Cover image: "Dreamtime" by Sara Barrett
Gallery 1
Visual Art, Poetry, and Prose
Beeper Peddle
Surprise
We have been every relation to one another.
In our ancient pasts;
You have been brother, lover, child and Aunt.
You have been Friend.
Confidante.
Foe.
The frequency with which
your heart can communicate with mine is all but audible.
For we have had lifetimes to attune to every minute
decibel of each other’s thoughts.
Barely detectable your breath movement calls to attention
each single strand of peach fuzz on my body. But,
I do not yearn to be touched; I’ve felt all your sensations.
I know all of your angles.
And yet, like the sharply lit curve of the moon,
you remain surprising to me.
Beeper Peddle is a writer and healer living on the East Coast. She lives with her partner and their beloved soul puppy. Beeper writes about sorrows, lies, and deep loves. When you read her work, you will dip down into her heart and end up in all manner of body parts. Should you find yourself reflected in these words, it is merely coincidence; however, it does not surprise her you share the same heart. Find her at www.bethpeddle.com and @beeperpeddle on Twitter and Instagram.
Jack Phillips
Less Mutter More Moment
My hunger takes the shape of cricket frogs jumping ahead wishing we go back home. I don’t want to eat them just to adore their calico backs but the last guy needed bait.
Linnaeus hired a marching band leading field trips likewise we pomp into the bush chanting taxonomic mutter to hang on creatures that can’t get away.
I long to enter the space in-between the void between verses the cool mud beneath barefoot with mysteries guarded by ivy and nettle better keep my distance and boots on.
The space between two things is a third thing indeed the innocence of being purely and ever-wildy frog, briefly spared the never-ending tromp and titter my clumsy love.
Jack Phillips is a naturalist, poet, nature writer and founder of The Naturalist School. Jack has developed mindfulness-in-nature methods that awaken wildness within and connect with the creative processes of the earth community. He lives in the Missouri-Kickatuus watershed. For more on The Naturalist School, visit www.thenaturalistschool.org.
Julia Justo
Born to Argentinean parents of European and Indigenous descent, Julia Justo is a multidisciplinary artist born in La Plata, Argentina. In 1999, she relocated to New York, a move that had a profound impact on her. Her sense of identity became one of increased complexity as she migrated to a land with a significantly different culture than the one she grew up in.
Justo received an M.F.A. from La Plata National University. She has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad including Smack Mellon, Museum of Buenos Aires, The Art Complex Museum, Hunterdon Art Museum, Asheville Art Museum, and American Folk Art Museum, among others.
- Website: www.juliajusto.com
- Instagram: @juliajustoart and @julia_justo_photo
Cheryl Leutjen
The Getaway: Learning from the Ancients
White knuckled, I swerve and swear my way through Los Angeles gridlock, my usual que sera, sera jettisoned at takeoff. The small talk that Joie, my strawberry blond and freckled co-pilot, offers from the passenger seat barely permeates my furious fog. I appreciate her efforts to ease the tension, but my agitated amygdala renders me incapable of polite reply. Heading north on this weekday morning, away from the frenzy of downtown LA, means this traffic must end at some point. I’m hellbent to find an open road—and to leave the madness of the so-called civilized world behind.
Only when we pass the looming Twisted Colossus at Six Flags Magic Mountain, more than 30 miles from downtown, do the lanes begin to unsnarl. My fingers release their death grip on the steering wheel. My shoulders slump and a great sigh escapes with a shudder. The relief is akin to taking off shoes a full size too small. We’re leisurely wending through the San Gabriel Mountains now, those snowcapped peaks that backdrop the LA skyline only on postcard-perfect days, now all dusted in cinnamon powder and dotted with sagebrush. I glance at Joie. Her grin is as wide as mine, from ear to ear.
My mood has taken a U-turn since this morning when I read that the Secretary of Interior Zinke, charged with safeguarding our natural treasures, intends to sell them off to the lowest bidder. His thinly-veiled ploy to trade off the scenic beauty and essential wildlife habitat preserved in our national monuments for the scars of petroleum and mineral mining inspired a cursing streak of which I am not proud. Who thought it would be a good idea to put this fox in charge of guarding the wildland hen house? My heart, already overwrought by incessant news of social and environmental crises, begged for respite. I snapped the laptop shut and paced.
I caught myself eying my stash of “medicinal Chardonnay,” and not even this calamity is an excuse for that kind of escapism. Not at 8 a.m., anyway. I texted Joie, the friend who’s always up for a spontaneous escape for sanity. We hit the highway an hour later, determined to enjoy a national treasure while we still could.
Crossing over the Tejon pass now, I’m tempted to lift my hands from the steering wheel, roller-coaster style, and careen down the mountain, shrieking as we go. Only the slew of semis boxing in my little eco-car keeps my hands on the helm.
~
Cheryl Leutjen draws from her experience as a geologist, environmental law attorney, spiritual practitioner and nature lover to inspire and inform her creative non-fiction writing. She enjoys yoga, mixed media art and playing board games with her family. She resides in Los Angeles, where she digs up the yard and throws a lot of darts as therapy. Her book, Love Earth Now, won a 2018 Silver Nautilus Book Award.
Kate Gough
Evergreen
a dusky-green hilltop at midnight,
on my back in prickly grass, gasping for
air and wiping the sparkling sea out of my
eyes: the grass shivers in silvery expectation.
there is a single star in the smoggy city sky.
i feel the evergreens, sparsely gathered
here by human hands,
are buffeted by the same inexplicable
winds of indecipherable whisperings as i.
(i think we would all ascend above
if we could.
each stem, each leaf
–struggling–
for its next breath, to pull nutrients
from a parched and
poisoned earth
we must endure here
as we can–
take joy in each moment of green
each splash of cool
water each pixie-sparkle of Io-dust-starlight:
stretch out to touch the blessing of
Earth.)
Kate Gough is a Californian writer and artist living in North Wales. She is cloudy, quirky, hopeful, and generally useless at getting her own way – but she is wildly in love with the world and stokes that love with words. Kate has written and exhibited for newspapers, lit mags, galleries, spoken word events, and touring exhibitions around the UK and the USA. She has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine, has produced and sold a self-published collection of poetry called :idiolalia, and continues to nurse a wailing wall of glacially growing fiction.
K. L. Johnston
K. L. Johnston first realized an interest in photography after traveling with the South Carolina ETV Endowment. Her first published photos appeared in that organization’s in-house magazine. She is an opportunistic photographer: the only planning that goes into her photography lies in taking her camera with her wherever she goes. Her favorite subjects are “found incongruities” and the majority of her subjects are environmental.
Alfredo Quarto
Cahuelmo At Dawn
The slanted rains pass with morning
low clouds skirt the steep walls of mountains
that rise green and almost trembling
then plunge headlong to estuary.
The flies have found me idle
plant their seas upon my brow
unsettle the breeze across Cahuelmo
where the ancient forests grow.
Southern lapwings churn the cool
airstreams singing familiar sounds
leave me sitting there too long
caught between the vision
and their song.
Alfredo Quarto is an environmental activist and poet. He’s been published in numerous poetry publications including: Poetry Seattle, Catalyst, Raindance Journal, Piedmont Review, Haiku Zashi Zo, Paperbag Poems, Seattle Arts, Spindrift, Arts Focus, Arnazella, Dan River Anthology, Amelia, Americas Review, Vox, Middle House Review, The Closed Eye Open, and Tidepools. He has also had articles published in The Guardian, Cultural Survival Quarterly, Earth Island Journal, E-Magazine, Wild Earth, Bird Conservation, and Tokyo Journal.
Mackenzie Porterfield
Tracks
This northeastern skeleton forest
that sheds pine needles in piles
like highland cow hair over crystalized moss,
reminds me of my father.
Big and tall,
and you could see straight through it—
beyond the chilled streams of drowning leaves
and the reach of lichen-swallowed branches,
over the hunched backs of boulders,
in a veil of winter flurry—
to the purple sunset
“everything’s gonna be okay,”
he’d say, through a frosted oak architecture,
with a booming voice that evaporates
into the atmosphere,
into the pull of the wolf moon.
And even though only I know the way,
I would want to follow him.
Mackenzie Porterfield is a fiction writer and poet from northeastern Pennsylvania. Her most recent publication is forthcoming in Beyond Words, an international literary magazine.
Melanie Harris
Born among the rolling hills of Germany, Melanie Harris was raised in Texas but is now an inhabitant of the Southwest by choice, having fallen in love with the mountains and candy-colored sunsets. Melanie is a storyteller at heart. Between her love of binge-watching indie films, performing on stage, making films or music videos, and exploring her inner life by gluing tiny words onto photographs, Melanie is a firm believer that stories carry emotional weight and reveal hidden truths about ourselves. When Melanie isn’t story-making you can always find her cuddled with a good book, rocking out at a punk show, or planning world domination with her two cats, Rosemary and Basil.
Kelly Gray
The Everlasting Eulogy of Lush
Lush being one of my words intimate, because
I have lived with ferns,
their dim undersides holding
rows of circled spores
laid neatly in shadow, dust sex and wind blow.
I am lush sideways salivation,
the way I creep through your orchard raising skirt,
Luh, the sound of moan with loop,
Ush, the last whisper, death rattle of lonely, pretty in creek walk,
I give you lip.
You come at me Mountain,
our home a wood field where deer go to die,
we fill our stove with bones, cloven hooves, broth,
steam marrow against winter, the glass cries drip.
“It’s the wind,” you say, “trying to find me to you.”
I am lush slut spoke softly
your bottom lip dragging,
there was never any poetry without you in it,
there was never any poetry,
there was never.
Everyone has a song,
But we have a wet, drunken word,
born of walk and bed.
Kelly Gray resides on Coast Miwok land amongst the tallest and quietest trees in the world. Kelly’s writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Pretty Owl Poetry, River Teeth, Lunch Ticket, The Inflectionist Review, Cultural Weekly, and many other swoon-worthy publications. She’s been nominated for both a Pushcart Prize by Atticus Review and Best of the Net by The Account Magazine, and her debut book of poetry, Instructions for an Animal Body, is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in the summer of 2021. She is a poetry reader at Bracken Magazine, but you can read more of her work at www.writekgray.com and follow her at @_west_of_west.
Elizabeth Templeman
Turns are on my mind.
At every turn some version of vert or vers—those ancient Greek roots—will emerge: conversations are the challenge that propel me through this piece; versions are how it forms and reforms; something between aversion and subversion to the demand of sustained effort is what tugs at me. And so we turn; toward one another, reshaping thing into thing, turning away, turning under.
But we also resist, and thus I stay with the page; with this page, of all the pages spilled out on the table.
It’s quite likely because I’m introverted—or inwardly inclined—that roots of words will linger in my mind. Others, more taken up with the actual physicality, more engaged with the momentum of the day, would likely have little focus to spare for the splinters and shafts that fix our language, intangibly and irrevocably, to meaning. (And yet, even as I persist, the mind wanders, taking its own turns. Diverting my focus.)
***
My puzzling through the whole bundle of complications at the heart of conversation began in the hours before dawn, during one of those sleeps punctuated by insomnia. My thoughts wandered wildly and freely, as they’re wont to do once they’ve pulled me from sleep. The topic was suitably vast; a perfect playground for the mind to romp through, having triumphed over dull sleep. My notes hardly make sense even to me, looking, as they often will in the light of day, like a cross between crazy jottings and obscure poetry.
~
Elizabeth Templeman lives, works, and writes in the south-central interior of British Columbia. Publications include Notes from the Interior, a collection of creative nonfiction, and individual essays in various journals and anthologies.
Sara Barrett
East Tennessee native and mixed media artist Sara Barrett lives blissfully at the foothills of the Smokies with her husband of 12 years, their 11-year-old daughter and two cats. A full-time creative thinker, Barrett repurposes used and discarded materials of all types in her artwork. Scrap paper usually hogs the spotlight. Although she admires most all art forms, she is deeply inspired by music and the talent behind it. When not creating, Sara enjoys traveling to obscure locations with her family and documenting the experience with amateur photos. You can see more of her work on Instagram @freelance.muse.
Jerrod A. Laber
Neighborhood citadel
I sometimes forget
what my grandmother
looked like the window
of my memory caked
with grime and dust
from years of neglect
though I remember well
the tree in her backyard
a neighborhood citadel
for my cousin and I
where we would swing
from its lowest branch
back and forth and back
and forth and forth and
back hands blistering from
the tree’s bark shins burned
from the Appalachian sun
plotting our next move on
those summer days when
time seemed to move slower
the sound of the Norfolk
Southern trains permeating
the air like background
radiation while we traipse
up the floodwall that hugs
the edge of the Ohio River
remembering perfectly the
height of the nearly knee-
high grass but not the face
voice and even sometimes
name of my mother’s mother
some 20 years after her death
and I wonder with my chest
gripped in anxiety’s vise when
half of me will disappear as
the reservoir of my ability
to remember my mother dries
up and my resemblance to
her is made vague with age.
Jerrod A. Laber is an Appalachian poet and writer currently based in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.
Anda Marcu
Anda Marcu is a multidisciplinary artist based in London, Ontario, Canada. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries internationally over the years and is part of private collections across North America and Europe. Her work aims to project memories into shapes and bursts of color, exploring her fascination with texture and form.
- Website: www.andamarcu.com
- Instagram: @andamarcuart
