Cover image: "Apologies" by Linda Pereira
Gallery 3
Visual Art, Poetry, and Prose
J.E. O’Leary
fog
when i think of albany in the morning i think of fog, a deep fog rolling
in from the west, over the bridge, over the river, by the amtrak station.
all weather came from the west, through a whole environment of metal
scaffolding structures, power lines, climbable skeletons, all burnt red.
what i picture when i picture fog: the color of the golden gate bridge,
somewhat darker, somewhat more sinister. when i lived on the hill i
would stare at it all. i had a good view, tentatively playing guitar over
by the window.
in my days at the art museum i was a tiger patrolling, eyeing the nervous
people on the edges of the balcony, the concrete and tinted glass, the high
modernism carved into the land. a waste, in the end, though there was
nowhere left to put it. i don’t know why i think of these things. at the
window i tried to be nimble with my fingers, over the guitar that is, make
the long notes like power lines, make staccato scales that run up and
down like the towers, the poles, the frames that hold these sketches together.
my seven months at the art museum was one of those long holds between
the hard motions of this life i’d built for myself. i had periods of respite
but they were just carrying me to the next. the next pole. driven into the
ground in a different physical location but still the same. highways were
like this too, when i was driving. long lines in between cities, hung with
stories, objects, drying, in the fog.
guitar notes plunk and bend over the morning haze. maybe tomorrow i’ll
see the sun. it’s january 12th.
J.E. O’Leary is a songwriter, stage performer, poet and visual artist from NYC. For over 20 years, largely performing under the stage name Joe Yoga, he has been bringing his music and art to NYC’s stages, festivals, subway platforms, and gallery walls. He has performed at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the New York Poetry Festival, KGB Bar, An Beal Bocht Cafe, Sidewalk Cafe, and numerous other poetry shows. Musically, his unique songwriting style and passionate performances have made him a favorite of and a fixture at venues across the city.
Hudson Gardner
Calligraphy of a Stream
I
A gray jay’s wing
looks like old cedar wood grain.
Grown from
melted snow, and robbed sandwich bits.
The jays move in flocks, take turns landing
softly on my hat.
The lower lake,
frozen solid, but for the edges, coated in glistening snow.
A small stream flows from one end
like ink spilled on paper, then melting it, and running downslope.
The jays drink, and watch us
in all our human awkwardness.
Gracefully stealing tidbits for a free lunch
Even though I heard: nothing in life is “free.”
The woods are soundless today, but for the shushing of trees shedding snow.
Almost like the silence is asking me to listen, and then
a jay swoops in to steal part of my sandwich again.
II
The cold creeps downhill, along the stream.
Flat rocks on a dark, gravelly bottom.
People walking far, up from stuffed parking lot, into this silence
leaving behind their cars
carrying their conversations
holding onto things.
Then resting in the rare light, here at the edge of a lake.
I wonder how easy it is
to leave it all behind?
To come clean to the creek-burble?
To cleanse the mind?
—Grey jays winging softly,
along tree’d edge of the lake
III
In mind, I gathered
thoughts, and things, and wasn’t always there
for the beauty.
Maybe if I drink snow melt, sleep outside, these things become me
Or am I them?
The transparency of the self grows clearer,
in the calligraphy of a stream:
Slowly flowing under frozen snowy bridges
As we walk together
Back
to our complicated lives.
Hudson Gardner is currently creating a podcast called Grass Journal about understanding and protecting wildness in the Anthropocene. It consists of stories, poems, interviews, and long walks outdoors. His work has been published by On Being, The Sun Magazine, Taproot, The Collective Quarterly, and others. His first book, A Body of Water, will be self-published this spring. Find out more at rivrwind.webflow.io.
Emily Buchalski
Emily Buchalski is an interdisciplinary artist with a strong fixation on history and the macabre. When creating work, she chooses her materials and imagery to focus on the conceptual context of the art. Her work tends to be straightforward and recognizable to lead the viewer to develop visual connections, encourage opinions and create questions for thought.
Gregory Stephens
Taming the Mountain: Two Views of Gabriel
The teenager Javier, a family friend in the Caiseas neighborhood of Mayagüez, often took old Gabriel out to the patio which overlooked the Caribbean, out towards the Dominican Republic. The patio was beside a pasture where Gabe once kept a small flock of sheep. That corral was now paved over. The old man too seemed frozen in time, like the jungle over which his wife Marta had concrete poured, once Gabriel was no longer in shape to fight it back. He could not speak, or move, and was in the endgame of progressive supranuclear palsy. But he listened attentively, and seemed to find ways to make his thoughts known.
Andrés, a Humanities professor who lived in an apartment below the family’s hilltop homestead, could hear Gabriel’s mute savage cries. He talked to Marta, the matriarch, from time to time, about her abiding love for Gabriel, and his ability to communicate without speaking. He also came up to the patio to speak with Javier, and began piecing the old man’s story together.
For those on Caiseas who revolve around Gabriel, he is dying sun that still has a gravitational pull. Everyone seemed intent on pulling their own kind of stories out of him, of framing the patriarch in a particular way.
His wife Marta is the resident goddess of this world that Gabriel built during his prime. She controls virtually every facet of his existence. There is nothing he does, sees, hears, or tastes that is not predetermined by his wife, it seems.
Marta likes to read to Gabriel, her angel, from her red Bible. Sometimes it is the erotic poetry of the Song of Songs. Sometimes Marta chooses a passage that seems to speak directly to Gabriel’s current condition:
“Would that I were as in moons of yore…
as I was in the days of my prime
…and now my life spills out,
days of affliction seize me.”
As the years passed, Marta confessed to Andrés, she sometimes asked herself: would the depth of their relationship have been possible without money? After Gabriel was confined to a wheelchair, she wondered: could the endurance of her affection be sustained without the financial resources which he had put at her disposal?
~
Gregory Stephens has taught Creative Writing to University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez STEM students since 2014. His book Three Birds Sing a New Song: A Puerto Rican Trilogy on Dystopia, Precarity, and Resistance was published by Intermezzo (2019). His fiction and literary nonfiction stories have been published in many journals, including most recently “Going South” in Barely South Review.
Gina Rini-Reese
blood ties
Gina Rini-Reese is a self-taught poet who has been writing since she was a child. Her work features the recurring theme of our indelible interconnectedness with nature, the universe, and the concept of time. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her fiancé and their dog, Moon.
Evelyna Helmer
Originally from Chicago, Illinois, multi-disciplinary contemporary artist Evelyna Helmer lives and works in Australia, but frequently works out of studios in both Florida and Chicago. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Art History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as well as post-graduate certificates in Photography, Fine Art and Horticulture. Her strong academic background in art and art history profoundly influences her work, and it includes a respect for archival techniques and materials.
Glen Armstrong
Neighbor #8
I want respect for the hollows that allow a musical sound. The bell’s shapely sleeve too big for its clapper. The grand piano’s playpen for hammer and string. The throat is just what grows around the vocal chords.
This is a city of air jet and projection. Our texts play out on the surface and never cast shadows. There are no knives digging names of young lovers into desktops or trees.
I fear the whole bloody opera will float away in the wind with nothing absent inside to ground it. I cannot remember the heroine’s contact lenses or melodic theme. Only the blinking neon in this quiet bar gives me any kind of hope.
Glen Armstrong holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters and has three current books of poems: Invisible Histories, The New Vaudeville, and Midsummer. His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Conduit, and Cream City Review.
Kay L. Cook
seen but not heard
The dimly meting moon spotlights
an unbroken cobweb,
linked between two cattails,
mirroring an altar;
as if declaring itself
a pentimento,
this dream flutters without
approval,
shelters its strands
allowing vibration
to seek out serenity.
Surroundings gently nod
reaching for connection
until abruptly
a gust from the north
bellows furtive promises
startling the moment
bankrupting the still.
Kay L. Cook was raised in the Midwest and is a longtime New Yorker. As a gay parent in a racially diverse family, she recognizes some of the ongoing disparities in America. Hence, much of her writing focuses on racial issues and the need for systemic changes. Her formal background and degrees lie in education and psychology. Her poetry has previously appeared in Wild Roof Journal as well as Rise Up Review, The Write Launch, 2 Horatio, and Poets Reading the News.
K. Johnson Bowles
K. Johnson Bowles has been featured in 80+ exhibitions and 60+ publications. She is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA, Houston Center for Photography, the Visual Studies Workshop, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She received her MFA from Ohio University and BFA from Boston University.
- Website: www.kjohnsonbowlesart.com
Helga Kidder
Bruised
All I can think of today is tomatoes.
The red fruit some say Eve gave Adam.
Logically, that can’t be true
since it was a tree that stood in the Garden
and tomatoes don’t grow on trees.
Unless it was really a bush that centered Eden,
though the serpent may have had difficulty
climbing a stalk without breaking it.
I think Eve was tempted by the bright-red color
of the tomato, and when Adam bit into it,
the juice ran down his bare chest and stung.
An apple would have been neater.
I’m reasoning that tomatoes need picking
or they will let go and fall to earth.
Maybe it was not the serpent who willed Eve
to pick the fruit but her common sense.
There is also the dispute whether a tomato is a fruit,
and the Bible definitely refers to temptation
as a fruit.
This is what may have happened:
Eve said to Adam, I’m going to pick tomatoes
for a salad, and he answered, OK, but this time
slice some onions as well into the vinegar
and oil dressing.
Unfortunately, they were evicted
as soon Eve tasted the salad and gave Adam
a bowl, so they had to go without dinner that night.
In retrospect, I don’t think snakes like apples
but tomatoes. As they fall to the ground,
their skins split, expose flesh,
open themselves to the worm.
Helga Kidder lives in the Tennessee hills with her husband. Her poetry has appeared in American Diversity Report, Silver Blade, and The Heartland Review, among others. She has four poetry collections: Wild Plums, Luckier Than the Stars, Blackberry Winter, and Loving the Dead, which won the Blue Light Press Book Award in 2020.
Clive Knights
There and Back
She shrugged him off, turning once more to the open window, the sill of which bore the imprint of her steadfast elbows, resolute in their command of this threshold onto the bustling promenade below, as they had been on so many previous occasions. This silent aperture, quite grandiose in scale, as they used to build things two centuries ago, and somewhat at odds with the dimensions of her humble apartment, once more gave release to her fermenting frustrations, as if the moist, salt air, like smelling-salts, could chase out the demons in her psyche. Once again, by habit from years of struggle, her eyes made the journey her body could only dream of, outward bound across a forest made of the masts of sailing boats pointing upwards, swaying back and forth in gesture, as if yearning for an answer from the sky to some unfathomable request. Looking beyond the obstinate harbor walls of ageless granite, her gaze skipped outward across frothy white peaks, penetrating deep into the fusing blues and grays of ocean and sky. This vision of freedom, calibrated only by the cycle of sunsets burning holes in the horizon at the end of each day, in relentless waves, punctuating the claustrophobia of her life, was, just for a few fleeting moments, enough to sustain a fragile hope for something more. Poised upon this window ledge, she had embarked on countless imaginary expeditions. She had circumnavigated the globe numerous times, being welcomed into the villages of unknown indigenous peoples in landscapes of such original beauty no words had yet been invented to describe them adequately. She had dived with whales into the deepest trenches of seas abundant from spontaneous eruptions of life, new species breaking the conventions of established knowledge. She had flown with condors, levitating on the updrafts from undiscovered canyons that carved erratic grooves into sedimented bedrock laden with the fragmentary fossils of strange and exquisite organisms. In navigating the oceanic currents of her unfettered imagination, she was captain of her own extraordinary vessel, a mariner of sorts, an expert at losing herself without ever being lost, drafting the maps of uncharted imaginary waters as she went. This time, upon return – and she always returned – while she moored her boat of dreams to the safety of a quayside sheltered in the tranquility of her closing eyes, she felt a warmth emanating from something behind her back, a steady, familiar, welcoming warmth that, despite her many – one could say selfish – excursions, persisted like a beacon on the shoreline, unperturbed by storms and swells, relentlessly radiating its signal of home.
Clive Knights practices both art and architecture—in particular, mixed media collage, monotype printmaking, and the design and installation of unique festival structures—in collaboration with colleagues and students from Portland State University’s School of Architecture, where he is a professor. He holds professional arts & architectural design degrees from Portsmouth Polytechnic, UK, and a Master of Philosophy from Cambridge University. He has written on the cultural interpretation of works of art understood through the phenomenology of the human body, with particular reference to the efficacy of metaphor in poetic works. Most recently his collages, non-fiction, and fiction writing have been included in four issues of Kolaj Magazine. Please see his Instagram gallery @knightsclive.
Linda Pereira
Linda Pereira’s photography is based in her passion for uninhibited creative self-expression, and for viewing our world from completely new and ever-changing perspectives. She represents daily life and nature in a thoughtful and playful way, inviting her viewers to reconsider the significance and utility of common objects. She appreciates the patterns and fractals of life and the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas and uses imagery to discover and reveal them. She employs various textures and vibrant color palettes to immerse her viewers in a parallel world that is both familiar and of another dimension, both palpable and faraway. Her photos are quirky and experimental, unique and creative, and made with the intention of inspiring others to feel free to be their quirky and unique selves as well.
- Website: www.lindacheriepereira.wixsite.com/corduroycashmere
- Instagram: @corduroy_cashmere
Audra K. Herrera
Invade
Crisp air like a thin sheet
invisible in the space between
the Joshua tree and me
between the pebble the boulder
threaten to slice me
stain the desert highway
from center body of a coyote
forgotten from a century story
within the erosion of my ancestors, cut tongue left dry
too proud to surrender
history
a crisp thin sheet
Audra K. Herrera is currently working toward her master’s in English. She’s been working on a poetic-prose-photography chapbook expressing the narrative of her and her family. Much of her upbringing in Los Angeles has influenced her writing, as well as family trauma, mental illness, and the general experience of being human. She uses her writing as a form of grounding herself back to her surroundings, although much of it all still takes place inside her mind. When she’s not writing, she’s working as a high school English teacher.
- Instagram: @aud.k.herrera.
Sindy Yeung
Sindy Yeung is an artist in Hong Kong. She was a social project manager and philanthropic advisor for over ten years before quitting her job to take a break and rethink about life. She felt so lost until she picked up the paintbrush, which she once played with a lot during childhood. Sindy gets inspirations for her art from daily life, the unique East-West urban vibe and countryside of Hong Kong, and her inner dialogues about life and self-actualisation. Her art covers mainly three aspects: 1. paying tribute to the amazing gift of our Mother Earth, 2. reflecting her inner struggles and faith, and 3. exploring various “relationships” and “interactions” — those between human infrastructure and the Nature, the world and the Heaven, the city and the wilderness, and herself as an individual and the society.
- Instagram: @sindyyeung
- Website: www.sindyyeung.com
