Cover image: "Particle Wave Variations" by Sara Baker Michalak
Gallery 1
Visual Art, Poetry, and Prose
Jocelyne Béïque
Jocelyne Béïque is a kind of UFO in the art world. She earned a Visual Arts diploma from Laval University in Quebec City, QC, but had a career in fashion design and then switched to community service for young children. Twenty years ago, she started to explore a new kind of expression by including real plants and fresh flowers in abstract paintings. Since then she evolutes in botanic discoveries that continuously transform her link with nature. Her artwork has never been exposed in public so far, except for the recent opening of an Instagram account in November 2019. She collects plants and flowers in North America during long road trips. She was even a full-time van-lifer for almost two years, in USA and Mexico, in order to get more particular samples instead of buying souvenirs along the way. Because she likes to travel light, she adopted digital techniques four years ago. She tries to celebrate the infinite beauty of nature, and puts plants into a creative dance to nourish endless fascination. You can follow her on Instagram @Eny_lecoj.
Sophie Hoss
Trespasser
What to make of you, strange visitor?
You seek refuge among us, yet
your plumed smoke twitches in our boughs, chafes our bark.
We feel your music’s shrill tremor
from wires that crown your face.
Why do you muffle our rustle of leaves, our delicate symphony?
The eyes of the forest sense you, but offer no mercy.
Your kind mistake us for easy targets.
You crawl among us bearing whittled knives and
cylinders of paint.
Curious how you are unrooted.
No matter. Our flesh grows only stronger over time,
while your frail skin rots on the bone.
Your decay is our salvation.
The eyes of the forest sense you, but offer no mercy.
Rest here for now, trespasser.
We will allow you houseroom to sit and be at peace,
or as close to it as your kind can come.
You will find that we are quite patient
so long as you do not outstay your welcome.
Soon enough, we will taste you the way you savor that tobacco.
The eyes of the forest sense you, but offer no mercy.
Sophie Hoss is a writer from Long Island, New York. She is currently pursuing a degree in creative writing at Stony Brook University. Her work has appeared in Beyond Words, High Shelf Press, and Thirty West Publishing House.
Carole Symer
upward mobility, from scratch
eyes cleansed
to see through smoke
to see through all the machinery that grinds on
the symptoms and sickness
when the sun slips down
who’ll handle the body bags
ask the bottom feeding sea otters
thank you but no we’re not fine
follow your breath to find what earth
and ocean are left in us
a chance to make other futures our cathedrals
burning juniper white sage sweet grass
thirsty for lessons from river birch
on how to read sky
when the beach plums are scarlet
if you close your eyes
imagine
a thin gray line
follows a field
of navy then
white like cotton
bird cries drown the quiet
it almost hurts to hear
how we moved on
from so much flesh
beneath the cosmic gauze
pulsing pulsing purple
minutes before
a pink dawn
like skin
turned way down
from summer’s heat
hydrangea nettle beach plums
let it be enough
By day, Carole Symer is a practicing psychologist in Ann Arbor, working primarily with parents and children, and she teaches at New York University. She has authored more than a thousand neuropsychological evaluations to help struggling learners get their educational rights fulfilled, discover the pleasures of reading, and make poetry with their lives. Her poems and essays have appeared in Across the Margin, Mutha Magazine, The Passed Note, Michigan Chronicle, and elsewhere.
Lynn Sisler
Lynn Sisler works in layered oil paintings, utilizing both drawing and painting language to mirror an ethereal space and setting within her art. She also builds ceramic sculpture-forms, glazing and firing with Raku, pit-firing, and other traditional techniques. Her visual Gaia-stories feature animals and humans, often blended as one entity, in a magical, folkloric construct. Her work strives to create thoughtful consciousness about humans’ relationship to the Earth and the connectiveness within all species.
Sisler completed a BFA in painting and a minor in art history from Northern Illinois University in 1991, and she is currently working on her MFA at Maine College of Art in Portland, ME. She recently received the prestigious Hildreth Family MFA Scholar Award.
- Website: www.lynnsisler.com
- Instagram: @lynnsislerart
Christine Weeber
Christine Weeber is the author of two poetry chapbooks, In the Understory of Her Being (in English and Spanish; published by Finishing Line Press) and Sastrugi. Her poetry and prose have appeared in A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park, Solo: On Her Own Adventure, and other publications. Christine is an editor at SAPIENS, an online magazine that illuminates the world of anthropology for a general audience. She inhabits a small mountaintop in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
L. Noelle McLaughlin
Go Back to the Woods From Which You Came
The blue-eyed grass winks as we walk
The crab apple barks and complains,
The bane belts out orders of
Butterfly borders
“ – Angelica!
Come inside now
It is time.”
A banishing
A welcoming
A wedding and
A blessing
A lady’s slipper with no stems to speak of
Tucked into a velvet bag
Yellow shine, long lily and an owl’s foot
A wondering
A wandering
An entering
A lessening
A maypole and a casting
And the mouse-ears
Everlasting
L. Noelle McLaughlin is a ghostwriter and fiction editor living in the Hudson Valley region of New York. Her work has appeared in The Stone Canoe Journal, Alchemy, Carte Blanche, Thrice Fiction, GAMBA Magazine, The Screech Owl, Sein und Werden, nth Position, Clockwise Cat, Danse Macabre, Unlikely Stories, and more. Her work explores the rhythmic contraction and expansion of the human mind in response to and in conversation with the outside world. She is the writer in residence for Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Gardens for Winter 2020.
- Website: lnoellemclaughlin.com
- Instagram: @photoanimism
- Twitter: @lnoellemcl
Emily Rankin
These pieces make up a part of an ongoing experiment, Overheard Poems, which seeks to frame rearranged pieces of everyday conversation within poetic convention. I’m interested in what makes poetry poetry, and how looking at conversation through a poetic lens might imbue things we overhear daily with new and deeper meaning. I’m interested in elevating the mundane, and in blurring the lines between high art and everyday life. And I’m interested in the confusion of words in which we are all steeped in our connected world, the jumble of conversation that creates meaning around us.
Coffee Shop
Blurry, dizzy cracks in the ceiling I
woke up and felt blurry, dizzy, barely
made it out the door;
Maybe it was particles in the air, maybe it was what I was breathing;
dirty floors dirty floors paint
peeling from the ceiling, couldn’t breathe;
Whitenoise, can’t sleep just
the lamp, dark but not really dark, masks,
sleeping masks, dark, dark as possible—
hormones buzzing in;
I can’t go to bed. I worry sometimes.
I’m not tired,
blurring insomnia, medicine in milligrams.
Dirty floors, cracks in the ceiling
Today I would have today insomnia
Sometimes I look at the clock.
I’m not sleeping.
Morning, usually it’s morning, sometimes afternoon.
Insomnia, middle of the
day, confused,
Looking at the clock, going outside…
Remember I want you
to eat if you’re hungry.
Remember what happened.
Your body is telling you,
you have to make yourself eat, you’re
gonna be hungry.
You have to make yourself.
Kitchen
You get to the point where you need somebody.
I think, it’s like I’ve known people all over the world—
I feel like I would have a heartbeat run by people,
people I can touch
There are people, people exist—
This could be somebody.
If you were to say you want to make a reality,
if you want to have connection,
There are thousands of people I walk past
building language out of their houses.
They’re thinking about—
they’re probably thinking about
Time, space,
lightning starting in a reactor
Cloud to cloud,
A unity of people—
But this is about the design of language
The real spacialization of
how sounds travel around space and time.
Maintaining an insane freedom
Building a complex code of screens and monitors,
unbelievable, absurd, components
Playing the music of a brain programming
a coding of language, of cloud, of connection,
Acoustics of that thing, that reality
That’s how it is in my house, in my heart,
It’s the same
It’s all the same, that need for connection
The language is pretty brutal
The reality is
We’re waiting to see
We’re trying to see
Curry Place
You have one of the most poetic minds I’ve ever met.
You’re in your mind, at that point you have no control.
What you thought was you, it was easy
One to one
Just make more things, get up, lay away,
just drive.
You remember that’s where it was supposed to be,
tried to,
Nonetheless but here’s the thing—
One of them—
this is the first.
There’s an idea that’s going to get inside your brain.
You have no control at that point.
Your brain makes up an idea and you’re in it, in the idea
because you’re inside your brain, your mind.
What control do you think you have inside your mind?
What control do you have inside your mind by thinking?
Emily Rankin was born in Riverside, California and attended Abilene Christian University, where she received a BFA in 2011. Her body of work ranges from Graphic Design and Scenic Painting to collaborative performances with Verstehen, an improvisational and interactive series which incorporates live painting, sound, and electronics. Her work has been exhibited at The Link & Pin Gallery, BookPeople, and Art.Work in Austin, Texas. She is currently based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Stella Hayes
Motel Room 1
I draw the nylon-threaded curtains to a close.
I’ve been to a room not unlike this one once,
on a frenzied cross-country trip back to LA.
I was being driven. I was invaded
by dry sickly heat of either Utah or Arizona.
The desert held in its teeth, like a lizard
or a mountain mouse. Everything in this room
was a throwback, anachronistic.
A TV rested on a brown Formica dresser.
The green-on-brown carpet had a pattern
of stains & flowers. The bed, a queen
with more nylon. I fiddled with the drawer
of the nightstand. On my dominant side,
I withdrew it from itself. A copy of a Bible
slithered out. I opened it & whispered into the air.
There was nothing left to live for in the room.
Or outside it. The background was a culture
overthrown. There is a knock on the door.
Russian-American poet Stella Hayes is the author of poetry collection One Strange Country (What Books Press, 2020). She grew up in an agricultural town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and Los Angeles. She earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in Prelude, The Indianapolis Review, and Spillway, among others.
- Website: www.stellahayespoet.com
Olga Gonzalez Latapi
Olga Gonzalez Latapi is a queer poet and MFA candidate in Writing at California College of the Arts. Although her writing journey started in journalism, she is now pursuing her true passion: exploring the world of poetry with a mighty pen in hand. She got her BS in Journalism at Northwestern University. Her work has been published in Teen Voices Magazine, Sonder Midwest literary arts magazine, BARNHOUSE Literary Journal (Box of Parrots), iaam.com, and The Nasiona magazine. Originally from Mexico City, she currently lives in Toronto.
Alexander Romero
Alexander Romero grew up in Golden, Colorado. Nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, he was always fascinated with nature and spent most of his time outside playing and exploring away from home. His first introduction to art was through encouragement from a high school drawing teacher. He became completely intrigued with the idea of creating something that no one else had control over. Art instilled him with the freedom to explore outside concepts from within. During school, Alexander was fortunate enough to complete a residency program in Fukuoka, Japan, where he found inspiration that developed into the backbone of his work. The hyper-realistic sugar rush that underlies Japanese sub-culture had a profound impact on his practice. Since receiving his degree, he decided to move to New York City. He now has a studio in Brownsville, Brooklyn. He practices his art every day and continues to challenge himself within the confines of fine art.
Robin Susanto
Robin Susanto was born in Indonesia. After many departures and arrivals, he found his way to the Coast Salish territory, or Vancouver, in British Columbia, where he continues immigrating homeward. His poetry and fiction have appeared in a few publications and anthologies, such as the New Quarterly, CV2, Blueprint Review, and Wild Weathers, an anthology of love poems published by Leaf Press. His poems have won prizes in the Dr. W. H. Drummond contest (2017, 2019) the Ross & Davis Mitchell Canada 150 Contest for Faith and Writing (2017), and the A3 Review (2019). He has faith in wasting time well, and in all things inefficient.
Robin Feld
Robin Feld is an abstract painter based in Brooklyn, NY. She works primarily in oils and watercolor and is excited to be experimenting with monoprinting. Abstract expressionism, minimalism, Japanese and Chinese landscape painting, and calligraphy are strong influences on her painting as are the grids and jumbles of Manhattan and Brooklyn and the line, shape, color, and form that she “collects” while working with watercolors in more rural settings like Prospect Park and beyond.
Feld has a BFA from CUNY and has studied anatomy and painting at the Art Students League in Manhattan. In recent years, her work has been shown at The Painting Center in Chelsea, NY; the Lemon Gallery at Kent State University at Stark, OH; and the Monmouth Museum and Victory Hall Drawing Rooms in Jersey City, NJ. She is currently preparing for a solo show upcoming in spring of 2021 at The Painting Center.
- Website: www.robinfeldstudio.com
- Instagram: @robin_feld
Jennifer Schneider
What Say You, Invisibility?
I see you.
Though I doubt you see me.
No one does, though I fail to comprehend Why.
Noise is everywhere. Senses overload, interior monologues ramble. News
streams forecasts of flooding rain, gunshots, and excessive winds – upwards of 70 miles
per hour – while dark, upper floor windows block views
but not targets.
Bulls-eyes. Everywhere.
Right-hand fingers apply cheap commissary red lip gloss – animal byproducts allowed –
and then remove all signs of color – blushes of pink, hues of rose – with old tissues saved
for untimely though certain tears. Flood waters recede, though never evaporate.
Left-hand fingers fold and tuck translucent tissue in an interior coat pocket. Single ply
and single stitched. The television room streams foreign film subtitles that flash
too quickly. And lives that move too fast. Activate Netflix scans for an English version
removed a week prior. Dark brown eyes focus in a room full of strangers.
Artificial laughs. Guards pace up and down dreary cinderblock cell halls.
Counting bodies, not people.
Cell phones trapped in two by four lockers. Voicemails full of unsolicited business loans and home mailboxes overflowing with circulars from off-brand stores. My mind wanders, but there’s nowhere to focus and no one who sees.
What say you, Invisibility? Is it game over? Checkmate. You win. Or I am the wiser one?
The one who now understands what it means to be (un)seen. Despite my impending freedom.
Oh, powerful one – Invisibility. You are omni-present and cunning. With me you’ve shared your wisdom. The poison that is the truth. It’s never been my dark shades, the clothes on my back, or the words on my tongue.
Invisibility is made of time. Memories, half-truths, false-truths, and the daily grind. Months in confinement, moments from release. Invisible all the same.
Release day – an anticlimactic moment comprised of unhinged locks, a pair of tokens, and a pat on the back. A day like any other. Once invisible. Always invisible.
Bus door clicks open.
Pairs of legs ascend steps.
Tokens drop dead weight.
Jen Schneider is an educator, attorney, and writer. She lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Philadelphia. Recent work appears in The Popular Culture Studies Journal, The New Verse News, Zingara Poetry Review, Streetlight Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, LSE Review of Books, and other literary and scholarly journals.
Audrey Gillespie
Audrey Gillespie is an artist from Derry in Northern Ireland, currently living in Belfast, NI. Her current analogue photo series “This Hurts” explores obsession, release, queerness, and identity.
