Cover image: "Gosia: Flight" by Sarah Kilgallon
Gallery 2
Visual Art, Poetry, and Prose
Rebecca Faulkner
Bees
I haven’t brushed my hair since you climbed
through the fence, your orange shorts shocking
against the smooth cheek of spring. We crushed
foxgloves, sucked cherry lollipops, didn’t talk much.
Kicked the dirt & practised kissing, our mouths sticky.
Distracted you’d shout 3,2,1, readyornot! & take off
across the field in search of something brighter. You found
the nest first, small but wide enough to push fingers into.
I shook as the first one landed on my tongue, wings reaching
for my throat, bees polishing the air black, a blazing happiness
with its horizon of pain. Arms pressed against bark, you skinned
your knee when you fell, dragging me down as the colony lurched
stinging like a length of rope, their legion of quick bodies burrowing
deep into my skin, chest humming inside my shirt where your hands
were careless, gaping words I could not hear. We ran hard, striking
at fear, don’t stop you said as my legs buckled. When you grit your teeth
shook the final few from my hair, I could hear the sound of them
doing their best to survive, and of you, trying to love me.
Rebecca Faulkner is a London-born children’s rights advocate, climate activist, and poet. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Pedestal Magazine, Smoke Magazine, The Maine Review, On the Seawall, Into the Void and Passengers Journal, among others. Her poem “Permit me to write my own ending” appears in Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology 2019-2021. She was a 2021 poetry fellow at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Faulkner holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Leeds and a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and is working on completing her first collection of poetry.
Kathleen Culver
Fog Song
At dawn
you may take a boat
out on the lake
and be
surprised by fog
enveloping you so
you lose track of
where you are.
No shores
no direction clear.
It’s just you and
your soul.
Put the oars on
the gunnels,
feel the small rocking
of the water,
the shifts without
compass,
afloat in a cloud
moist gray,
almost a caress,
almost a kindness.
Listen to the song
of quiet.
Born in Chicago, but continually sliding south, Kathleen “Corky” Culver is a poet, activist, videographer and historian who earned her doctorate in English from the University of Florida. Her full-length poetry collection, The Natural Law of Water, was published in 2007. A second book, Finding the Well, will be released in 2021. Culver’s poems have recently been featured in Tipping the Scales, Otherworldly, Showbear Family Circus, HerWords, Rogue Agent, Sinister Wisdom and Crone Chronicles 2020. Culver is a life-long scholar of Henry David Thoreau and she lives and writes in a 1935 log cabin on a lake in North Central Florida.
Mia Depaola
Mia Depaola is an inspiring, creative, independent artist and photographer residing in Washington DC. Originally from Portugal, she has lived, studied, and worked most of her life in Belgium. Being of an introvert nature, she has always favored art as her medium of expression. Her interest in art, nature, and travel has provided opportunities to develop a unique, and even unorthodox, photographic signature.
Photography is an essential part of her life. Following the light and her instincts, Mia sees art in the most mundane things. Her artistic approach is to evoke a gamut of emotions. She is constantly looking to experiment with her work and striving to learn, improve, and grow as a photographer, as an artist, and as a woman. Instagram: @mia.depaola
Anna Lockhart
I was supposed to be pregnant in April. That was the plan, at least, contingent upon many factors: the loan for our in-vitro fertilization treatment coming through, my husband’s sperm retrieval, the shots and hormones, my uterine lining thickening and the embryos made in a petri dish blossoming and implanting and deciding to stay. Using IVF to get pregnant was never my first choice of course, but I’d come to be comforted by the sureness of its clinical planning – until March 2020 put a pause in those carefully charted plans. The world seemed to shut down around us like lights on a stage, one after the other. Along with my dentist appointment and my haircut, the fertility treatments we’d scheduled were suddenly deemed elective, and the clinic closed indefinitely.
I kept reminding myself I was lucky: lucky to have a job I could do from home, to have a house full of food and company, lucky for my health. But it didn’t feel lucky to have to wait for something I’d planned and saved for, and wanted so badly. IVF may have been elective, but it felt essential to me.
Locked down and waiting, the house became my universe, and I turned my attention to domestic matters long neglected, like my houseplants. They were a rag tag crew I was surprised to find alive: a flowering cactus, its leggy stems stretched up noodle-like, capped with blooming heads that pressed against the window screen like refugees. An ancient, crusty aloe plant I’d rescued from my office, which had a lizard-like claw hanging down below its outgrown pot. One plant caught my eye the most – a stout green-leaved house plant, its round, glossy leaves in a playful spray….
~
Anna Lockhart is a writer based in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlantic, and The Bitter Southerner, and more.
Beverly Rose Joyce
Perhaps Someday
There is a sideways
ladder maze
nailed to my wall.
One short of a full hand
are they stacked
atop each other,
to soften slip or fall.
Stringers and rungs
in width and height
are all about the same.
Each notch of twenty-four
I do mark with X
to spot its flip,
a kind of pirate game.
Looking at it there
spying back at me,
my eyes left to right
march in time
like the press of 88 key
black and white,
from A to C.
Low to high
would my fingers fly
sitting on its padded chair
that with hinged lid hides
pink sticky
love notes inside.
How absurd
that my whole world
like tick of metal arm time,
set by the key to play the key,
is confined by rails and shelves
sketched ruler straight for me.
Like the bar with no last call
yet sets the pace of it all
do my days move
against the rising sun
both ways, not one.
Most stories start low
and wind up high,
kind of like notches put to bark
inside the shape of Judith’s card
one might find at Frost’s fork.
By the time the circles inside
are enough for the limbs
to play finger steeple
the people whose names
graffiti the tree
can no longer see them
they used to be.
The letters that stand
for the whole of the thing
mean much at the time,
but with each gained ring
are harder and harder to find,
just like sorrow
that blurs the black rung
between today and tomorrow
and the pedals three
which slur the silence
within the melody.
Why then,
are stories we eat up
plotted on paper
in rows of letters
left right, left right
like the flat numbered boxes
that with black white, black white
note day night, day night?
Mine is not.
Like a knot,
it twists and turns upon itself,
comes undone to just again
get locked on those hurts
up on a closet shelf
in a box
tucked tightly away
and sharp marked—
perhaps someday.
Beverly Rose Joyce lives in Brecksville, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. She holds a BA in English from Baldwin-Wallace University and a MA in English from Cleveland State University, and she was a public high school English teacher for sixteen years before taking a voluntary respite from the profession to spend more time with her children and to better focus on her writing and photography. Her writing has been published in Plants & Poetry Journal and in the anthology titled Inner Eye (by Poets’ Choice). Her writing is also forthcoming in the anthology titled Turning Darkness into Light (by Quillkeepers Press) and in The Silent World in Her Vase, while her photography is forthcoming in The Closed Eye Open.
Sarah Kilgallon
Sarah Kilgallon is a Lisbon-based photographer and writer. Her work has been published in The Bark Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, and Harvard Bookstore Flash Fiction Anthologies. View her recent work at www.sarahkilgallon.com and on Instagram @sarah_kilgallon_photography.
Elya Braden
Shell Collector
As a child, on every beach vacation, I stalked
the liminal space where sand greets tide,
my seaweed-colored eyes scanning for those tiny
houses buffeted by surf.
If a soft inhabitant peeked out, I’d fling it
back to sea. I knew how easily flesh purples,
the vulnerability of those of us born
without an exoskeleton.
I was no murderer, just greedy for something
to clutch in my fist, to call mine. Shoe boxes
weighted with scavenged riches perfumed my bedroom
with brine and loss.
Later, I only lived on islands, my hands hungry
for the tide’s refuse. Every morning, dawn sang
her blue song into my dreaming ears, woke me
with her salty kiss.
Those Northwest beaches bit with teeth
of seagull-shattered clams. Kelp lassoed
my ankles. The wind frisked me, lifted my shirt,
exhaled the rot of dead sand shark.
I searched for cowries, forgetting they slept
on southern beaches. I remembered they were money
once. Coin of the realm in India and China. Before that,
still and always, home.
The kind of home I’d need
to build for myself—
one I could extrude from my waiting bones,
one I could ferry on my back, one hard enough
to set a boundary, one light enough
to let go.
Elya Braden took a long detour from her creative endeavors to pursue an eighteen-year career as a corporate lawyer and entrepreneur. She is now a writer and mixed-media artist living in Los Angeles and is Assistant Editor of Gyroscope Review. Her work has been published in Calyx, Causeway Lit, Prometheus Dreaming, Rattle Poets Respond, The Coachella Review and elsewhere and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her chapbook, Open The Fist, was recently released by Finishing Line Press. You can find her online at www.elyabraden.com.
William Lychack
Villanelle for My Mother Not to Read
Leaving was simple. They walked to the train station, the old man handed him his rucksack of clothes and effects. The train arrived, Joseph boarded, sat beside a window, touched the glass where his grandfather’s hand touched the other side, the train whistled, started to move slowly, slow enough to let his grandfather walk beside it, Joseph watching the old man stand at the end of the platform.
The Ukrainian fields opened out full and spread the sky wide with light, hours of empty hills and trees, endless farms and land, the rivers and port, the sea. Leaving was easy, the raw movement of it, and all of that turned blue with distance and time, as blue as the voyage across the ocean, nothing but shades of blue for days on days, days and blue as heavy as the drone of engines and sea and stories he would hold and carry like souvenirs, another world entire.
Leaving was easy, and Joseph would have stories to survive—gifts to give—like the one about the woman who had the baby she was bringing to America. Just the word alone—America—it came to you then like a dream and a promise big enough to hold everyone who shared it. They left from Danzig on board a tired, half-sunk ship called The Estonia. He was 20 years old, according to the ship’s manifest, his eyes brown, hair brown, a worker. The story went on about how Joseph—Józef, on the manifest—would help the woman with the baby, and get them food, find fresh water, bring it to them. He never knew the woman’s name, but the way she looked?
“But her face,” he would say, “it had the sea in it.”
~
William Lychack is the author of Cargill Falls, The Architect of Flowers, and The Wasp Eater. He teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
Bruce Turk
Through expressionist collage, Bruce Turk aims to capture the loss and pain of the past year—the loss of life we’ve suffered, the loss of experiences, the loss of touch and contact with others. He uses pages from old books to explore the remnants of language and attempts to notate our constant effort to communicate deep needs and desires. The work ultimately struggles with the challenges of connecting/re-connecting with others through language. After all is said and done, what is the feeling that remains?
As a professional actor on and off Broadway and at regional theatres across the country, Bruce’s explorations of language have led him into deep investigations of sound in the body and space and its representation on the page. He continues to perform and practices visual art in his Southern California studio, inspired by natural surroundings and the brilliant insights of his artistic wife. Instagram: @bruce.turk
Hayley Stoddard
Lilacs
Lilacs have over one thousand varieties,
and can survive in -60 degrees. Woody
shrubs that don’t die easy, their soft petals
are drought resistant. They bloom best in heat.
A pair of purple roller blades, no helmet or pads,
going in circles round and round the cul-de-sac
on long drowsy summer afternoons, counting gray squares,
drought resistant, my hair bleached white from summer heat.
Known in Latin as oleaceae, they technically belong
to the olive family. But it is not their job to be crushed
and pressed, no tombs or bottles waiting, only sunny hours.
New house, old clothes, cardboard boxes, red brick heat,
with lilacs growing up the side of the house, blue-purple
garlands plucked for my worm, or bird, or bunny funerals.
Hushed voices, muffled crying, more casseroles, a split
strange people in and out the door, letting in the heat.
The light blue variety symbolize first loves, a petalled prayer
for resilience, roots to last through frozen winters. They
always smelled like love to me. In Utah I was kissed
under them once, but felt only cold, neither summer love or heat.
The flowers will dry, crack, fold, and fall, but they come back
even after the nastiest, most harmful weather. They sleep
soundly in frost. Ripped fingernails and tears catch on a white
stuffed teddy bear, getting in the car, little eyes red with heat.
A long drive through the dark across the desert, to California.
A new house, picking peaches. Balmy salt and star jasmine in the air.
Lilacs don’t bloom on cold, windy beaches. But they do come back.
The roots will weather. Drought resistant. They bloom best in heat.
Hayley Stoddard lives in Colorado and is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s degree. She has been inspired by such writers as Billy Collins, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Anne Lamott, Mary Oliver, and Leonard Cohen. Her work has been seen in or is upcoming in several publications, including Parley Publishing, Oberon, After the Pause, Eris+Eros, Drunk Monkeys, Button Eye Review, Sad Girls Club Lit, Beyond Words Magazine, and Eunoia Review.
Mary Silwance
of value
as you roll up the cord
you explain how it came to you,
how you coil it the same way each time
how you’ve had it for almost 30 years
I watch your scarred broad hands
then your broad back as you put the cord
in its rightful place in your ancient truck
when you have something of value,
you take care of it and it’ll last ya.
you say
something in me settles
quiet and deep
like an anchor.
Originally from Egypt, Mary Silwance lives in Kansas City. The mother of three daughters, she is also an aspiring farmer, herbalist, and award-winning poet whose work appears in numerous publications. Mary is a member of the Kansas City Writers Group and serves on the editorial team of Kansas City Voices. Mary explores environmental issues from the intersection of spirituality and justice in workshops and at www.tonicwild.blogspot.com. She is a recent recipient of the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship for environmental non-fiction. When not going down research rabbit holes, you can find Mary either outside in her garden or begging her children to play charades.
Isaac Wolfe
Isaac Wolfe is a charismatic deadbeat and occasional observer of life. If asked for enlightenment, he will point to the obituary section of the local newspaper; for knowledge, to the mechanic, carpenter, electrician, plumber, or tradesmen; for life advice, perhaps the town drunk or an overpass bum or a man who has just lost his love. His bucket list includes bar brawling with Bukowski, painting by numbers with Van Gogh, and people watching with Picasso. You can follow him on Instagram at @wolfe_writes.
Leah Browning
Year of the Rat
Danielle was scraping bits of food from her dinner plate into the trash. It was a tall metal can that she held open by depressing a foot pedal, but when she released it to walk away, the lid didn’t close again.
The garbage was almost full, and a rat popped out of the crumpled napkins with a banana peel from breakfast draped over his head like a yellow wig. It was such a strange and funny sight that Danielle started to laugh. The rat looked at her with a scornful expression, though, and she broke off, embarrassed.
There was a temptation to put something poisonous inside the can and something heavy on the top, or to hold it closed with some kind of giant rubber band, but she didn’t want him to suffocate in there with her old trash, and anyway, he looked strong, like he’d been working out. She imagined him lifting tiny rat-sized weights.
He shrugged off the banana peel, and the look he gave her this time leaned more toward inquisitiveness than derision, so she abandoned the idea of the giant rubber band (and the possible jailbreak) and let him live.
For the most part, they avoided each other. She left the apartment early, trying to catch the first bus of the morning. By the time she got home from work, her feet throbbed painfully and all she wanted to do was lie on the couch with a glass of wine and the TV remote. She paid little attention to the carrot peelings and shredded newspaper he left on the floor when he was finished with them.
The notes, though, she couldn’t ignore—the scratches he left on the side of the garbage can or nicked into the wood of the lowest kitchen cabinets spelling out his demands. A bowl of ice cream, crackers. She never knew what he might request from one day to the next. Food, usually, but there were other items as well. A small blanket, for example, or a bed. She made one out of an empty tissue box.
He began to increase the pressure, waking her up in the night by scrabbling across the floor or leaping from one piece of furniture to another. He called her at work using fake names, pretending to be other people.
“Stop using the phone,” she told him, but he wouldn’t listen. He had been working out day and night, and eating her food. He was the size of her foot, perhaps, but stronger than she was, more muscular. In a physical fight, she was pretty sure, he could take her.
At work, her boss called her into his office. She seemed distracted, he said, and had missed an important meeting. Her work was suffering. A letter had been drafted for her personnel file.
At home, the rat scratched “your work is suffering” into the bathroom mirror. He meant this, she knew, in a more philosophical sense. He wanted her to quit her day job and focus on her true purpose in life. But I don’t want to suffer, she thought.
“Tough shit,” he wrote all over the linoleum, which she found scratched to bits when she got home the following day.
He was in the corner, under the kitchen table. The look on his face was pure disgust.
In the morning, she woke early and typed a letter of resignation. She fumbled around in the desk drawer for a pen, but the rat had stolen all of them for who knew what. There was a long list of items she’d had to replace, a hairbrush being the most recent. His whims were unpredictable. Somewhere, she suspected, he’d stashed away her hand mirror and a new box of paper clips and the Sudoku puzzle book her cousin had given her for Christmas, and someday she’d discover this stockpile.
For now, though, she left the letter, unsigned, in the drawer, and ran to catch the bus to work. She couldn’t afford to be late again.
Instead she was late getting home, and she entered the apartment fearfully, knowing that the reprisal would be swift and merciless. The night before, the rat had requested a bowl of soup for tonight’s dinner, but she’d forgotten what kind. She was exhausted. She had already left the office after quitting time, and she hadn’t wanted to risk stopping at the store and coming home with the wrong thing. Her stomach twisted with a combination of hunger and fear.
But then, when she went inside, peering around the corners, he was nowhere to be found. She slipped off her shoes and sat down at the table. What to do, then, about dinner. She was still sitting, motionless, waiting for an idea to come to her, when she heard an odd noise from the bedroom. Soft scraping, then the click of nails down the hallway.
The rat staggered into her kitchen. He was bloated, disoriented, searching for water. Immediately, she remembered the black boxes her neighbor had baited with poison and set on the balcony. It had been a year earlier, after he found droppings when he went outside for his morning coffee.
She fetched the rat’s tissue box bed and tried to help him into it. The rat kicked her hand away. He would have scratched insults into the floor, she knew, if he had had the strength. Still, she filled a shallow bowl with water and sat up with him for hours, waiting for the end.
Leah Browning is the author of six chapbooks including Orchard City, a collection of short fiction published by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2017. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Four Way Review, The Forge Literary Magazine, The Threepenny Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Mojave River Review, Watershed Review, Superstition Review, The Homestead Review, Newfound, Belletrist Magazine, Poetry South, Coldnoon, Clementine Unbound, The Stillwater Review, and elsewhere. Browning’s work has also appeared in anthologies including The Doll Collection from Terrapin Books and Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence from White Pine Press. Website: www.leahbrowninglit.com
Ray Ball
Tuesday’s Bystanders
After César Vallejo and Donald Justice
I will die in Madrid at dusk,
while the sun sets on the slanted roofs
of Lavapiés. It will be a day
like many other days in early summer,
perhaps a Tuesday just like today.
Yes, I believe it will be a Tuesday—
except it will be twilight instead of morning.
I will be cradling a glass of Albariño
instead of taking notes on a legajo.
My life: these seventeenth-century folios.
Both cluttered with marginalia
and different sets of men’s hands.
My hound who is not with me now
will not be with me then,
but my shoulder will still ache dully.
Ray Ball is dead. On Tuesdays
she bought apricots from a street stall.
The metro was crowded with limbs slick
with sweat and gleamed like cinder stars.
Everyone grumbled in the crush
of musky bodies. The walk from the stop
up the hill to her small loft was short,
the step out onto the balcony
shorter still. On a Tuesday the only
bystanders were chronic ache and wine.
Ray Ball currently lives on the land of the Dena’ina, where she works as a history professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She is the author of four books, including the chapbooks Tithe of Salt (Louisiana Literature, 2019) and Lararium (Variant Lit, 2020). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including descant, Glass, Orange Blossom Review, and Waccamaw, and have received multiple nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. She is an associate editor at Coffin Bell and an assistant editor at Juke Joint. You can find her on Twitter @ProfessorBall.
