Cover image: "Hide Seek" by Kevin Bodniza
Gallery 3
World as self
Jacob Schepers
Snippet from Vasectomajestic
Wouldn’t you know it?
Caravaggio’s Conversion
on the Way to Damascus
(Conversione di San Paolo
among friends) has up
and gotten affixed
in my wandering mind
for some time now
on account of all this
self-incurred commotion.
So Roman, that muckety-muck
pre-P pick-up, garbed in soldier’s
attire, cuirass, tunic,
boots, muscular as all get-out,
which the man himself
was decidedly not, but thrown
to the ground, cape splayed,
arms akimbo, outstretched
towards some source
of light made all the more
dazzling from the artist,
his tell-tale tenebrism, chiaroscuro
dialed up, darkness
dialed in. All this, mind you,
in the bottom third of the field
of vision. There’s an older
balding man, I suppose
the horse guide, face turned
downward, clutching
the reins in an act of seizing
control amid the flurry
of action. More notably,
the skewbald horse, patchy
colored for the equestrian
neophytes, glistens in the rays
of alarm, of grace,
just perceptible on the right
edge of the vision. That glistening
horse spells out the hard fall
into blindness and later
into new sight, big britches
maybe. Might just be becoming
the central image for
this whole fucking thing
and that feels like a big
fucking deal and so
I’m making it a major fucking
point of it for you to marvel
at with me and honest
to goodness comprehend
and contemplate
the aesthetic experience
at its altar.
Jacob Schepers is a Midwest poet and the author of A Bundle of Careful Compromises (Outriders Poetry Project, 2014), the chapbook Connections & Choreography (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and the micro-chap Shipwreck Abstracted (Ghost City Press, 2024). His poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming in antiphony, DIALOGIST, The Greensboro Review, Harpur Palate, Heavy Feather Review, Hobart, Indianapolis Review, The Shore, Psaltery & Lyre, and elsewhere. His reviews and critical work have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, The Fanzine, Entropy, Cleveland Review of Books, and Contemporary Women’s Writing. He received his MFA and PhD from the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches in the University Writing Program. With Sara Judy, he edits the nonprofit literary journal ballast. More at www.jacobschepers.com. Instagram: @jacobschepers / Bluesky: @jacobschepers.bsky.social
Emily Benson
Fair Trade
The hole in the sky—a gap at the horizon—is what I see first. An emptiness, absent expected green, before the land rolls over before me, spreads out its violation; its bare ruined flesh: Dry ashen dirt tilled roughly up, studded with raw stumps like boils. And the steel-clawed backhoes and treaded drills hunch bolted spines into the blind blue air. And the square footage of naked earth, the hectares of desolation, the acres of absent trees—rendered into piles of pale pulp still weeping sap—press into me like a weight, a shock; sorrow that brings my palm to my chest. In the face of this, what comfort can I take in the recollection of my fingertips pressing into rich black soil around the smooth grey slimness of five hardy hibiscus? How do I hear the dripping golden song of a Red-eyed Vireo, an Eastern Phoebe, a Northern Cardinal and not despair? Where is the shaded safety of a home, a nest—the thrum of wingbeats in the phosphorescent twilight beneath a leafy canopy—and how can one person replace such loss? The sign says, “Future home of aerospace manufacturing.” Flight for flight, I suppose, but not a fair trade.
Emily Benson lives in Western New York with her husband and two sons. Her work has been featured in The CryptoNaturalist Podcast, Deep Wild Journal, Gastropoda, Literary Mama, Moist Poetry Journal, Paddler Press, and others. Read more at www.emilybensonpoet.com.
Nico Gargiulo
mist upon sea
i surrender time to water, trickling
and limbs, needling . . .
i wake in several quiet gasps to:
( e x p a n s e )
then, a shimmering . . . then
g r e a t e r
( e x p a n s e )
until, finally, the Blackwater Bay
with Her wide, dawning skirt
reaches light to throat . . .
“world as lover, world as self:”
i whisper with acorns . . .
i sing with sincerity . . .
my yearning is (s)Pacific:
hold me as i melt, hot salt.
Nico Gargiulo swims in a kaleidoscope of expressive magic: poetry, music, dreamwork, collage, stained glass, ritual, prayer, activism, communion with nature, divination, and meditation. Her music projects include the Open Music ensemble (avant garde), Not Your Ordinary None (feminist sound art), and nico gargoyl (solo improvised meditations). She publishes a poetry devotion via Substack called Beluga Croon, and regularly contributes to private art installations, public art projects, and community arts events. Nico offers workshops and 1:1 consultations on dreamwork, embodied arts, and sound healing. She is mostly nomadic, though currently based in central Pennsylvania. To learn more about her work you can find her at nico-gargiulo.com or on Instagram at @nico_gargoyl.
Reva Elise Johnson
precariously balanced
I am precariously balanced on a small spot of happiness, in which my niece is giving kisses and my nephew says his name is Basketball; he makes a pig snort noise and watches for my startle, for my laugh, so I play it out for him again, again until his brother joins, and I’m not sure they even find me funny but they’re laughing just to laugh and what a gift. My dad made and brought a cherry pie and this sets us off on tales of how he’d stop on family road trips for cheap cherry pastries tucked in cardboard sleeves; he’d drive and drive while us kids played word games in the back, imaginary games that have no end except to draw entire worlds that represent one word. I know I often walk into a room and look for knots I can detangle, but tonight my brother comments that he’s glad the smell of turkey dinner doesn’t linger in the air, at which the rest of us all laugh and tell him—go walk into the hallway, then come back to reassess. What I’m trying to tell you is—we can adapt to anything. Do not probe my pain tonight.
Reva Elise Johnson lives in northwestern Indiana, where the edges of Chicago meet the steel mills, Lake Michigan, and the Indiana Dunes. She is a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Valparaiso University, and she explores the interfaces between humans, nature, and technology through both her poetry and her research on prosthetics and pediatric mobility devices. Reva’s work integrates storytelling with engineering, appearing in publications ranging from Frontiers in Neuroscience to Moss Puppy Magazine. She currently serves as editor for the Assistive Technology journal.
Christy Sheffield Sanford
Christy Sheffield Sanford was born in Atlanta. She holds an MA from Antioch University in Creative Writing and Interarts. As an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, she completed workshops with Carolee Schneeman and Terry Allen. She won the recent Arts & Letters Unclassifiable Contest and was a finalist for the last Calvino Prize. Sanford has work in Drunken Boat, Ekphrastic Review and a video at Parley Lit. New work is forthcoming in PoetryXCollage. Sanford is the author of many books, including Great Lakes (Map-Induced Trance States) and The Cowrie Shell Piece (Baroque and Rococo Strains). Her web-specific art and writing are being archived by Washington State University. Red Mona 2.0 has been completed and can be found at The NEXT. Website: www.christysheffieldsanford.com
Daniel Brennan
Economies of Scale
A horse bites clean
through its tongue. What
is to be expected
in today’s climate?
I watch the roof of a corporate tower
go up in flames from
my apartment’s window.
Somewhere, there is
an architect,
storing his feeble hands in
a safety deposit box,
that safe place where
a mother hides
her dreams for her
child or
a Senator stows
his guilty conscience.
Every morning
I think
this is the best
day to die
and then I
wake again the following.
Funny, how that
works. The horse
doesn’t die, either.
No cause
for alarm! You see,
it wasn’t even a horse
after all,
not in the traditional
sense. No hooves or mane,
no tongue, just
what we remember
of tongues. Pen
to paper,
I craft what a horse
once was, or could be. There
is no grief too small.
Tomorrow, looming
over our heads.
Does the man
who drives the combine
hear a wheat field’s
final chord? That
is how it feels,
the blade swifter
than a hawk
diving into the gold
landscape to collect
its dues. My throat
so full of grief.
I wish I could stop
bringing up that
word, but it is
easier to say it often — grief —
than less, its
strange economy
of scale. I bite clean
through my tongue
when I say your
name, or my mother’s
name, or any
name, really (which is its
own kind of grief
in the making).
Smoke drifting
across the city’s
aged face,
I wonder
if the tower will fall, if
a mother
will believe
her child when
they describe
the horse, the horse
with no tongue,
the angels
riding them in
as their own demented
cavalry. Will
you share
your grief with me?
Place it here
on my tongue. I will
carry it. After all, no grief
is too small.
Daniel Brennan is a queer writer and coffee devotee from New York. Sometimes he’s in love, just as often he’s not. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has appeared in numerous publications, including The Penn Review, Sho Poetry Journal, and Trampset. He can be found on X/Instagram: @DanielJBrennan_.
Durell Carter
The Occipital Lobe Exercise
There’s rain on the windshield
And there’s a home for the excitement
A Friday brings,
burrowed under tires
And oil and the roadkill
That is yet to unexist.
There’s Thursday optimism in a can
Of whatever caffeinated bad habit
I’m believing in and
A fellow traveler I’ve never known
is in the car behind me staring at the mist
That is ahead of us. The unknown
We both believe in acknowledging but exalt
With the gusto of a 7 am road zombie.
There’s a beautiful home where my thoughts
Make sense to me, and I’m currently not sitting on its couch.
I am awake, my highway neighbor might be too,
But the rain on the windshield won’t let them know
The man that is living for any Friday
With a “hopefully I’ll stop drinking this bullshit someday”
Screaming in his chest.
Durell Carter is a writer and teacher based in Oklahoma, where he shares his passion for literature with his students. He holds a graduate degree in English from the University of Central Oklahoma and recently released his poetry collection, Mr. Monday Morning’s Broken Songs and Testimonies. Carter’s work has been published in numerous literary outlets, including Posit, Midway Journal, Closed Eye Open, and Drunk Monkeys.
Kevin Bodniza
Kevin Bodniza, a self-taught artist born in South Florida, has always approached art instinctively, creating without formal training. Using collage as his medium, he constructs textured worlds that reflect the chaos and beauty of life. His work is raw and unapologetic, evoking emotions that range from joy to discomfort. In 2024, Kevin held his first solo exhibition at his studio in Miami Shores. His art challenges viewers to question their feelings, sparking conversations that linger.
Angela Nordeng
Curtain Call
“Aren’t you nervous? Doesn’t it scare you?”
There are two sides to the stage. The captive and the held captive. Those who seek to feel special, and those who yearn to feel less alone.
I hear murmurs of people trickling in, and bodies settling into unclaimed seats. I steady my breathing in the wings, as music swells to signal the beginning of the show. I feel myself start to slip away as I am replaced by Raquel, a bottle redhead in fishnets and too much onyx eyeliner. Her troubled inner life washes over me, casting out the monotony of my own existence.
I am often asked if I am afraid before I go on stage. The truth is, I am afraid to leave the stage.
When I perform, I shut off and let repetition take over. Each moment is planned and perfected. I always hit my mark. My body has a GPS for every deliberate movement, and every word that escapes my mouth is vital and poignant. When I cry, people care. When I laugh, it encourages laughter. My real life does not offer me that safety net. I drift aimlessly from one moment to the next, unsure of what to say or do, and with no stage direction to offer me any kind of roadmap.
Every night, when Raquel reaches her climactic moment, I feel the silence get dense around me. I know I will fill that silence with the exact right words, and the precise cathartic emotion everyone has been aching for. I will draw the audience in. I will make them love me. Because this moment exists on the page and on the stage for that exact purpose.
In that moment, my body takes over and I become a vessel. I draw in a breath and lock eyes with my scene partner.
My face grows hot and my eyes brim with tears. I catch them with my thumb as they begin to spill over, brushing the frayed edges of Raquel’s oversized hoodie across my cheek. I learned early not to let myself wear tears as a badge of honor in a performance. In life, I soak my sleeves or the back of my hand, praying that no one will witness my moment of weakness. When I act, I do the same.
By the end of the speech, I’m sitting on the edge of the stage, my legs dangling past the third wall. Eyes bore holes through me as I gaze down at Raquel’s scuffed boots. They are caked in the residue of mud from god knows what field party my imagination might have set her loose in. My shaggy red hair cascades in front of my face, enveloping it, acting as a personal curtain call to my performance. When the curtains close behind me, I am left to fend for myself in the real world.
The swelling applause from beyond the sheltered glow of the stage light tells me that I am finished. I look up across the illuminated halogen pool. I bathe in the warm embrace of the only love I have ever known. Particles of dust float like bits of glitter in front of me, suspended in time. This version of me hangs here with them in the musty air, visible only when the light shines just so. I shed this layer of myself here among the dust. I am at peace knowing that I will never be the same again. I belong here. I live here, ever so briefly, and I die here, just as often. I am reborn every time.
Every moment is a death. Every goodbye looms permanent. Every kiss is a last kiss, because we are never the same again. We take a bit of their breath with us and leave a bit of ours behind. Every connection changes the course of our life, for better or for worse, in some slight way, forever. All that we can hope, is that when we meet again, we have changed in a way that still fits together in an effortless embrace.
This is the magic of theatre. For a brief moment in time, everything fits together. If it doesn’t, there is a good reason. We enter the theatre, atoms vibrating at an alarming rate, incapable of forming a bond. We spend a fleeting moment fuzzed into one perfect being, before splitting off again. But we do so with the hint of some microcosmic shift.
I am met by the cast, who help pull me to my feet. Our hands clasp together, forming a flimsy chain. When the bond breaks, Jane will go back to her husband and kids. Mark will seek comfort in a pack of Marlboro Reds at the bus stop, wondering how he turned forty-three in this town. We will all rewind our TVs because we missed the same scene three times, too distracted by Instagram.
Awash with all of the emotions my time on stage cultivated, I will think about texting my mother. I will stare at the hot white glow of my cell phone, buzzing with an inner life that has no hope for relief or outlet. These things, so precious and dear on stage, are so inconvenient in my car at midnight, when I realize I skipped dinner because my oil change ran past schedule. In an instant, my heart will go from feeling so full that it might burst, to feeling like it has been slowly leaking for the past decade.
There are two sides to the stage. The one where you live, and the one where you slowly die, bit by bit, as the world drains every bit of color from your withering soul.
I am often asked if I am afraid before I go on stage. The truth is, I am afraid to leave the stage.
Angela Nordeng is a Los Angeles-based actress and writer from the upper peninsula of Michigan. She has helped workshop scripts for a number of feature film writers, and has received best actress awards at a handful of film festivals for her work in feature films and shorts. She is currently in preproduction on a short film that she wrote at the end of 2024, and is beginning a festival run for a short that she co-wrote and shot in 2023. Angela is currently working on her first novel.
Judith Mikesch-McKenzie
What the Widow Scott Left Behind
My mother’s laughter rises up from beneath the ground,
and I think: this is not a story I’ll write for
Sister Mary Mark’s class.
She thinks writing about the people I know is, in her
words, “unimportant,” but I think it’s
just that she’s pissed I never leave her a reason to
use her red pen.
Mom and her friend have been down there a while, from
time to time appearing at the open
hole to hand us
up found objects so we can . . . careful, now
. . . brush off dirt and place them on the blanket
yards away for safekeeping —
at least for now.
My mother is laughing again, her deep glowing
laugh now coming from farther away under
the ground, and they are both laughing —
fearless explorers in a cavern
that opened in our yard hours ago, and into which
they immediately descended,
sliding down the dirt and disappearing into the
darker recesses, Mom’s small
penlight fading away in the dark with them.
Sister Mary Mark will never know what it means to
hear mother’s laughter rising in delight from
beneath the ground we stand on,
(my mother telling the
younger neighbor how the
widow who first owned this land had a
root cellar — and here it is! — and an icehouse and
what’s now the garage was her barn . . .)
because Sister Mary Mark cannot understand the
importance of two women
emerging from a dark hole, faces
smeared, brushing dirt off
their shoulders as my
mother holds a blue cut-glass jar up
to the sunlight —
awed by its beauty.
Judith Mikesch-McKenzie is a teacher, writer, actor and producer living in the Pacific Northwest. She has traveled widely, but is always drawn to the Rocky Mountains as one place that feeds her soul. Writing is her home. She has recently placed/published in two short-story contests, and her poems have been published or are upcoming in CALYX, Her Words, Plainsongs Magazine, Cirque, Wild Roof Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, and over 40 others. She is a wee bit of an Irish curmudgeon, but her friends seem to like that about her.
Laura Sergeant
To Raise a Snow Pea
water hits the bucket like a rifle shot
while I wait in the soft bog grass
the wasp sun pressed against my neck
I lurch with unequal shoulders
past an orchestra of discarded things
a bony ladder, bicycle wheels and rebar—
they anticipate the weight of august
I’m learning what small shapes beget what harvest
lemon zucchini flowers,
ruffled geysers of sea blue kale,
and carrot’s early lace
I watered five rows of string
devotion pricked by doubt
my casual thumb
plunged seeds
a depth of one inch
into the cool loam
exhaled when pale tentacles
octopus slick
curlicued around the mesh net
I cast between two poles
somehow tiny tendrils
knew to climb
now I stand
before a green sheet
snow peas hang like ornaments
from elf collars
I pop them into the ladle of my shirt
and wonder what else in this world
I fail to see—
or mistake for ordinary
and not divine
the elegant code
invisible
in the head of a seed
Laura Sergeant is a Pushcart Prize nominated writer, with creative non-fiction and poetry publications. She won Hamilton’s Short Works Prize for CNF in 2021 and was runner-up in 2020, and was also a finalist for the Icelandic Writing Retreat (2018). She has completed the Sage Hill Non-Fiction Colloquium (2022) and Vancouver Manuscript Intensive (2023). She is completing a book-length memoir about a mid-life #CrossFit fail. She believes raisins ruin everything. She writes from her home on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas—the land is covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant. You can find her on Instagram @laurahsergeant.
Kelsey Overstreet
Kelsey Overstreet is an abstract painter and printmaker working with water-based paints, oil sticks and spray paint. Kelsey has a rich background in a variety of media including textile design and non-traditional printmaking. Kelsey received her MFA in 2018 and has been painting for 25 years. Overstreet lives, works, and resides in North County San Diego with her two kids and husband. Website: www.kelseyoverstreet.com / Instagram: @kelsey_overstreet
Léni Paquet-Morante
Léni Paquet-Morante is an award-winning artist whose work has been exhibited primarily in the northeast since 1984. A Signature Member of the National Association of Women Artists, she is also listed in the Women Artists of America National Directory. Her studio is part of the Johnson Atelier Studio Program within the Grounds for Sculpture complex in Hamilton, NJ. She has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Peter’s Valley, and Lacawac Field Sanctuary, and is a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Finalist Grant recipient. A solo exhibition is slated for 2025 at Princeton University Art Museum’s Bainbridge House Gallery. Website: lenimorante.com / Instagram: @lenimakespaintings
Emily R. Antrilli
nel septembre
the shape of leaves look like the inside of my
mother’s palm rose gold and lined with strain angels
don’t make a sound when footing their limbs through loose
gates how many wrinkled leaves become angels after folding into
ash I trace the outline of my mother’s hand in the veins of
the tree wondering how I can feed its drying bones if I can’t
bleed the same silver sap è il pane di ieri and I wonder when my taste
became too rich for hardened bread I wonder when the sun became too
good to breathe life into these earth angels aspettiamo novembre
my nonna used to say when the sky yellows with the dolore di ieri
that is when the children change from saplings to new life inside wet
wombs that is when the trees would say goodbye to the mouths they
used to have to sing to be nourished by the gold of summer
Emily R. Antrilli is a confessional poet living in South Philadelphia. She recently received her Master’s in Secondary Education from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently an educator in Philadelphia. She is a graduate from Arcadia University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. Her work can be seen in The Esthetic Apostle, Bee House, and Black Horse Review, among others. Her poetry underlines the intricacies of mental illness through personal narrative.
