Cover image: "'Untouchable' Wilderness: First and Last Human Eyes Behold a Disappearing Glacier" by Bill Hanson
Gallery 1
Visual Art, Poetry, and Prose
Paul Waters
Paul Waters is creating art full time after practicing architecture for decades and just making art in his free time. While an architect, his role included integrated-art-in-architecture projects using etched glass, photo-based glass art, and mosaic tile. Paul works in a variety of media including screen-printing, digital printmaking, public art installations, mixed media collage, found-object assemblage, and mosaic. His current artistic endeavors include making sketch collages every evening while listening to podcasts. These are quick (created in about an hour) collages with various sets of self-imposed rules such as using only tourist literature from Barcelona, using only circles, not using any representational imagery, and even adding small found objects fastened to the paper.
Paul lives in Portland, Oregon with his artist wife Kathryn. They remodeled their home last year to create a collaborative artist’s room-share, providing rooms and studio space for three artists.
- Website: www.behance.net/paulkwater058a
- Instagram: @paulkramerwatersart
Jacqueline Schaalje
Matkot
I resist you until you stand
flat against the tidemark
and I can look at you
so well silhouetted:
Mirror in the sun, tines
prone in wavy frame.
Hungry mouth misted over.
If I place my hand over it
I paddle a new pathway
to the Avalon of empathy
where Sylvia Plath’s terrible fish
shudders in a crack.
So you have come to replace
me, phantom-without-a-wrinkle?
But tell me, if you are a mascot
for the singing dolphins,
how do I recognize you
if you have no marks at all?
Sister, how can I be loyal
to one who doesn’t want to beat me?
We run and bat next to the sea—
neither can win.
You scratch out my eyes, I take
my distance from you.
Jacqueline Schaalje has published short fiction and poetry in The Massachusetts Review, Talking Writing, Frontier Poetry, and Grist, among others. Her stories and poems have been finalists or have received honorable mentions for the Epiphany Prize in the Live Canon and New Guard Competitions. She has received support and/or scholarships at the Southampton Writers Conference, International Women’s Writing Guild, One Story workshops, and Live Canon workshops. She joined the Tupelo Press 30/30 project and is a member of the Israel Association for Writers in English. She earned her MA in English from the University of Amsterdam.
Olivia Lee Stogner
The Woods Inside
Because the world outside
is all inside—
except for the woods,
which I keep trying to bring in.
Leaf and flower, rock and mossy bark—
fallen worlds.
I look for leavings,
brought low by the wind,
submerged by a storm,
undermined already.
I will not have the hand
of an executioner,
only of a grave robber.
Leaf and flower, rock and mossy bark—
I wish I could swallow them
and carry the woods
inside me—
Olivia Lee Stogner is a poet, novelist, playwright, and English professor. She has published two novels: The Unfading and The Unbinding. Her play, In Emma Rendell’s Attic, had a stage reading in 2018. She has been recently published in Writing for Peace’s DoveTales, an International Journal of the Arts as well as in Sonnets for Shakespeare and The Elevation Review. She has forthcoming work in Other Worldly Women Press and in SPLASH! from Haunted Waters Press. She is committed to fighting human trafficking and supporting Fair Trade companies and products. She is thankful for the racial equity community group in Saxapahaw, NC: The Social Justice Exchange. She is a fierce feminist. She has taught English in China, hunted down manuscripts in the UK, loves to travel, and loves books. She enjoys the woods around her home, spending time with her sister and their two dogs, and listening to music. Connect on Instagram @ladyolivialee.
Bill Hanson
Bill Hanson is an Alaskan photographer and writer based in Juneau. He believes that science strengthens and deepens art, and that artistic creativity offers new paths of inquiry to science. His photographs arise in the murmurs of streams, the darkness of ice caves, the secrets of trees. He can be found rummaging through Southeast Alaska rainforests and salty water Archipelagos in search of stories in the voice of the landscape. After 37 years working as a biologist, forester, and seafood processing supervisor, he has become a novelist and photographer. From his earliest memories, he has been a curious explorer, a roamer of landscapes vast and niches small, and a lover of wild things.
His Southeast Alaska: Changing Climate-Changing Landscape-Changing Life featured 12 photographs in 11 narrative posts, in a 7-day takeover of the Everyday Climate Change (@everydayclimatechange) feed on Instagram from October 26 to November 1, 2020.
- Instagram: @bhfootloose
- Website: www.hansonalaska.com
Anne Hampford
Circumpolar River
I understand what grows in the scrape
left by icebergs on the sea floor. You were not
a beginning or an ending but the thick
middle of circling and circling, trying to gauge
depths and edges, the topography of growing
up and goodbye. You might have been
a seed in this white desert, eager
to sprout. I was a vessel that couldn’t
hold you. Watertight. No room for the tiny
bubble of ancient air making the ice
as blue as your father’s eyes. An ecosystem
without regret, I orbit the cold emptiness
of what you might have been. Filled
with questions, coming to terms
with memory and consequence. Changed
by glacier, growler, circumpolar river.
Anne Hampford is a writer, traveler, yogi, and lover of nature and animals (especially dogs). Currently, she is working on a series of poems inspired by travel in South America and Antarctica. Anne calls Connecticut home but is spending time on the coast of Ecuador, enjoying life in another language. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Connecticut River Review, Naugatuck River Review, River Heron Review, and Crab Creek Review and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Martha Krausz
Sinking & Floating: Staying in Motion in Crises
One summer, my boyfriend and I hiked three miles into the High Sierras to Skelton Lake—or, as I first heard it, “Skeleton Lake.” The trail switch-backed through pine-needle-carpeted rock gardens. As we approached the 9,000 ft. elevation mark, trees shrunk from prehistoric heights to struggling shrubs. We are surviving beyond the tree-line, I thought to myself, somewhat self-conscious of the human impulse to grow bigger, stronger and further than mother nature. With jubilant limbs, and our lithe white shepherd, we Godzilla-ed across struggling cities of ants, and broke the pathways of flighty chipmunks.
Eventually, the sweep of hidden rivers quieted and calmed into a glass-still meadow. Skelton Lake was crowned by snow-clothed peaks, its shores bejeweled by small, smooth boulders—each one mossed by the terry cloth towel of a hiker.
I dropped my pack in the shade of a pine, shed the skins of spandex, and inched into the placid blue. But the heat of August screamed against the cold of mountain water, emitting a muffled squeal from behind my bitten lips. I dug my nails into my palms as if I could crush the cold, and watched as my thighs and calves whitened to numbness.
After a series of slow-moving, craven negotiations with pain, I thought of my water-loving sister, Eve. She would have let the lake swallow her in one smooth gulp; she would have welcomed the pain of cold, as if it were extinguishing something burning inside; would have handed the weight of her body over to the body of water like a fair trade.
I now stood halfway submerged, arms wrapped around my chest, hugging dryness goodbye. I sent a wistful glance back to my co-adventurer ashore, then leapt forward with Eve.
~
Martha Krausz is an emerging essayist and poet living in Northern California. She runs a private writing program called Write Align and is a Mills College MA graduate of English & American Literature. Her poetry has been published in Ricochet Magazine, and in Written Tales Magazine’s recent book, Renewal.
Katilyn Shull
Pink Camellia
Your house would always be cleaner than mine,
I realized while you asked me
About existential dread as you spun
Around your kitchen.
I told you that I found existential dread in your eyes—
Crisis in your voice.
You handed me a copy of Ivan Ilych
And told me I didn’t know what dread was until I’d read it.
I flipped through the pages, worn like the bags under my eyes,
The soul inside my body,
The calluses on my hands—
Hands that have worked their entire lives
According to you the first time you fumbled over them,
Drunk, when we couldn’t sleep.
Hands that craved the touch of your liberalist lips and silken skin.
I looked up from the blue scratch in the margins
And saw you staring back at me.
You grinned,
Told me that death was the only thing you feared.
I feared never being able to sit on the picnic table in your dining room.
I feared never being able to taste the flavor of cheap vodka
On your lips
Before falling asleep in your unfinished basement.
Katilyn Shull is an emerging writer from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. She is always looking for ways to grow as an author, and she loves to experiment in both poetry and prose. When she’s not writing, she is busy teaching, reading, dancing, or playing with her dogs, Raven and Bea.
- Twitter: @kat_poetics
- Instagram: @kat_poetics
Andrew Martin
I like the thought of being a lighthouse keeper
but back when the light
came from candles
their flames
tethered songbirds
I imagine watching them
sinking slow as shipwrecks
lightning another
when a sail swallowed
or torn from the mast
watching the thread of smoke
fracture the air
is there a darkhouse keeper?
someone who keeps the night twirling
throughout the day
who keeps the silhouettes sedated
within matchboxes
silk lined with smoke
a place where shadows
can slumber
and dream their dreams
of canaries singing
from behind the bars
of a rib-cage
Andrew Martin currently lives and works in Devon, UK as a software developer for the NHS. He studied wildlife illustration in Carmarthen, South Wales, which has imbued his writing and artwork with elemental and natural world imagery. For him, writing poetry follows the same creative process he uses in the generation of his digital pictures. His creations are alive with fractured fractals, shattered symmetries, and images that bleed and repeat, shift and change into each other, like variations on a theme in music.
In 2012 he had highly commended poems in the Bridport Prize and the Hippocrates Prize, and was shortlisted for the first Venture Award for a poetry pamphlet. He is the author of the illustrated poetry collection Shoals of Starlings (Waterhare Press) and a chapbook of planet poems Solar Satellites (Shoals of Starlings Press). He has also appeared on BBC Radio and pens the popular poetry blog www.shoalsofstarlings.com.
Russell Carmony
Jean-Michel Basquiat. Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart). 1983
Poem One
Just before he wrote the words on the classroom board, Dr. Tom Byers, our professor of contemporary poetry at the University of Louisville, said, “this is the shortest poem I know.”
—It
It—
by Robert Creeley
The poem appeared on the board as if in performance, or as an object of ephemerality. It is part of the poem ‘“Time’ is some sort of hindsight,” from Creeley’s book Pieces. To what degree Professor Byers explained the idea of a poem within a poem, it standing on its own outside of the poem in which it was written, or how it showed moving from passivity to action, I can only paraphrase in a reimagining. I write phrases of the professor’s action “as if in performance” and “or as an object of ephemerality” out of my current vocabulary. They were not in my verbal toolbox back then. What he was laying on us that chilly autumn day was too much for me, some distance beyond where I was artistically or intellectually. The accumulation of artistic scope in the contemporary poetry he taught that semester would take time to sink in. But the class changed me, stretched my imagination, inspired new ways of thinking, and set me on a road I had no idea I’d be traveling. One of the roads the Creeley discussion sent me down came in the form of a consideration planted in the deeper recesses of my mind: would I ever find a one word poem?
Creeley used one word twice. My interest was about one word, used so effectively, poetically and with all of Mark Twain’s lightning, that it rose into the being of a poem, to the “level” of a poem. Did everything a poem could do and was supposed to do.
I do not want to say I found the one word poem, for it could have found me. I will say I encountered it and read it and leave it there. When I did read —it, it— froze me in my tracks. Here it is in the best that typeface font can do:
¿DEFAC/MENT©?
by Jean-Michel Basquiat
~
Russell Carmony is a fiction and essay writer from New York City. His work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Eclectica Magazine, and Open Democracy.
Craig Barker
Willow Branch (to a friend departing)
I would like to follow you there
my wide-armed intent to embrace
your map folded into a placeholder
could lessen this distance + abandon
commitment but we are both grown
at last + I once found you passed out
in a Wetherspoons bathroom your head
on the rim + you confessed that you loved
leaving if only for the occasion + would
remember the night we spent stationary
talking about how we all eventually leave
memories that may yet be the making of us +
I have memories of seasonal motions
红花绿叶 red flowers green leaves
蓝空白日 blue sky white sun
粉肤红肤 pink skin red skin
we smoked menthols in a meadow
forestalling the future + here it is arrived
bilingual + I could not find a willow branch
but I have a twig from the garden of our old house
presented + primed for a breaking
Craig Barker is an English teacher from the UK, currently living in the city of Hangzhou, China. His first collection of poetry, Kudryavka: Cosmodog Dreaming, was published by BatCat Press in 2020. Elsewhere, his poems have appeared in journals such as Sky Island Journal, The Flexible Persona, and Cosmographia.
Ekaterina Nikidis
Ekaterina Nikidis is an artist, designer, and art historian. She graduated from the Art Lyceum named after Carl Faberge with a degree in jewelry, and from ITMO University with a degree in graphic design, and is currently studying art history at the Institute of the Russian Academy of Arts.
Her fundamental themes of creativity are philosophical questions of beauty, eternity and moments, the transience of life, and experiments with forms and colours. The main media: acrylic and gilding on different surfaces, watercolours, metals, and gems.
- Instagram: @nikidis_art
- Website: www.artmajeur.com/nikidis
Emily R. Zarevich
Not Quite in Love
When two people who are not quite in love take a walk together on an autumn day, everything is open to interpretation. Does romance in autumn premeditate a split in winter, or does the frosty season of harvest represent the chore of obtaining, bottling, and storing something worthwhile? Is love, like the lottery of each day’s weather, deceiving? Will that storm cloud hovering above bring with it a gentle rain or a typhoon to make you run for cover? Do you even have a cover, just in case?
The pair’s unfocused thoughts were as scattered as the wet leaves that littered their path, stretching forward and left behind them. She bent down to retrieve one, a ruby red, her favourite kind. She pinched its stem between her forefinger and thumb and twirled it. It was a slightly less graceful pirouette than a ballerina in a child’s music box. She wanted to make words from these leaves as easily as her nieces and nephews made crafts from pinecones, glitter, yarn, and buttons. Her companion felt the same, but he just stared ahead as he walked, his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets, his thick-heeled winter boots crunching her potential art supplies.
“You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?” she finally spoke up. He turned and offered up a quiet smile, as befitting someone who was not quite in love but fond of her regardless. That was fair enough, considering she was not quite in love with him either. As they perpetually insisted to their acquaintances, their families, and his devoted readers, forever fishing for a scandalous real-life romance to compare to his fictional ones, they were just friends.
“Of course not,” he said. “What happened to you happens to everyone, at some point.”
“Not in the same way,” she protested. “Most people don’t end up in the—”
She’d been discharged yesterday, and everything felt so awkward to her now. Fresh air. Casual conversation. The presence of a real friend. She couldn’t bring herself to say the last word.
“Look,” he began, not to interrupt her, but to set things straight before the subject spoiled their first peaceful afternoon in ages. “Look at that tree right there. Look at how orange it is. It looks like it’s on fire.”
She closed her eyes. Fire evoked many strange, unwholesome images in her. The California forest fires on the news. Midnight campfires up in Muskoka. The burn on her mother’s hand from accidentally touching a too-hot casserole dish. Jane Eyre’s finale. Zelda Fitzgerald’s death. All at once. She had to do what her therapist had taught her to do, which was to let each new, unbidden notion slide down and away like a raindrop on the car windshield. If a drop froze in place, it meant she was fixating on it too much, and she had to chisel it off. She had to do it constantly. It was exhausting.
When she opened her eyes, he was still standing there, looking at her. She looked back at him and wondered if things would have been different if they had really been in love, if they had really been a couple. He was a writer. She was his Zelda Fitzgerald. That was what they called her, online, insultingly, and it hurt. They hadn’t known Zelda, dead nearly a century, and they didn’t know her, lucky to reach past a quarter of one. Meanwhile, they called him a hero, for standing by her.
“It’s a beautiful tree,” she said.
“It is a beautiful tree,” he agreed. “If trees looked like this all year round, I think less people would hate the world.”
“I think if trees looked like this all the time, people would just look for another reason to hate the world,” she pointed out.
He shrugged. “I suppose you’re right.”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that,” she remarked.
“Well, this is the first time you’ve been right,” he teased.
He reached out and took her hand then. She let him. Anyone watching them would have thought they were in love. All the checkpoints were there. Fingers intertwined, gazes locked, mouths curled into easy smiles. Still, not quite in love. Everyone had expected them to fall in love. They’d been close for years, and that’s what all the books and movies promised would happen, when two people had been friends for that long. But they hadn’t followed the script, not properly. She was not supposed to break down like that, at her age. She was supposed to be settled by now. An engagement ring on her finger, at the very least. But all her hand had right then was his.
“Are you sure I’m not crazy?” she asked him again. Above them, their fire tree swayed in the chilly wind and shed a few ruby red tears in sympathy with her. Or perhaps the tree thought they were in love as well, as it was showering them with leaves, in lieu of flowers or rice. It didn’t agree that it looked on fire.
“You’re not crazy,” he promised her, giving her hand a loving squeeze. “It’s them that’s crazy, the way they treated you—”
“Let’s not talk about that, please,” she pleaded.
“Alright,” he said with a sigh.
“Alright,” she said back, with a grateful, sweeping blink of her eyes. They had to be in love, an onlooker would insist. Look at them! But not quite. Not quite.
Yesterday, he had threatened to break the nose of an onsite psychiatrist whose rude bluntness and lack of bedside manner had reduced her to tears. That was something someone in love did for someone they loved, wasn’t it? And what about this, this hand-holding business? Was that even allowed anymore, between old friends?
“You’re not going back there,” he insisted. “You can’t.”
“I won’t go back there,” she promised. “Never again.”
“I’ll take care of you.”
“I know you will.”
They were not quite in love. But yet they walked on, over, and through the red and orange autumn leaves.
Emily R. Zarevich is an English teacher and writer from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. She has been published previously in Understorey Magazine, Living Education, and Dreamers Creative Writing.
Janet M. Powers
September at Pinchot
I feel summer slipping away
as I slide my kayak into the lake
under a clouded September sky.
Wind riffles the water, showing
a clear path through lake weed
more abundant this year than most.
I make my way up Oak Creek
where the algae bloom, first
thick, gives way to trees.
Nesting boxes are empty, yet
great blue herons stand stiffly
at attention as I glide by.
Pollinators still visit loosestrife;
though invasive, its dashing
pink ornaments the creekside.
There, skeletons of dead trees
stand stark where wetland
had expanded, dry this year.
Painted turtles skid into water
and a great bullfrog startles,
plopping suddenly without grace.
Autumn flowers appear along
the stream – orange jewel weed,
not yet ready to pop its seeds;
a drift of black-eyed susans,
a burst of goldenrod and
one brief cardinal flower.
I paddle as far as I can
up the creek until my way
is blocked by a fallen log.
So now I must turn around,
the winding journey back,
familiar now, marked less
by discovery than regret.
Janet M. Powers, Professor Emerita, Gettysburg College, taught South Asian literature and civilization, women’s studies, and peace studies for 49 years. She has published in many small journals, including Azure, Chaleur, Earth’s Daughters, The Poeming Pigeon, and The Gyroscope Review. Her chapbook, Difficult to Subdue as the Wind, appeared in 2009. This old lady still writes poetry despite, or because of, our sorry world.
Jeff Dunn
A musician, geologist, and project manager as well as a photographer, Jeff Dunn adheres to a philosophy of rigorous ironic eclecticism. Jeff began an interest in graphic arts in 2007, when he illustrated his own music reviews online with commentary via photocollage. He has been an active participant in local and international exhibitions, a judge for the Northern California Council of Camera clubs, and a reviewer for LensCulture. His photography is found at www.musicmemory.smugmug.com, and also in his book Big, Bad, Beautiful: Death Valley, available on Amazon.
