Cover image: "Beauty Persists" by Jocelyn Ulevicus
Gallery 2
Visual Art, Poetry, and Prose
Alice B. Fogel
Author’s note: The poems published here are part of a series titled Nothing But: A Series of Indirect Considerations on Art & Consciousness. Each is an indirect consideration of a single work of contemporary abstract expressionist art and a meditation upon the disruption that happens to our consciousness or cognition when we are confronted by the nonrepresentational.
“Om”: Justin R. Lytle: “Looming,” unaltered photograph of light sculpture (shown below). www.justinrlytle.com
“Logos”: Peter Wegner: “Mineral Logic III,” mica, staples, pins. View at peterwegner.com/detail.asp?id=570.
Alice B. Fogel served as the New Hampshire poet laureate from 2014 through 2019, instituting a NH Youth Poet Laureate, among other projects. Her latest book is A Doubtful House. Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature and the 2016 NH Literary Award in Poetry, and her third book, Be That Empty, was a national poetry bestseller. She is also the author of Strange Terrain, on how to appreciate poetry without necessarily “getting” it. Nominated for Best of the Web and twelve times for the Pushcart, she has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Spillway, Hotel Amerika, The Inflectionist, and DIAGRAM. She works one-on-one with students with learning differences at Landmark College in Vermont and hikes mountains whenever possible.
Website: www.alicebfogel.com
M. A. H. Hinton
Unkempt
you lay the words down
like a mason would stones
for the wall of a small cathedral
no
not a cathedral
a small gatehouse then
at the edge of a little frontier town
where a road comes out of a forest
and up and over an old wooden bridge
again
no
how about this
a small garden
where stones are set randomly
as a border between wild roses
and an unkempt yard
yes
M. A. H. Hinton grew up in Montana and lives in Minnesota. His publications include poetry in Minnesota Review, Into the Void, Temenos, GFT, West Texas Literary Review, Blue Heron Review, Aji, Emerald Coast Review, Third Wednesday, Typishly, and Spitball. He has also published several Western short stories. You can read his blog at www.mahhinton.com.
Sam Schramski
Rogożno is not your typical stopping point on a European rail system. Especially in the twilight period of December, when the festiveness of Christmas is nigh but melancholy begins to sink in alignment with the setting sun. It is, like numerous nondescript train stations in Eastern Europe, in the middle of a railyard-cum-industrial quarter-cum-city park. Passengers are only likely to stay long enough to look up from Sudoku or texting, unless of course they must disembark.
But disembark I do, the dankness and typical pallor of Poland in the winter unabated. Indeed, my fondness would grow disproportionate to any gratifying results. My connection to a not-so-distant ancestry would remain as tenuous as the sun’s rays. The same ambivalence is in store for anyone who spits in a vial and squirrels it away in a FedEx envelope.
#
When the entire human genome was revealed in 2001 (completely, two years later), it was declared one of the singular achievements in the history of science. Some members of the scientific community adjured that it was as significant as the achievements of Watson and Crick, the discoverers of DNA, or at least more important than putting a man on the moon. Headlines flooded the pages and grainy web pages, such as The Daily Telegraph, which breathlessly reported, “All human life is here: This picture marks a milestone in man’s knowledge of himself . . . for good or evil.”
But superlatives only started to wrap their double strands around the public once new technologies surfaced, managing to translate, simplify, and economize formerly expensive and bulky exams designed for individuals with rare diseases (or who somehow possessed seven-figure salaries and trust funds to spend down). The explosion in personal genomic testing, often known as DTC (direct-to-consumer), has not only charted the rise of accessible genetic science but has evolved into the most “data-driven” means of measuring one’s ancestry.
~
Sam Schramski is a writer, journalist, and researcher who lives in Silver City, NM. He has written extensively about the absurd in the Amazon, the surreal in South Africa, and ugliness in the USA. He is currently working on a haunted house devoted to scaring people into accepting climate change as fact.
Kwok Wai Walter Kwong
Through his work, Kwok Wai Walter Kwong explores the nature of human existence, his relationship with memories, the wider social environment, and history. Real-life politics are utilized as raw materials to create fables in visual forms. Specific visual symbols are employed as metaphors to illustrate the politics-induced tremor inside as well as the entanglement. He has been drawing “vines” for years to designate the process in which these political knots have become a part of him.
Amanda Hartzell
X’s
This ends with fire but first—backseat,
brownstones and moonlit alleys.
Clothes soaked by an early snow
coming down over unsuspecting
foothill towns. Easy to believe people
we love are set on fire
or glow despite.
Twirl through night just to be deposited
at a door, touching your new body but still
begging the young ghosts under skin:
Give me a chance to tear a forest apart
with my teeth. Small animal, bright-eyed.
Soil in matted paws. Nitrogen hovers
above a warming den.
A thousand years later,
not so long, and after
the strangest
and most delicate dream
where the body belongs
to itself, wake up hungry, ember
under each shredded claw.
Amanda Hartzell holds an MFA from Emerson College in Boston. Her work has appeared in New Letters, Paper Darts, Petrichor Journal, The Knicknackery, and Cathexis Northwest Press among others. Her writing finished as finalists in Glimmer Train and won the Alexander Patterson Cappon Prize. Originally from eastern PA, she now lives in Seattle with her son, her husband, and their dog.
Michelle L. Mowery
Glass and Black
Weightless
is what
we become when
the darkness of
lonely turns
bright
Everything
shifts downward
Every tiny thing
moves to cover
what was
once
all life’s packets
tucked away
full of microscopic
miracles
spill into continua
Michelle L. Mowery writes predominately from a female voice, focusing on love, loneliness, loss of innocence, and how they are all interconnected. Her most recent publication was in the Fall 2020 issue of Zig Zag Lit Mag. She currently resides in Vermont within the small countryside town of Panton.
Iris Koffijberg
Iris Koffijberg is a Dutch abstract water photographer based in a small village in the middle of a national park. Her water photography doesn’t reflect the real world, but transforms it to an imaginary place. Most of her singular photos are not edited. The colours and the patterns are like she found them in nature. It’s also her way of showing the beautiful variation that water offers.
- Website: www.koffijberg.com
- Instagram: @iriskoffijberg
My water photos reflect the way I feel, so I can see when it’s busy in my head, when I’m out of balance, when I struggle, when I’m trying to escape my daily life. They’re like repeating themes. Every time I stare into water, I get enchanted. It’s my flight in another world that triggers my imagination. Water is an inexhaustible source of inspiration and fascination. Always in motion, every moment different. Current, season, density, sun, time, and wind cause a continuous change of the image that I am trying to capture. If I am in the right place at the right time, it is magical. As if a gate opens to a temporary world. New patterns, images, and beings come to existence by the grace of that moment. Through water I found my own way of looking at the world.
Paul Smit
A second cigarette docked perfectly into Jackson’s chiseled mouth. He was quite content to suck on his ashy pacifier while I rambled on about the funeral, as we sat, strangely, in a park with slides and swings. Neither of us were particularly close with Robert, but we were both close, at different points in time, with his suspected killers.
“Of course those bitches killed him!” he suddenly interjected. “Hell hath no fury like a tall, rail-thin Asian furniture designer.” Jackson had fallen out with Robert’s best friends – the suspected killers – a few months prior.
“I agree. Something happened the weekend before he died…”
“Well?! What do you think it was?” he asked, his smoldering cigarette almost connecting with a nosy child.
I sat upright; unveiling a conspiracy theory was always a great thrill for me. “Okay, here’s what I think happened: They did Molly all weekend and Robert came home on Tuesday, took something to deal with the comedown, and whatever he took killed him that night.”
“Have you spoken with them?” Jackson’s nasal tone conveyed how disgusted he was that I maintained contact.
“I have.”
“Anddddd?” He waved his hand around in the air like a propeller, urging me to hurry up with the details.
“Well, I’ll say this: when I asked what he died of, their answer was very rehearsed.”
His eyes rolled right up into his skull, leaving me with marshmallow sockets to stare at. “Of course it was. Death himself would say a prayer before visiting them – more skeletons in their fucking closet than a graveyard!” We both cackled.
Only a year later, Jackson would also find himself knocking on Heaven’s door. A slew of health issues had crept up on him. With missing enzymes, spontaneous headaches, and a throat burnt to smithereens by vodka, his prospects of making it to thirty-five had begun to diminish.
~
Paul Smit grew up in South Africa and now lives in New York, where he works in the music industry. “The Water Fall” is inspired by a real trip he took to Merida earlier in the year. “The Army Nestled in our Shadows” appeared in the March 2019 edition of The Write Launch. Paul has completed his third novel, titled The Secrets of Sea Cliff, and is happily on the hunt for an agent. He has completed writing courses with the Sotheby’s Institute of Fine Art and the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. In January of 2020, Paul enrolled at the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), where he hopes to complete the Graduate Gemologist Program before the end of the year. Feel free to follow @paulus_1 on Instagram if you’d like to see more.
Darleen Coleman
Darleen Coleman is an artist, writer, and incurable junk-addict. She lives on a dot along Lake Michigan’s shoreline midway between Chicago and Milwaukee along with the two lovely dogs who rescued her. She has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has shown work at Artworks and Left of the Lake galleries in Kenosha, WI. Her stories have been published in Great Lakes Review and Bird’s Thumb.
Instagram: @dcolewoman
Nadine Klassen
Yolk-Soft Sobs
The blood of an apple is so well-contained
under its tightly stretched skin. How controlled
it must feel its bitter seeds. I like the feeling
of control more than I like being held
accountable for the things I am in control of.
The chin-dripping prayer, the peeling
poem. But I have seen the bruises like you and I,
like you, have seen how an apple bleeds through
pressed pulp. Pretentious; there’s no excrete
of soul. No exodus of heart. The rot is predestined.
When I was younger – and this is a theory my friend
proposed – my bitter seeds would dissolve
whenever I laughed, until my vocal cords drowned
in their juice. To me, it was more of a plague. I lost
all control. I made it a habit to set a timer
for my laughter. When I had a bruise the size
of a lover, I pressed a thumb to it
to make sure I didn’t leak. This is how I grew sour
from the inside out. But I have sold my soul
to my body, apple for egg. Click-skin,
all or nothing. I don’t put a stopwatch
to my laughter anymore. The loudest liaison
of soul and body is my loss of control
when crack into laughter of biblical
proportions. My old testament lungs,
a list of walking fathers who are sons to joy
and birth their sons in yolk-soft sobs.
Nadine Klassen is a German poet, living in her hometown with her family of a boyfriend and one dog. Her work has been published by High Shelf Press, Storm of Blue Press, Envision Arts Magazine, and others. It focuses on mental health, trauma, and relationships of all sorts. When not writing, she likes to crochet sweaters with puffy sleeves.
Laurel Benjamin
A Fuzzy Dot Like a Dandelion
My mother started sentences
with the word “no”
not disagreeing with anyone
stepped into flowers
attempted to reverse poison
in the stinging tree—
like boxcars she kept coming—
yet I cannot plant three billion trees
in my backyard
global warming reversible.
Visiting Betsy in St.-Germain-en-Laye
walking paths of Versailles
now part of the town
I only thought of goat cheese
raw unpasteurized with ash
a box shape
impossible to us, but cheesemakers
like palace pathmakers
even with heavy lifting
or dripping candlewax
know
things change
know
of continuance.
They did not carry mountains
up hills—
did not measure too much
whey—
like a damsel fly they
engineered perfect intentions
for laws not understood.
I would like to put the burned forests
back together, stumps to leaves,
give the gibbon an extra arm
a rope bridge to swing through
the arboreal highway.
I would crawl towards
loneliness if I had the choice
a dwarf maple
tollgate to the desert
what we will become
if violins loudly playing
are not stopped.
Laurel Benjamin lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry, California Quarterly, The Midway Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Poetry and Places, WordFest Anthology, and Global Quarantine Museum, among others. She is affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers. More of her work can be found at thebadgerpress.blogspot.com.
Jocelyn Ulevicus
Jocelyn Ulevicus is an artist and writer with work forthcoming or published in magazines such as the Free State Review, The Petigru Review, Blue Mesa Review, and Humana Obscura. Working from a female speculative perspective, themes of nature and the unseen as well as exit and entry are dominantly present in her work. She resides in Amsterdam and is currently working on her first book of poems. To see her artwork and her cute cat, Pilar, visit her on Instagram @beautystills.
Eugene Franklin
Cover Letter Beta Test #(God Knows)
Sunday, October 4, 2020
Dear Sir or Madam,
Years ago, I created a utilitarian document titled Application Info. because job applications ask for the kind of information I can’t possibly recall in detail. Life has not been simple enough to recite my escapades from memory. The document lists places I’ve lived, schools I’ve attended, and work experiences. It tells me I’ve lived in ten different homes, moved eleven times (having returned to one address), attended nine schools, and held fourteen jobs. I’m thirty-six years old.
The unending quest for fulfilling employment necessitates such a document, and it causes me to circle the question of whether there’s something wrong with me. I dislike this mode of thought because I’ve decided that the premise– that there’s a standard of behavior that qualifies as normal– is unfounded. The human brain is too complicated a mechanism to be precisely categorized as normal and abnormal or healthy and unhealthy. We can only make guesses in these directions. A person deeply troubled by one set of circumstances adapts perfectly to another.
But most people don’t accept this. Eccentrics have always been viewed with scorn. The people who review my job history harbor this same tendency to see my past as a sign that I need to be fixed. No thirty-six-year-old should have fourteen jobs under his belt resulting in an average of 1.28 years spent at each. There’s obviously a problem there. Why should they invest in bringing someone like that onboard? And the more I move around, the worse it looks. My lily pads are running out.
~
Eugene Franklin is a happily married self-proclaimed underachiever who produces writing rather than children. He has contributed to Christianity and Literature, Philosophy Now, and Iconoclast. He also has a story forthcoming in The Alembic.
Jeremiah Gilbert
Jeremiah Gilbert is an award-winning photographer, writer, and avid traveler based out of Southern California. He likes to travel light and shoot handheld. His travels have taken him to nearly a hundred countries and territories around the globe. His photography has been published internationally in both digital and print publications and has been exhibited worldwide, including in Leica’s LFI Gallery. His hope is to inspire those who see his work to look more carefully at the world around them in order to discover beauty in unusual and unexpected places. He is also the author of Can’t Get Here from There: Fifty Tales of Travel. He can be found on Instagram @jg_travels.
