Cover image: "Fort Fisher Pathway" by Audrey Kriss Berkowitz
Gallery 3
Visual Art, Poetry, and Prose
Hermine Spies Coleman
Hermine Spies Coleman qualified with a Fine Arts degree from Pretoria University and an Honours degree in Art History from the University of South Africa, and also trained for three years at the Art Academy in Ghent, Belgium from 1974. Her most recent exhibition was in 2019 at the Tatham Art Gallery in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. She opened a creative centre—Giverny Country Studios—near Curry’s Post, KwaZulu-Natal Midlands in South Africa, where she now lives permanently.
- Website: herminespiescoleman.site123.me
- Gallery: onlineart.gallery/featured_item/hermine-spies-coleman
- Instagram: @herminespiestheartist
Editor Note: An artist feature titled “The Art of Transition” provides an analysis of Hermine Spies Coleman’s artwork. I am grateful to the author of the piece, Louise Torr, who generously offered it for inclusion in this issue to accompany Hermine’s paintings.
Ann Buxie
Natal Dialogue
in a forest sanctuary Buddha listens,
the Bodhi tree speaking . . . truths without end *
its girth raining light, its fruit a blazing radiance.
the world is not silent.
in the Far East, Neak-ta, spirits of the earth,
guard dignity for all. they speak through banyan trees.
gathered in their shade women hear them and swoon,
shutting down garment factories, opposing evictions,
demanding justice for all.
on august 6, 1945, the Enola Gay delivers a message
to Hiroshima. in the first three seconds, the heat produced
is forty times greater than the sun. 80,000 people
die immediately, but 170 hibakujumoku, bombed trees,
survive. a weeping willow, less than ¼ mile from the epicenter,
falls, torched, but new buds sprout from its roots.
a holly tree burns to its stump and sprouts again, in 1949.
eucalyptus, red peonies, Japanese fern palms, hackleberry,
silverberry, gingkos–all these, among 32 species, survive.
today, Planting trees in Hiroshima is part of the peace industry, *
because surviving matters, because roots
can save our blasted lives.
To heal troubles in the village, Saroja, a Tamil elder,
directs people to marry trees. how primitive,
to submit oneself to the trees, that I be not mute
or timid but steadfast as the weeping willow to its imperative.
I ask an arborist what trees taught him.
Patience, he replies. have we forgotten
the diplomacy of trees, the length of their suffering?
could restoring relations with them be the peace industry
of the 21st century, showing me how to bear
the injustice of this life, and to sprout,
like the holly tree, four years later,
offering the fruits of my passion,
going forth, in peace,
on the road leading everywhere. *
* The Flower Ornament Scripture
p. 147, 55, 522
Ann Buxie has been published in several anthologies and local newspapers. She has served on the poet laureate committee in Malibu, CA, since its founding four years ago. She also co-hosts Poetry by the Sea, quarterly poetry concerts in Malibu.
K. Blasco Solér
Water I—The field
I hear the quickening insects
colors burning in the darkness
In my field of vision
nearby rock-cliffs stagger into the night
haunted by the trembling of undersea trenches
they shrug off their grasses
all their transgressions
crumbling soundlessly
into the blind crash—the breakers
not so much forgiven as forgotten
forsaking height for fathoms of sea
another field
another kind of grain
This place was never meant for silence
These sounds were never made
but mounted and emitted
and when the sun peels like a cast-iron bell
all trivial things fall away
into infrared radiation
We are bombarded by magnetic fields
a million tides in a day
The undulating sand below this solemn ebb tide
is gilded with tangled weeds and glass shards
ground to a dim luminosity
Nothing here is heartless
but everything is savage
I’ll be taken down into the sea tangle
I’ll be wrought by the tension of never knowing
cut and torn open on the rocks and razor clams
salty and swallowed up
by those with talons and sharp claws
Call them foolish impulses
unreasonable ideals
and misguided yearnings
and let them be carried away
by the currents of the Salish Sea
Arctic Circle of Fifths
Freezing cold glaciers drift as evening begins.
It’s a kind of meditation—
my undoing.
It’s getting warmer here, perhaps hot in time.
The ice worms start to liquefy when the sun comes out.
And how many ice mummies will be discovered in time
along this expedition of exhibition and humility?
I want to be a nesting ground for the porcupine herd.
Yes, that’s caribou for you—with their plush horns
and violent rutting.
And the orca and the polar bear,
one day a killer and the next a plaything.
But I also want to melt and disappear into the daylight
into this sea change of uncertainty.
Where will they nest when I am something else,
no longer jagged underwater—jutting out?
Blue hues, my inescapable wavelengths,
still trapped in ice.
Razor sharp paranoia can cut
into the hulls of unsuspecting ships
just brushing past in their own explorations.
And we bare teeth but then must put them away,
because we’re all made of the same things
and we all want the same freedoms
as well as the intimacy in this immense moment.
How can one be both the bearer
and the disappearing?
It just is.
And even when all is gone and there is quiet
in the frank intensity of the night,
I feel the air and water intermingling,
I feel the shoreline both shored up and eroding
in places.
Secret Willingness
I can only breathe in and out
and continue as a newly formed organism
originating from a source of
such secret willingness
to exist.
This figure is a fire opal
of a tossing burning cylindrical enmity
of a gravitation.
As a matter of course
I must retire on occasion
exhausted and ridiculous.
Our rivals are always with us.
The ideals and the emotional investments we’ve made
collect and float along the surface.
I continue to draw you near
in the hopes that you will rest and resonate
whatever that may mean for me.
K. Blasco Solér is a poet, science writer, editor, and mathematics instructor. She hails from Anchorage, Alaska, by way of Peculiar, Missouri. She now resides in Denver, Colorado.
Lance Newsom
Lance Newsom is passionate about capturing the beauty and uniqueness of life in his images. When he’s not traveling to discover life outside of his daily experience, he’s using his camera to create his own unique abstract and emotional landscapes. His images are both familiar and inviting while simultaneously surreal and eerie in an attempt to capture the essence of what it means to be alive and aware. Instagram: @lpnewsomphotography
Justin Bell
Achilles’
Webs of trees stretched to the sky, all backlit from the thunder. They flashed
—one, two—appearing each time a different form. I remembered, there is
something greater than these trees, the thunder, something greater than me—
Once I prayed to get clean. And Thetis came down: All the junk and the sweat
poured out of me, the bloated animals rising up from the flood, too, her hands
my mother’s hands pulling me away from the pipe, I turned away. It always returns
to this, in the end. The way downpours draw onto the plains during the wet
season, sandreeds reminded of how far they can sink, that we ever thought
we were so tall. Before inpatient groups and sponsors, NA and Jimmy K and
the first chapter of the book they gave you at the meeting—you swore
they stole your life story to write it—there was no fear of succumbing to
it. Urges were as much the background as anything else was. What
memories I have of that time are the color of a carousel blurring
together as it spins; as beautiful as that for you stood shirtless on an
abandoned building, red haired, angry delinquent and I loved for you
you were always so hauntingly familiar to me. We both came out here to make
war with the world. We both prayed to get clean once. And who came down for
you? The darkening waters of the Fox River weakening the strongest docks off
the shore—when will it come for me? These days I remind myself there are
no guarantees. And only you know how double edged that feeling is. You can
imagine no future, but plan for a future where you’re drowning and swallowing
water and drowning and—the little I know about you now makes me choose to
believe that you’re alive. Now the storm violently shaking at the branches, the
branches bleeding into the flashes. Too afraid to keep looking, I turn away.
Justin Bell began writing through the Creative Writing program at Knox College, but now studies as a master’s student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Previously, Justin has been published in the student publications Catch Magazine, Cellar Door, and most recently Signatures Art and Literary Magazine.
Lawrence Bridges
The Final Push West
The slow choice of pathways cross grain
and make me nod like the fiery heads of protein
feathered for war and nourishment,
arrows of Aztec warriors pointed toward the earth.
In the distance: house, bar, store and shed,
granary empty and all roads grown over
with abundance, grain by now choosing plows.
I’m far away from water except the muddy
furrow my hand could trowel and squeeze
mud into my mouth cocked to make the fields a wall,
clouds the outskirts of the future’s missing suburbs.
I’ve come here to glide and not repent
the burden of my effort buried
in the underground of junk, my treasures.
Here I enter time again and pass through
Santa Fe to Pasadena where I’ll work on engines
moving through prairied fields, mole—nose
sniffing, pushing and billowing air junk
until my grandchildren notice and rebel
when I’ll settle and become a night watchman
and care for my youngest daughter, a surprise,
who will mature and marry well. I’ll harbor anger that
my grown sons were called up by FDR.
There was no fascism in young grain
no tanks to plow them uncut, only
nesting places for birds flying north and mice
receiving feet and teeth from moist earth.
Lawrence Bridges is best known for work in the film and literary worlds. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums, Flip Days, and Brownwood. As a filmmaker, he created a series of literary documentaries for the NEA’s “Big Read” initiative, which include profiles of Ray Bradbury, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolff, and Cynthia Ozick.
Audrey Kriss Berkowitz
Audrey Kriss Berkowitz was born in Brooklyn, NY. She moved to Montgomery County, MD in 1987, raised a family, and had a successful banking career for over 25 years. Photography is a world that opened up to her after the tragic death of her son in 2016. Audrey relocated to the Wilmington, NC beach area and refocused her energy on what was important to her. She realized the beauty of nature brought her peace and serenity. As a photographer, Audrey feels she is a witness to Earth’s beauty and uses her lens to capture the story in front of her. As a fine art photographer in the Wilmington, NC area, she has participated in galleries and art shows in North Carolina and different areas of the United States. Her specialty is landscape and food photography, but she brings an artistic spin to her work and always strives to bring forth an emotional connection with her work. Her work can be seen online at www.audreykrissphotography.com and on Facebook @audreykrissphotography.
Acelin Eck
Reprogramming
The rain pooled and then was splashed away as the automated trams made their nightly appointment. The neon signs of the bars and tattoo shops reflected in the puddles below against a line of humans waiting before a titanium kiosk. Those in line were hunched over, shabby. Anne stood in the downpour at the end of the line. She rarely ever made the night cycles, but she got called into the office early and missed the morning session. You’re not allowed to miss more than one session in a row. She shifted uncomfortably as a figure dressed in rags joined the line, standing too close behind her. A large, bulky man blocked the view in front of her. Instead of having hair on his body, he seemed to have filled every inch of skin with tattoos. The line inched forward bit by bit. Anne shuffled to move with the rest of the line when a gnarled hand reached out, grabbing her shoulder.
The voice that followed was as ugly as the hand it belonged to, “Careful where you step, honey. Not all of these puddles are water.” Anne could see that the ragged figure in line behind her was an old woman missing most of her teeth.
Hearing the chatter behind him, the tattooed man turned and growled, “Marian, let the girl be. She doesn’t know what she’s doing here. If she steps in something, then it’s her own fault.”
Anne scoffed in disgust. She plenty well knew what she was doing. She was following the rules like any respectable citizen.
Amused at her discomfort, the man offered out his hand, “Name’s Jericho. The oldie behind you is Lady Marian. Most everyone down in these parts knows one another so even if you weren’t dressed like a corporate monkey, we’d know you weren’t from here.”
Anne shifted her weight, uncomfortable with the thought of being surrounded by filth. A young boy approached Lady Marian and tapped her on the shoulder, holding out something in his small hand. Without a word she reached into her rags and pulled out what looked like a programming chip and gave it to the boy in exchange for the thing in his hand which Anne could not see.
Lady Marian patted the boy on his shoulder and asked in her creaky voice, “Do you need directions?” The boy shook his head and bolted back towards the end of the line.
Even in this uncivilized space, Anne couldn’t believe that they would just give out programming chips. She looked up at Jericho, “What did she just give that boy? Don’t you know if you’re caught with a chip that isn’t yours, you’ll be taken away?”
A smirk made its way across Jericho’s face, “There’s a lot you don’t know about those programming chips, missy.”
Anne recoiled at the insult. “The chips are there for our protection. They allow us to have the latest news, they keep us safe, they regulate the possibility for emotion-based error, the chips enhance life more than we could hope for.”
Anne stood there in silence after her outburst. Lady Marian clucked her tongue and busied herself with the contents inside her raggedy shawl. Jericho looked at Anne with a mixture of pity and mockery.
“Tell me,” he spoke softly with urgency, “what are we really being protected from? You look around and see all of us living a ‘lesser’ form of a life than what you get up in the city, but do you really benefit? Have you ever stopped to wonder if the ‘updates’ and ‘live information’ you get is actually true? The only threat is if people start thinking for themselves. The threat is for Them to lose control.”
Until he stopped talking, Anne didn’t realize her jaw was clenched and tried to relax her shoulders, but the anxious tension wouldn’t leave.
He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, “Think for yourself.”
At the same time Lady Marian reached into her bundle of rags, pulling out a programming chip, and offered it to Anne. The line had moved enough that it was now Jericho’s turn at the stainless-steel kiosk. As he stepped forward and pulled out his counterfeit chip, he glanced over his shoulder at Anne, giving her a lopsided grin, the glint in his eyes reflecting in the dark wetness against the sky of neon.
Acelin Eck is currently studying Creative Writing at the University of Missouri.
Damilola Olusegun
Damilola Olusegun, a visual artist, works with graphite and charcoal on pelican paper and sometimes on Strathmore bristol paper. She is often questioned about why she doesn’t work with colours; although she is developing interest in such a medium, she feels a greater connection with her art pieces when she uses graphite and charcoal.
Through her artwork, she is able to pass on messages without writing an essay. Her subject matter mostly deals with emotions and self-discovery. She connects with her environment and situations around her before creating any art piece. And of course, she keeps her music close to herself while working, which adds to her inspiration.
- Website: www.dameart01.blogspot.com
Morgan Boyer
Monochrome Kaleidoscope
trinkets from the dusken sun
dances across the living room
a monochrome kaleidoscope
an apricot-flavored light show
for those returning from work,
circling around like casual clothes
in an overwhelmed washing machine
Morgan Boyer is a Carlow University graduate and the author of The Serotonin Cradle (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Boyer has been featured in Kallisto Gaia Press, Oyez Review, Thirty West Publishing House, Pennsylvania English, Rue Scribe, LEVITATE, Storm of Blue Press, and Flumes. Boyer lives in Pittsburgh, PA with her family.
Terence Degnan
I Raise Her to Be Free
though she is not
I teach her the definition of it
by the tone of my voice
though she is shackled to my ancestry
I tell her she has a soul
though I’m quite certain
I shouldn’t
I give her a name
that I hope the wild ether inside
might recognize
and if not
I tell her she is free
to change it
I explain
that we are all
mostly the same
which we are not
I tell her
to look for the typos
in the natural world
so she will recognize them
in her own
I forget the prayers I was made to recite
so we don’t have any accidents
when she peels back the veil
I warn her that Abram
almost stabbed his son
on a dare
I tell her
she has two hearts
but only one recognizes
the sound of my voice
which, I explain
is somewhat reliable
though I know it will abandon her
I implore her to memorize the tone
of a sanctuary
so she will recognize
the discord of its opposite
Terence Degnan has published two full-length books of poetry. He is a co-director at the Camperdown Organization which was created to increase access to publication and education as well as promote agency for underrepresented writers. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
Cindy Matthews
Cindy Matthews is a multi-genre artist (visual art and writing) from rural Canada. She likes to play while making visual art. She works in pen, acrylic, watercolour, digital, mixed media (including waxes and repurposed objects), ink, and anything else she can get her hands on. Her work has been recognized by the Walkerton Juried Art Show, the Blue Mountain Foundation for the Arts, the Owen Sound Art Banner public art project, Retired Teachers of Ontario, the Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery, and Grey Bruce Health Services’ first-ever art exhibit, “Momentos,” in celebration of Canada’s 150th Anniversary. Her work is available in small boutiques, libraries, and galleries in southwestern Ontario. Find out more at www.artofwhere.com/artists/cindy-i-matthews and @Matthec1957.
Joshua Sabatini
~
Joshua Sabatini was born in Hartford, Connecticut. In October 2002, he moved to San Francisco, California. He earns rent money as a journalist. His publications include “Eternity,” a short story published in Artist Studios literary magazine; “Skeleton’s Progress,” a short story in a collection of modern fairy tales titled A Fitting End; and “Boneyard,” short fiction published in the December 2019 issue of Delay.
Steven Tutino
Steven Tutino was born in Montréal, Canada, and is a writer, poet, painter, and personal trainer. He is currently a graduate student at Concordia University in the process of completing an M.A. in Theological Studies. His artwork has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the Minetta Review, TreeHouse Arts, Montréal Writes, Spadina Literary Review, The Montréal Gazette, From Whispers to Roars, The Indianapolis Review, After Happy Hour Review, Apricity Magazine, Apricity Press, and Ariel’s Dream. Apart from painting, Steven enjoys reading and writing, as well as going for long meditative walks and hanging out at the gym.
Note: “Dystopian Love” first appeared in Apricity Magazine, Volume IV, 2020.
Valyntina Grenier
A Great Help
All the people give time and knowledge
Privilege and pleasure imagine trust
Patience, humor, and love
are our seeds
selling pleasant odes
Plenty of vibrating bees X a stench of human beings
We should be riding indispensable friendship
w/ an ear and eye morphed of gratitude
Errors remain heartfelt
We garden and stumble
spend a laughable afternoon
disseminating genes
species fingering
our sovereign prerogative
to thrive and charge
The long chain
engineers, breeders, days,
choose/ call/ harvest/ divide
Wondering at a bum plundering for nectar
is a self-serving conceit
In genes consciousness means
Valyntina Grenier’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gaze Journal, Sunspot Lit, High Shelf Press, Lana Turner, and Bat City Review. Her poems, paintings, installations, and encaustic and Neon art sway between representation and abstraction to reveal the tenderness and violence that mark our human natures. Fever Dream / Take Heart (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2020), her double debut poetry chapbook, features paintings from her LGBTQIA+ series Cloudshow | Utopia. Find her at www.valyntinagrenier.com or on Instagram @valyntinagrenier.
Janet Powers
Janet Powers grew up in a family of photographers—both her grandfather and father were award-winning amateur photographers, and her father was well known for his slide travelogues on many parts of the world. She received her first box camera at the age of seven and hasn’t stopped taking pictures since. Janet’s photos have been exhibited at juried shows and art councils in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Colorado. She is best known as Professor Emerita at Gettysburg College and Presiding Officer of Mediation Services of Adams County.
