Cover image: "So Much Like Remembering" by Nicole Renee Ryan
Gallery 3
The weather of wolves
Samuel Gilpin
Parting Green from Green
loose shadows
branding your steps
in the blemish
of old snow,
brown in the lines
of reference
and recollection
and this another
small instance of poetry.
a light breeze deformed.
a bird’s silhouette
high against late sky.
a muted thread
of gray light hung
over everything.
you call to mind
those poets
who sing of loveliness
and moodiness
and the remembrances
felt in those engaging places.
we need
these diversions
occurring at the edge
of what we know,
of what we can see,
and never ending there.
who knows
who we are?
what is the poetry
by which we live?
I close my eyes,
I can hear you.
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. His chapbook Self-Portraits as a Reddening Sky will be out soon from Cathexis Press.
Lucie Chou
Creatures
1
Why is it that in the scheme of being,
we are not the stars or like the stars?
We are reeved in the webs of the Divine
no less than Simone Weil’s glittering grains
tearing and tossing hearts like black eyes
of white doves flowering divine flame.
We too are ambitious of the heavenly,
but have settled for the kitchen counter
without inordinate malcontent, scuttling
among redolent rinds, your willingly
surrendered spoils, before your woozy
waltz into our common room’s morning
gathering. Find us flattened under
cutting board, frying pan, salt grind,
find us becalmed in water, milk, blood
spilled from heirlooms, not detainable
nor discreet, in sequins of stale grease
on walls, creatively mapping gravity.
We may, for reasons unfathomed by us,
dash uncontrollably into the controlled
holocaust of your cooking flame and die
immolated, not much blacker than in life.
Lights hazing dusty air veil the Divine
with more mystery. Your wish to wish
on stars is a black-shelled speck going
down the kitchen sink. We, nonetheless,
rise up to dwell with you on this earth,
gifts that will not give up until accepted.
2
Noah never knew we existed. In grass.
This afternoon the sky burbles ashen
rose over slimy oatmeal and boils over.
Dark thick dollops begin to splatter.
Dinosaurs must have felt the ice age come
this way: too real, quite out of the scope
of getting to grips with. No slower rages
this deluge. Had weeds clutched us tight
we wouldn’t have been flushed down
the pavement, mud from ruderal roots
braiding with turbid rapid water-sinews,
grappling with our frantic hope to hop
out of this unexpected and undeserved
cataclysm. We couldn’t swim but suddenly
find ourselves reborn as water striders,
improvising all kinds of rough laughable
dance steps to overcome the overwhelm
that has wiped out the world we knew.
This pipe pouring from a hole in the wall
is not helpful. Even plantain leaves bob
dangerously on the brink of floating free,
ruptured from the root firm in the chink.
Like evolution, we begin taking big leaps.
Our pantaloon thighs are not for floods
but they come in handy. Against the flux,
up the steps, onto the dry! Marble slabs
slippery, but salvage of any kind deserves
going on living full throttle for gratitude.
For those who don’t return, the eventide
has flowed in too fast. Then there emerge
and disappear, the stars. Some forever.
In or against their time. Cicadas emerge
ripe from earth, leaving rinds called flowers.
Others find the way to the other world.
Lucie Chou is an ecopoet from China whose work appears or is forthcoming in Entropy, Black Earth Institute’s blog, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Transom, Tofu Ink Arts, Halfway Down the Stairs, Kelp Journal, Sky Island Journal, Plant-Human Quarterly, Slant: A Journal of Poetry and Poet Lore. Her debut collection, Convivial Communiverse, came from Atmosphere Press. In August 2023, she participated in the Tupelo Press 30/30 project where she fundraised for the indie press by writing one poem each day for a month.
Emily Patterson
Red Oak
At the nursery you tell me
red oak is an auspicious choice.
I can twine two fingers around its trunk,
but with its leaves tenderly tucked
in burlap, the tree is longer than
our car. You say the oak signifies
the light half of the year, reaches
its slender branches to touch
summer, and not only that: it stands
for the shedding of the dark.
I think of the other night,
when I let my dark out at you:
my anger hot as August, wanting
to burn uncertainty to bright
ash. I won’t say you’re the light
to my dark; I won’t say
I’m not mad at you again, now,
as you uproot the peony,
the magenta one with its buds
like little fists, to make space
for the tree. Thirteen years in,
I keep saying I’m still new
at this: still learning, every morning,
that each living thing—red oak,
a marriage, a poem—needs soil
as much as sky.
Of Womb and Wings
In the small clearing, we sway
between two trees, weightless.
Oceanic wind and the sky smooth
as water. My daughter pulls the aqua
nylon of the hammock closed over us,
tells me we’re inside a crystal-lis.
But instead of wings, I think of
wombs. This dark rhythm:
how lush to be held, rocked, absorbed
in a belly of forest. Because
on the drive here we passed
a nameless green field, because
my daughter said I’ve been here
before, because I believed her,
now I ask from inside our shared
cocoon: Is this what it was like?
Oh yes, she says, voice sure
as a heartbeat. It was just like this.
Emily Patterson is the author of So Much Tending Remains (2022), To Bend and Braid (2023), and haiku at 5:38 a.m. (2024). Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best Spiritual Literature, and is published or forthcoming in SWWIM, Rust & Moth, CALYX, North American Review, NELLE, and elsewhere. In 2024, she was a finalist in the Sweet Lit Poetry Contest and runner-up in the Sundress Publications Poetry Broadside Contest. Emily received her M.A. in Education from Ohio State University and works as a curriculum designer. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio. Instagram: @emilypattersonpoet
Jaina Cipriano
Jaina Cipriano is a photographer, designer and filmmaker exploring religious and romantic entrapment. Her second short film, Trauma Bond, a dreamy, coming of age thriller that explores healing deep wounds with quick fixes, took home the grand prize at the Lonely Seal International Film Festival. Jaina is the executive director of the Arlington International Film Festival and the founder of Finding Bright Studios, an experiential design company in Lowell, MA. She has collaborated with GRRL HAUS and Boston Art Review, and was a Boston Fellow for the Mass Art Creative Business Incubator and a finalist in EforAll Merrimack Valley.
Shannon Vare Christine
ETYMON / noun Greek / true thing, derivation
Cracked acrid soils, dusted over crumbled
fallow longing fields: my harvests depleted.
Flickers hammer-drill, tongues dart, ants cover-scatter.
Dust baths clean sparrows’ feathers, my nail beds caked.
I claw the toponymy, roots tunnel, synonym search.
Lateral radicle absorb, nourish, trace, true,
truer, truest, steadfast, truce.
Raindrops muffle, hunters stalk.
Rabbits burrow, birds skim, squirrels huddle.
My rainy season arouses germination,
saturates the empty echoes, soothes the drought,
coaxes sleepy blooms of desire, hibernating
buds from their sepals.
My derivations: thirsty languid leaflets sprout,
radiate energy, collect, decompose, grow.
Compound blades wield pointed
pronunciations, whorled fives scatter
transmuted seasons.
Reason displaces, worry seeds divine.
All the bull thistle what-ifs, couldas, shouldas, invade
cloaked nectar, lucerne reposes.
Swarm ant gangs sow my doubting seeds, disperse,
disband, disseminate, distribute,
rosette taproots drive down
Bolting semantic stems sway, attract
plague butterflies, bugbear burdens, black beast bothers.
Beheaded root crowns, stop screaming abdabs blight.
Flourish foliage, lush, listless, lolling days.
Harvests, cuttings, cultivars, propagate.
Repeat, replicate, our
recurrent cycles, plenty
to forage, to gather, to gorge,
to discover, to metamorphose, to, to, to, to, to, depleted.
Revolving exhaustion, my surrender gaping
holey lobed leaves, spiny prickles detached,
my flaccid stems stripped.
Parasites of self-doubt feed on me: leach, filch, abduct.
Frost-crackled dormancy breeds
rhizomes of desire.
I awaken and invoke:
The independent marauder Gráinne O’Malley,
The enemy uprooter Lozen,
The unsexed soldier Deborah Sampson Gannett,
The misunderstood protector Joan of Arc.
Oh, warrior-spirits, cloud-gatherers, avant-garde feminists,
wrap me in your armored cloaks, help me escape
my guardian mind settlements, close
my lexical gaps, welcome
me into the weather of wolves, complete
my trinity knot: maiden and mother hibernate, the crone arrives
but why, why, why the dusty contemptuous labels?
Drown, hang, bury them alive!
Food for the worms and nematodes, decay and rot, reborn — I can, I will, I must
rebrand myself: moxie, maven, now lioness.
Shannon Vare Christine is a poet, teacher, and critic living in Bucks County, PA. She is an alumnus of The Community of Writers and Tupelo Press 30/30 Project. Her poems are featured in various anthologies and publications. Additionally, her poetry reviews and literary criticism were published or are forthcoming in The Lit Pub, Cider Press Review, Sage Cigarettes, Compulsive Reader, The Laurel Review, Vagabond City, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived writing and more can be found at www.shannonvarechristine.com, her periodic newsletter Poetic Pause, and on Instagram @smvarewrites.
Zoe Berger
The home my mother built
It is a glory and a privilege to love
what death doesn’t touch.
I am thinking of
the shape of a year.
Of cotyledons—the first leaves
of growth. Also the furrow’s
new and shallow grief.
When the afternoon comes for me
sickle in hand
I dig holes out back,
feed the greedy goats, give in.
The coffee’s stale
but this is a verdant thing,
and how could I not
tell you, when
the expanse outside
is as boundless
as the word,
when the ink bleeds
with no water
to make it run.
Zoe Berger is a queer, Filipino-Jewish writer based in Brooklyn. Her poems have been published or are upcoming in The Poetry Society of New York’s journal Milk Press, Antiphony Press, and The Naïve Journal, and she recently completed a residency with Tupelo Press to refine her manuscript for a forthcoming book of poems. Her work explores cyclical patterns of nature and the limits of primal bodies. She can be found on Instagram @sadspot.
Gregory Ross
Mexican Wolves
Arthur sat at a white Formica ledge smudged with fingerprints. It ran the length of four tall windows. Bars cast resilient shadows over the bright linoleum. He was eating a package of blue PEZ from a stash under his pillow, thinking about his mother. He thought about her often. More often than he ate PEZ, at least. She always seemed so busy. Or dizzy. Sometimes both at once. His thoughts turned to kidney stones, puzzles, cardinals. In that order. The color blue, the color green. He thought about broccoli. He wondered if broccoli was not really a shade of blue after all. Wouldn’t that be nice? Then he tore open another package of PEZ and ate them all in one handful.
-Gah!
-Would you like me to excavate that?
-Hmm…I can probably find a grapefruit spoon. Or an awl.
-How about an ice skate?
-What? Oh. Tom Hanks, right? Sure. I’ll see what I can do.
Looking out the window at a decrepit, empty playground, Arthur thought about John F. Kennedy. There was a time when he told people he’d been rescued from the waters off Hyannis Port by John F. Kennedy and his brother. He had been drowning. Although the veracity of this claim was admittedly suspect. He told the story so many times he forgot whether it was actually true himself. Veracities thereby gaining a life of their own. One day, couldn’t say when, he read a story, couldn’t say whose, that contained a similar tale flipped on its head. In this story, Robert Kennedy was in need of a hand at sea. Now he couldn’t remember whether The JFK Salvation, or merely its telling, if it did prove false, had occurred before or after reading this story. Arthur thought if he could place this point in time it would resolve a lot of uncertainty. He could always ask his mother. No. Arthur was afraid to ask his mother.
The truth was, Arthur distinctly remembered a trip through Arizona with his family when he was ten years old. Driving along the ferruginous wasteland, he remembered their car had been surrounded by a pack of Mexican wolves, or perhaps some other xerocole with pointed ears and a sly, whiskered snout. He remembered stroking the fur of one that ventured to brush against the door beneath his window. It was a miraculous experience, and he told this Kurosawa desert tale many times as he grew up. Years later, he related the story to his father, no doubt or hesitancy, just wanting to relive the old days. Scowling, his father leaned up in bed. “What kind of bullshit is that? Sounds like a dream to me, kid.” They had gone to Arizona, he assured him, but nothing like that occurred there. Arthur felt gastric distress. Worse. This meant, for thirty-four years, he had assimilated a vision of sleep into waking life, into reality, so to speak. Which meant reality was tainted. Memories, once soft and warming, sharp and painful, were now homogenized by a sinking of the gut, an underlying dread that whatever raw fragment of time had evoked this sense of certainty and connection, this heavy-handed stroke of emotion in time, was also potentially none of this at all, nothing, in fact, but a figment of the animated mind’s restorative lapse into autopilot.
He walked downstairs and entered a subway packed with faceless strangers. It reminded him of the train ride in Spirited Away, and he wondered if he had misread the Zenibas in his own life. Had he missed some kind of transition from this world to the next? Who were these people? Were they people at all?
He woke up in the hospital. He did not remember getting off the subway. This was what psychologists who burnt their textbooks on graduation day referred to as the “breaking point,” the “big one,” or simply, “ah yes, that.”
Real or not, Arthur had once done a lot of things. No more. His hours were now long and deleterious, composed mostly of bright lights, white walls, wandering thoughts, and questionable bouts of sleep. Sometimes a shuffle in the courtyard sun, sometimes a hint of longing or fleshy tingles to chip at the haze of Seroquel that cloaked his inner world, sometimes even the faint hope of a return to… to… Where? There were smiles, too. Smiles everywhere. But they were disgusting, untrustworthy. Big. Toothless. Toadlike. Disingenuous. Oppressive. He shook at the thought of them. He didn’t like the smiles. He never liked the smiles. The smiles made him—
“Arthur, your mother’s here to see you.”
The voice came from an old speaker in the corner of the room. He glanced up but quickly averted his eyes. The speaker was beige and crusty. Probably from the ’70s. It watched his every move, a vocal panopticon, a meddlesome god. Crackling, wheezing, late in the night when no one spoke. Just to let him know it was there. And he couldn’t just see its smile, he could feel it in his nerves, a sinuous, pronged hook that would never release him back to the vague sea he craved.
“I don’t want to see her,” Arthur whispered. Nauseous. Resolute. “I want to leave this place.”
“But Arthur,” soft, maternal persuasion, “she’s your mother. Surely, you don’t want to upset her. Do you?”
Do I? Arthur wondered. He was already preparing himself for the hour of Tootsie Pops and double solitaire to come. He hoped she brought the blue ones. Last time, they were orange. All orange. Arthur squirmed in his chair as he remembered. He hated the orange. Maybe she has the blue ones, he thought again. He felt excited. He shuffled to the locked door. The bolt released with a bee-hive fanfare. He continued into the hallway, head down. “I hope she brought the blue ones,” he said aloud. The blue ones. Not the orange ones. He hated the orange ones. Of that, at least, he was certain.
Gregory Ross is a peripatetic poet and music journalist from New Jersey. Author of Notes from the Parking Lot of Lost Hopes and Dreams (Alien Buddha Press, 2024) and The Animate Veil (Bottlecap Press, 2024), their work has also appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit, HAD, Burrow Press Review, TIMBER Journal, and elsewhere. Find them on Instagram @grbilodeau.
Nicole Renee Ryan
Nicole Renee Ryan is a studio artist who creates imagined landscapes that blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy. By combining painted elements and three-dimensional shapes, she builds environments that invite viewers to meditate on time, memory, and place. Her work often explores the liminal spaces between the familiar and the whimsical, between what is real and what is imagined. Drawing from her own memories and imagined scenarios, she crafts abstract versions of the world, where the past, present, and future collide, and the boundaries between places blur. Nicole’s paintings have been exhibited in venues such as the Heinz History Center, Butler Museum of American Art, and Westmoreland Museum of American Art.
Clive Knights and Terriann Walling
Note: The collages by Clive Knights and poems by Terriann Walling are collaborative works.
Gemini
A wistful wanderer,
Searches the sky —
Through the frenzy,
Sits Gemini —
The air is thick,
The blanket black —
Light shines in,
Through a tiny crack.
Eyes with a numb culpability
Recognize a concussed,
Noble vulnerability.
Imprinted soul to fight the dark,
Inside the choice to disembark.
A clever and clear choice appears
To open the eyes
And clear the ears.
To hold on wistfully in the night
To search the sky
For transcendent light.
What is now — will always be
For the cloth came from eternity.
Time Holder
A traveler bent on
c
r
o
o
k
e
d staff
Weaved along a jilted path.
He stood a moment like
f
a
l
l
e
n dust
Shaken from the essence of trees.
A lady sat upon that path,
And spotted the
c
r
o
o
k
e
d man
She said “dear sir? What
is that
you carry in your
hand?”
“I have time in my hand,
dear woman”
And if you remember
well
I was your greatest
lover
Into a pit I
f
e
l
l
English collage artist Clive Knights and Canadian poet Terriann Walling published a book collaboration titled Labyrinth of Wind: Poems and Collages. The co-authors met in July 2022 at the Chateau d’Orquevaux artist residency in France and over the last two years have generated a unique collaboration in which 52 original poems are paired with 52 collage characters that form a magical community trapped inside a mythical labyrinth. The creative interpretations unfolded in both directions with poems inspiring collages and collages inspiring poems. The poems and collage characters offer strange, thought-provoking insights into the vast array of beautiful idiosyncrasies found in human nature, fragments of each we often discover in ourselves when we least expect it. The book is available now.
M. Rose
Hurricane Isabel
There are sharks on my street, lazy, maybe dulled by the hum of electricity rumbling from homes. In my bedroom, maybe on my windowsill or maybe on the pebble-pocked gray of shingles just outside, the place I climb to when I want to be alone with trees, I am on tiptoes, peering out into the river that gushes my street, tidal force that feels no stranger to me than a snow day. Red tickertape runs the bottom of the morning news, talking heads and the burnt-umber smell of coffee, but I do not watch them, I am not watching them, I am watching the cool gray slip of sharks on my street, the way they never stop moving. I am running my hands along my shins, no hair yet, smooth, and wondering if this is how the sharks feel. The rain drives. Rays in the aquarium feel soft, slippery, a feeling that I will remember a decade later when I have my first girlfriend, a feeling that will tangle with the smell of cherry ChapStick and the cool press of bleachers at my back, but for now, it is only me and the sharks. We have no school today. The bus drivers couldn’t reach us, our street, Jamestown Crescent. We are only a sliver, a fingernail, purpled at sunset and plunged deep into the waters. It is a snow day, a hurricane day, a shark day, and one day, there will be no days here, only the whoosh whoosh whoosh endless of waves and sea grass and the little openings and closing of coral polyps, mouths open, asking asking asking for more. I feed baby birds in this tree one summer, after a neighbor-cat turns their mother into a torn nest of feathers in the front yard. I scale the oak and pluck the little bodies—pink and black-eyed, the corner of their mouths rubber-yellow and gaping, wings that remind me of a baby’s finger, a check mark, the ears of a newborn cat. My mother says not to bring them inside, that they could have mites and germs, but I know there is nothing in them that is not in me. I climb this tree, I drink this water, I wake to the same sky, and I bring them inside, to my bed, and lie shirtless with them on my chest, watching held breath as they climb blind until they find it, the rise and fall on the left side of my body. We lay in the quiet, their three hearts beating to mine, soft as the time I let my best friend draw hearts on my hand, the one-two of a hook sent into the sky and returning home. It tickles, and at another time, while my mother watches the news and drinks her coffee, I creep, on hands and knees, to that very edge of the roof. Watch the swishing of the sharks. Wonder if they are ever sad that they can’t hold still.
M. Rose is a storyteller, imagining the rewilding of the human mind. Their work is animated by the relationships between human and nonhuman entities, hybridity, the consciousness of land, death transitions, queerness, language loss, and language revitalization.
Bruce Parker
Bruce Parker was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and grew up in Albuquerque. He has published two chapbooks, Ramadan in Summer (Finishing Line Press, 2022) and Tears for Things (Plan B Press, 2024). He holds a BA in History from the University of Maryland, Far East Division, Okinawa, Japan; and an MA in Secondary Education from the University of New Mexico. He taught English as a Second Language, worked as a technical editor, and was a translator for the Department of Defense. His work appears in Triggerfish Critical Review, The Field Guide, Wild Roof, Cerasus (UK), and New American Writing and is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner. Married to fellow poet Diane Corson, he lives in Portland, Oregon, and is an Associate Editor at Boulevard.
Olivia Torres
Olivia Torres is a queer, ex-fundamentalist, biracial fangirl who hails from a small town in western Massachusetts where the potholes in the roads are so large they have now developed sentience. She received her bachelor’s in English from and works at Westfield State University as their Marketing Copywriter. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Merrimack Review, Lucky Jefferson, Apricity, Talon Review, and SWWIM, among others. She was also a finalist in The Good Life Review’s 2024 HoneyBee Literary Prize competition. In her spare time, she enjoys gaming, avoiding (green) vegetables, and playing eye-tag with the moon.
Patricia Farrell
Wallowa Lake
During the unprecedented drought
and multiple once-in-a-thousand-year storms
lost things were exposed
Receding waters and crumbling cliffs divulged
remains of villages rusted wagons broken pots
the perfectly preserved boles of massive trees
Scavengers were everywhere
antiquities became curios became trinkets
became currency
Along the shoreline I find
an ancient net weight a basalt rock
made narrower in the middle
Meant to hold woven net
as anchor between the push of the fish
and the rushing stream
Someone else once stood here
this same time of year setting a net
hungry for a flash of red fin
Now the shallow stream
barely cuts through the silt
losing itself in braided dry washes
I grip the rock by its slender waist
throw it back to the depleted lake
knowing what has been exposed can become lost again
Patricia Farrell lives in rural Oregon. Trained as a biologist and landscape architect, she received a certificate of creative writing from Linfield University. Her poems have been published in Paper Gardens, Camas Literary Journal, and Verseweavers. In 2023 she won first place in the New Poets category of the Oregon Poetry Association contest.
Holly Willis
Holly Willis is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker who moves between Maine and California exploring landscape, color, movement, and material. Her writing and photography have appeared in journals such as River Teeth, carte blanche, Ponder and The Normal School.
Harry Bauld
Landscape
I want to do that say passersby
on the path behind the plein air painters
but no one stops to attempt
a gouache which is not
gauche, look it up. Spelling
is a visual art. Desire,
not so much. My touch
with color (to be honest
as the young say) disintegrates
in this inconclusive spring,
the yellow forsythia with its white beret
of snow, hawnh hawnh hawnh.
So much depends on what age
says, such as I will not have you,
youth. Confession time: I would love
to have you. Here is where
the crazy random list
should appear, the magpie,
the poppies, the secret names
of stars. Give it up,
the authorities demand,
staring down the stare decisis
in languages that continue dead,
unlike (kinehora!) this one, groping
toward heaven, a cornfield
strewn with what you will. Everyone
is almost sick for one—a heaven
I mean—because there there is no shuffling
or snuffling, there there we comfort,
the hope that there IS a there there
if not here, and these artists out in the open
forging and then escaping chains
of words, lies of the fathers, piles of old books
here somewhere in the open air.
What country, friends, is this?
Harry Bauld is a poet, painter, translator and teacher in the Bronx. His poems have won awards and appeared in numerous journals in the U.S. and the U.K. He was included by Matthew Dickman in the anthology Best New Poets 2012 (UVa Press) and his paintings have been exhibited in galleries in Vermont and in numerous magazines in print and online.
Andrea Aldrete
I Wish to Be Sand
I’m heavy with the downpour
of a thousand lives. A grain of sun
quenches the August drought,
and I’ve squeezed out every drop
trying to save what’s already gone.
Fixing unbroken things, wiping the lust
off my scarlet chin. I devour the waves
of climactic ruin before the rising tide.
I bury my head in the belly of the world,
a mortal stone without inscription.
I run with the double-edged sword
that nostalgia keeps, hoping to sever
the want from the need, the flesh
from the blood.
Andrea Aldrete is a published author from a small Texas border town where she savors every bit of her rich Hispanic culture. She is a mother of two small children, and a wife to an amazing husband. She lives a sober life that allows her to enjoy her loved ones creating long, meaningful memories. Instagram: @dre.writesnow
Paul Karnowski
A Miner and a Gardener Both
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil…
And, for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Did your name—Vincent—
on your brother’s tomb,
pre-load your palette
with earthen umbers in the early years,
as you picked your way
through darkened shafts bereft of light?
Did those potato eaters, earthy and forlorn,
portend a life of dread-filled days?
So it seemed.
But suddenly,
like seeds popping from the soil,
you make a play for air and light.
Growing gold in your painter’s plot,
sunflowers bloom, wheatfields glow,
fellow workers pose for you,
a postman and his wife.
Forthright faces, brazen blooms
writhing cypress trees
all announce you’re living in the light.
When evening comes, you splash your golden
brush against the darkening sky—
but your many stars prove no match
for the midnight hues with whom they dance.
Darkness never goes away,
your damaged ear hears the cruel taunts
and dismissive tones
echoed in the cawing of the crows.
And, for all this,
you worked away in well-worn boots,
a miner and a gardener both.
Paul Karnowski was born in Hawaii into a military family and moved frequently along with his many siblings. Interested in the priesthood, he attended the seminary at St. Meinrad, Indiana, earning a BA in English. He studied theology for three years in Rome, but was never ordained. Always interested in both the visual and verbal arts, he is largely self-taught. In his mid-thirties, he received his Master’s degree in Art Education from Florida State and taught art to elementary students for 25 years in the Atlanta area. He has been featured in a number of group and one-person shows through the years. When he retired from teaching in 2014, he and his wife, Gale, moved to Asheville, NC where he continues to paint and write.
