Issue 8 - 2023

Dear readers, Letter from the Editors

We are excited to present the eighth volume of 45th Parallel and proud of the strides we’ve made in enhancing the digital experience of our literary magazine—the fiction writers, essayists, poets, and artists we have the privilege of publishing deserve a venue at least half-equal to the quality of their work.

Herein you’ll find essayistic deep-dives into the history and underappreciated potential of parentheses, forays into the Shanghai Metro abroad and the Lan Su Gardens stateside, Polaroids that turn the quotidian into the spectral and fractal, and much more. While we enjoy the breadth of submissions we receive sans-theme, the resonances that nonetheless arise and swirl in these pages are the happiest of accidents. The editorial team often found themselves in total accord with the words of Nell Johnson’s poem “antiherstamine” – “i can’t believe/we live and sleep under the same moon” – as our selections at once affirm one another while also proving just how diverse the output of today’s writers and artists is.

We designed this virtual issue with readability in mind and overhauled our website to make for a more navigable and fluid reading experience. We’ve worked with talented undergradu-

ate interns here at Oregon State University to produce a thoughtfully laid out magazine that removes the need for our readers to visit several web pages to experience 45th Parallel in its entirety. Reading online should be joyous. We want our contributors and readers to feel our digital format is an additive opportunity for showcasing their incredible work.

We are immensely grateful to all of our readers for their support and enthusiasm. 45th Parallel would not be possible without you. We take pride in our mission to bring together a diverse selection of writers and artists from across the world, and are always striving to create a publication that represents their rich diversity and creativity.

Sincerely,

Daniel & Molly Managing Editors, Issue 8

Anna Gayle Art & Comics Editor

Natalie Patterson Poetry Editor

Kosisochukwu Ugwuede Prose Editor

Molly Weisgrau & Daniel Weiner Managing Editors

Layne Bolen & Cooper Theodore Design Interns

Masthead

PULSE

By Gordon Taylor

A robin examines the garden’s pooled rain. Leaves swept to the edge of the lawn by gusts of wind. Great broom after this morning’s storm. The sun is born again. I forget how to open a stuck jar of applesauce, escape to the backyard, drugged by late afternoon. Fall asleep. listen to the dead

I wake, stuck to a lounge chair in chilled dusk, chest pink and sizzling. Echo of slurs hurled with lit cigarettes from a pick-up truck in 1996 at my boyfriend and I holding hands. Nothing changes. Tonight, bodies will dance in pulses of light, shamed in strobes of bullets. History will stutter another list of names. Shoes flying off in the flee, thudding on sticky nightclub floors.

our noisy hearts repeating

Faux Postage

By Michael Thompson

Still the Dandelions Come

By Lynne Golodner

They grew up and out, gripping the soil, fanning in circles of soft jagged leaves like neck ruffles on Victorian royalty. Perfectly symmetrical, actually beautiful. Like art. Some small, some large, ready for picking, for cooking, for fermenting. But we don’t eat dandelions from the yard, though I’ll buy them from the farmers market in a bunch, cleaned and beautiful in their feather lightness and elegant length. At home, we only harvest what we choose to grow, not what pushes through on its own, in spite of us.

Perhaps it’s a modern mindset that limits my perspective. I was not raised to forage for my survival, to learn local plants and cultivate what comes easily or within reach.

Dandelions litter the garden. Every year, all season long, I pull them out, toss them in a lawn bag for disposal. But why? They grow and they grow, offering vitamins, nutrients and perennial goodness just for me to hack them out, rejecting their simple, easy offering.

Last Mother’s Day, my daughter Eliana said we should do something together to celebrate, like a forest hike. I wanted to dig up the grass and double the size of my garden. “Help me dig,” I said. She put on flimsy white tennis shoes and jumped on the edge of a shovel to push it into the hard ground. “I’m only doing this because it’s Mother’s Day,” she said, sweat glistening along her temples.

The dandelions, bright green and hardy, grew up through the toughest corners –where concrete paving blocks lay next to an electrical outlet, in the crevices between garden and grass. They had grit and endurance, bursting through hard earth, clinging to soil, reluctant to be removed. My shovel could only attack at certain angles.

Taraxacum, the genus known more generally as the dandelion, is one of the most common plants in the world, edible in its entirety, from yellow flower down to the hard roots. One of the most vital early spring sources of nectar for pollinators, dispersing over great distances, carried on the wind.

“Why don’t we eat them?” Eliana asked. “Why not these?” I dropped the fans of leaves into a paper bag, searching for a good answer. So this fall, when I pulled up the garden to prepare the earth for winter, I gazed at the newest dandelions – so many symmetrical leaves, artful in their points and right-angled cuts along each narrowing shaft – and wondered why I work so hard to throw them away.

In fifth grade at Forest Elementary School, classes suspended for field day. It was brisk spring, when the air has a nip, but the ground is thawing and a gray sky

promises future sun. My frizzy hair pulled into pigtails, my jeans with rolled cuffs because my mother refused to shorten them as I’d just grow taller. We had two days off classes, and lots of events to compete in and learn about the natural world – foot races and forest walks and art projects involving leaves and thick paper. I was in a group tasked with making dandelion salad. “You can eat them,” a teacher said, but I didn’t believe her.

Scientists say dandelions evolved over more than 30 million years, and humans have consumed them for a long time – as nutrition, as medicine, as a healing tea, in traditional Chinese medicine and in the Native American palate.

We set off along the sloping field and into the adjacent forest as well as into the yards of houses that bordered the school grounds. And when we pulled the dandelions from the hard earth, the teacher tore the leaves the same way my mother shredded lettuce and tossed it in a bowl to drizzle with oil and vinegar and sprinkle salt over top. “Good enough to eat,” she said, and I tasted them and was surprised by the tang and the bite.

This fall, it took all of a day to pull out everything growing in my garden. Nine tomato plants thick at the base and deep in the soil, stalks reaching in all directions. Some leaves had started to brown, and hard green orbs clung to the branches but refused to ripen. I bent the branches to fit them into bags, tossing metal cages onto the grass to organize later. I raked the soil smooth for the coming slumber of winter.

The raw greens are rich with vitamins A, C and K, calcium, potassium, iron, manganese and lutein. The flowers contain phytochemicals including polyphenols, and the roots offer inulin. Every piece of the plant has value, from the seeds floating through the neighborhood to the roots which can be roasted into a coffee alternative.

I had crowded in so many plants that the cucumber vines snaked through the garden, choking the eggplant, which didn’t grow to full height until late August, after the cucumbers turned yellow and withered. I pulled at long vines of rotted vegetables, reeling them into the trash. Too late, I noticed two budding zucchinis, which might have grown fatter before the last warm day if I had left them.

Spotting one budding eggplant, I left the soft leaves and lavender flowers, hoping the last few warm days of full sun would sprout new fruit before the frost. I left the lavender, too, which neither grew bigger nor shrank all summer, and hoped it might weather our harsh, gray winters and become a perennial with promise. I doused the banana plant near the hedge, hoping it might live through the cold and bloom.

Once, I drank dandelion wine in an Amish village somewhere on the road between home and away, with an older lover. I was in my twenties, eager to wander and explore. The wine was syrupy thick, too sweet, even then, when sugar was magnetic.

When I married the first time, we bought into a farm share that delivered a box of produce every week of the growing season. I learned to cook the bitter greens of beets and bake them into a pie with cheese and eggs. And one day, long after that marriage ended, I started buying long, clean dandelion leaves bound together with a rubber band at the farmers market. It never occurred to me to cull them from my yard, from the rich soil of my garden. I cooked them in a skillet with olive oil, garlic, salt and the juice of half a lemon. Sometimes, I zested lemon peel over top. The kids never liked the bitterness, but I felt like I was returning to some hidden part of myself, close to the land and unafraid of what grows near my home.

Found on six continents and part of virtually every menu in history, it grows back despite all efforts to kill it.

But come fall, I return to habit, digging out pernicious weeds, persistent plants that refuse to give over control. Even as I wrested them free of the cloying ground, digging until my hand closed around the hard white roots, I wanted to double-back, to give them their due, show respect for the hardiest among us.

The next week, three deer came, a doe and two fawns. Their graceful heads bobbed – we’d let the grass be overtaken by wild strawberry and clover, a fine meal for wild mammals. They munched at the bushes and trees, pulling leaves between their teeth. When I stepped outside, the mother deer lay on the ground, flanks folded beneath her, ears alert and twitching. She stared at me, and I backed into the house.

“You win,” I said.

For hours, she lounged on my ground, nibbling. After five, my husband came home. The doe watched, listened. When his car lumbered into the garage, when the door lifted with a thunderous thwack-thwack, her ears twitched and she tensed at our soft steps, at the swish of his car door closing. I waved for him to follow me into the yard.

“You’ve had long enough,” I said. She stood, staring right at me, daring me closer. Dan flapped his arms. “Go on now,” he called.

We stepped deeper into the yard, peered around the back of the brick garage, where her fawns stood, watching, waiting for mother’s lead. The banana plant had withered and shrunk into itself, the ends of the leaves nibbled to nubs. The mother leaped over the back fence, and the babies followed.

I could see the outline of the mother’s ribs through her fur. I had left her alone all day to make use of what is abundant. Somebody should. Animals know.

It’s a good day when I play in the yard. This year, everything burst forth under the rainbow spray of cold water, under blazing sun, under varying days when I couldn’t tell what season was really upon us.

When I moved into this house, the back yard was littered with debris. Fallen trees, heaps of dead leaves and at its center, an overgrown sculpted hedge surrounded by thorny roses, pretty things with no purpose, and the refuse of a yard growing in on itself. Our children were little, so we pulled out the thorny plants and hacked the bushes to the ground, feeding the soil and erecting a fence so we could plant vegetables and keep pests away. There are rats in this neighborhood, but I’ve never seen them, though raccoons, possum, chipmunks and squirrels abound.

Year after year, I plant the garden and bask in the glory of budding fruit and sprouting leaves. My hands press the damp soil, and I breathe in the heady scent of all that is natural. I think I am cultivating nourishment, but really, the world has a way of regenerating itself despite me.

I pull at what we call weeds, pests, reverting to the bias of my youth. A weed is a “plant not valued for use or beauty,” but everything has a purpose. My fifth-grade teacher tried to tell me that we could live on what grows wild, but I was raised to believe in store-bought and pre-packaged.

The other day, I wondered if I could sit beside the deer and have a conversation. I’d like to talk with someone who just knows in her body how to live in this world.

Hunger

By Patty Paine

Valley

By Gary Lark

It’s about staying alive and gathering, watching for movement, gutting a deer.

A chorus of warblers, river rapids passing the bend, fish line riffling through eyelets, a lure plopping in the current-a coho leaps and slaps water shaking down her eggs, the slow plod of cows an intermittent bell around one’s neck, the cry of a rabbit chased and killed by a weasel, a beagle and a husky lament across eighty acres, sickle bar snicking through alfalfa as a tractor provides the drone, a sedan going south, a pickup going north, a manure fork scraping and dung flung across the morning air, worms moiling among it composting by the barn, fire crackle of lopped orchard limbs. children in a playground yelling-laughing-posing-crying, arithmetic on a green-board, boots walking through mint, clouds whispering.

The sides of the valley are old, with thin soil and scrub oak leaning toward ancestors where the trees change and quiet walks. You could get lost there.

untitled

By belle dorcas

My Heart Thrills to a New Vocabulary

By Mary Kay Feather

“I begin to see all disciplines as creating a vocabulary, a set of tools for understanding human life in a particular way.”

Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

I. Diagnosis

The doctor places her stethoscope on my chest and listens to my heart. Rather than an even thumping, she hears the bumpety-bump of a man falling downstairs. Irregular breathing signaling the rhythm is awry. She prescribes beta blockers and refers me to a cardiologist. After an electrocardiogram (EKG), lab tests, videos, sonograms they look at the left ventricle; it is responsible for pumping four to five liters of oxygenated blood to the body and brain via the aorta and may make the heart beat irregularly. I finally score an in-person appointment with the specialist. As heart patients have palpitations, cardiologists have schedules.

Eva the Cardiologist is chatty, perky, wearing green shoes, blue nail polish. Her diagnosis: Atrial Fibrillation (AFib), a misfiring of pulses in the upper chambers of the heart (atria) causing the beat to be off and potentially provoke a stroke. Eva grasps principles, procedures. I grasp at straws. This sounds serious to me, and I can’t quite take it in. Is it a revisit of the mysterious cardio arterial spasm I suffered at age forty? A year of medical disability, strenuous diet and an exercise regimen followed in 1986 which seems so long ago. But not forgotten.

Her recommendations for A Fib: pills and cardioversion in which an electric jolt resets the heart’s rhythm.

My husband, Michael, turned back as we exited the exam room.

“What about alcohol?”

“Never!” said Eva.

“Never?” I whined, “Even after rhythm is reset?”

She shook her head: “Never.”

I bemoaned the disposition of my ample wine cellar. And the tasting group and trips to Walla Walla, to Portugal, to France. Would my friends forget to invite me to dinners centered around a fine Cabernet?

Days earlier I’d been to a yoga retreat at Tubac Inn in the Arizona heat, breathe in, breathe out. Who goes to Southern Arizona in August? An old friend was leading the sessions. She is a gentle instructor attentive to our weaknesses and reluctance. Alone after class, I jumped into the hotel pool to mollify the 101-degree temp. I tried to swim the short width to the other side, but my limbs were as weak as a new foal’s. I struggled across the forty feet of water, sputtering and panting and grasping for the ladder. My panic surfaced. Would I surface? Or would I drown here alone in the pool? What had gone wrong with me? Lungs? Limbs? I never suspected my heart.

What do Joe Biden, Billie Jean King, KISS bassist Gene Simmons and Barry Manilow have in common? All have been diagnosed with AFib and take medicines to control it.

II. Etiology

Why me? Year of birth? Yes. One in nine in the U.S. over age sixty-five have AFib. I celebrated my seventy-seventh birthday last month.

Genes? Possibly. My family rarely shared bad news. Though I do remember a cardioversion back in the nineties because I was in the room waiting for my mother to regain consciousness so I could drive her home. The nurse kept patting her cheeks, trying to wake her. My mom, a former RN, joked when she finally opened her eyes: “Scared you did I?” She had, but I didn’t admit it. And I didn’t admit my fears about my current diagnosis and pondered the causes.

Stimulant Intoxication: It may be something as simple as caffeine, or drugs like methamphetamines and cocaine. Hmm. In the three decades since moving back to Seattle—only coffee and of course wine.

Heart Disease and High Blood Pressure: I had neither of these.

Holiday Heart Syndrome: According to a California study, on Super Bowl Sunday, New Year’s Day and other holidays, emergency rooms are filled with people with AFib from too much drinking, or, as they call it, alcohol poisoning.

While not much of a Super Bowl fan, I have certainly exceeded the one glass of wine recommended for women on New Year’s Eve, my birthday, and just about any other holiday from Seder to Summer Solstice. And this is to say nothing of Friday nights when the neighborhood gathers to unwind each week over a glass of wine.

III. Procedures

Eva schedules the cardioversion reboot and I show up at day surgery, remove everything from the waist up, don a hospital gown and footies, and tuck my shoes into a plastic bag. I keep my phone so I can play Spelling Bee as I wait. Sticky discs are

attached to my back and chest and larger cotton pads are affixed to my torso. A specially trained nurse injects me with Propofol for sedation. The cardiologist appears, an unknown doctor, and the event takes only about fifteen minutes while I am dead to the world. Post cardioversion, the doctor warned me there might be a rash. My skin looks like someone put a hot coffee cup down on my chest, a bright cardinal ring vivid on the left breast. Successful in regulating sinus rhythm, it lasts only for a few days, Eva next refers me to Dr. B. for an ablation.

An ablation involves burning, freezing or scratching a small part of the heart muscle to corral rogue electrical impulses which throw off the sequence in the sinus node, the heart’s biological pacemaker. The word originates from Late Latin ablātiōn-, ablātiō, from Latin ablā-, “to carry away, remove.”

The ablation happens the afternoon of November 6, 2018: three hours, two cardiologists, an anesthesiologist, five or six technicians, a couple of nurses and a bank of computers. Or that’s what I recall before I drifted away on the river of oblivion. Without insurance, the cost runs just under $100,000. Thank the Goddess for Medicare. Other than bruises on my thighs, I suffer no side effects and my sinus rhythm is normal.

Dr. B, a Kansan, is calm and attentive but not chatty like Eva. Fit and slim, he has worked a as cardiologist for thirty years. He wore striped socks and beautiful shoes the color of amber to our first meeting, tennis shoes to our second. I would guess that he jogs. I made him laugh when he asked how I was, and I remonstrated how his well-being was all we care about. He’s about to insert a needle into my heart.

The ablation seems a factory-like procedure in the hospital unlike the cardioversion which is folksier and in day surgery. Dr. B does so many ablations a week.

IV. Medications

Prescriptions include: Amiodarone, Beta blockers to regulate the heart, Xarelto, the vital blood thinner to prevent strokes, Lasix, a diuretic, Losartan, an angiotensin II receptor antagonist to lower blood pressure, plus Spironolactone, another diuretic.

Face to face with the following litany, I shake my head and am thankful my only side effect is tiredness and perhaps, what? Hearing loss? If I look much longer at the list, I imagine I’ll have them all.

Side effects: drowsiness, stomach upset, vomiting, headache, cough, dizziness, fainting, fever, bleeding, numbness or tingling in fingers or toes, sensitivity to sunlight, trembling, blurred vision, fast or irregular heartbeat, sensitivity to heat, muscle cramps, gout, hearing loss, insomnia, etc.

On a cheerier note, dark chocolate has the potential to lower blood pressure, lower stroke risk and lower cholesterol. The Guna People of San Blas Islands in Panama

drink an average of five cups of cocoa a day and have a low risk of cardiovascular disease and strokes. If the Guna moved to the mainland, however, their blood pressure and disease rates were more consistent with the general population of Panamanians, so it was not genes. I spent a month living with the Guna in San Blas back in the seventies and later wrote an undergrad thesis on their history. I should have stayed there longer, drinking cocoa.

V. Prognosis

Four pillars of managing AFib: take an anticoagulant to prevent blood clots; control the heart rate with drugs; control the heart rhythm with medication or medical procedures; and modify lifestyle (exercise, diet, maintaining healthy blood pressure and cholesterol levels and weight). I am a poster child for the first three of the pillars and struggle with the final one, but I’ve given up so much already. Leave me the cream in my coffee, the occasional dessert.

It is estimated that over twelve million people in the United States will have AFib in 2030. The death rate from AFib as the main or a contributing cause of death has been increasing for more than two decades, mentioned on 183,231 death certificates in 2019. And a startling increase is seen in ages thirty-five to sixty-four.

Those of us of European descent are more likely to have AFib than those of African descent. Because the likelihood of having AFib increases with age, more women suffer than men due to their longer lifespan.

Congestive heart failure is another condition associated with AFib in which the heart cannot pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs (see left ventricle above). Ejection fraction rate measures how well this is functioning. Mine is borderline. Those who died from congestive heart failure include Betty Friedan, Marian Anderson, Elizabeth Taylor and Wilt Chamberlain.

My panic in the pool and fears of stroke are tidily moved to a back burner as the procedures and drugs help me maintain a steady rhythm.

VI. Annual Checkup

The man the doctor heard falling downstairs in my chest is back on his feet. My heart is marching rhythmically. I feel great, inching my way into exercise, and am reminded of my mom’s favorite admonition from a Persian poem: “I wept because I had no shoes...until I met a man who had no feet.” Not everyone lives to seventy-seven and, if we do, we are all aging into some infirmity. DuPont’s slogan for almost fifty years: “Better Things for Better Living...Through Chemistry.” I ingest another pill.

Estranged2

By Patty Paine

Two Stories

By Derek Updegraff

A Boy and His Father

Once a boy trudged up a hill with a potted chrysanthemum. The pot was wider than he was, but his thin arms managed to encircle the clay, and he embraced that weight from home to hill somehow. When he reached the clearing at the top, he took his place at Table 7, just as his acceptance letter had directed him to do. He picked up a marker and two sticker nametags from the table and wrote Joey on one and Chris on the other. He stuck Joey on himself, careful not to block any part of the stegosaurus on his chest, and he stuck Chris on the pot just under the lip.

Then the director of the Silky Valley Father/Son Picnic and Potato Sack Race Extravaganza approached the boy and said, “Welcome, Joey! And welcome, Chris!” And the director turned his back to the plant and whispered to the boy, “Now is that your father there in that pot? Or is that your son? Because you look a little young to be a dad.”

And the boy said, “This is my father’s pot. I was thinking about bringing his shoes, on account of the race, but my father used this pot to grow many things, like Chris here, which he planted three years ago.”

The director turned back to the plant, looked him over, then said to the boy, “Are you sure he’s not your father? Observe how he’s tilting toward you. That’s genuine concern there. Such protection. Don’t worry, sir! I’m just speaking to the boy! Nothing else! And look at the resemblance. I see it now, how the swoop of your cheeks is the same as those leaves there near the stem. And how the petals’ prickly tips look just like the stubble I’m sure you’ll grow one day. I’m kind of taken aback by how alike you two are now that I’m absorbing it all.”

And the boy said, “Thanks, sir.”

And the director said, “Thank you for coming, dear boy! And thank you for coming, sir!” And the director shook Chris’s longest leaf heartily the way hearty men shake, and he tossed a potato sack to the boy, saying, “You should be able to share that okay,” and then he was off to greet another duo.

After the racing, after the eating of potato salad and watermelon, after the frolicking with other children and their partners, such as somersaulting on soft grass and playing freeze tag among shade trees, after all that, the director let the boy keep his potato sack so that he could drag down the hill his father’s pot and his blooming likeness, his second-place plaque and his three participant trophies, as well as an extra watermelon gifted to him by the woman who wagoned the watermelons up the hill

that morning. When the land flattened out, the boy placed his goods into the burlap and humped them over his shoulder the rest of the way.

A Boy and His Owl

Once when a boy was a little, little boy, he couldn’t sleep. In bed he listened to the live oak’s branches scrape his third-story window. In bed he listened to the great horned owl nestle into the live oak’s leaves and eat the Thompsons’ cat. The great horned owl, which is also the tiger owl, which is also the hoot owl, pinned Oreo between branch and claw, then pierced the warm belly. The beak left the heart alone, and left the stomach alone, but searched out the liver in the center, needling fur and skin until an apple-sized opening let the liver slide out. Prize in claw, the great horned owl hurled the Thompsons’ Oreo from his branch. And the cat kept her grace and corrected herself midflight so that she alighted on four paws, distributing her body’s weight among all her legs even though she was lighter now.

But when the boy was a little, little boy, he lived in a one-story bungalow with Mom and Dad, and their only tree was a tangerine tree that yielded fruit with peels so loose even he could dig a nail in, slip finger under skin, and tear out the juicy flesh without calling for Mom’s help. And when the boy was a little, little boy, he knew Dad meant it when he said their bed was off limits, that men—son—do not crawl into their parents’ bed at night.

So once, then twice, then many times when he couldn’t sleep because the pecking and slurping of the great horned owl kept him awake, he grabbed his blue blanket with orange basketballs and inched down the hallway toward his parents’ room. Wrapped in his blanket, he curled into himself and slept on the hallway floor outside their closed door. In the morning, sometimes Dad would wake first and step over him on the way to get his coffee, but usually Mom opened the door first, and she’d scoop him up and return him to his bed while he pretended to be asleep.

Then after cereal, when he’d play outside and see Oreo stretching in the sun’s warmth, he’d say, “I’m so sorry that keeps happening to you.”

Awakening

By Maxima Kahn

if i could just step one foot closer i know i could hear the breathing burning rippling in the trees to pass through the mirror

glistening to enter the strange and become sister hand-holder a field of wheat taking on the suppleness of a sweater the world wears slack across her bare shoulders

how i would stand upright in that wind yet bending bowing

until words—imperfect, forgiven, paralysis ring in the chime of syllables collide in a falling floating architecture of

cell-beings protoplasm carved art of letters volatile indifference of numbers unseen doorway of music—

bathwater and birthwater of the sleeping world standing in that shattered wind piercing the light like notes squeezed from the bell of a trumpet

my bloodstrings plucked resonant earning acreage in the cloud-crossed

i would bleed like sap rising in season touch the origin of ochre and cyan

my fingernails sprout and seed i become rhythm ash ripening the slow fruit of spring and denial curving edge of the leaning world the far side of light and mind

6 month check-up

By Emily Pinkerton

Describe the quality of your ache. Cystic in nature. Black and white and gray. Ultrasound in three tones. No, not like that. A different kind of life. A more killing kind. An unusual pain. Circumstances require close monitoring. Gravelly tissue. The primary mass is not discrete. Not fixed, not immobile. It does not shine bright white. Dark spots are better news. Easier to live with. Emphasis on live.

Sarah Said

By Toni Bertucci

Sometimes there is just the dark and sometimes all is darkness. Sarah said when she was in the pit of winter and the very pit of her depression that it was so dark she couldn’t see herself. She tried to make art and she tried to make conversation in the evenings, over dinner, as if there was some part of what she felt that could mean something, but she felt none of that possible meaning. She could not feel her own face, could not see her own hands. She practiced the guitar. We could hear her afternoons in her bedroom, and picture her swaying back and forth with her eight track and the guitar and the dark a message she was transcribing faithfully but without hope of deciphering. This is what the dark gave her; I saw it give it to her but she did not try to love it. The darkness was folded into itself so that when she reached what she believed may be an edge, it was just the lip of darkness kissing itself. What did she do then? One thing and then another. She worked a lot and made herself meals that she sometimes couldn’t finish or taste. She tried going on dates. She drank a lot of red wine and alcoholic seltzers, a lot of White Claw. She played music for us we had never heard, Big Thief and Bill Callahan and the album A Crow Looked at Me. She was very generous in her visions. She had complex, lurid dreams and read tarot to interpret them. Sometimes I found myself on my knees in the grit around her, searching with her for the source of her body, for the place her body could make some kind of relational sense. I knew that what I experienced as meaningful or useful could not pry open the lips of darkness nor translate the dark song that came from behind them. There was no erasure, only a deeper imbruing. I let it happen to her while I watched and I tried to allow myself to embrace her and be embraced by her. It was difficult to touch. We went out dancing and drank a lot of slutty liquor and sweated profusely into each other’s arms and didn’t kiss on the way home, crammed up together in Hillary’s backseat. I respect you too much to kiss you, I said to her, but this was a cheap joke, we both knew. When you really learn to love yourself, that’s when you’ll let yourself love women, she told me. You are afraid of how good it could be. I believed her. I went to bed with some boy anyway, some boy who broke my heart in such a predictable fashion I barely felt it. I lay on my back in the woods in midsummer in the filmy warmth after a rain, looked up at the half-light and remembered what he and I looked like, fucking in his closet mirror. We looked like one silky tattooed animal. Glamorous and dumb as shit. She used to look at me over the breakfast table with circles under her bluegreen eyes, dark lashes tangled as her tether to herself, face white with exhaustion. She paced when she spoke. Little luminous person in the dark. I wanted to make light by the force of my desire, wanted my desire to be capable of the generation of light. Much was illuminated thereby, it is true, but it was like lightning; an instant of sight and then everything burnt to a stump, and no fire to warm a body by.

‘Murica

By Patty Paine

By Michele Popadich

I have to remind myself on days like this—when I cannot fall asleep because of how acutely aware I am of the little space my tongue has against my top row of teeth or when I am in a bout of despair of which there is seemingly no bottom—that I am expanding my capacity to feel in both directions (hopefully).

The definition of a parenthesis arrived in 1540 from the French parenthèse or from Medieval Latin parenthesis: “addition of a letter to a syllable in a word.” It is rooted in the Latin parentithenai or “put in beside.” It was only in 1715 that the definition was extended to include the curved lines that were putting (meaning) in beside.

(Was there a period of time for which those two curved lines stood idle in a sentence doing nothing but existing?)

Google’s modern definition: a word, clause, or sentence inserted as an explanation or afterthought into a passage that is grammatically complete without it.

There is something gentler about “put in beside” of the Latin root which is lost in the contemporary “inserted” which I am stuck on. There is something about “afterthought” which feels charged and unfeeling, when parentheses have always given me an out when I am too far in.

(Can you imagine being robbed of the freedom to modify [oneself]?) (Can you imagine there being a limit?)

When I first started taking medication, my anxious spirals were no longer robbing me of entire days (sometimes weeks) of my life—a sadness finally with a bottom— but that meant my capacity for joy had a cap too. My anxiety (always inserted) was whisked away with a pill a day, but so too all that was breathtaking about (and gently tucked in beside) my daily reality.

Even when George Puttenham tried to rename it to ‘insertour’ in 1580 and even when he tried to declare it altogether unnecessary (“Your first figure of tollerable disorder is Parenthesis or by an English name the Insertour” from Art of English Poesy) and even when his peer Thomas Blount made it clear it’s priority by declaring “A Woman is the unnecessary Parenthesis of Nature” in The Academy of Eloquence in 1654, still the parenthesis persists (and sometimes even reigns).

I remember the first numbing (via medication) while taking a walk in a small town in Mammoth, California. There it was, my anxiety, across the street hiding behind a huddle of trees. I could see it, but could not get any closer. But at the same time,

I couldn’t engage fully with the golden hue of a setting sun dancing across freshly packed snow. That intimate association with life had taken refuge beside my anxiety, a thing separate of me. I raced towards it, but I repelled it.

(Was there a period of time where I stood idle in my life doing nothing but existing? [I can’t remember]).

A recent text from my friend: Love is addicting (or at least the pursuit of it is).

A follow-up: Do parentheses make the love or the pursuit more important?

Based on Google’s or Puttenham’s or Blount’s or capitalism’s definition (which is essentially: an indication of the unnecessary), this sentence in itself declares their definition (by my calculated placement) inconsequential, incongruent, and altogether meaningless.

Yet math has taught us to prioritize the parenthetical. So: (Logic of math) x (linguistic parenthetical) = prioritization of the unnecessary

Which leads me to believe that the moment we consider a parenthetical and the potential to introduce excess to the tidiness of a sentence’s life, we must have something (very) important to say.

I am a fan of modern medicine (believe me, I am), but if the solution to anxiety is capping the depth of feeling are we saying: you are grammatically complete without it (or) to feel is unnecessary

(My anxious thoughts [am I good enough] [will I ever be loved the right way] [what if] [what if] [what if] live in parenthesis, yet so too do my richest [how does one live an unordinary life]. If I put both in parenthesis side by side, mathematical operations deem both of equal importance).

In my pursuit of love with someone else (and with myself) I have ended entire relationships with others (and with myself) over a seemingly simple question: Do you live through the body or through the mind (or both)?

My definition: a hidden meaning in plain view.

My definition: a non-required but fundamental change in meaning.

Instead of weaning myself off of medication, I indulged in the unnecessary and went to a concert on the south side of Chicago to remind myself how to feel. I watched a Scandinavian folk artist play her voice like an instrument (clawed at the back of her throat for a primal cry) carving out moonlight and wishbone. “For all the outsiders,”

she said with her arms spread wide, barefoot and black caped, “this is for you.”

My definition: a sentence’s outsider. An intruder.

A famous use of parenthesis by Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita) for its nonchalant, literary intrusion: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three…”

(I would like to learn to intrude [on myself]).

And when she started banging on the drums, I went so deep inside myself (to that non-required part unless you want to be spooked), I found something ancient, ordinary, and impossible to ignore: a way to live through the body and the mind, equally.

“I think you know how to love better than any of us. That’s why you find it all so painful” (Fleabag’s dad in the show Fleabag).

A guaranteed muting of oneself: “(No worries if not)”

Fleabag regularly breaks the fourth wall, flicking her focus directly to the camera and offers to the audience an explanation or context or sometimes just an eye roll. Each aside a parenthetical insertion in human form.

I can hear a voiced parenthesis: (I think I’m having a panic attack) and

(I’ve been thinking about you) and

(I think) (I think) (I think)

(Is an entire sentence in parenthesis a black hole of grammar? Or is it proof that the most important things can fall into an abyss? [Sometimes I want to sit beside my own annihilation]).

My response to Fleabag is that sometimes an endless pit of despair is worth it to see what’s at the bottom (if there is one).

Parentheses are just one of four types of brackets (parentheses, traditional brackets, braces, or chevrons). Deiderius Erausmus Roterdomaus (an early user of the parenthesis) called upon the rounded shape of the crescent moon and lovingly gave parenthesis an alternate name: lunula.

“They make for softer interruption than the abrupt snapping or darting that dashes do” (“Parentheses” from The New Well-Tempered Sentence by Karen Elizabeth Gordon).

My definition: an interruption as soft as the curve of the moon, a gentle nudge, a guiding light.

In a bout of despair, my friend walked along Ravenswood Avenue next to the screaming train shuttling people back and forth from their jobs. She fell to her knees in the grass and, looking up to the clear blue sky (although I like to imagine her calling to the moon), raised her palms like an open parenthesis wanting to be filled with meaning. She cried, “I refuse to live an ordinary life!”

My definition: a subtle, unwavering demand to be understood.

“When I die, I want to be reincarnated as one of their instruments” (A YouTuber’s comment in response to Scandinavian folk music).

When my friend told me about this Ravenswood episode, I imagined her yelling to the sky one moment, and the next, brushing off dirt and grass from her bare knees and assured her, there was nothing ordinary about that.

“This is the problem with hunger. This is the problem with love. There is no end in sight” (Sabrina Orah Mark from Wild Milk).

My definition: the bottom of a sentence, taken where it didn’t know it could go.

For my first tattoo, I considered a punctuation mark before discovering the many heavy associations: the semi-colon for those struggling with depression since it continues a sentence that could have ended; quotation marks, as a reminder to the individual that they are in charge of their own story; an equal sign for gay rights and equality. Each of these tattoos empty of words they hold up, yet charged with meaning. A vacant set of parentheses doesn’t have a universally known tattooed meaning (yet).

Merriam-Webster’s definition: an amplifying.

I didn’t get a punctuation tattoo. But when I die, I do want my name protected by parentheses to indicate a life amplified.

I finally fell asleep once I began running my tongue against the jagged edges of my bottom teeth which were never braced into composure.

I am not surprised that Google’s definition is limited. Only a trillion dollar company at the heart of capitalism and a determinant of modern day importance would declare parentheses to be a nonessential afterthought when the insertion is often (by which I mean, always) the most intentional choice I make.

My definition: protection from the rest of the sentence. My definition: a modest yet stubborn demand to exist.

The day I begin to un-numb: while sitting outside (of a coffee shop) with my friend, there is a cicada flipped over on its back (flapping and buzzing in a fury). A tall spindle of a man (in a ripped up wife beater and washed out jeans) sulks over and (with mathematical precision) turns the creature (over). It slips in the sidewalk crack and (pillowed by the inverted parenthesis of concrete) it rests.

(Can you hear the way parentheses tell a busied sentence to breathe?)

My definition: A place to rest or be disturbed (or both).

Fortune

By Brandon Downing

Mandarin Gardens

By Shawn Brophy

It’s less a brick street than a brick oven, Though ill-suited for baking bread. Our July is so humid it can be chewed instead. Inside, the darkened air is refrigerated. Rum drinks. Paper lanterns. Some of the booths have heavy red curtains. There is only one waiter. He wears white socks and sandals. He writes nothing down, but the orders he brings are always right. He writes nothing down, but the bill he presents is always correct. Upstairs, the remains of eight men smoke opium in their bunks. They are almost astronauts; they exhale themselves into space. Downstairs it’s the Far East in Illinois, Air conditioned and vividly fake. Rum drinks and mahogany. Paper lanterns and bamboo. The curtained booths host liaisons of varying illegitimacy. There is only one waiter, and he’s never wrong.

I exhale my Lucky Strike into a humid July, and Flick the butt into the scorching brick street. It is noon. Cicada roar in the leafy oaks. But push open the heavy glass door, and inside The air is refrigerated, a cooler season vividly faked. At the mahogany ridge I order a rum drink that glows Like a paper lantern. I take a matchbook from a wooden bowl. Mandarin Gardens: Chop Suey, Chow Mein

The Far East right here in Illinois! Dial State 6-0232

There is no mention of egg rolls or carry out or opium. The only waiter emerges from behind a bamboo curtain. He wears a cummerbund and white socks with his sandals. He tilts his head toward a red-curtained booth And raises his eyebrows. I nod. And why not? There is only one waiter, and he’s never wrong.

Stump Fire

By Wendy Barry

When what we thought were termites swarmed the pine tree at its base, we hired a traveling handyman to cut it down. It didn’t want to go, and broke through the fence, and injured the privet hedge smashing through. But the stump remained in the ground. It had been there a long time and was used to the place. He hacked away at it with an adze, and let it dry out, and hacked some more, and then when there was a caldera at the center of the stump, he lit a fire and fed it, slowly, piece by kindling piece, cannibal stump, eating its own, until the dried wood of the stump began to burn too, slowly, slowly, and steadily, and it burned away, and the roots caught alight, and the fire crept along in the soil, down in the dirt, until its fingers in the ground were fire. Liquid gold and orange, tracing the capillaries of the roots in brilliant interconnected lines, reaching in and holding on to the earth. We watched it for days and nights, letting it burn slowly, slowly, stretching underneath the surface of the terrain like a bright map of a hidden city, visible for a short time, after a thousand years.

SHANGHAI METRO: 2019

By Mark Crimmins

After rocketing into town on the maglev train at 432 kilometers an hour, you manage—score!—to get a seat on the Line 7 train at Longyang Road Station. The smart train is soon pulling into Fanghua Road Station. You look for the digital readout above the doors, but this isn’t Shenzhen: there is no digital readout or smart graphic. Instead, you have to look at the Shanghai Metro’s old skool subway map stuck on the train’s wall. Now the train pulls into Jinxiu Road Station. All seats are full but nobody is standing. There are twenty-six million people in Shanghai but they seem to have so many subway lines that nobody needs to stand while riding the metro. As the train moves towards South Yanggao Road and eases into Yanggao Nan Lu Station, your girlfriend, in her Beats headphones, is bobbing to a live set spun by DJ Kiril Matveev broadcast on Deep Mix Moscow Radio. The subway speaks: “The next station is West Gaoke Road. You can transfer to Line 6. Doors will open on the left.” Well, things have been easy so far on this trip across Shanghai. A computer voice: “We have arrived at West Gaoke Road.” Bingbong! Bingbong! Bingbong! Fwoop!

Rattlethunk! Ping! Xia yi zhan Yuntai Lu. English polite voice: “Next station: Yuntai Road.” Whoosh! Weeee! Rattles. Whoosh! Thunk! Eeee! Oooooh! Whoosh! Ping!

“Next station: Yaohua Road. You can transfer to Line 8.” Perhaps it is a very posh

Aussie voice. Click clack, click clack, click clack, click clack. A woman in a red jacket, black mini shorts, and high-heeled suede thigh boots walks down the platform. Click. Clack. Click. Clack. Bingbong! Bingbong! Bingbong! Ping! “Next station: Changqing Road. Doors will open on the left.” Bing, Bang, Bong, Bung! Bingbong! Bingbong! Bingbong! Eeeeh! Ooooh! Whoosh! Ping! Xia yi zhan Houtan. “Next station: Houtan. Doors will open on the left.” Whoosh! Houtan dao le! “We have arrived at Houtan Station.” Xia che de chengke, qing tiqianzuo hao junbei. “Departing passengers, please get ready in advance.” Bingbong! Bingbong! Bingbong! Oooooh! Eeeeeh! Whoosh! Ping! “Next station: Middle Longhua Road. You can transfer to Line 12. Doors will open on the left.” Rattle. Sway. A corner! Wobble wobble wobble wobble. Oooooh! Eeeeeh! Arrgh! “We have arrived at Middle Longhua Road. Doors will open on the left.” Passengers get off, get on. Bingbong! Bingbong! Bingbong!— Thunk! Oooooh! Eeeeeh! Whoosh! Ping! “Next station: Dongan Road. You can transfer to Line 4. Doors will open on the left.” The platform speaks: “Bing, Bang, Bong Bung!” The train replies: “Bingbong! Bingbong! Bingbong!” Passengers get off, get on. Ping! “Next station: Zhaojiabang Road. You can transfer to Line 9. Doors will open on the left.” Zhaojiabang Lu dao le! “We have arrived at Zhaojiabang Road. Doors will open on the left.” Passengers get off, get on. Bingbong! Bingbong! Bingbong! Rattle—thunk! Eeeeeh! Oooooh! Whoosh! Ping! “Next station: Changshu Road. You can transfer to Line 1. Doors will open on the left.” Ratatattle tatatattle! Ooosh! Squeesh! Oooooh! Weeyooo! “We have arrived at Changshu Road.” Nobody gets off, many get on. Bingbong! Bingbong! Bingbong! Your girlfriend speaks: “Two more!” Thunk! Oooooh! Eeeeeh! Whoosh! Yeeeawww! Ping! “Next station: Jingan

Temple. You can transfer to Line 2. Doors will open on the left.” Pewwwww! Piuuuuuu! Squeak! “We have arrived at Jingan Temple.” Your girlfriend speaks: “Next stop!” People get off, people get on. Bingbong! Bingbong! Bingbong! Thunk! Ping! Xia yi zhan Changping Lu. “Next station: Changping Road. Doors will open on the left.” Your girlfriend gets up. You get up. Whoosh! Yuuuuuuuu! Ewwwwww! The train slows. Changping Lu dao le. “We have arrived at Changping Road.” You pick up your bags and get off the train. Bing, Bang, Bong Bung!

Strawberry Fields Forever

By Brandon Downing

Consolacion and the Sea

By Aurora Stone Mehlman

Consolacion waited and waited but her papa did not pick her up from school. When even the music teacher, who was always the last to leave, drove away in a yellow VW, Consolacion decided to walk home and did not hurry, for how was she to know everything had changed? She stuck her thumbs in her backpack straps and headed east, behind the school. This way she wouldn’t have to contend with the others— neighborhood children who teased her and spit date pits in her long hair. On the windy roadside, homemade signs for the salsa stand and Benny’s Texico slapped the ground like big, angered hands. Sand slid out of the desert and gathered in the street, whiting out the blacktop. She thought she would never make it, until she did. At the house the driveway was empty, but often her papa didn’t come home until dinnertime, though he usually sent a neighbor to fetch her. She let herself in the always-unlocked back door and fixed a snack and drew letters she liked—like C and O—in stray masa on the countertop. There were voices in the living room. Papa? No, it was not him. The TV had been left on. As it often was.

On the news, a search was underway for an unknown swimmer who had been sighted in the Santa Monica Bay. Stuffing potato chips into her mouth, Consolacion watched the updates live. Somewhere the man’s family had no idea he was missing. Between talking reporters and commercials, the news showed the beach, empty now of everyone but the rescue crews. On TV, the sun set over the ocean.

Consolacion kept looking away from the TV to the couch beside her, but not directly, mostly with her senses. Sometimes, her papa could be immaterial, exhausted and cross, slumped into his phone screen, there but not there. But often he was dynamic. His green lower eyelids stretched kindly as he colored construction paper on the kitchen floor, drawing her whatever she asked like masked superheroes or horses, or when he tied the apron with the picture of boobies on it around her waist three times because the ties were that long. Sometimes he’d make a chef’s hat out of a sock for her and let her make him dinner while he drank beers and told stories and sat on the kitchen counter like a boy. Now, in the darkening house, neither the excited papa nor the exhausted papa sat beside her, neither papa walked in the door. No matter how many times she peeked.

Now rescue divers gave interviews. The water shone darkly and reflected red warning lamps of boats blinking gently about. The news cut to a live feed of the Santa Monica Pier. Under blaring lights, Families played carnival games and looked over their shoulders at the cameras. Kids horsed around harder than they normally would and gave their friends rabbit ears and kissed surprised strangers for the cameras. Consolacion recognized the boardwalk where her father took her to ride the rides. Small, dizzy rides that stunk of gas and now she was nauseous thinking of it. But she was

also a little excited. On the news, a lifeguard was explaining how he had spied the unknown swimmer out in the current waving arms overhead, but when the lifeguard got to the spot, no distressed swimmer could be found. Coast guard boats teetered around on the water as if they were about to fall off the edge of something.

In the living room, Consolacion finished the chips and licked at the burning salt on her lips and fingertips. She wanted to be that person—a lifeguard. Saving a swimmer. Then she would always be brave and honorable. Everywhere she went, people would see it in her. But she didn’t like swimming. Never had. Chlorine water brought rashes out on her bottom. And there were the YMCA pool rats, those kids who loitered all day near the exit to the locker rooms because they had nowhere to go. They picked on her for how her stomach stuck out like a camel’s hump. That water in the local pool wasn’t even really blue. She smirked and put two more chips in her mouth. It was only the bottom painted blue.

Later, Consolacion wandered from room to room, which in a small house took no time at all. She was sure she was walking just behind her papa. As she entered the kitchen, he’d just gone to the bathroom. When she came to the bathroom door, he’d just headed to the bedroom where both their mattresses lay. When she stepped into the bedroom, he’d only just slipped under his own sheets. She was invested enough in her game that when she lifted the sheets and the bed was empty it was a great blow. The tears surprised her, as if her eyes were traitors. As if they knew something the rest of her did not. It had never occurred to her before that their home was just a house when no one was there.

It must be very late. Back in the living room, Consolacion stood on the couch and looked out the little window. Porch lights illuminating cinder-block fences created maze-like shadows between the neighborhood’s sporadic properties. Heat settled around the white bases of the date trees in the orchards. Soon the yard light swarmed with moths whose wings bore eyes. Still her papa did not come home.

She stood, scratching flea bites in the backs of her knees. Consolacion had become single-minded; all she could think of was her papa. His voice could be low as an engine or high as an opera singer; he doused his funny-colored jacket in rose cologne; he loved his shiny car dearly and joked it was a sister to Consolacion. His family, who was her family, though she didn’t know them, wrote letters, which he’d read aloud in competing voices. He’d put his head in his hands and cry after he read them while Consolacion made him tea and patted his back and thought about the black pores where his hair came out. Oh my, what would he do now without her? The TV was a bright hole. Going to it, she stood close. Her nose tapped the screen. Strange tickly currents fizzed into her nostrils. Consolacion heard the newscaster say that so far, the coastguard had spared no effort. Still, the missing swimmer could not be found and despite the airtime, no one had filed a missing person report. As if electrocuted, she jumped. The TV’s reflection, rectangular moons, cast back from each wide, indigo eye. “Papa,” she said.

After Image

By Patty Paine

antiherstamine

By Nell Johnson

in my dream we snort benadryl in the bathroom of bath & body works, crushed-up pink like fairy dust mixing with blood and glitter in the sink. we block out the scent of cucumber melon, ignore old teenage dreams, the middle school girls’ locker room. you look like don bluth’s anastasia and for a second i think i have the money to buy you something made of mink, something you could cover your ears with. i can’t believe we live and sleep under the same moon, can’t believe we both drink water from the tap, wash our faces with it. after the benadryl we dance the maypole, ring around the rosy, pocket full of posy, another pink thing to stop the bleeding, the disease. we burn the men once we’ve danced, but only after we’ve given them everything we have, until our chests cave in and marigolds replace the tiny structures in our lungs. how do you tell someone—after the fire is out and the ground is orange and warm— that if they die, you die? that they control the moon?

Contributor Bios

Wendy Barry (pg. 30) is a Connecticut Yankee living in South Carolina. She earned her Master’s degree and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and her undergraduate degree from Colgate University. She has recently had work accepted for publication at The Meadow and Santa Clara Review. She is the co-editor of The Annotated Anne of Green Gables from Oxford University Press.

Toni Bertucci (pg. ??) is a writer, artist, thinker, and plumber of voids and mysteries. She/they reside in the Pacific Northwest, where they strive to be in an intentional and tender relationship with all pieces of the land and water they touch.

Shawn Brophy (pg. 29) is a hospital clerk and sometime voice actor who lives in southeast Wisconsin. He was most recently published at Southern Florida Poetry Journal But be advised: sometimes small magazines publish Shawn, then disappear.

Mark Crimmins (pg. 31)

belle dorcas (pg. 11, 40) is a collage artist from Michigan, USA. Her world reflects a sort of fancy, relaxed surrealism. Her work has been used for album covers, film posters, and most recently, the covers for Juste Milieu Zine and Quibble Lit Review.

Brandon Downing (pg. 28, 32) is a poet, visual artist and filmmaker, active for the last three decades. His published collections include The Shirt Weapon (2002), Dark Brandon (2005), AT ME (2010) and Mellow Actions (2013). In 2007 he released a feature-length collection of short digital films, Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics, while a monograph of his literary collages from 1996 to 2008, Lake Antiquity, was published by Fence Books in 2010. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives in rural upstate New York.

Mary Kay Feather (pg. 12) is a Seattle native alarmed over the recent driest summer in the Pacific Northwest. An acknowledged bibliophile and former bookseller, she can be found curled up most anywhere with Jenny Diski, Helen Garner, Ali Smith and words, words, words. She met her spouse in a bar called Sgt. Pepper's in the seventies when she was known as Fun Girl Feather and is writing a memoir called The Trouble with Fun. Her work has been published in Ruminate, Persimmon Tree and Poets Choice.

Lynne Golodner (pg. 5), in addition to their eight books (which includes two poetry collections as well as the globally renowned Hide and Seek: Jewish women and hair covering, and the more recent The Flavors of Faith: Holy Breads), has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Seventeen, Forbes, Parents, Parenting, Midwest Living, Saveur, the Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press, Crain’s Detroit Business, Better Homes and Gardens, and many more publications.

Nell Johnson (pg. 36) (Aries, Okie, Gamer) graduated from the University of New Mexico with a dual degree in English and Russian. She has worked as an editor for the student publications Scribendi and Conceptions Southwest and read for Blue Mesa Review.

Maxima Kahn (pg. 19) is a writer, teacher, and firekeeper. Her first full-length collection, Fierce Aria, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020. Her work has been featured in numerous literary journals, including The Louisville Review, Wisconsin Review, Sweet, and others. She has taught creative writing since 2004 and she is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Community of Writers and the Vermont Studio Center. She is also an improvisational violinist, an award-winning composer and a dancer. MaximaKahn.com

Gary Lark (pg. 10) is a poet. His most recent collections are Easter Creek, Main Street Rag, Daybreak on the Water (Flowstone Press), and Ordinary Gravity, (Airlie Press). His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Catamaran, Rattle, Sky Island and others. https://garylark.work/

Aurora Stone Mehlman (pg. 33) lives with their daughter in Boise and works for a local literary nonprofit, where they help kids in juvenile detention learn to express themselves and write creatively. They also teach English at the College of Western Idaho. Their work was featured as a Judge’s Pick in the Boise Weekly’s Fiction 101 Contest, and in 2020, they won third place in the Glenn Balch Awards for Fiction.

Patty Paine (pg. 9, 16, 22, 35) is the author of Grief & Other Animals (Accents Publishing), The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), and three chapbooks. She edited Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf. Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, Adroit, Gulf Stream, Waxwing, Thrush, The South Dakota Review, and other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal and Diode Editions.

Michele Popadich (pg. 23) is a current graduate student at Northwestern University, working on their MFA in Creative Nonfiction with a focus on experimental and lyric form. Their essays have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Talking Writing, Driftless, and Lint Magazine. Their poetry has appeared in Heavy Feather Review, LOCUS, Lost Balloon, and the Normal School. They also tell stories in live lit storytelling shows around Chicago. http://www.miche1e.com/work.

Emily Pinkerton (pg. 20) lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds an MFA from San Francisco State University, and her writing has previously appeared in Pome, ZYZZYVA, Juked, BlazeVOX, Foglifter, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. Emily is the author of three chapbooks: Natural Disasters (2016), Bloom (2018) and Adaptations (2018). Her full-length collection, All Hazards, was recently selected as a finalist for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. More of Emily’s publications can be found at thisisemilypinkerton.tumblr.com.

Contributor Bios, cont.

Gordon Taylor (pg. 3) (he/him) is a queer poet who walks an ever-swaying wire of technology, health care and poetry. A recent Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Narrative, Rattle, Event, Grain, Banshee, and Pangyrus. Gordon was the winner of the 2022 Toronto Arts & Letters Club Foundation Poetry Award. In his spare time Gordon is a volunteer reader for Five South Magazine.

Michael Thompson (pg. 4)

About the Editors

Derek Updegraff (pg. 17)is the author of two fiction collections – Pup! et cetera (2020) and The Butcher’s Tale and Other Stories (2016) – as well as the poetry collection Paintings That Look Like Things (2018). His first novel, titled Whole, is forthcoming from Slant Books. He has a PhD from the University of Missouri and an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. His work has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, CutBank, Fiction International, Fourteen Hills, The Greensboro Review, Hobart, and other places.

Kosisochuwku W. Ugwuede (Prose Editor) is an essayist & photographer from Enugu, Nigeria. Her essays and photographs have been published in Agbowó Magazine, The Arkansas International, The Sole Adventurer Contemporary Art Magazine, The Forge Literary Magazine and elsewhere.

Natalie Eleanor Patterson (Poetry Editor) is a poet, editor, and instructor from Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of the chapbook Plainhollow (dancing girl press, 2022) and the editor of Dream of the River (Jacar Press, 2021), and has work featured or forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom, Hunger Mountain, CALYX, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry.

Anna Gayle (Art & Comics Editor) is from Buffalo, NY (and a bunch of other places). She most recently worked as an elementary art teacher in Benton Harbor, MI. She is passionate about ensuring creative resources/opportunities are accessible to minority communities and has been active in arts and music education for most of her life. Her poetry explores ideas of home, identity, womanhood, and family. When she’s not writing, she is usually painting, baking, or listening to soul records.

Daniel Weiner (Managing Editor) is from New York. He came to Oregon State after cooking professionally and managing several fine dining restaurants in Manhattan. His essays borrow from Transcendental and road literature traditions to tell stories about odd pockets of America, the culinary world, and the desire to leave home. When not writing, he enjoys listening to Rostam and Phoebe Bridgers, watching Tom Brady, or planning his next dinner party.

Molly Weisgrau (Managing Editor) often tells people that she grew up in “The City of Dreams” – Lawrence, Kansas, where she sold used books and wedding dresses. She writes about sad kids and rogue body parts and midwestern summer weirdness. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in HOBART, Waif Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Every Day Fiction, and elsewhere. Read more at mollyweisgrau.com

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By belle dorcas