Cover image: "Camouflage in Nature" by Chel Campbell
Gallery 2
The nectared flow
Sarah Chin
Some Bathroom in Tribeca
I think it’s her I’m always trying
to catch up with by doing lines of
poetry-scrawl black ink
off the bathroom sink.
She creeps and crawls
along the black backsides of my eyelids
that close around a dream where we are twelve
again, singing and dancing and painting the roses
in her mother’s garden the scarlet blooming from the tips
of our tongues. She takes the words, gasping shapes,
right out of my mouth and swallows them whole, syllables
catching on the curve of her lip, Cupid’s bow nocked
and drawn, and a shot rings out
that echoes years later, sound pounding patterns
on the greased grey linoleum sad state I’m in.
Sarah Chin lives in Chicago, IL. From nine-to-five, she works in progressive politics and organizing. From five-to-nine, she is working on her first novel. Her writing has previously appeared in HAD, Kingfisher Magazine, fēlan, and Instick.
Claire Wolters
Goldenrod
I grow easy,
wild and reaching,
flourishing
where I am
not wanted,
rarely where I am.
Once—I was told—
human creatures
lusted for gold,
but my botanical being
must exist as an exception.
Blooms of enthusiasm expose me,
Solidago,
let me make you whole.
I hold hands with my ego
and whisper softly,
I am a flower.
You blame me
for your fever,
your summer sneeze,
and I forgive you
for the way your hands
gravitate towards safe daffodils.
But my clemency betrays me,
as your careless gloves
rip at my roots,
pulling
to discard the seemingly
overgrown—
ugly, invasive
“weed.”
Discarded in piles of
clover and dandelions,
I try to die,
despite
my curse of strength.
Claire Wolters is a writer for history textbooks, a former teacher, and a poet living in Indianapolis, Indiana. She has written poems in secret for as long as she can remember, but she is working on sharing her poetry more. Finding the quiet-pretty in natural things inspires Claire’s writing; she wishes to speak with flowers. When Claire is not writing poems, she can be found digging in the dirt with her dog, Ernest Spaghetti, reading a good book, or wandering in the woods. Instagram: @clurrw & @bookvermhat
Daniel Lurie
Salvage
If only I could slip inside the wallpaper
of this tomato without splitting
the skin. Behind the church,
Mom is pulling tarp over the rows.
The food bank hired me to cultivate
a plot for pennies. My fingers
play the vines like a violin,
pinching the fruit with anything
but tenderness. Mom is running,
leaving troughs in the mud,
like the tidepools we tiptoed
around in Oregon, poking
around shells and fishbones
with the seagulls. She could slip
beneath the skin. We leave
the green beans and squash,
grab at the not-quite-ripe.
Mom and I retreat towards
the church, forcing the doors
open as hail eats through
the garden. We can’t enter
the chapel, wrong religion, so we sit
in the lobby. She notices hickeys
on my neck, tsks, but I see her smirk.
Outside, there’s a murder scene:
washed up worms, cherry pulp,
carcasses with holes
see-through clear to sky.
Daniel Lurie is a Jewish, rural writer who grew up in Eastern Montana. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho, where he currently teaches First-Year Composition. Daniel is a Poetry reader for Chestnut Review. His work is forthcoming in West Trade Review and Pleiades, and has appeared in Fugue, New Verse News, The Palouse Review, FeverDream, and others. His poem “One Night Only” is stamped onto a concrete street in Billings.
K.G. Ricci
K.G. Ricci is a self-taught NYC artist who has been creating collages for the past seven years. In that time his work has evolved from the larger 24×48 panels to 7×10 books and most recently to a series of 11×14 collages on cardboard titled Incongruities. His work has been in gallery exhibitions throughout the country, and he has appeared in numerous online exhibitions. Many of Ricci’s most recent “visual stories” have been featured in several literary magazines.
Haley Neddermann
Descendants
We begin
to swallow: a pale blue dot, gravity of the world pressed against the roof of our mouth. A clay pebble, eye sockets eroded by streams of starlight racing across the sky. The beginning of us, our first face, carried across deserts and through snaking canyons of jasper and carnelian. Carried by each other in the valleys of our hands. We have only gotten this far by leaving what we love, and we will keep going. The truth of this rattles in our throats, leaves a metallic sheen on our skin. We glow, but take no time to worship ourselves. We open ourselves to hunger, to ripe fruit. Rosehips, plums, fistfuls of cherries, we want the seeds and stones to weigh us down. Whole pomegranates fill our stomachs until they burst against our ribs, ruby juice rising out of our mouths, running down our chins. We hold our hands out to catch this scarlet river, but a red tide washes down our thighs, and pulls us to the ground. At our feet, a pearl gleams. A miniature moon that starts to roll and pick up speed as we bend to pick it up, it slips from our fingertips. The pearl rolls to the base of a tree, begins to burrow into a forest of haircap moss, into the shadows underground.
We begin
to descend
into the earth: we expand the spaces between roots and stones for each other, and climb through. We are pulled through layers of soil and into the orbit of the pearl, our snail-egged star, that shimmers out of reach in the hushed horizons of loam and sand. Our bodies are covered with dirt, and we don’t know where one of us begins and the other ends. We cannot call out to each other without an avalanche of sediment colliding with our teeth. Sometimes we fall so slowly, the pressure begins to bend us into sharper shapes of flint or diamond. We drag our breath with us, holding the scraps in our fists when it grows ragged. We think we have lost the pearl when an earthquake tremors it further into a fold in the dark. With closed eyes, we sense the pearl’s heat pulsing in front of us, just out of reach. At last we fall into a pool of molten light, the inner honeyed sun. The pearl is caked in grit and sediment, and only a small sliver of white, crescent of a rabbit’s eye, peers out at us. Our hands and lips buzz at being here again, to guide you now.
We begin
to descend
to you
being born: out of the pearl, into the gold. We press our palms as close as we can, to feel a breath, catch a spirit eye unfold. We fall back when the nectared flow contracts away from our touch, seeps into the pearl and turns it the color of an apricot. Each speck of dust and dirt disappears inside, and the pearl expands to the size of a turtle egg, a giant puffball, a drifting moon. We step closer as a mouth opens at the crown. Your tongue, a slip of clay comes out, and starts to cry. Of course. You are one of us. Ready to make yourself fully as an eye gapes at the tip of your tongue, as a hand reaches out from under the eyelid and into the inkiness of your pupil, drawing out your heart. This tangled mess of red ribbon starts to beat, the rhythm echoes in the cavern. You dig under the roots of your teeth and find the rest of you waiting there, bundled in silence. You wake each part with the whorls on your fingers, and pull them out, placing them behind a rib cage, under a crown made of bone, adorning yourself with the long train woven from shadow and light that has unfolded at your feet.
You begin
to rise: as you turn away from us, tunnel out of the hollow in the earth. You hear a distant hum, a crackle of radio static, a voice calling from a forest above you. Your life, a path through cedar and spruce, where pools of shadow can be so dark they have stars, where the sun illuminates and edges everything in gold. You stand in this light, wonder at how it can fuse the broken parts of you back together after you have splintered like quartz. Your sharp edges will keep carving a way through the world, a way for your children, and their children. You will not always be there to teach them how to scrape forward, how to cut away, but their bones will know just like yours do. One day, when you are ready, but probably before, we will come with our hands full of golden light, and have you drink every drop. We will help release you from the gravity of what you love, pull you back to our path. We will help you forget, at least long enough to join us back at the beginning, a pearl tucked behind your teeth.
Haley Neddermann is a writer based in Connecticut. She is constantly being inspired by the natural world, everyday magic, and what it means to be human. You can follow her on Instagram @lemniscatory_story.
Lisa Stice
Genesis
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s
first home // continental divide
not knowing and knowing
two directions // both downward
both uncertain
rivers begin
far above that forbidden tree
rivers begin cold and quiet
small // a sleeping embryo
how everything begins
Lisa Stice is a literary activist and an author of four full-length collections, Letters from Conflict (2024), Forces (2021), Permanent Change of Station (2018) and Uniform (2016), as well as a chapbook, Desert (2018). She volunteers with various writing/art organizations. While it is difficult to say where home is, she currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, daughter and dog. You can learn more about her at lisastice.wordpress.com, facebook.com/LisaSticePoet, and Instagram @lisasticepoet.
Author’s Note: The first 5 words of the poem are the first 5 words of Finnegan’s Wake.
Maia Brown-Jackson
Love stained indigo and mustard, in prime numbers
When I was younger, I feared
dying asleep, to
disappear
from space and time, trapped in the
nonexistence of
a nova
become mere nameless dust. Yet,
perhaps farewell might
at last let
me end my fight, fade
in the night.
Yes, unaccustomed to love
that didn’t leave scars,
like Chekhov
refusing to admit his
tuberculosis,
gentleness,
when unexpected, means I
run. So each time I
choose to fly,
is that wanderlust
or distrust?
To be so vulnerable
that my skin feels a
tangible
difference when you’re near; not
touches that claim and
bruise, but wit
and kindness, gentle kisses—
then the ones that start
eclipses.
Is this love? I so
want to know—
After the incredibly practical literature degree from the University of Chicago, Maia Brown-Jackson then braved the myriad esoteric jobs that inevitably follow, ultimately straying to Iraq to volunteer with survivors of ISIS genocide. Inspired with a new focus, she caffeinated herself through a graduate degree in terrorism and human rights and now investigates fraud, waste, and abuse of humanitarian aid in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Also, she writes. You can read more of Maia’s work at maiabrown-jacksonwriting.com. Instagram: @tilting.at.windmills / Bluesky: @andyetpoetry
Rachel Bunting
Fear Is a Rabbit
April 2022
My mother has always been a nurse. She worked in many specialties over her career: emergency, organ donation and transplant, intensive care, trauma, neonatal intensive care. She spent a number of years working for a private corporation where she used her nursing background to assist in the coordination of international emergency evacuations. She also spent time working for an organization that provides court-appointed advocates for children. She dedicated decades of her life to the art and science of healing. She has always been good at this work, with a brilliant mind that can process information quickly and craft a plan of action that is accurate, efficient, and effective. She’s been witness to moments of incredible vulnerability for so many people, held the trust of these people in her hands.
My maternal grandmother died before I turned a year old. My mother was twenty-six, her mother fifty-three. What did my mother know of the world? What did she have left to learn? She told the same stories about her mother so often they are etched in my own memory, as if I myself had seen her standing at the kitchen counter rolling out a pie crust, a cigarette with a long ash dangling from the corner of her mouth. As if I knew the sound of her laughter, understood the ache of losing it. But memory is malleable, unreliable, a lace of delicate neural connections susceptible to alteration, breakage, and repair.
November 1995
When I was sixteen, my mother dropped me off at the salon before a school dance and told me she’d be back to pick me up. I sat in the stylist’s chair as she wound my hair around the barrel of a curling iron, then pinned it up into a loose knot. Once finished, I sat in a chair in the waiting area for forty-five minutes, admiring the grown-up reflection in the mirror across from me and wondering when my mother would come back inside to find me. When the salon phone rang and the receptionist told me my mother was waiting in the parking lot, I realized my mistake. My stomach tightened; I could feel the storm building as I walked to the car. On the drive home she let loose her anger like hurricane wind: how could I be so selfish? I should have known she’d wait in the parking lot and now I’d kept her waiting for an hour, didn’t I ever think of anyone but myself? At home she retreated to her office, refused to come out and meet the shy boy who had nervously asked me to be his date only two weeks before.
October 2020
I had been volunteering at the wildlife hospital for more than a year, steadily growing more comfortable with the rhythm of the seasons and the ebb and flow of the work we had to do. In late October, the summer rush was over and the hospital was quiet, only a few adult animals in care: a squirrel (caught by a cat), a juvenile opossum with a broken tail, a Canada goose with a lame foot.
I hung up the phone and crossed the kitchen to the basement door. Claire, Christine, and Flora were down there, occupied with some dark, difficult task that involved a young deer who arrived the day before but didn’t live through the night. I didn’t venture beyond the top of the stairs; I called down to them instead.
“Can one of you come up? We have an adult rabbit coming in from the parking lot that needs assessment.”
“Be there in a minute,” Claire called back over the distinctive sound of a small saw. I closed the door against it.
In the reception area, a man in a heavy field coat stood on the far side of the glass divider. His baseball cap was pulled low over his eyes, the bottom half of his face covered by a gray mask. He held a large Amazon box in his hands.
During our brief phone conversation earlier, the man told me he’d let his dog out into the backyard and watched as he headed straight for the new wire fencing around an area of the lawn the man was trying to reseed. The dog loved that patch of lawn, dug there so often that no grass would grow. The fence was meant to keep him out. The man saw him nosing one particular area and went to investigate; that’s when he found the rabbit trapped in the wire. She was scared, breathing heavily. It took the man ten minutes to free her — he had to cut the wire away.
I explained our COVID protocol: he should leave the box on the floor of the lobby, then step outside so I could retrieve it; he’d be able to come back inside as soon as I returned to my side of the glass divider. The box was light — I was always surprised by how light the animals were. As I walked into the kitchen, I heard the man step inside again. At the exam table, I pulled a large plastic bin off the floor, lined it with a fluffy towel, then opened the Amazon box to take a look at the rabbit.
April 2022
After her mother’s funeral, my mother vowed she would never speak to her father again. There were stories about him, too, stories that brought an oily skin of fear and anger to her voice. (Once he sat in the kitchen holding my brother on his knee while he contemplated a single bullet on the table. There had been, he said, entirely too much crying that day.) But she did speak to him again, allowed him to be a grandfather. I remember eating broccoli off the stem from the garden behind his house, riding in the front seat of his old pickup truck, hearing him talk about driving out to the Great Salt Lake. These memories are blurry, sun-bleached, so vague I can’t quite place myself in them. Eventually, though, the tension became untenable, their tempers erupting like twin volcanoes too many times. By the time I reached middle school, my grandfather was nothing more than a small dark shadow in the back of a closet we rarely opened. Decades later I saw photographs of him on the wall at my aunt’s house: in his Marine Corps uniform, on a fishing trip, in a suit on the day of his wedding. I was surprised at how like him my mother looked.
I married Todd when I was eighteen, after a year of dating. He was twenty-two, handsome and attentive, with a family that seemed genuinely pleased to see me each time I visited his house. Before the wedding, my mother told me I was confusing sex with love. She told me I couldn’t possibly understand what it meant to be in love. She asked me if I thought he made me a better person, because that’s what love does. I said yes and her voice turned acidic: I must have been a much worse person than she thought because anyone could see I was nothing worth bragging about. When Todd and I divorced after seven years, we had a house to sell and a two-year-old son to share. My mother said she was right, this proved it wasn’t real love, because it didn’t last.
October 2020
The rabbit was large and beautiful, with long ears and dark, impassive eyes. Both rear legs were wrapped in homemade bandages — paper towels secured with medical tape — and there was blood seeping through. Her fur was thick, a soft brown mottled with white, the perfect picture of a rabbit. I reached in slowly — she pulled her head back in response to my hands, but didn’t move any further. As I slid my hands beneath her, I noted a large wound on her back where the fence skinned her, exposing the bright red muscle. It looked like an angry mouth slashed into the middle of her body. I placed her carefully in the plastic bin, then set a lid studded with holes on the top.
When I returned to reception with the man’s Amazon box, he asked eagerly, “How’s she look?”
I smiled at him before remembering he couldn’t see my face behind the mask. I made sure my voice was soft, reassuring, as I began reciting the script I’d been trained to deliver.
“She looks okay,” I said evenly. “I’ve transferred her to one of our enclosures, so I’m going to return your box. We’ll let her rest for a bit as being handled, even just for a few moments, can be stressful for the animals. After a little while, one of our staff members will do a full exam to determine the extent of the injuries and treatment plan.”
“Can I find out how she’s doing? Will you call to give me an update?”
I pointed to a plastic brochure holder on his side of the glass. “You can check in on her. Those slips of paper have instructions,” I said. “Keep the pink copy of the form you just filled out; you’ll need the intake number in the corner.” The man looked anxious. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “We’ll get her the help she needs.”
I returned to the kitchen, where Claire was pulling a fresh pair of nitrile gloves from a box on the wall. “Grab another towel,” she said. “I’ll need your help with this one. What happened?” She nodded at the bin; the lid was set at a wrong angle — she’d already peeked inside. She finished fitting the gloves onto her hands then lifted the rabbit, towel and all, onto the table as I recounted the man’s story.
July 2009
I was visiting my brother in California when Todd called. We were already divorced and there was a new brittleness to our interactions as we renegotiated our custody agreement. Before I could say more than hello, Todd yelled that my parents, who had agreed to watch our son for the first two days of my trip, were refusing to turn him over as agreed for the remainder of my time away. It took an hour and a half to reach my mother, who told me that our son, who loved his father, who was always eager to see him, didn’t want to go there. He cried and cried, she said, and how could she do that to him? She hung up the phone, refused to answer again.
October 2020
I didn’t usually assist with intakes. This task was typically reserved for more senior volunteers and staff members, for good reason: intakes are unpredictable; an injured animal will go to great lengths to keep a human from touching it. I’d seen this plenty of times: a black vulture with a compound wing fracture snapping at the wrist of a volunteer who stepped too close; a raccoon with a broken leg scampering off the exam table, headed for a nearby shelf where there was a hiding spot behind some supplies, hissing and spitting the whole way. Even a rabbit can do some damage with a well-placed bite. These things happen even after an animal has been in care for several weeks, but the likelihood of injury to the animal or the human is highest during intake, when all parties are still assessing the danger of the situation.
But no one else was around. Flora and Christine were still working in the basement. Two other volunteers were outside cleaning up the grounds. I took a deep breath in an attempt to steady my nerves, then followed Claire’s instructions to wrap the towel around the rabbit, covering her head, and hold her in place on the table.
Spring 1992
My parents never hit me; they reminded me of this every time they scolded me. Are we terrible parents, my mother would ask, do we beat you? I never knew how to respond to this. It was a trick, a question that demanded two answers, but no answer I gave could ever be right.
I learned quickly to be invisible while my mother was cleaning, often disappearing into the basement rec room after I finished my own assignments to re-read my favorite books and listen to the sound of the vacuum overhead. One week, well after the vacuum stopped running, I climbed the steps from the basement, headed to the kitchen for a snack. I was standing in front of the refrigerator, scanning the shelves, when my mother re-entered the room with a snap in her voice. Couldn’t I see that she’d just swept the floor, that I tracked dirt all over and now she’d have to do it again? Her anger kept coming; I was suddenly drowning in a river with a strong current, struggling to keep my head above the water.
October 2020
Claire began to snip with a small pair of scissors at the medical tape binding the paper towel to the rabbit’s legs. The rabbit twitched uncomfortably once, then stilled again, her flank rising and falling heavily. Slowly the tape loosened and the paper towel fell away. Claire peeled it back to reveal dark gashes, more skinned muscle on both rear legs. She separated the toes on each foot, flushing the fur with saline and peering quietly at the cuts there. The rabbit, still breathing heavily, remained otherwise motionless.
“See here,” Claire said, holding the toes apart, “she must have really been tangled up in that fence for a while. You can see where the wire cut into her toes.” The fur there was dirty, matted with blood. “And here,” she added, pointing to the exposed muscle on the rabbit’s legs, “this is what happens when they try to squeeze out; the wire is too tight and pulls their skin right off.” I winced.
“There’s another one on her back,” I said, “another big cut.” I loosened my grip on the hand towel and Claire lifted it slowly, just enough to see the cut. She inhaled sharply.
“Oh, yeah. That’s a bad one.”
She gestured for me to release the towel entirely. In one quick motion, she swept the rabbit into her arms and flipped her over so her belly was exposed — a smooth, uninterrupted expanse of soft white fur. She stroked the rabbit’s head while rocking back and forth and talking quietly to her. The rabbit’s breathing evened out; her eyes seemed to relax. Claire murmured quietly, “Yes, you’re a beautiful girl. I’m so sorry, beautiful girl.” She looked at me and nodded. She didn’t have to explain.
December 2024
If we trace the thread of anger back through the years, how far would we travel? Certainly the forty-plus years of my lifetime. Through my mother’s? Her father’s? I know now that most of my choices in life were not choices but reactions, an attempt to increase the distance between myself and my mother. I have always wanted to bear as little resemblance to her as possible. It seems to me that she delights in cruelty.
We haven’t spoken since 2013. I don’t remember the contents of our last exchange; this is true of most of our verbal interactions. She is adept at steering conversations so that I end up feeling disoriented, lost, uncertain how I came to be sitting in this chair at this moment. I was thirty before I heard the term gaslighting; it was another few years before I understood that’s what was happening to me. By the time I decided to see a therapist just before I turned forty, I felt like a clenched fist all the time. I didn’t know how many layers of grief and anger I’d need to remove before I felt like a human instead of a wounded animal. I still don’t know.
October 2020
I moved the bin closer to Claire so she could place the rabbit back inside. I had seen this happen hundreds of times over the past year, was generally unmoved by it. Animals arrived daily with injuries too severe to treat. I knew that every exam assesses the potential for long term recovery and quality of life. I’d seen the telltale sign of euthanasia, a bin with a towel draped over it, more times than I can count. But I had never been part of the equation before, never a participant in the process. I caught one final glimpse of the rabbit’s dark eyes before she disappeared behind the towel.
Rachel Bunting is a writer and artist living between the Delaware River and the Pine Barrens in Southern New Jersey. Her writing can be found in both print and online journals, including [PANK], Muzzle Magazine, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Hippocampus Magazine, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. She co-founded the journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts and Letters with fellow writer and artist Donna Vorreyer. In 2022, Rachel was awarded an Individual Fellowship in Prose from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. She is easily distracted by birds. Instagram: @rebunting / BlueSky: @rebunting.bsky.social
Chel Campbell
Chel Campbell is a poet and artist from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. You can find her most recent work in X-R-A-Y and Anti-Heroin Chic. Their collection of micropoems, Lovebug, is out now with rinky dink press. She does not bite if you offer her a treat in your open palm, and you can even say hi on Instagram @hellochel.
Lindsey Wagner
Lindsey Wagner is a multi-media artist (see also: analog photoshop) and poet based in Brooklyn. Her focus stretches horizontally across the intersecting planes of art and science. Lindsey’s art is influenced by spectral intimacies and liminalism as she considers how the inter-zone of nostalgia, grief, and desire can be imprinted on everyday objects, sourcing her materials from discarded objects like guest checks and lists. Her work opens the doorway between what is sacred and common, showcasing the moments that occupy the interstitial spaces of our lives, those part of fleeting and momentary interactions, and the awkward intimacies that manifest from their recollection. Her recent collage layouts were for Venus in Pisces, a book of poems published earlier last year. Her work is forthcoming in the March 2025 issue of Vagabond City Literary Journal. She is a first-year medical student in Harlem.
Eva Alter
Access Permissions Revoked
Eva Alter is an emerging poet from the Southeast. Her work focuses on nature, memory, decay, and rebirth. She loves hiking, bouldering, spending time with her cats, learning languages, and reading sci-fi and nature writing. Her work has appeared in Liminal Spaces Mag. X: @eva_alter_poet
Devorah Levy-Pearlman
Cul-De-Sac
I can’t explain why but I think it grows darker every year.
I can’t explain why the Santa Ana winds whacked
the fan palms like plastic clacker toys
and then I stopped seeing foxes on our street
I knew we had to be near the end
when the names of the streets
like Swift finally matched their meanings.
Before I learned they’d sown fig trees
atop blown dynamite
I was told the squirrels were invasive
and I grew taller than the latticed fence
and could see far, far over it: throngs of vine
ringlets, pearl-white blossom bush,
hallucinating the scent of garlic,
the vertigo the crisscross highway lets in.
I learned to follow burial sounds,
the squirrel making its hut
outside my bedroom window,
the shaft no one could see through.
Devorah Levy-Pearlman is a poet, essayist, and community organizer raised in California and living in New Orleans. She writes out of a compulsion to detect the fine, subtle frequencies humming under the surface of everything, especially familial mythology, grief, placehood, and belonging. She likes to write on long train rides, in cheap motels, and with her cat Ponce on her lap.
Andrea Thurairatnam Imdacha
✔ Shopping List for an Apocalypse
It ought to be hard to think about aesthetics when the world is ending, but we manage. How will you imagine the list inked onto our palms? Let’s say you conjure water jugs, food in cans. Pocket knives and batteries and powdered milk. Candles and kerosene. Matches and sleeping bags and a tent to hide us from the raining fire, a place to curl together like commas strung along, like a slip of the hand on the keyboard,,,,,,,
demanding a long pause at the end of the world.
We do not purchase such provisions. What I buy instead is another red lipstick and a bottle of perfume thick with the scent of incense at evensong. I find a candle that smells like the heat that rises from gardenia blossoms in the wet Savannah night and light it before we reach the register so the walk down the aisles takes on the texture of ceremony.
I buy earrings that curl around my lobes like little snakes and let them whisper secrets. I fill my cart with apples, hoping for knowledge.
My husband tears into figs, searching for the wasps that died bellyful, that ceded to the comforts of appetite. Their flesh is succulent in my browsing mouth.
Hunger carves new space for sugar, for salt, for dark chocolate and lite beer. I palm a dozen mangos soft underthumb and sample the tomatoes bleeding from their vines. They taste like the echo of summer in an autumn afternoon, like the warmth of sunlight in the dead of winter. A memory of a memory. I fill my basket and carry on.
We buy a lounge chair too large to load into our sedan, so we buy a new car and gas it up. All the pumps around us gargle gasoline and you’d think we’d feel the throat of the earth closing beneath us, but instead we turn our faces to the burning sky. Funny to think of the little lives that fuel us. I wonder if Earth remembers trilobites combing through the thick silt of her belly or the gentle kiss of falling Sigillaria leaves? And it follows, doesn’t it, to wonder if our Mother will hold in her womb the memory of the thrum of our cars and the heft of our cities and the searching drift of shopping carts abandoned to parking lot winds — and with these memories, will she make new blood to feed the survivors?
In the streets, no one panics. We’re letting the fire consume us. Like stewing frogs, we can’t feel ourselves cook. We are phoenixes mid-transformation. We are holy communion touching the tongue — now wine, now blood. The heat of our dying engulfs our anxious bodies. Already, we navigate the ashes, sifting for gold. The scent of meat lingers as we burn, and I think I could go for a steak.
I nudge my husband off the highway. One more stop. Just one more.
Andrea Thurairatnam Imdacha is a writer and poet of Sri Lankan and Hungarian heritage who hails from Savannah, GA. Her poetry and fiction are forthcoming or have appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Chestnut Review, and other publications. Andrea resides in Cleveland, OH with her husband and son.
Jenny Lloyd
Jenny Lloyd is a full-time freelance collage artist and designer in Amsterdam, where she makes handcrafted and digital collage illustrations for magazines, album art, book covers, zines, and other custom pieces and commissions. She most loves to combine vintage and modern ephemera to create colourful, maximalist, escapist worlds, where new stories and fresh feelings emerge to be explored and each piece has a spirit of its own.
Piera Chen
Recessed Luminaires
On the door of the care facility, there,
softened by clipart doves, are mugshots
of those who try to leave. Like Laverne
who flickered past the prayer room,
the lunch smells, reception and its sweating
water jars, all the way to the weeping
forsythias, beyond which the town
thrives openly with its other residents,
but couldn’t make Susan or happy
hour, nor recall much else,
lying in bed that night, besides Susan.
Also Bruce, hounding his boyhood room
to room to weathered faux-sky ceiling, and
as eras elided like the evening’s shadows,
found himself on the distant edge
of the blue linoleum where
someone he knew had stood,
signing the intake forms.
And there’s my mother, the artist,
and her flawless freehand spheres
that moons in migration turned
involute. She was spotted by a field
of wintering Russian geese, clutching
yarn, mouth warm with Cantonese
diphthongs. At the assessment I joined
from zoom, her answer to where’s home
was no, no, though what I thought
I heard was mou, mou*.
The homes call it elopement, this wandering,
this spontaneous evanescence, this shedding
of one’s shadow to appear somewhere
at noon, eloquent, wearing spring.
Mother is at risk of elopement, Laverne,
hands in pockets, at high risk of elopement.
Because it is comforting to think, the residents,
in their unremarkable decay, still
know of a place where they will find
the lover waiting.
Piera Chen is an anglophone writer and poet from Hong Kong. She has (co-)authored some 20 travel guides for Lonely Planet, and published poems in Sky Island Journal, Anthropocene, Pinhole Poetry, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Voice & Verse, Canto Cutie, and elsewhere. Piera is also a creative translator whose work was one of three Highly Commended entries for the 2024 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation. Website: www.pierachen.com / Social Media: @pierachen
Author’s Note: In Cantonese, 「冇, 冇」 (mou5 mou5) can mean “No, no,” “None, none,” or “Wrong, wrong.”
Ashley J.J. White
Renovicted
Not far from here, there once lived two towering elms.
One shy and slender, the other louder, taller and potbellied at the trunk,
both, luxury living for a musical and lively community of
woodpeckers, chickadees, orioles, warblers and finches.
Trees bursting through floor of their own brethren,
canopies who fell in love as children, grew closer with each passing year
until they finally kissed, soon became new parents to shade.
Sweet baby shade, unwittingly a refuge, a suburban oasis—
koi pond, birdhouses, rhubarb bushes and all.
A low branch lobbed off, a soldier’s sacrifice,
its amputated stump repurposed into a stool,
Goldilocks-just-right for a tiny bum.
And there I’d sit, impressing my grandma’s friends into thinking
I was some sort of prodigy, reading Anne of Green Gables at age six.
An early reader, sure, and precocious. But no genius.
Just a regular kid with my nose in a book, an irregular family and two regular trees.
And as time passed, the stump shrunk until it was no longer a hospitable seat
and after that, I’d climb. Higher and higher, perched like a finch on a branch—
a bird’s eye view of the sort of life its inhabitants have no idea they’re living.
As I grew, the shade grew, swelling with the secrets and tears
of the strange family dwelling beneath.
Strange how the woman always seemed so lonely, even with a house full of people,
how an entire generation went missing between them, how the birds said more to each other
in an afternoon than the old couple did in a lifetime.
To remodel is to sever what’s old, cut it off at the source.
Is that why she hired a hitman I mean arborist to take care of those trees?
Did they remind her of the heights she’d never amount to,
or were the roots posing a threat to something underground?
When I asked her why she did it,
her eyes went somewhere far away, her mouth made the shape of smile.
And I wondered (I still wonder) where all the birds went
after their renoviction, and were they okay?
Were they happy? Were we?
Ashley J.J. White is a Calgary, Canada-based arts advocate, community builder, and writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. You can find her work in Berkeley Fiction Review, After Dinner Conversation, and Wild Roof Journal, among others. She is a recent alumna of the Banff Centre’s Early Career Writers of Fiction Program, for which she received a Myra Paperny Award for Emerging Writers. She loves to read and write about philosophy, human nature, and relationships and is deeply inspired by the natural world. She advocates for her fellow writers through her dreamy job at the Writers’ Guild of Alberta.
