Issue 4 Full Text

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Jen Schalliol Huang

Ritornello

And do I keep you constantly with me
for instance, tattooed on my skin
as three blue-hearted flowers,
a simple translation of blood for blood

And do I carry you all the time inside me
though the blood has long gone
and all the familiar cells will evacuate
in turn within three years or so

And is your little triad ghost a happiness
to remember or a pain much like contractions,
unmistakable when they come, demanding?
One after another? Each in turn?

And were my several months a motherhood,
despite my continuing solo, my going ahead
with you behind, my choosing to survive you?
The story, every chapter, I retell:

constantly        I keep you       I do     with me
tattooed blue   blood inside the blood   all the time
familiar little triad      a ghost happiness
like several months, continuing: my you

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Jen Schalliol Huang received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recently left the Second City for Boston. Her chapbook, Means of Access, was printed through The Kenyon Review, and her work has appeared or is upcoming in Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, decomP, Gone Lawn, RHINO, Your Impossible Voice and elsewhere. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee as well as a consideration for Best New Poets.

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Elizabeth Bradfield

Fourth Occupation, Baffin Island

A slate foundation dug into the slope,
whale bones wedged in cracks, entranceway

sighting toward sea, heather lush from what
was scattered. One bone drilled and carved. Not

marked Thule site on the charts. Not yet forbidden.

I sat in the doorway. A caribou (reindeer, here called reindeer)
skull with only one antler was being buried by beach.

There were ridges to climb, valleys, falls, tundra
but I just wanted to sit, quiet, a falcon

scolding from the ridge, snowmelt gurgling through scree.

The Thule left because it got colder, because
there were no whales to hunt, and then

westerners encroached on their skin-spear boats. Vikings came
for a brief blush. Trappers, route-seekers, the foot

soldiers of politics. And us? This ship of us?
The land has not absorbed that story yet.

The falcon does not know that call.

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Elizabeth Bradfield

Encountering the Oomingmak, a Conversation across Decades and through Silence

            My first sighting in the Tacoma zoo post-
renovation, pre-high school. Rolling hills. Their squat,
shaggy selves a paradox: so boring, so riveting.

I have often seen black dots on a white hillside and been undecided even with the aid of a good glass
as to whether they were boulders or musk-oxen.[1]

Later, on Devon, the same as Mac. Long
minutes on the bridge with binos, debating.

We shall go on leisurely killing muskoxen whenever possible for ourselves and our dogs[2]

            Leisurely.

…the practice of rubbing their heads on their legs puzzled me for some moments, until I concluded
that they were rubbing away the frost formed about their eyes by the condensation of their breath in cold weather.  They were thus able to see their assailants more clearly.[3]

Wrong. No trees so they mark the trunks
of their legs. Scent transferal. Territory. Mac was meant
to smell them and then run.

In 1917, apparently in response to the continuing destruction of muskoxen in Canada’s arctic by
MacMillan’s party, the government of Canada initiated conservation legislation to protect the species.[4]

I have to think he didn’t know. What don’t I know?

It is a shame that the boys in their excitement killed so many. [5]

Shame.

The little fellow, possibly a month old, faced out with the others….Later we captured him and slipped
on a dog harness….Later, we tied him to the body of the dead wolf.[6]

I think he loved the little one. There’s a photo:
Mac sitting on snow, hands deep in scruff,
for once not looking at the lens.

_________________________________
[1] MacMillan, Etah and Beyond, 170
[2] MacMillan quoted 1914 in Muskox Land, 412
[3] MacMillan, National Geographic, July 1925, p. 706
[4] Muskox Land, p. 273
[5] MacMillan quoted 1914 in Muskox Land, 413
[6] MacMillan, Etah and Beyond, p. 175

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Elizabeth Bradfield

Of Flight

Or frightened, said Eliza, and, grass blade
tremoring where I held it above the still
head of the grasshopper, I knew she
was right.
Seconds earlier, the bright
yellow clap of flight had startled up & caught
my predator-quick eye. We’d been talking
about art, music & what we might make
together, the world’s bad news held
aside, pushed back like a curtain so we
could peer into something else.
And
I saw it. Tracked it as it landed, folded,
settled small and inconspicuous: dull, dun. Then
my torn pointer, pointing: Look. So bold,
as we stilled together above it, unmoving
but no longer unseen on a path mown through
a small field.
I knew it took air into its body
through small holes along its abdomen, knew how
it rasped song, leg pulled against forewing, its own
instrument.  But see what I’d forgotten
again.
My loud attention turned threat before
I could think and check it…Innocent.
Innocent.  Yet I think now of woman
after woman stepping into sudden speech,
naming predators we knew and named
among ourselves, beating hard into flight, both
bold & frightened, bright & seen—

—fall 2018

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Writer/naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Toward Antarctica, Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work and Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, West Branch, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion and elsewhere. Winner of the Audre Lorde Prize from the Publishing Triangle, finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, her awards also include a Stegner Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Scholarship and a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press and a contributing editor at the Alaska Quarterly Review, she lives on Cape Cod with her partner and is Associate Professor and co-director of creative writing at Brandeis University.

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Precious Okpechi

shadowed

the bark of trees
surrounds us
dark as the distance
between them.
there is the little
shuffling of feet
on dead leaves,
& palms smoothing
against the other.
I don’t know
who needs saving
more: the woods
crackling under fire
with consistent
single cries,
or the only boy
with a head missing
from his shadow.
it is true whatever
happens to us,
our shadows
suffer the same
fate. & mother says
deformed shadows
are from under-
worlds, they come
to walk their masters
home – this is some
thing I don’t know
either, how this boy leaves:
dragged from the head
into the night, or chopped
off by this shadow
eager to predict
a future for once.
this night is more
than the little
suns in the sky.

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Precious Okpechi studies biochemistry at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. His work has appeared in Brittle Paper, Praxis Magazine, Nthanda Review, Kissing Dynamite, 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Poetry and is forthcoming in the Nigeria Poetry Anthology.

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Bob Hicok

You had to be there: a poem of good fortune

We gloriously puked, every one of us
on a catamaran ride between dots of land
in the Mediterranean forty years ago.
A boat with one big room full of people
giddy as hummingbirds on meth at the start.
Smiling like hatchets. Like bonfires
in shorts. Then the zoom. The chop. The bounce.
Then the contagion of vomit. One after another.
Two after too many to count. With nowhere to go
and nothing else to watch. No channel
to tune our lives to. No bell
to stick our heads in. No point to solace
or sympathy or prayer or tissue.
We could have used a firehose or a god
but Zeus was elsewhere raping a swan.
The first person to lose it
tried to hide in the open, behind her hand, the air.
Her retching sent a long wave of conversation
through the room, a twittering of sympathy
and nervousness over whether to watch
or turn away, until one and then another
bent over a sea-sickness bag, when the chatter
smashed into gasps and exclamations
as people got a sense of what was coming.
On the surface (on every surface)
it was the most disgusting experience of my life.
But trapped and joined by this democratic loss
of control, we became a tiny polis
in which shame had no purpose and differences
were trumped by the unity of our unraveling.
You couldn't think about how you
or others looked, couldn't slide or slink
or pay your way free of this. We were the same.
We were ruined and alone and pounding our way
to an island famous for the shards
of a civilization in love with light. I adored Greece.
The blue houses and water and sky.
The food on Oia. The Parthenon at night.
Kids shooting smack in the bushes on the walk up.
Kids fucking. The klieg-lit ruins
suggesting a career in home renovations: a splash
of cornice here, a little rebirth
of an ancient culture there. I felt young
everywhere I went. No more than a zygote
with a clean passport. But I'm most grateful
for the puking, for how quickly
we accepted our wretchedness and the equality
bestowed by suffering side by side. Toward the end,
long after anyone had anything left to give,
and as if a sigh were passed like a cigarette
around the room, we sat back, enjoyed the ride,
and smiled, manwomanchild. Decorum had died
and been reborn as affection. We seemed softer,
truer dreamers. As if the sun, as if we had finally seen us.

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Bob Hicok

Refraction

In Alaska, the sun had insomnia:
I chased a rainbow at midnight
south of nowhere, in a rental car,
having lost my favorite cap.
As fast as I went, the rainbow went.
As awake as I was, the sky never blinked.
As much trouble as I have
being around people, Alaska agrees:
Alaska gives humans the cold shoulder,
the frozen river, the scary bear.
I love that Alaska wants to be alone too.
For hours, the world was empty
of McDonalds, lawnmowers, For Sale signs,
capitalism; it was like looking in a mirror
that ignored my face, that saw
where I really came from, that stared back
at the savannah inside my bones.
I pulled over and built a house
of my affection: I would live there
with distance and mountains
and the intelligence of rainbows,
who are smart to be untouchable.
If we caught them, we'd put them in zoos,
cut them open, try to civilize them,
teach them French, teach them war.
I pulled over, sat on the hood
and leaned into the air
with my capless and bald head,
the bite of it, the hello of it,
and decided to stand taller within myself,
like a swing set or giraffe.
I've driven along fracked fields,
where mountains have been scalped
and refineries channel apocalypse
with their forests of pipes, their fire
and smoke,
and while some places make me eager
for lobotomy, Alaska
made me want to be better, think better,
do better: to fit in. Not that I know
what that is or means. Not that we can.
Just that we better. Just that we must.

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Bob Hicok

Bring your daughter to work day (all her life)

She wanted to know at what speed
wind would rip a dress from her doll.
They strapped the doll to a vertical rod
at the top of a steel test frame
and dressed her in an evening gown,
something Cinderella would have liked.
Seventy two MPH. She wrote the figure
on a piece of paper. Then she wanted to know
how fast wind would have to be going
to suck jelly out of a jar.
How about we try something
we won't have to clean up, her father said,
tapping the top of her head with a pen.
What happens to a flute, she wondered:
can we make it sound like it's playing a song?
But they had no flute and it was getting late,
she needed to get home and do her math,
finish fifth grade, go to college, get a job,
bury her parents, get married, have a daughter,
find a lump in her breast, have it biopsied,
fall in love with the word benign,
study how ants respond to the presence
or absence of this or that microbe,
get tenure, and win an award
from her university as Researcher of the Year.
As part of that, she was given a small grant
to study anything she wanted. At what speed
does wind suck jelly out of a jar,
she asked the man who runs the wind tunnel,
a big man whose big head
might have another head inside it.
He scratched his big head,
this possible homunculus of a noggin
and looked up and to his left.
His eyes stayed there a long time,
as if this were home, as if wondering
is all they ever wanted to do. I don't know:
I guess it depends on the jelly, he said,
taking the jar from her hands: grape.

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Bob Hicok has published ten collections of poetry, including, most recently, Hold, for which he has been nominated for the 2019 Library of Virginia Literary Award for poetry. Hicok’s first book of poetry, The Legend of Light, received the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year. Other poetry collections include Elegy Owed, a finalist for the 2014 Library of Virginia Literary Award; Animal Soul, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Clumsy Living, winner of the 2008 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt national award for poetry from the Library of Congress. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Southern Review and The American Poetry Review, as well as in eight volumes of The Best American Poetry and six times in the Pushcart Prize anthology.

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Emily Rosko

First Lesson

At the end of our childhoods, the forest thinned. The pine-needle-coated-ground
gave way to gravel, then concrete ahead. We dragged our feet to make a trail, in case
we could return. Bird-rustle in the high branches. Tiptoed closer past the canopy,
toward the open wind. We looked back to where we had been: the trees
dematerialized to ones and zeroes, a fine mist settling in. Caught, we thought, one
last glimpse of the fox seeking sun in the rain; or, was it a trick of light playing on
the coarse woody debris? We turned up our collars, our jackets too short now at our
wrists. Thought, for a moment, we could sing our way back in: cedar, linden, ash, and
beech. At once, a chorus of squirrel-screech ushered us out, and then we knew.

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Emily Rosko

Shard & Smoke

In those fossilized days, the clouds were invited in. The purple drag of them
pressurized the living room with gloom. Light of the television the one beacon.
We razored all tenderness against scripted words. You’d go through the house
raiding the shelves, knocking everything off their seats. No, you were like some
large mammal after a hornet sting. Brain that warned fire, skin flaring with
ancient angers no one can reach or fathom. My tongue cut short, metallic with
blood. A thick coating to numb the shards. Later, you at the stove, turning the
faulty burner; me turning stone.

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Emily Rosko

Threat Cycle

Fires in auburn autumn,
the smoke stiffened our lungs
so that singing became difficult.

The moon barely showed
us our faces in the blot
of night, or lasted through

dawn’s thickness. Once,
the villages in the woods
were a sanctuary, each house

could be trusted. Now the men
go around setting torch
to ground, and the gun-spark

of their missed shots burns
black the rock and then
turns the field to flame.

The pines, alive last season
with beetles, become
pyre. Land deskinned.

Mountain coyotes ate
the ghosts became the new
ghosts. We thin

ashened, our hair matted.
They say the bread
will be scarce. We hear

the streams and soil are to
be poisoned to uproot us.
So many good creatures

have disappeared from earth.
So many new knocks
to start us from our doors.

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Emily Rosko is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Prop Rockery (University of Akron Press, 2012) and Raw Goods Inventory (University of Iowa Press, 2006). Additionally, she is the editor of A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (University of Iowa Press, 2011). Her poems have been published in AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, New Orleans Review and Pleiades, among others. She earned a MFA at Cornell and PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri. She is associate professor of English at the College of Charleston and the poetry editor for Crazyhorse.

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Simon Perchik

[From out the river below, these pilings]

From out the river below, these pilings
just born and already their wingtips
connect with another shore

though there's no feathers yet and underneath
just water, the instinct to stay still
when there's no wind --it's how all bridges

are built for the dead, the back
that is broken, has to be lifted
held up by another place and you follow

by lowering your head to let the river leave
know it is remembered, has a home
though not a star is out, no roofs with chimneys.

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Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Gibson Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2019. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.

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Andres Rojas

On a Line by Amiri Baraka

Your shadow wreaths the table. Windows
testify to a dark morning’s eulogy.

I make myself thankful
we are not in chains or behind wire.

Things have come to that.

I make myself thankful
for your face haloed in my hands.

You ask me to drive you to school
again the last time.

I don’t know that yet.

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Andres Rojas

Third Winter in Our Second Country

after/for Charles Simic

On this crystal-fanged night
the unflinching stars

are an old family
photo:

so many here
gone already.

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Andres Rojas

Soon Before All Light Is Gone

Frame now as a hand like a wave
on night’s sea, crashing. Still

a child, he peels seconds
off the evening

like insect wings:
boots multiply, breed

mud, see there’s no getting
out.

            In the movie-set
courtroom, smoke

refracts shadows
and meat-marbled

light:
the war criminal

shrugs in his death
shackles, bored of resignation,

pointing fingers harden
to bullets and skulls. Now

frame the boy as he fears
for the sun’s canary egg

as it breaks to be healed. And frame
how he cries for dead cicadas

oblivious
to the will of the swarm.

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Andres Rojas is the author of the chapbook Looking For What Isn’t There (Paper Nautilus Debut Series winner, 2019) and of the audio chapbook The Season of the Dead (EAT Poems, 2016). His poetry has been featured in the Best New Poets series and has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in, among others, AGNI, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review and Poetry Northwest.

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Martha Silano

Pain Is the Foundation

Instead of a uterus, a small and inconspicuous moth,
a moth at the mouth of my womb, a cervix like a walrus’s nose.
Instead of a body, a broken communion wafer, the broken body

of a man on a cross who touched your lip
to remove a crumb, touched it and everything changed.
From then on you could love another, a flock of starlings,

a house blacker than the eaves. Pain
is the foundation; relief is the roof you dream
of jumping off. Life begins and ends in a church

of redwoods, where you do and do not grow a storm.
Your beauty’s like the moss on a rock on a rainy day.
Something is hidden between your ribs. It’s a purple violet, a smudge

of violent, a rib not a rib but a star.
You can hear the hummingbird’s not-quite
song, that buzzy ticking. It’s like you could

box them up, a menagerie of iridescent wings;
it’s like you could love the whole lot of them, each beak,
each one’s desire for the nectar in the fuchsia’s long-tubed blooms;

it’s like they all belong
in a museum curated by llamas
who will never escape their muddy corral,

though perhaps someday
someone will hold open the gate,
welcome them into the darkening day.

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Martha Silano is the author of five books of poetry, including Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. She is also co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press). Martha’s poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, New England Review and AGNI, among others. Honors include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award in Poetry. Her work appears in over three-dozen print anthologies, including The Best American Poetry series. Martha has received writing fellowships from Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, among others, and she spent eight months in Oregon’s Wild and Scenic Rogue River Canyon as the 2004 Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency recipient. Martha teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA. Learn more about Martha and her work at marthasilano.net.

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Kathryn V. Jacopi

Death in Three Parts

Purchased, cherries shine.
A recycled, perforated box,
the baking soda,
shoved way back.
Mold will appear
like a rock
dropped into a river.

*

The badger’s shot in the backyard,
runs into the forest.

Fire gorges on the forests,
wings against purple skies.

*

In the backyard she digs up
cardboard bits, jawbone,
a Polaroid, edge-eaten, a dog: 1963-1974.

She looks at the bag of concrete, teeth and bone,
The hole she dug for the fence post.

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Kathryn V. Jacopi, an adjunct professor, received her MFA in creative writing from Fairfield University. Her writings have appeared in Pudding Magazine, Statorec, Fjord, Manzano Mountain Review and Drunk Monkeys. Kathryn's poem received first place for the 2016 Hysteria Writing Competition. When she’s not reading, writing and lesson planning, Kathryn’s either kayaking or enjoying her spouse’s fantastic cooking.

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Gillian Lynch

Liminal Space Steeplechase

June 4, 1923
Belmont Park, NY

Not a four-person car slipping
over white, not a plane dripping
out of the sky. More malfunction
than collision, more one person
moving on that Sweet Kiss
to death. The difference this
two-mile stretch. Not
a person notices, not a single.

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Gillian Lynch

Rows

I might as well hang
out here if I’m dying
anyway. He really said it when the cops
asked. Nitrous nostrils facing
that cartoon sky. Leaning against
a stone angel in a sea

of serried gravestones that still
speak silently amongst each other
of his failures, the failures of others, their expiration
dates. The angel’s polished eyes match
her skin’s serene. The cemetery – a city, a city
like the one his mother

is now. The type that doesn’t
sleep at night.

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Gillian Lynch

Of the Little Magothy

To think of the banks
of that place, before

the weather, before
the wilt. Where our river

leaked into the hollow
of the hollowed. Where the warble

would tune with the high school
band in the field lining

our old backyards. Like most things,
I (and probably

you) didn’t notice until
the lull. With each flood

that doesn’t, this is what you remind me
of. But since I wrote it down,

it has probably changed.

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Gillian Lynch is a senior undergraduate student studying creative writing at Salisbury University. She has previously published in The Scarab and has poems forthcoming in Asterism.

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Sarah Uheida

Entering a Room

The poem: deceptive,
we are not the children of tomorrow
so do not break my jaw with spring and summer/ with ponds and pearls/
I saw you sitting in a puddle of survivor’s guilt and walked right past/ I’ve got my own rivers
to drink dry, baby/ all I wanted was shelter for the night/ hold me cowardly that I may
wake and walk/ my bed was set on fire eight years ago/ and now/ touch me where there
is already blood/ touch me like burn and bandage/ Look what I’ve done with the room
honey/ I have charred the walls/ Smoked your perfume outta the pillows/ oh and honey/
I won’t be able to make the dinner date/ or the breakfast in bed/ cannot get back/ got
caught in the storm/ or in the openfire/ got caught stealing bread/ or breaking my
affection against your teeth/ got caught whispering to the enemy/ got caught in the
bombs of 2011/ a boy’s body lit like an unlit match/ another woman, bodiless/
there is this saying in Libyan/ how does it go, oh god/
I am trying to detangle memory from trauma/ trying to open backdoors to my childhood/ so as
to not have the alarms impale me/
entering a room is not the same as exiting it
/that’s how it went/
entering a room is not the same as exiting it/ and you have been entering and entering
/so sinless/
honey look at the mess I’ve made/ I dropped the paper knife/ admired the papercut/ but the
wound was unimpressive/ the blood just won’t gush goddamn it/ it gapes for a long time,
though/ so that is something in this nothingness of surviving/ you hide the strappings from
me/ lasso the fishing net/ I think of the Mediterranean and its hungers/ lapping at my
mouth/ I think of the Roman ruins on which mama built us a house/ and now
/ruined ruins/
and now/ revelations like the Nile/ but love is betraying the night/ love is waking up/ too
gentle/ give me your mouth/ like a hook/ pass my panties/ I needa go home and air out
the smokeroom/ because entering a room was never the same as exiting it/ and I have
been exiting and exiting/
so sinless

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Sarah Uheida was born in Tripoli, Libya. She is 21 years old and is currently busy with her undergraduate in psychology and linguistics at Stellenbosch University. She learnt to speak English at the age of 13 when the civil war in Libya forced her to start a new life abroad. She is compiling a poetry collection, Beautiful Women and Where to Find Them, and penning down her memoirs of the war, A Girl’s Plethora of Knives. You can find her strolling through the streets of Stellenbosch and reading Sylvia Plath. Her work is featured in the literary journal New Contrast and Blindeye.

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Taylor Schaefer

To Sachs Covered Bridge

Gettysburg, PA

They say these trusses are sown
with ghosts, or at least that’s what I remember

as I step into you. I can imagine
what the tour guides say, stepping foot

over toe: both armies passed over,
once in triumph, once in retreat. This passage could echo

with leather boots, either worn through
to the wool or left on the battlefield. But I look

for what guides studiously ignore: scores
carved and inked into your skin. Names, addresses,

phone numbers, dates. I let my fingers fall to the deepest,
the oldest mark left. ’58. Can you tell me

who was first?

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Taylor Schaefer

Fabrications

I.

Your mother didn’t give you
the choice of gun or needle. She took you straight

to the corner mall kiosk. Ten dollars
to pinch your ears, mark them violet. One,

two, three came out of left field. False diamond backings studded through
two-year-old earlobes. She’ll tell the story to anyone— what a doll you were

later in those tiny golden hoops! Conveniently, she doesn’t remember
when the holes turned              flaky and raw. You

II.

let me choose needle               (by eliminating gun). You said
put your shoulders back. It won’t hurt that much. Pulled me

      by the wrist, kept me from the sunset bent
through glass pipes, viper green dappled sharp against dark

          carpet. For me it was two young men in a sterile room, bursting
with color and shiny rings in all the places
you were bare. You held my hand

and squeezed it through the one, two,
three that felt like the eternity between

bowstring slapping forearm and arrow       buried dead
center in the bale.           The flesh pulsed for hours

III.

after. I chose needle, held my own hand
in my mouth as I bit the left pinky to the quick. Let it

happen with a onetwothree that seared through
me, a hot knife. Then I let it happen again. Couldn’t sleep

on my left side for two months, couldn’t eat chips for six
weeks, couldn’t swim June

through July but I can look
myself in the eye and know that I     make me.

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Taylor Schaefer is a student at Salisbury University. She is a lover of poetry, and tries to make work that either pulls and pulls at something deep inside or hands out black eyes like candy. Her previous works have also appeared in Poetry South, Stonecoast Review, Santa Clara Review, Polaris and The Scarab Literary Magazine.

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Michael Hettich

This Melody

1.
moved through our bodies
and taught us not to think

which taught us to open
our bodies to the grass

at the edge of those unexplained woods where the deer
stood without names

quivering
and taught us

to lie down and open
ourselves
and learn to

sleep
again

like the boulders

2.
Wake up! my father
would call on those chilly

mornings when my body
was somehow more dense

than it is now, and I could sleep for days,

growing my fur,
dreaming my life,

wondering when I’d be born, and what

I’d call myself
when I stopped pretending

and let what I feared come inside me.

3.
I’d like to carry myself away
myself, not let you
carry me 

            but the day is so full
of gleaming, and the breezes

are moving so slyly
through the trees, I feel

alone forever,
as though forever

were alive
like a body—

so I give myself to you

4.
For generations, their dead were buried
on top of each other, like mica-flecks or wounds.

            We think they knew    the dead still dream
for years beyond their lives; we think

they knew dreams push upward
like stones do, toward the light
while roots push deeper into darkness.

Imagine dreams rising from the old dead through the new--

                        hummingbird wings
woven like veils
across their empty eyes.

5.
The first dreams were trees
he explained to us then,

whose leaves were pressed
into oil and charcoal.

They contained a secret knowledge
only angels ever sang.

6.
In a room of rubble
and brittle light,

I suddenly know things
I’ll never understand:

each moment is a living
animal, leaping

sunlight
to give us

these bodies.

7.
all the shells on the beach,
all the ripped-up seaweed

                       teeming with tiny lives

the clothes you wear
as though they hadn’t
been made by children,
as though they made you shine

the breaths you will waste, all the heartbeats.

8.
the moon
rises

like a moth
into the darkness

inside us, full of satellites
mapping out our lives.

9.
Birdsong, older
than science or the prayers

oak leaves rustle
as they color into fall:

the song of my mother’s
labored breath

as I wait without knowing
to be born.

10.
He told us his parents
were angels who lived
in the branches outside
his bedroom.

They whispered and tapped
at his window when he slept,
so he climbed out and sat
in that tree for a while

with his parents, and looked at the moon.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Hettich was born in Brooklyn, NY, and grew up in New York City and its suburbs. He has lived in upstate New York, Colorado, Northern Florida, Vermont, Miami, and Black Mountain, North Carolina, where he now lives with his family. He has published over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, and his work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. A new book of poems, To Start an Orchard, was published in September by Press 53. Michael Hettich’s awards include several Florida Individual Artists Fellowships, a Florida Book Award, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry and the David Martinson–Meadow Hawk Prize. He often collaborates with visual artists, musicians and fellow writers. His website is michaelhettich.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kathleen Hellen

the crow that knows itself as evening

—you are close, I feel you close
a particle of sound, faint oscillations

through soundfall of the tires, the hammer
of the headlights, your frequency a mouthpiece
held up to the self, howling

through the clouds
becoming rain
becoming oceans

though static in the backup
on the parkway. I ask you how to breathe
into my feet, how to find you—

what you are looking for
is everywhere, you say
signaling through mist, sniffing
at the saffron boundaries
the trees’ new magenta

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Colorado Review, The Massachusetts Review, Leaping Clear, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East and West Branch, among others. Hellen has won the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. For more on Kathleen visit https://www.kathleenhellen.com/.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Bridget Tevnan

They’re Katydids

In the salt marshes
it’s dragonflies as big
as birds as big
as planes,
and passing through Austin
it’s Mormon crickets.
The shieldback katydids
—with vestigial wings,
an amendment out of context—
cannot fly.
Starved for salt,
they breaststroke
through the sagebrush ocean
in a nod to Bonneville,
a retelling of the 8th plague.
A caravan of patriots
on The Loneliest Road in America
gather over a grease slick.

Eureka County, 1882,
Trains unable to make headway
over the main line
of the Central Pacific Railroad

Leonard J. Arrington,
a cross between
a spider and a buffalo

The Miracle of the Gulls
doesn’t mention
the miracle of the nuptial gift,
the 850 milligram spermatophore passed,
the horsehair worm carried,
that the roving band
follows a listless leader
through seven instars
—stopping to sate on the dead,
starting to pace the succeeding swarm—
up to two kilometers a day.

At the International Hotel,
it’s, I heard that once they return,
it’s another four years.
The fowl’s feast first
devour tossed millet
as a woman waiting on news
of the Salute to America
pulls her garden.
I want to preserve one a novelty
in Allura Red
and suck a candy
the size of a dinner plate.

In 1863,
moguls shipped that hotel
from Virginia City to Austin,
and during the Holocene,
juniper and pinyon
retreated to sky islands,
and on July 4th,
I crushed a hundred some odd
migrant Mormon crickets
with my sedan.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Bridget Tevnan grew up in New Hampshire, but now lives at the unique intersection of the Eastern Sierra Nevada foothills and western edge of the Great Basin Desert, in Reno, NV. A student of the natural world, she spends time gardening, gleaning, botanizing, foraging and wildcrafting, with her heeler mutt, Bodie, in tow.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jeremy Rock

Absterge

Of all the forms of silence, the sleeper
hold of fresh-fall snow is the densest, wrought

iron against the aluminum of a car’s AC
pinwheeling to rest. A shout into rural midnight

tapestries itself between loom-arm firs and a memory
over pine sap and snapped twigs, breath

steam-clouding in whisper font, are you sure
no one will find us? The silt-bottom grope

of the lake smothers change, preserves in rotgut
twilight an archaeology of sinking. The undertow aches

the floor, rugburns with anonymous granules
those resting out of reach

of light. The town will dredge. The mystery
will be stripped, flashlit, autopsied. An insurance

agent will say, I’m sorry, there is nothing more
we can do, as if speaking of the guilt might wash it

from the record. By winter, the pontoons
and two-stroke sixties will be moored and wrapped

for the frost. November winds can carry a name
from one shore to another with a kind of tightness

across the low-tide glass, but the words never
come. It’s easier not to look.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jeremy Rock

Scrapped Wallops Launch, 2008

Ignore the Posted sign, coal-walk
barefoot between chestnut gravel and white
cobble, uncertain in the dark if it’s better

to rip off the bandage and run blind
for the sound of the waves. Wrap yourself
in a blanket poncho, fringe dipping into the Sheepshead

all capillary, and wait. A kayak is tied to the piling, rhythmic
knock against the wood like a snore. Late spring bullfrogs
bagpipe over the reeds. The flash pan drumroll of the lighthouse

sweeps miles of buds and naked stems, oyster shells sour
and gutted on the crushed calcium drive, and you kick the water
like disturbing the moon will pull morning closer. An hour, two

and I guess they’re not doing it as though a pillar of fire
skinning the night sky could be louder than the sound
of breeze against cattails, coming in and coming in.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jeremy Rock is from Frederick, Maryland, and is currently a student at Salisbury University. His work has been featured in New Mexico Review, The Scarab, The Tuscarora Review and elsewhere.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Derek Annis

Departure

Mother touched her hair
to the torch to keep us
warm, peeled strips of flesh
from her chest for us to eat.
We sat beneath the porch
to smoke and drink. We buried
our dirty thumbs to the knuckles
in each other’s eyes, broke
roses against the rocks.
She fashioned a buckle
from bottle caps
with which to clip my lips
shut, and blew our noses
out with bricks. I love you
more than putrid fruit,
she said, and plucked
the few remaining nails
from my fingers.
He wore his finest suit
the day he left,
she said, pulled the teeth
from his own head
and left them in a box
atop the mantle.
Then she sprouted sails,
allowed the wind
to lift her.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Derek Annis is the author of Neighborhood of Gray Houses, which will be released by Lost Horse Press in March, 2020. Derek lives in Spokane, Washington, and holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University. Their poems have appeared in The Account, Colorado Review, Epiphany, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review Online, Spillway, Third Coast and many other journals.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Catherine Weiss

Upon Returning the U-Haul On-Time, Without Crashing

Someone smoked in there,
said the guy handing
me the keys, apologetic.
I tried really hard to
get it out. I’m the kind
of person who can’t
cook because I won’t hold
sharp objects. My hands
inevitably shake
and then I overthink it:
maybe I am the kind of
person who pushes
a blade to my thumb just to
be dramatic about
forgotten tomatoes.
And yet! I have successfully
navigated this cargo van
through several towns
and also in reverse. I've conquered
parking lots, driven in rain.
I am the kind of person for
whom renting a U-Haul
and returning us both
intact is an accomplishment,
but not once have I mistaken
a pedestrian for a plastic bag
or a red light for a moon gone
hungry. I am doing it all correctly,
become the kind of person who says
Yeah, I can drive a U-Haul,
knowing it is cruel and also true.
I want to stop in the middle
of this intersection
and nap in all the unused
furniture pads. I want
to drive to a new town
and buy a house
without bringing any boxes.
I want extraction from all
the things I said
I was capable of doing.
I drive on King Street,
past the Stop & Shop
and Liquors 44. Through the
green light turning yellow,
grasping the wheel with
skeleton hands, windshield
wipers playing on the radio.
Strangely, I am not done
doing these things
I don't want to do, thank god,
I am still as here as the smoke
inside these tired
cushion seats.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Catherine Weiss

i can't tell if i'm okay in real life but supposedly all the characters in my dreams are played by me, so

i look for my face in the shopkeeper’s face,
find myself in the taffeta wall beyond
her back. fifty champagne dresses
hung up to the ceiling and i can’t decide
which face to wear to prom. here i am
in my old city’s face, a park dribbling
down its center aisle, cigarette tracks
smoking east to montauk. i'm in my grandfather
clock's face. i'm in my trickster ocean's face.
i'm dressed in my finest mother's
mother's mother's face. here's my face
as the earth’s face, as seen from a jewel
toned vacation, my face shattered into rainbow
spectacle by all these comets with my dimple.
my face, here's my face as a grown
boy’s face. he turns to me from the window,
showing me our forlorn, pink wet cheeks,
he already knows why, tear-formed stalactites
stretching out as if to kiss.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Catherine Weiss is a poet, artist and organizer based in Western Massachusetts. Their work has been published in Tinderbox, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Counterclock, Petrichor, Noble/Gas Quarterly and elsewhere. More at http://catherineweiss.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ronda Piszk Broatch

My Kingdom Is Your Prayer

Tonight, I carry hope. It panics like a bird
in a closet, not unlike a shadow in catharsis.

Tell me what you do all day with your extra
rib, in that yellow colored sundress. Please

if it’s not too absurd, could you croak again
like a jay bird? There is not much more joy

than when we shared the responsibility
of blood, of bone. Such a gone song, little

sleeper, like a lion’s mane jellyfish, chandelier
of locks and keys, fringed in glass and sin.

Give me your fourth line, and I will cede
my citrus tattoo, my red pepper meat grinder.

Any more hurt than that, I’ll have to kiss
your knees, our brows wrecked with sweat.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Poet and photographer, Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press, 2015). Ronda is a finalist for the Four Way Books Prize, and her poems have been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. Her journal publications include Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Sycamore Review, Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol and Public Radio KUOW’s All Things Considered, among others.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mariah Bosch

Lunarpuntal

“What moves me most is that what
I don’t see exists nonetheless.” - Clarice Lispector

In this open field, I feel closer.                                               I always feel
closer to something                                                                 in this open field. I look
at the moon and lambs ear clouds                                         & think this can’t be real.
Come out of your houses                                                       and tell me it is:

this is suburban witness.                                                         Say this is real. Say that
the sunset and the half moon                                                 and lambs ear clouds exist
in the same sky tonight.                                                          Let’s linger on them,
learn I can build                                                                      textures to behold.

Devotion: when the moon is out                                             in the day,
as in the moon is in half devotion.                                          By now,
the end of a cycle, full devotion:                                            we both
vibrate in time. In this open field, I                                        know I could

walk to the moon.                                                                   I tell my lover, what will he say?
I ask him Where does the moon go?                                       I can only see half
and he says he never wanted to know.                                   He can tell me
what the moon does to us on Earth                                         but I already know.

On earth, the ocean moves so fully,                                       with or without devotion —
I move so fully, with or without devotion.                             These are things
that I don’t need him to tell me.                                             I feel
the frequencies of devotion. Sometimes I stare                      longingly at the moon,

at others. Or I forget it is there.                                              I want to know where it goes
when I can’t see it, I do not want to think about it                 only being half forever.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mariah Bosch is a Chicana poet from Fresno, CA. She attends the MFA program there, where she works with Juan Felipe Herrera as a graduate fellow in his Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio. Her work can be found in Peach Magazine, The Acentos Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry and is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Joanna Gordon

Migration

We came by boat, by plane. We came in droves and droves. We came for vacations, for plastic
tropics, for coconut flavored grandeur. We arrived as tourist and never left. We brought our
husbands, our wives, our children. We came on fighter jets in fresh Navy whites. We chased our
children with thick white sunscreen down beaches we couldn’t pronounce—Wae-kiki and Ala
Moena. We came in elaborate bathing costumes, all polyester frills and red & white bunting. We
adorned our shoulders with lavish plumeria, with fragrant puakenikeni, with violet orchid lei.
More names we can’t pronounce; we call them flowers. Paradise is two dollars, made by nimble
fingers we don’t have to remember. We tell our children don’t stare, don’t talk to locals. We
aren’t sure if they speak the language we do, where that accent comes from, that skin with its
dark wood stain, its wind-beaten working class look. We drink rum poolside at resorts called
“The Royal Hawaiian” and call ourselves Hawaiian too. Sometimes we go home, swearing to
call our Hawaiian romances, our lovely hula girls and never do. Later we will reminisce about
our exotic lovers, all hips and grass skirts. Sometimes we marry the hula girls, give them pale-
faced children and last names like Smith. We buy land, buy homes, buy hotels. We hire locals to
wash our floors and change our sheets for fifty cents a day. When Elvis Presley vacations in our
suites, we name a cocktail after him, a Blue Hawaii, blue curacao and pineapple juice, a moon
sitting atop the weary sea.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Joanna Gordon is a writer from the gentrified swamplands of East Honolulu. She graduated from the University of Hawaii at Manoa with a degree in English and completed a Masters in Fine Arts at Western Washington University. She served as the former Assistant Managing Editor of the Bellingham Review, as well as published her poems and prose with Cherry Tree, The Tenderness Project, Blood Tree Literature and more. Her writing is interested in discussions of white privilege, diaspora, trauma and tenderness. In her spare time, Joanna enjoys scalding cups of coffee, hiking, bright lipstick and the company of great friends.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Carolyn Oliver

Saint Agnes Meets a Hawk on the River’s Edge

Hawk, my lamb is lost, she says.
Her voice is a piccolo the hawk
could grip between two red talons.
Where have you lost your lamb?
The rain tastes like moss and smoke.
There is nowhere I have not lost my lamb:
in forests, in caves, in dwelling places.
The river sediment, stirred, disturbed,
remembers winter. A bird in hand is worth
one bird, one bird exactly. I could be
your lamb—my feathers soft as fleece.
What’s the use in hunting through the storm?
The trees grow from their own martyrs.
Hawk is too familiar. The girl does not reply.
Or cannot. Her hair grows and grows,
enough to make a rope to the other shore,
or a nest.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Carolyn Oliver’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in FIELD, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Booth, Glass, Sixth Finch, Southern Indiana Review, Sugar House Review and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry and the Frank O’Hara Prize from The Worcester Review. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family. Links to her writing live at carolynoliver.net.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Bill Burtis

Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image

There, against the ultimate gloom
of what we do not know, is
the splattering of everything we do.

The whole place is littered
with tiny disks of whirling stars,
galaxies of millions of suns

and planets and moons
and every color of light in pinpoints
farther off than those

and then farther.  All on black satin
or maybe it’s nothing, appearing
as space, with the same consistency

as rooms at night, but darker.
We fumble through the threshold
thinking to find with a foot

or an outstretched hand
the thing that will bruise us
or trip us up, not imagining

that we are in it, swimming
in a consciousness beyond fathoms
beyond what we could have conjured

even as children, cautiously
entering the ocean at night
for the first time.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Bill Burtis

After the Last Train

In the old ceramic subway hall,
too early or late in the day, never
any weather but the storms
brought in and out by trains,

one now just sifting down
behind the departure
of the last train, the one
the man has missed,

he rocks uncertainly
heel to toe, hands pocketed,
listening, noticing again
the blunt brown smell

of a place so long
without sunlight, full
of used breath and skin dust
and earth filling in.

Here there is, too,
a palpable waiting of souls,
light left by so many eyes
peering into the tunnel,

having felt the push of air,
to see the shine on the curving wall,
hear the first faint clicking,
feel the slow thunder in their feet.

But he knows none of that is coming,
sees the next hours same as this one.
After a while, he will turn to the stairs
for solace, for the change and direction they offer.

________________________________________________________________________________________

A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Bill Burtis has published in literary magazines and journals, print and online, for many years. Most recently, he's had work in 3QR, Aurorean and Nine Mile. Previous publications include work in Seneca Review, Paris Review, Sou'wester, Chelsea, Aspen Anthology and several others. He lives and writes in Stratham, New Hampshire and Readfield, Maine.

________________________________________________________________________________________

James Owens

Cycle, Then Stasis

A man rests at a table between the lake and the museum,
shuttered since tourists escaped this poor town for fall,

and a cormorant tacks back and forth a few metres
from shore, diving and coming up unpredictably,

straying beneath the sombering images of sky and cloud
for what seems an impossible term, before its dark head

bobs into sight far away. Now the man lays his face
on the table and shields it from wind under his hands.

Maybe he is tired, maybe his child is sick and he prays
without the faith he had once, begging to take her place,

maybe the whole world is bitter. Or maybe he is happy,
despite how this looks, thinking about his wife's body.

He must still hear the couple of dozen grey-backed gulls
that loiter on a near patch of sand, shrieking as one or another

rushes the lake in a hopping run to lift off and flap
over the water in a lop-sided loop that brings it back

where it began, as if testing the weather
for some quality favorable to gulls and finding it lacking.

Beside the table, an ancient boiler from the engine room
of the fishing tug Everad – which, a plaque says,

pulled whitefish from the North Channel off Mudge Bay
during the 1940s – proclaims the town's useful past.

The wind shifts, and the reflected sunset shivers like flesh.
The hollow of the boiler would be large enough to sleep in.

________________________________________________________________________________________

James Owens's most recent book is Mortalia (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poems and translations appear widely in literary journals, including recent publications in Adirondack Review, The Curlew, The Honest Ulsterman and Southword. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in a small town in northern Ontario.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Suzanne Frischkorn

Victors of Tiny, Silent, Invasive Insect

Where the Ash canopy died

thickets of multiflora rose
and barberry flourish.

Hardwood saplings sprout. Sunlight
penetrates the forest.

Woodpeckers nest in dead tree
cavities, feast
on Emerald Ash Borer larvae.

Wood rabbits rebound.
They court by jumping—
one over the other,

or one leaps and the other
darts beneath.

Tell me, what did sorrow ever do?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Lit Windowpane (2008), Girl on a Bridge (2010) and five chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Indiana Review, North American Review and Verse Daily. Her honors include the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook, Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Writer’s Center and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.

________________________________________________________________________________________

James Miller

For Abbas Kiarostami

In Koker
and Tehran, students
leave doors wide.

Trim rind
and pith from their
breakfast tangelos,

whose carpels turn
like staffless score-sheets
into shallow bowls.

Eyes close: wait
on dark Queensland
mudflats.

Moonless. Listen
for unchurched frogs,
wise in their new wet.

________________________________________________________________________________________

James Miller is a native of Houston, though he has spent time in the American Midwest, Europe, China, South America and India. Recent publications include Cold Mountain Review, The Maine Review, Lunch Ticket, Gravel, Main Street Rag and Juked.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Carly Madison Taylor

Dream-Plane

We are on an airplane
and this is a clue,
alarm of unreality.
It tilts as if to touch
an impossible skyscraper,
the dream-physics slide up and up
skimming windows
like seawater. This is after
I wander the night
into conclusions:
not mourning. Every
hard science is a form
of philosophy,
it takes equal faith to test
how as to wonder why
and still, you say,
why don’t we try,
why don’t we split
an atom? Because, of course:
let’s fuck around
and get blown up
for the sake of knowing,
for what’s in there
when we are here bound
by exquisite inexistence, gravity
in spacetime, skyscrapers.
We fly and I wonder
neither whether there are people
in that building
nor if it matters.
You are on the plane
and I cannot take
my eyes off you.
In dress after dress
(because this is a dream)
on every perilous edge
when I reach out
for your hand as I fall,
when you catch me
and never ask why
and never ask how
and when I wake up
it has always been
lifetimes. Dream lifetimes
turbulent and unbelted,
your hands around my
throat when the engine
cuts out, our only
touch. This is not about
belief, this is wrenching open
at atom, let’s fuck around
and blow ourselves up
on this dream-plane,
this inevitable, this
color of a bruise,
this instant before
nothingness as our bodies
come back to each other.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Carly Madison Taylor is a poet, songwriter and essayist living in Buffalo, NY. She earned her BA in creative writing and dance studies from Knox College in 2016. More of her work can be found at or is forthcoming from Rhythm & Bones Lit, PVSSY MAGIC, Electric Moon Literature, Memoir Mixtapes, Blanket Sea Magazine and Vamp Cat Magazine. She’s on Twitter @carma_t and Instagram @car_ma_t.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lindsey Novak

Acquired Taste

She can get used to anything:
the taste of coffee, living in fear.

Used to the heat:
frog, grow accustomed to this pot.

Praying to the celestial bodies right now:
heal her & make her famous.

She has drawn a circle around her in fire;
she has circled her tongue in salt.

She both has & becomes the abusive father.
She has already made a poppet of you.

She has spent all day
relearning how to breathe.

The Pleiades are seven sisters
but it must be the Cherokee in her

who speaks to the pine
trees.

She just wants some time
to know that she has time,

let her cerebrospinal fluid peak
& run back,

backwards—
like the Mississippi at New Madrid fault

line. I’ve been reeling back, too
recoiling at your touch,

world.
Take to the hills.

Didn’t I kneel enough to catch thick woven polyester tights against burnt sienna carpet?
Now what?
Wait for the organ failure & the ghosts
to sidle up beside me.

I turned all my prayers to lit matches
& I burned down every bridge I crossed.

How rarely I let myself
be soft.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lindsey Novak is a writer who followed the sun west from her native Missouri Ozarks to the dusty Arizona East Valley. She teaches composition for Arizona State University and her work appears in The Fourth River, The Rumpus, Atticus Review, Angel City Review, Puerto del Sol and is forthcoming in Chattahoochee Review and Stonecoast Review. She is a 2019 Best of the Net nominee and her chapbook, Echolalia, is available from dancing girl press.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mehves Lelic

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mehves Lelic is an Istanbul-born artist and educator based on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She received her BA from the University of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally, in venues such as the Ogden Museum, Filter Photo, Rotterdam Photo Festival and Cosmos Arles. She has been awarded grants from the National Geographic, the City of Chicago and the Turkish Cultural Foundation.