Cover image: "Bottomless Chaos" by Nazrene Alsiro
Gallery 2
Visual Art, Poetry, and Prose
Georgianna J. Van Gunten
Georgianna J. Van Gunten is a visual artist and writer based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has an MFA with Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she has recently taught creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Her work has appeared in Bluntly Mag, MeowMeowPowPow, Gesture Literary Press, Le Petit Press, Bombay Gin, and others. She was selected as January 2020’s Poet of the Month by the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe.
She has attended informal workshops with CA Conrad and has participated in the Jack Kerouac School’s Summer Writing Program, where she has worked with writers such as Andrea Rexilius, J’Lyn Chapman, and Anne Waldman. She has also attended five residencies at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she has worked with the poet Matthew Dickman extensively.
Connie Wasem Scott
Motion of Rocks
I woke early this morning to watch the craggy-faced mountain
shift colors with the rising light. I thought I heard singing
as I stood in the garden, my water breaking
before the sun. We followed the mountain’s spine
that stretches south then tapers and dips underground
downtown near the hospital that receives me
with a bedrock for birthing. I feel her magnetic arms
through the polished linoleum. A brush of her fingers
turns the skin of my belly to stone.
I am a granite woman walking this lit tunnel
hefting a boulder past other caves where
great women moan and calve, that one
is calving right now, I hear her howl, and then
I’m gripped by a seismic shift grinding
my insides, it makes me into a hot boulder
fissure cracking open. How quickly we learn
the body of a woman contains magma.
My stone belly rocks in geo-elastic waves,
core shocked into shudders
that shudder, and the masked woman
shouts tilt your hips!
so I shift and erupt
my child into her gloved hands,
and before my baby’s breath
can blast beyond her rock-round
cheeks, before the lust for mother
milk spills into her mouth like a
riddle she must solve to live,
her mind is a tongue
of fire lashing out
of my substratum into life.
Connie Wasem Scott lives in Spokane, WA, where she teaches writing and literature at Spokane Falls Community College and enjoys the great outdoors with her Aussie-American husband Alexander. Her chapbook, Predictable as Fire, was a finalist in Moonstone Press’s contest and will be published by the press this coming winter. Connie’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in CIRQUE, American Poetry Journal, CITRON, The Shore, Minerva Rising, Cathexis Northwest, and elsewhere.
Gibson Berglund
Voyage On Liberty Cap
If you trip
Selah,
Let the sails
Carry the ship.
Seasick sailors
Gripping the ropes,
Remember,
Always fight horror
With hope.
Don’t fear a glimpse
Into the abyss,
And don’t fear those eyes
In deepest darkness.
Breathe with your gut,
Roll with the motion,
Those eyes are your own
And you are the ocean.
Selah
Hidden oasis, where Isis awaits,
Purring, pearlescent, the Sphinx awakes.
Ivy-curled colonnades unfold,
A bird-headed golden god enthroned.
A river of wine flows forth from her tomb,
From the doorway to heaven,
From her open womb.
Selah
Blinding patterned silence in a great white web,
The open mind is petrified by an infantile regression.
A voice like death fills in the chest, eyes open wide.
The self dissolves, unraveling perception,
As one life to the next we fall.
As the brain to the mind,
And the body to the soul,
The lock is large
But the key is small.
So trip unto writ,
As writ to a trip.
The penny dropped
And fell to bits.
Gibson Berglund was raised and educated in the Midwest, and has spent his adult years traveling, working a variety of odd jobs, and writing fiction. He is now an English as a Second Language teacher living in Pichilemu, Chile. More of his writing can be found on his website: www.gibsonberglund.com.
Katie K. Davis
Katie K. Davis grew up on a dairy farm in Central Ohio. She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro and has taught at High Point University and Columbus College of Art & Design. She shows her work regionally and nationally, and she is also the mother of three boys and owner of one very lazy cat.
- Website: www.katiekdavis.com
- Instagram: @katiekdavisart
Morgan Lawrence
Pando: Conversations in the Shadows of the Trembling Giant
Early morning light slips through the geometric patterns of windshield frost as I drive cautiously around the dizzying curves and terraces of central Utah’s State Road 25. At nearly 9,000 feet, minute particles of sparkling snow flutter unexpectedly from October skies and melt softly into the blackened road. Mule deer, hoping to reach an unknown haven of vegetation in a distant gully, force my partner Logan and I to brake suddenly with their erratic road crossing. Looking up at a blunt ridge, vaporous exhalations backlit in sunlit gold alert us to the passing presence of hunters otherwise steeped in deep-red willow. Their orange outlines move forward, shotguns at the ready, hoping to flush fallow from frosted underbrush. In the distance, we spot thick stands of trees, mostly leafless, and know we’re on the right track. Around a final, winterblue bend, we come into view of a hillside draped in incendiary yellows, oranges, and reds, all fluttering in symphonic coordination. I gasp in delight—here it is—cloaked in an autumnal tunnel of colorful leaves, the oldest and largest living organism on the planet.
——————
On a pale spring day many millennia ago, a single aspen seed separated from its parent tree, drifted lightly over a viridescent Colorado plateau, and settled finally in the wet, soft soil of a sun-drenched, east-facing slope. Taking root, the seed emitted vivid and distinct green shoots called ramets, genetically identical and connected through a hardy root system. In the ashy trunks of these ramets, songbirds now long-extinct sang of spring and fall, watching as plant species grew and decayed under shifting climate regimes. Through fire, flood, and landslide, the aspen stand endured—little ramets breaking through soil, time and time again, towards the warmth of an aging sun. As paleolithic people established a mammoth-hunting camp 14,000 years ago, as the Fremont people dried fish on the shores of the lake below, and as the Ute tribe fought the white Utah militia for rights to the land beneath a speckled canopy, the aspen stand stood quaking.
Over 14,000 to 1 million years of change, the fragile seedling grew to become the enormous aspen stand we now call Pando. Yet despite demonstrating incredible resilience over many millennia of disturbance, Pando, the oldest and largest of all trees on earth, is beginning to wither away.
~
Morgan Lawrence is an Environmental Humanities MS student at the University of Utah. She completed her undergraduate degree in English at the University of Montana, fought wildland fire throughout the American West for three years, and worked as a naturalist in Rocky Mountain and Denali National Park for three years. Her master’s thesis work revolves around the changing ecology of the Great Salt Lake under anthropogenic climate change. Originally from Hamilton, Montana, she resides in Salt Lake City with her partner and their rambunctious cat, Genie.
Stella Hayes
The Long Drive
She packed up the portrait in the trunk
Of the updated station wagon. Face down, smoothing out the canvas,
Tucking in the four corners over underpinnings
Of the last of the summer garden which held —
Garlic stamen and stem, darkening green kale,
Wine-dark beets, bright-orange carrots, chamomile flowers that would,
Dry over fall & winter.
Potatoes holding on to dirt. Picked by gentle hands the night before
The failed morning hung on beside his dog,
In the back seat. She was so still, that I kept turning to see
If she were breathing —
My sister worked from a color photograph of him as a teen-age boy,
From a garage-turned-studio, awash with Northern cool light,
The portrait takes up what’s left of her life. She keeps turning,
Upside down. She is Dorothy, caught spinning out & in.
Sometimes turning the house upside down.
The roots of the single apple tree, in the large backyard
Set against an old forest
We are driving away from the pre-dawn lobster fishermen’s
Morning pilgrimage. Out to the ocean that would pierce her shallow
Sleep & mine. The front bedrooms, facing
A desirable ocean front view. I toss my dream out the window —
Of the updated station wagon, as we make our long drive
Back home. Of walking on soft ground. Not this patch of ocean-
Deteriorated mix of weed-grass, across from a back-country church
& a mechanic’s garage that makes him a home. I don’t tell her not to look back
As I should. I tell her to keep her eyes on the road —
Our drive will be long
We pull up to the apartment. She gets out first, the dog,
then me. She picks up the week-long portrait, winding it into a narrow
Roll, which for the duration of the drive, lay among a mix of house-
Hold items, things that wouldn’t make it through the corrosion of winter
Oceanside. The paints & brushes of an artist, things being hauled
Back to a big city life, root vegetables, contained in cloth bags,
That have taken root, without her permission
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, CA. She earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in Prelude, Recluse, The Indianapolis Review, The Lake, and Spillway, among others. Poem “The Roar at Wrigley Field” is featured in Small Orange Journal anthology and is nominated for Best of the Net 2020.
- Website: stellahayespoet.com
- Twitter: @stellahayespoet
George L. Stein
George L. Stein is a writer and photographer in the New Jersey/New York metropolitan area with interest in monochrome, film and digital photography, urban and rural decay, architectural, street, and more generally, art photography and digital manipulation. His work has been published in Midwest Gothic, NUNUM, Montana Mouthful, Out/Cast, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, and DarkSide Magazine.
Zac Furlough
Consecrated
the leaves wear the looks of worms
wet stretching slow
hungry and digging home
one falls
makes no sound
lands on my foot
only for a moment
swept away in a gust
crashing in
silent
no foam no roar
no salt midday, summer
breezes over the lake
push waves
against the shore
cause discord
branches flail
I stand rooted to the trunk
rooted to the earth
though I long for concrete
glass noise
the wood bark skin
consecrated long before
the rise of bishops and priests
Who will hear my confession?
Zac Furlough is a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program and the co-founder of Passengers Journal. His work can be found in Gravitas, Still: The Journal, Prometheus Dreaming, and others. He teaches at Jacksonville University and Keiser University’s Jacksonville campus. He lives with his wife and their puppy in Jacksonville, Florida.
Aaron Wallace
Airport Drop Off
It was Sunday morning after yogurt,
the skylight leaking on tan t-shirts
as if tepid water breeds an epidemic,
like the unwashed dishes. Cocaine crusted
your nostril. The mirrored chandelier was above
your lip as I told you my flight leaves in an hour.
So we fought until our anger drove off
of the Pacific Coast Highway.
The manuscript of your first screenplay
was bookmarked with an evangelist’s flyer,
and did you seethe when I reminded you
of the seaside motel? The inlet?
We listened to the transmission’s
séance as you told me you were praying
that the biggest bomb would find me.
Aaron Wallace honorably served in the U.S. Army as a combat medic. His work has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, The Deadly Writers Patrol, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and North Dakota Quarterly. His poem “The Blue Angels at Naval Air Station Jacksonville” was named as an Honorable Mention in Volume 8 of Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors. Aaron currently resides in Jacksonville, Florida, with his wonderful wife Darby and their dogs, Bailey and Benji.
Nazrene Alsiro
Nazrene Alsiro is a practicing interdisciplinary artist located in Atlanta, Georgia, but she was born in the Philippines with a mixed racial background of both Palestinian and Filipino. Her original focus at Florida State University was Video/Photography and Sculpture; however, she has been focusing on painting and analog lately. She presents her photography in a variety of formats as well as video installations that may include sculptural forms.
Steve Henn
Steve Henn wrote Indiana Noble Sad Man of the Year (Wolfson 2017), and two previous poetry titles from NYQ Books. This is one of a series of essays he’s calling a “memoir collage.” Find out more at therealstevehenn.com.
Kat Bodrie
Narcissus
Last summer the landlord
and his father pulled up
the overgrown lamb’s ear, pungent
rosemary I could smell on my clothes
after pacing the front sidewalk.
Brown dirt like new wounds.
They planned to plant grass
but this year stalks reached
arms upward, dozens of daffodils
opened ripe faces and smiled,
happy to be alive.
Kat Bodrie is a professional and creative writer based in Winston-Salem, NC. Her prose and poetry have appeared in bee house journal, Waymark: Voices of the Valley, West Texas Literary Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Poetry in Plain Sight, and elsewhere. Website: katbodrie.com.
Paul Ilechko
Gilead
Liquid surges slowly through pipe imagining
a drum that beats the drumming of rain
on a ramshackle roof as heavy as lead as heavy
as iron that heats and melts transforming
into the quicksilver intensity of steel that melts
again in a carbon unraveling a desperation of sickness
a sadness of endings forgotten before they began
liquid pumped sluggishly through vein a steel
and glass receptacle a flash of needle of
underpinning a stranglehold on fabrication
in a world of markets a global exchange
a mercantile release a downpour of morphine
enriched with oxygen and the smell of rain
after months of heat such sweet release
liquid spurts suddenly as mechanism is activated
the balm propelled across an ocean to the waiting
hungry to the starving faithful a towering world
of glass and steel of hatred and capital of thirst
for solutions but embezzlement awaits in this time
of fever and detonation this final paroxysm
as you lift your weakening arms up to the sky.
Paul Ilechko is the author of the chapbooks Bartok in Winter (Flutter Press) and Graph of Life (Finishing Line Press). His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Juxtaprose, As It Ought To Be, Cathexis Northwest Press, Inklette, and Pithead Chapel. He lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ.
Leslie Ebert
An artist by profession, Leslie Ebert’s artwork, transformed in 2005 when a box of light with the shadow of a cross appeared in her living room, and she picked up a camera to document it. Leslie has been chasing light with a camera since that day in search of ideology and beauty. Turning the lens of her camera intentionally towards the sun, she broke the photography rules to reveal the physical properties of light radiating around us. Turning photographs of lens refraction and optical anomalies into an art form. Leslie Ebert is a lens-based artist, living in Portland, Oregon.
