two years later. Their decision pulled the rug out from under the regulatory system that allows, for example, the EPA to set standards for clean water and air.
That morning in June 2022, I felt enraged. My frustration, fury, and fear could probably serve as a renewable energy source. Then, I looked down at my daughter and saw that the breath of the trees, trapped under the glass, had started to condensate on her flushed cheeks, making her hair go curly. We are all small, up against such a force as nature. I kissed my girl’s face and closed my eyes, feeling the warmth of the air like a hug. Around the edges of my anger, hope snuck in. If we can learn from the forest, the trees will teach us that survival is not about individual adaptation. We have to work together, as a system, for all of us to flourish.
***
In the greenhouse, I smiled when I saw a fiddle leaf fig looking even shabbier than mine, despite the humidity. In its native Africa, a fiddle leaf fig can grow over forty feet tall, but as a house plant, it allegedly dies if you look at it the wrong way. I wanted the challenge. I have been tending my own fiddle leaf fig for five years. I studied how to care for the plant, watered it just the right amount, turned it occasionally, and was proud of how it flourished. Then we moved in the middle of the winter, and it started to drop leaves. I suspected that the stress of the move was to blame until I realized that the leaves had vanished. One morning, all of the leaves and the immature part of the trunk were gone. My beloved fiddle leaf fig was just a stick in a pot. That is how we discovered that a pack rat was coming into the house at night.
The tree recovered eventually, growing to five feet tall. As it reached toward the sun in its west-facing window, it started to lean on the glass. My effort to stake the tree and rotate it was too little too late. I tried moving it outside for stronger light and wind baths, but the leaves got sunburned, and the trunk was no straighter. Holding my breath, I aggressively cut back the tree below where the curve developed. I trimmed over two feet off its height, growth that I had been so proud of. I trusted that the tree would grow back, but I nervously waited three weeks for signs of new leaves and branches. Finally, the smallest green specks
emerged, and three new branches started. I do not know if my tree will keep growing upward or if it will develop more like a bush, but it continues to thrive, and I will remember to rotate it. Amidst the beautiful giants of my photo collection, it holds a special place because of the front-row seat I have to it growing. It is the only Fabulous Tree that lives in my house.
The resilience of this tree reaches toward a parable about what plants can do if given a chance. Technology will certainly play a part if we manage to escape the worst of the looming climate crisis, but I still have hope for what trees can do if we stop working so hard against them.
I may make my Fiddle Leaf Fig a sort of mascot, watching it adapt and grow as I learn to breathe through my climate anxiety.
Unless it dies.
[1] Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. A. Knopf, 2021.
[2] Talsma, Carl J., et al. “Characterizing Drought Behavior in the Colorado River Basin Using Unsupervised Machine Learning.” Earth and Space Science, vol. 9, no. 5, May 2022, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021ea002086.
[3] Bartholomew, David C., et al. “Small Tropical Forest Trees Have a Greater Capacity to Adjust Carbon Metabolism to Long‐Term Drought than Large Canopy Trees.” Plant, Cell & Environment, vol. 43, no. 10, 4 Aug. 2020, pp. 2380–93, https://doi.org/10.1111/pce.13838.
[4] Mackay, D. Scott, et al. “Conifers Depend on Established Roots during Drought: Results from a Coupled Model of Carbon Allocation and Hydraulics.” New Phytologist, vol. 225, no. 2, 5 Aug. 2019, pp. 679–92, https://doi.org/10.1111/
nph.16043.
[5] Gutiérrez-Ortega, José Said. “Aridification as Driver of Plant Evolution.” Botany One, The Annals of Botany, 31 Jan. 2018, botany.one/2018/01/aridification-driver-plant-evolution.
[6] Blackwell, Deborah. “How Plants Adapt to Climate Change.” How Plants Adapt to Climate Change, Arnold Arboretum, 21 Apr. 2020, arboretum.harvard.edu/
stories/how-plants-adapt-to-climate-change.
[7] Johnson, Daniel and Raquel Partelli Feltrin. “Trees Are Dying of Thirst in the Western Drought – Here’s What’s Going on Inside Their Veins.” The Conversation, 3 Nov. 2022, theconversation.com/trees-are-dying-of-thirst-in-the-western-drought-heres-whats-going-on-inside-their-veins-162385.
[8] Solnit, Rebecca. Orwell’s Roses. Granta, London, 2022, p. 6.
Kasey Butcher Santana is a writer and caretaker of a small alpaca farm where she and her husband also raise chickens, bees, and their daughter. Recently, her work appeared or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Split Lip, Superstition Review, Passengers, and The Hopper. You can follow her on Instagram @solhomestead or at Life Among the Alpacas on Substack.
A. Pikovsky
Sometimes, the overwhelm
Sometimes, the overwhelm.
Do you think about how beauty begets burden?
i don’t. i measure time in how a process becomes the passion
and how people become the products. (Roethke)
Sometimes, the awe.
It’s the cone-headed image of me handholding the prospect of you.
Do you think about how reflection lures identity?
i do. i pass seasons with earlier selves laden with ennui.
Sometimes, the upset.
Do you think about goosebumps?
The body sings to the brain but grapples with symmetry.
It can’t all end in flowers or rest with rain.
Do you?
A. Pikovsky is a poet living in Philadelphia whose work has been featured in literary journals like Passengers, Waxing & Waning, Cathexis Northwest, Wild Roof Journal, Poet’s Row, and others. She is currently an MFA Poetry student at Temple University and works as a fundraiser for an academic institution. She is most inspired by landscape, relational experiences (and theories), the pastoral, and language as a plaything.
Justin Evans
When Death Comes, May He Find
Each of You Quite Unaware
John J. Audubon probably had no idea
birds were a limited resource when he
killed so many to keep them still,
posing them just so in order to exact
the greatest degree of detail, both
feathers and eyes iridescent and bright
beneath the brush as it transversed
his pale canvas. I was an adult when
I learned how he captured then killed
the birds he painted, so I did not
struggle too much, having learned
what art can sometimes demand of us.
Decades later it is still an education
I keep tucked away, just to bring out
for the occasional social gathering, or
like today—a classroom lesson for my
seniors as they prepare to leave the nest.
Sitting here in the dark, alone now,
not one of my former students can hear me
whisper in their sudden absence.
Justin Evans was born and raised in Utah. He served in the army and then graduated from Southern Utah University and later the University of Nevada, Reno. He lives in rural Nevada with his wife and sons, where he teaches at the local high school. Justin’s seventh full-length book of poetry, Cenotaph, was released in March of 2024 from Kelsay Books. He has poems forthcoming from The Meadow and Weber: The Contemporary West. Justin has received two Artist Fellowship Grants from the State of Nevada.
Ibby Lanfear
Thoughts on listening
If you cannot speak in our language we will not, it seems, listen. Not to the old. Or the very young. Or if you have fins or feathers or fur, or a body that’s woken by the heat of the sun.
An old man died one April. His words were so tangled that at last he stopped speaking at all. Because he could not speak in our language no one much listened, I seem to recall.
When I was young that youngish man told stories. Of the moths on the common. The brightly lit birds in the wood. Of the otters and eels and crayfish in the sun-spilt pools where we swam when we could.
His stories are quieter now. And often come only in sleep. I dream them alive and aloud and he’s there, but on waking just the hush of the grief.
His stories are quieter now. Are echoes rather than songs. They dance in the streams and the tops of the trees then like will-o’-the-wisp are gone.
Their stories are quieter now. And the quiet feels horribly wrong. And deep in the streams and the tops of the trees the ghosts silently sing their songs.
Ibby Lanfear is an environmental artist and writer based in the UK. Her work is deeply rooted in the specific materiality of place, and she uses natural and waste stream materials to explore themes of species interdependence and kinship. She has an MA in Arts and Ecology from the University of Plymouth, and her drawings are held in public and private collections. Her work has previously been published by Wild Roof Journal and Dark Mountain, and she can be found at www.ibbylanfear.com.
Brad Robert Benford
Brad Robert Benford is an illustrator from Hertfordshire in the U.K., working with a dip pen and India ink on paper to create images for numerous books, zines and other publications.
Ann Keeling
Whales’ Home
On deep sea-blue waves
in a little yellow boat
we watchers
lock eyes
onto the vast roof of her undulating home
waiting for her to spout white or gleam silver
our ears
keen and open
for the bubbling raspberry sound of geysers
when suddenly
a feeding frenzy of sea lions makes us giddy
knowing at any moment
a barnacled back will break the rippled blue
and
wow
there she is
ebony torso gleaming under knuckled backbone
like a giant platter
what’s this . . .
her roommate
surfaces
blow-holing a 10-foot
exhalation as we ooh and gasp
and tap our phone cameras
grateful for not one
but two gorgeous gals
who love to play
a hide/seek game —
here
now here
ever closer
and then farther
but in reach
anchovy breath and blubbered oil, each time
a giveaway that they are close
but down they go
and I imagine I am an invited guest to their
table in the dark and gloamy depths
laden with napkins of seaweed
and crab appetizers
opening our mouths
with a yawning stretch
to capture krill and shrimp in bucket-sized gulpfuls
with fish schools
a shark pod
a squad of squid
and not a trace of
human
reminders
like plastic bags, Styrofoam coolers, broken flip flops, or Starbucks cups —
because I surely would not want
them to deposit their waste into my home
it seems only fair to give them
the right to their ocean while we have all this land
seated at their feast
perhaps I could apologize for us as such appalling caretakers
or it occurs
I can do it now
while the two whales
leap up and down into a swan song dive
a dipping of two black backs
bony and scarred
these half-moon slippers in harmony of
line and speed
arch and drop their matching flukes in balanced arc
suspend and hold
a divine dance of perfect majesty
I whisper a prayer of sustenance
for their home
as they slip down
into an endless blue.
Ann Keeling’s writing and art have been published in such journals as CutMeUp Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Tint Journal, The Disappointed Housewife, defunct magazine, Lucky Jefferson, and more. She was chosen as a finalist for the Quarterly West Prose 2022 contest, short-listed for the 2022 Storm Cellar Force Majeure flash contest, and was an artist-in-residence for the Kolaj Institute’s 2023 Passing Place Project in Sanquhar, Scotland. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and an MFA in Dance from University of California, Los Angeles. Ann leads art, writing, and movement retreats on the Central Coast of California. Website: annkeeling.com / Instagram: @ann.keeling.art.writing
Jaden McGinty
A Baptism at Bennington Lake
This town is full of ghosts. Not Victorians in nightgowns, or demonic little girls, but revenants, shades, apparitions who look just like us. My ancestors might have called them fetches. Usually they portend a death of some kind. Most Irish ghosts do. But these are not augurs of our future, only reminders of our past. There, by the creek outside Stanton Hall, Callista stretches out in the grass and casts on the stitches of her first knitting project, pausing the video tutorial she is watching every few seconds to make sure she has got it right. There, at the table by the Penrose Library’s tall windows, Rohan presses close to his book as if in prayer, scribbling notes in the margins with a tight hand. There, on the darkened path to Maxey Hall, I carry an Irish coffee to my evening class, The Nature Essay, too nervous about tonight’s workshop to face the criticism of my peers sober. Here, in the Writing House, we three meet. Rohan and I share the basement bedroom. Rohan and Callista share late nights over tea and toast. Callista and I share our timid love, there, on the unassuming gray couch in the living room.
It is 1 A.M. now and a long time since any of us have lived here. We watch our ghosts from the sidewalk, but it is hard to see them through the windows. The lights are on inside and someone else is gossiping at the table, someone else is sleeping in our rooms.
We have returned to Walla Walla to watch younger friends graduate from the college we sometimes think we still go to. Sunday, we will watch them make the same momentous step into adulthood we did last year, by crossing the commencement stage and shifting their tassels, right to left. Tonight, though, we wander the streets with our ghosts. Callista cries on my shoulder. Last she was here, both her childhood dogs and grandfather were still alive. Rohan looks around like he has lost something. Last he was here, his feet knew every inch of this place, but now that familiar feeling is missing. I pass in numb silence. Last I was here, I felt cursed by this town, by the whole dry scabby elbow of southeastern Washington. It felt too much like the deserts of Idaho where an abusive stepfather made my childhood end too soon. It still does.
This is the first night. We find our way to bed haunted and dejected. The second night, Rohan walks all the way to Bennington Lake and asks us to meet him there. By now, we are sick of ghosts. We have watched them go to parties, share meals with friends, fall in love, for too long. Callista desires an exorcism. So we wander into the willows until we find a secluded spot on the beach. Callista strips off her clothes. Rohan turns away, more for his modesty than hers. Then she wanders into the water. Night tide washes over the sky. The frogs sing all around. She stops when the lake has swallowed her hips, then cocks her head to listen. Her arms are lifted to her chin. Her pale form is reflected on the glassy surface. My world narrows to the space between willow branches. All that exists is water and frogs and ghosts. Then she sinks below the surface and all of our ghosts disappear.
When she wades back on land and slips into her dry clothes, we three stand and shiver for a while. We talk about our time in Walla Walla. We laugh at the recliner we found at the bottom of Bennington Lake’s boat ramp. We sigh over the one roommate each of us was in love with in our own ways. We cry, because tomorrow we will leave this place again. But Rohan crosses himself. I squeeze some of the lake from Callista’s hair and press it to my forehead. She is making up the room in her heart where her ghosts will always live. And we put our arms around each other, because there is nothing left to do here.
Jaden McGinty is a writer from the sagebrush steppe of Idaho and a family of hippies and Irish immigrants. His work explores the many relationships with place and people that make life meaningful. Aside from writing, he works on a habitat restoration crew for Thurston Conservation District, at the southern tip of Puget Sound.
Eliot Cardinaux
Hyacinth
For Mette Moestrup
I have not yet stumbled
on blue flowers
& been aware.
But if I sought them out?
In my mother’s garden
(who lives in the house
& has not yet planted them
under her mother’s tree
to the right of the garden
(whose brother has no tree,
whose father has
no tree, whose tree is
languishing in the shade of
a larger birch), or her father’s
tree, to the left of the garden,
which is doing quite well),
I have not yet stumbled on
blue flowers & been aware.
Eliot Cardinaux is a poet, pianist, composer, and translator working at the edges of the lyric and improvised music. The author of On the Long Blue Night (Dos Madres, 2023); and the trio of Quiet Labor, Toy Elegy, and This Music From Another Room (Bodily Press, 2024); as well as numerous chapbooks, Cardinaux has also produced over a dozen albums of original music, including, most recently, Imminence (self-released, 2024), with percussionist Gary Fieldman. His poems and/or translations have appeared in Jacket2, The Arts Fuse, Meridian, Bennington Review, California Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He is the founding editor of The Bodily Press.
