Title Page and Table of Contents Photos: "Nature's Lace," Pamela Bergmann Design and composition: Signe Nichols
ISBN: 9798197235541
Independently Published Published by
Anchorage, Alaska
www.cirquejournal.com
All future rights to material published in Cirque are retained by the individual authors and artists. cirquejournal@gmail.com
Photo by Cynthia Steele
From the Editors
Cirque #30: Celebrating Sixteen Years
We stand in the breach—between the unrecorded turbulence of lived experience and the careful work of shaping it into lasting record.
For sixteen years, we have gathered submissions of art and writing and shaped them into a literary journal. In doing this, we are creating a historical record of our era. We are spinners and weavers—gathering voices from Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and parts of Canada—and turning them into something that endures. Sometimes I tell Michael Burwell this is our legacy: we take sighs and whiffs of wind and give them weight, paper, and light.
The first issue of Cirque was published on the winter solstice in 2009, and the journal turned sixteen just last month. Michael Burwell published the first five issues on his own, building the framework—the structure, the process, and a methodology that still holds. When I joined him in 2011, we already had an extensive mailing list, a format, and readers. From the start, the response from the community was marked by genuine excitement and steady encouragement.
Cynthia Steele joined the staff in 2017. She is our first reader, a feature writer, and staff photographer. Among her many contributions to this issue, she interviews writer and artist Brenda Roper.
In 2018, we established Cirque Press. As the work has grown, so have the demands on each of us, and we work steadily to keep pace. In the past year alone, we published ten books. Cirque Press operates largely through volunteer effort, with payments provided for certain essential tasks such as editing and design. To date, we have brought sixty-five books into existence, capturing story, memory, and history. In this way, we are not only publishing work, but also—quietly and deliberately—archiving the stories, art, and poetry of our era.
The journal itself has grown as well. What once averaged seventy-five pages now approaches two hundred. This issue includes more than fifty images and work from about one hundred contributors. With this growth comes a deepened sense of purpose and responsibility. We know we are involved in something that matters.
And so are you. Your support keeps this work moving forward. Whether through submissions of writing and art, or through gifts of time and financial support, you are standing in the breach with us.
This issue gathers many strands. It teems with writing that gives shape to lived experience—from the winners of the A Moment in Time contest to reviews of five significant books. We announce our 2025 Pushcart Prize nominees and the winner of the Andy Hope Award, sponsored by Vivian Faith Prescott. We also announce a new contest, If I Could Change the World seeking poems about freedom and setting the world free.
James Sweeney’s piece about climber Balin Miller is one with threads that tighten as you read, breaking the heart more than once. In “Cirque in Motion: Pacific Northwest Vignettes of People and Places,” Cynthia Steele follows the Cirque Press Summer Tour—stories and photographs woven together with a sense of motion and the playful.
Fiction and nonfiction, poems and a play. Many voices, many forms. Settle in. Let the reading begin.
Thank you for being part of this work.
Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim
Sandra Kleven, Managing Director
Publisher and Mike Burwell, Senior Editor
Cynthia Steele, Associate Editor, Staff Photographer Tyler Jon Kleven, IT
Signe Nichols, Chief Designer
Design Team: Dale Champlin, Kari Odden, Lizzie Newell
Published twice yearly near the Winter and Summer Solstice Anchorage, Alaska
Our mission: to build a literary community and memorialize writers, poets and artists of the region.
Volume 15, No. 2
POETRY CONTEST
Robin Koger A Moment in Time 10
Contest Winners 11-12
Honorable Mentions 13-18
NONFICTION
p. l. carrico That or Anchorage: Essays on Survival, Shelter, and the Beautiful Absurd, Part One 20
David Cheezem From "Entertain" 26
Amy Holonics The Fire 30
Mike Hull Arctic Spring: Galactic Fecundity 31
David Fewster In Search of Richard Brautigan 33
James P. Sweeney Balin 37
FICTION
Naomi Klouda The Bridge Walkers 46
Laura Kalpakian The Spring of Love and Death 52
Gavin Andreoff Look Away, Son 54
Eric Morlock Salvage 59
PLAY
Michael Meyers Smoke Your Secrets 67
POETRY
Christianne Balk Stellar's Jay 78
David Boose My Father’s Chain Saw 78
Kristina Boratino Wonder Bread 79
Nicholas Bradley Baader—Meinhof Phenomenon, Also Known as Frequency Illusion 79
C.W. Buckley Firmament 80
Susan Chase-Foster Boketto 81
Kersten Christianson Sight of Worm, Crow, Snow Crust Moon 82
Douglas Cole (Two Poems) The Story of Fire 83 Lost Luggage 84
Chelsey Cook Old Vessels 84
Mary Eliza Crane All Saints Day 85
Chris Dahl Pussywillows 85
Gene Ervine Slava Ukraini! 87
Leslie Fried Impossible 88
Rozalija Grace 1917 89
Farley Green 3 a.m. 90
Jim Hanlen Where Stolen Cars Go to Die 90
Amy Holonics When the Swans Have Gone 91
Marc Janssen In Conclusion IV 92
Christopher J. Jarmick (Two Poems) Damn Right I Like the Rain 93 We, the Border 93
Jill Johnson (Two Poems) Pioneer Park 94
Sunday Fishing 95
John Kooistra Joseph Enzweiler, Poet and Star Gazer, 1950—2011 95
Jonas Lamb 44 Word Reflections on My 44th Year 96
Eric le Fatte (Two Poems) Release 97 "Let It Be Perpetual" 97
Daniel Liberthson (Two Poems) Cure for a Teen’s Broken Heart 98 A Lose-lose Situation 98
Linday Lucky The Cricket 99
Jerry McDonnell Bones of the World. 99
Maria Mecham Fireweed 100
Bruce Parker (Two Poems) Wheat Harvest 101
Something Comes Along 102
Timothy Pilgrim Last Pause 102
Vivian Faith Prescott (Two Poems) Imagery of the Coastal Environment 103 My eX gives Me Crabs 104
Emily Ransdell Housebound 104
Don Rearden The Official Language 105
Richard Roberts Naturally 107
Stan Sanvel Rubin Blessed 107
Steven Schneider (Two Poems) Arroyo Seco 108
Walking Rain 108
Rob Schnelle The Pieces of Wild Things 109
Anna Maria Spagna (Two Poems) Near Safety Harbor 110 Rainbow Ford 111
Kathleen Stancik Survival 111
Mary Lou Spartz From the drawing “Child’s Play” 112
Cynthia Steele Offline Treehouse, Seldovia Bay 112
Richard Stokes Only Human 114
Rowan Tate (Two Poems) Before the Fence 114 For Those Who Will Inherit the Mountain 115
Kelly Terwilliger (Two Poems) Under Rain 115 Nocturne 116
Lucy Tyrrell Sundance of the Coyote 117
Angela Waldie How Long Do Forests Remember Fire? 119
Taylor Waring catch & release 119
Tonja Woelber Pavane for a Tufted Puffin 120
Emmie Wuest Summer Succubus 121
Robin Woolman The National Cemetery Recruits 122
FEATURES
Cynthia Steele Brenda Roper, Untethered: Artist, photographer, scribbler: An Interview from Alaska to New Mexico 125
Paul (Pablo) Haeder Dream Tigers—What Would Neruda Say About Gaza? 133
REVIEWS
Two Reviews of Josie Gray and Tess Gallagher’s Surrounded by Weasels
Kim Stafford Surrounded by Weasels by Tess Gallagher and Josie Gray 142
Douglas Cole Stories in Motion: A Review of Josie Gray and Tess Gallagher’s Surrounded by Weasels 144
Mary Odden Pertinent, Possibly Crucial: A Review of Dan O’Neill’s The Impertinent Question: The Words and Adventures of a Liberal Columnist at a Conservative Newspaper in the Red State of Alaska 146
Sean Ulman A Review of Shannon Gramse's Lost Last Poems 148
Diane Ray Cirque Press’s Nugget of a Masterpiece: A Review of Sara Berg’s Kissing Kevin 150
Joanna Streetly A Review and Interview: Mending Holes by Patrick Dixon 152
FEATURE
Cynthia Steele Cirque in Motion: Pacific Northwest Vignettes of People and Places 153
CONTRIBUTORS…163
POETRY CONTEST: A Moment in Time:
"The emotional color painted by these artists fluourished on their tongues…"
Robin Koger
There are poems here which require attention. They demand it. Have no doubt, they are disturbing. There are others, too, which hold my attention in joy. Spritely and playful. All of them speak to connections—found or foundering —within humanity and with nature. I am glad of this experience—even the hardest parts—which by far, is in the choosing. As a retired high school English teacher, reading over 250 poems is not daunting, though some are haunting. Therefore, I chose to read in rounds, allowing some time to pass between each, giving space for the poems to speak to me beyond the pages. I felt them talking to me. Calling me back to them. Some in whispers as soft as a shadow. I found in that way, I was able to respond to them more intrinsically. Here you find the results of my study. I hope you will judge my choices gently, as each of them has earned their place here, by layering their experience and telling me their secrets.
The Critic Ruth Carter
CONTEST WINNERS
Kathleen Holliday
The Tiger in the Zoo
To the tiger in the zoo, Madeline just said, “Pooh Pooh!”
—Ludwig Bemelmans
Never pooh pooh the doodoo the hoodoo the voodoo the muumuu the woo woo the dojo the mojo the fomo the no-no the so-so the too-too the ruh-roh the yo-yo
xoxo
Kathleen Holliday
Katy McKinney
Sandra Porter
Katy McKinney
Nice Parking Job, Buckaroo!
The windshield of my car was where the note was left, scrawled on a napkin in dark ink. I had to laugh – they didn’t sugarcoat their words and I confess it made me think. I checked – and yup! I’d gone a third or more across the line that marked the next car’s space. I’m usually more careful so therefore I blame it on our new car’s wheelbase.
But here’s the thing: I could’ve been called worse –you probably know the names I’ve got in mind. So now I stop, I park, I check, reverse –and all because the note was not unkind. There's no need to be mean in what you do –it made me smile to be a buckaroo.
Sandra Porter
Growth
I stare at my soiled boots covered with red Durango dust
Mixed with tan of the San Pedro and pink of the Gunnison River
Yet the mind drifts to icy, glacial silt of my Susitna home
Wondering if the one who grips my heart
Is planting the tiny seedlings, grown gangly while I am gone
I picture the warm sun of our greenhouse pulling them alive
As he mixes rich dirt with mulch inside the bucket
Placing delicate sprouts into aging yogurt containers
Later we will move them to large green pots
Where they can spread deeper roots
I’ll transplant in June
Hoping what we have sown together
Can flourish, bud and blossom once again
As the long days of our Alaskan summer
Chase away any slow, lingering chill.
Sheary Clough Suiter
Embrace Your Wild
Brian Wright
Anchorage Bridge
Honorable Mentions
Patrick Dixon
Connected
eBay says it’s shipped the gift I bought for Tommy. I discover old friends have passed away via Facebook. My wife DM’s me from the family room, and my sons rarely call: it’s all about texting emoticons these days.
To feel grounded, I sometimes drag out the old shoebox (yes, really, a shoebox) of my mother’s letters. Seeing her handwriting reaches parts of me the wired world cannot. I sense the mood of the moment from the gesture on the page, color of ink, word scratched out, underlined three times. As I read, I hear her voice in my head.
With the evanescence of today’s connection, what box will my granddaughter open tomorrow? How will she fit the sound of my words into her heart? What of me will reach her once my number is undialable, my server forever disconnected?
Annekathrin Hansen Veins of the Mudflats
Mary Ellen Talley
Demi-Sonnet for a Tattoo Artist
Sometimes I wonder how to read the snakes and roses of my son’s tattoos, although his arm’s sad clown, rising like a gray ghost from a typewriter, with banner in script, conveys affection for his MOM and DAD Most people call their tattoos, ink He plies art on skin; I write on paper.
Transcription
Sheary Clough Suiter
Desert, Raven
The morning sun shatters on the canyon walls and falls into our campsite like mist from a thin cascade. Mesquites rattle the long maracas of their pods in applause. Above the rim, a black cross races its shadow where the red rock face meets the turquoise sky. The grawks drift down in pairs—the one from the stone just after the one from the air.
Jim Thiele
Screen Time
David Boose
Linda B. Myers
How to Build a Fire
In my eighth decade I’ve become an enemy of my country. One of us has changed our ways. It wasn’t me.
My old body is my old body’s business. Same for every woman. Same for they/them bodies. Every body.
Hangers aren’t surgical equipment. Kiddies aren’t to fuck or shoot. Our backbones are extracted with each immigrant removed.
White women who oppose sisters are biggest traitors of all. You’re wrong. We won’t forgive your trespass against us.
Vaccination, education, protestation. What evils I promote. If you haven’t taken note by now, back away from me.
Our country tries to ghost us, kick us to the curb. But old women tend hot flames in our final years. The fire rages. We burn.
Amy Holonics View from the Granary, Colorado River, Canyonlands National Park
Cynthia Steele
October Flame
Susan Chase-Foster
Into the Light
A friend died recently post a brief affair with cancer which he refused to fight because “There’s no delight in it, though I’m counting on chocolate, democracy, and zero blight on the other side.” And then after a breath long as infinity he bid us goodnight.
Sanvel Rubin
Insomniac Dog
Nothing protects from dying in sleep
like a dog howling who keeps me awake.
Something terrible has got under its skin.
Barking at shadows. Barking at stars.
You’d think eventually it would run out of moving things to bark at in the dark night which is also mine.
The invisible dog’s as sad as I am, and I know no one will come to comfort the dog.
Longing
Ruth Carter
Stan
Holding Hands with the Dying
Cheryl Stadig
Tim Gillespie
Knick-Knack Paddywhack
—for my grandson
This old man he plays one does the dealy-dink on his thumb and two his shoe and three his knee his this his that to nine his spine and the little boy stuck in his entirely otherworld
comes unstuck a moment, finds a small smile in all the paddywhackity knick-knack jazz
gives the dog his bone
This old man goes rolling home
al kitching
Piliated Woodpecker
Shouting bursts of edgy laughter, a piliated woodpecker, wings spread wide, bright white and ebon feathers, limed in sudden sunlight, flies through an opening in the trees. His flaming crest flashes briefly, his crazy chortle fading into rat-tat-tat drumming, leaving undecipherable hieroglyphics on the gray parchment of dead alder bark.
Shake Off
Brian Wright
Cheryl Stadig Ssshhh
Katherine Kennedy
Song of the Hermit Thrush
At the Snake River crossing an unfamiliar bird sings from somewhere under the faded green bridge. One long note, stepping up a tone and holding it half a moment before moving up one final step, then tumbling down in a melodic arpeggio, a perfect triad. An Ode to Joy, spilling from the grief of a profoundly deaf genius, is no more miraculous than the bright lucidity flowing from the tiny syrinx of this unseen creature: a song of belonging, messaged body to body, of being safely held in the cupped palm of the world.
Lorna Rose
What I Learn
I listen to the sweaty silence, his throbbing presence as he stares at my developing chest.
I learn to calculate the tides. Learn his breath smells like mints when he’s offering me up. Men’s gazes have teeth.
Pivot and scan for the response he wants At the appropriate time You’re pretty. Perform for me.
Legs and boobs get you far. They open doors to bedrooms
Where all good girls go.
Learn to hide and calculate the tides. Aren’t you proud you made your father happy?
Sheary Clough Suiter
A Circular Path
Brenda Roper
In the Shadows
Chair Stack Jack Broom
NONFICTION
p. I. carrico
That or Anchorage: Essays on Survival, Shelter, and the Beautiful Absurd
Part One
Suicide
You can read the obituaries for free on the Sitka Sentinel Website. Everything else costs. Alaska is a hub of suicide, Native peoples are the most likely demographic to do so. I was a substitute teacher in a boarding school for Native kids in Alaska. We never spoke of suicide. Are there words even? Could a perky administrator recently hired from California present a PowerPoint and TED talk on suicide? September was Suicide Awareness month they mentioned on the BBC on the way to work. The air was thick with rotting salmon and there was no cruise traffic downtown. The million visitors had dissipated back to Texas, Florida… Portland.
Suicide has substance but is dependent on no frame of time. It lays thick like volcanic ash on the windshields of cars, I thought, peering at the volcano from the school parking lot. Statistically many of these children are marked to die and they know it. During a day actually unburdened by suicidal thoughts, the therapist has four new activities she found online about it. Now it’s back. A brutal machine sputtering and coughing in the corner of the room only you can see. Other suicidals can’t see your machine, how its vents snake along the ceiling and down dark corridors. Other suicides are a disembodied snare drum floating in the middle of the room. Gun shot raps at odd intervals. I had quit drinking recently, and these were the kinds of thoughts I was having.
Like most schools, this one existed primarily for the edification of the teachers. As a sub, I inhabited their tiny thrones, peered at their family pictures, sneered at their faded college degrees and searched desperately for snacks in the drawers like a crazed gold miner. Between classes I inspected book collections. My favorite teacher-owned book was the one with a 1990’s college bookstore “used” sticker on the spine. I liked these books as they often had unbroken spines, showing their first owner hadn’t read
them either. Today’s teacher was from Illinois. His desk was a shrine to Illinois sports teams and fucking Star Wars. In came the kids. The kids were private. They seldom made eye contact, but when they did, it melted my cruel soul. They often stopped in the courtyard between the buildings to look out over the water. Sometimes three at a time. They poked at their phones and I craved a cigarette as I watched them through the classroom window.
Fall in Alaska it’s always dusk and there are always subdued colors dancing on the surface of the harbor water. It’s a brief but necessary trance one falls into throughout the day.
Sub notes: video on the language of love in Google Classrooms. Quiz at the end. The kids powered their laptops and the droning from 30 pairs of headphones filled the room. I couldn’t see this video; I would just have to imagine. I still sleep on my side of the bed. I think as if she can hear me, possibly appear and make rebuttals against my thoughts. Then the typing began. 60 chubby little hands pecking away at laptops. It sounded like rain on the roof of a van down a dusty Kentucky road. Time passed. Looking outside the sun had almost set. Looking around the room there were posters about valuing your culture. The laptops began to slap closed and phones appeared. The school day was almost over. Who fucking looks at posters anymore? Teachers trying to remember their saccharine mantras.
My half of the bed seemed to be expecting me that night. Day two no whiskey or beer. Thoughts on the nature of the acceleration of thoughts, feelings of being trapped in a narrow underwater cave, a desire to weep until someone came and rescued me were par for the course. Tonight I lay there and felt myself disassembling. It was a subtle feeling at first. I stood and turned on the bathroom lights and stared at my ugly old face a few times. There was an inevitability to it. I was disassembling. The spaces between
the molecules in my body were growing. I returned to bed and got into the fetal position and thought of people and warm memories. I could see the fireplace from my childhood Christmases disassembling. Growing, bulging. Faces of loved ones, eyes vacant and their facial features spread slowly as they ceased to exist. All I knew of myself and everything in the universe was becoming matter that was expanding. The emotions, the regrets, the fear of working tomorrow…Everything that made me alive was bursting at the seams and breaking loose and drifting away in pure geometric expansion. I had to think of things and people I loved otherwise they would cease to exist. I had to think or thinking would cease to exist. I began to lapse into matter, but by extreme will managed to pull myself back. Each lapse became longer. Soon the memory of being alive became a vague concept and I was just matter. I wasn’t aware of being matter, I was matter and was so, for a very long time.
Presently I landed behind my eyes and began to relearn breathing, eye blinking. Although I had just gotten back from a place of pure dissipation, I found my body clenched and gasping. That was ok.
I sweat all day through six periods of English. I felt so fragile that if I didn’t have the school days routine, I would die. Sometimes my terrified glances would fall on a kid’s eyes. Five weeks into a year of sleeping in dorms, away from their families and homes in a world of earphones and “super excited” teachers. Suicide is for me the machine in the room, I have learned from a lifetime of bar and homeless shelter conversations. For others it is personified in many different ways. The hum of an air conditioner… Maybe I am suicide for some scared kid, recognizable palpable terror on the face of an adult in a common situation.
Despite the agony, I was proud. I can say, a seizure is the most satisfying thing that ever happened to me. I learned this as the school day ended, mercifully. I was back behind my eyes and the machine was gone.
It was the last day of September. October was health literacy month. They were already putting up the healthy diet posters in the office. The hotdogs at the Pioneer Bar weren't on the poster anyway. I guess I’ll keep being sober.
Don’t Talk About It
“Your problem is…’ she began sternly, stirred her drink then smiled broadly and continued. “Your problem is you talk about it.” By the bar light her skin looked camouflaged with the faded green tattoos. “Guys don’t talk about that shit. It’s probably easier. I think about my ex-husband. He had to get high to say a word.”
I wondered if this was a subtle cue that I had been talking too much.
“Or maybe I listen too closely. It shuts people the fuck up.”
Now I felt challenged to speak. “Talking and thinking and relating and whatever… they seem like kids stuff. We're all supposed to just shout at each other that we are ‘super excited.’ The only nuance we are allowed to make is to sometimes say, super excited ironically.”
She scratched her forearm. Tattooed words briefly were legible as her skin turned bright, then faded. “That’s not a new problem though. You don’t think your mom wasn’t super excited about your shitty crayon drawings when you were a kid?”
A verbal silence fell and the terrible music from the jukebox was the soundtrack to our private memories.
Wormhole
Jim Thiele
“I wonder if AI will be super excited,” I said, flicking my phone. “My ex-wife worked for the biggest grocery store, and they were worried about AI getting in their databases and learning their 40 years of grocery data. The prescriptions, the changes in buying habits they had on 200 million people. I feel like this data was as close to God as I’ve ever been.”
“What did she do at her job?” she asked.
“I heard her on the phone a lot. She was ‘super excited’ a lot,” I said. I caught the bartender's eye. My new friend was texting. Someone in her gigantic life I should be jealous of. She smirked and put her phone down.
“Mom,” she said. “She says don’t get murdered. Growing up here, growing old here you think about moving. But white people come to the island and get drunk and talk about how sad they are. Kind of ruins the dream of escaping. People leave all the time, but when they’re gone you realize you were never really close anyway. Then they act differently when they come back. Or they fail and come back. I never left. Your ex-wife probably knows all this. And she’s super excited about it. Who cares?”
I had a shot and looked at her arm again. There was a date on her forearm. Right where you bury your face for a covid sneeze. “What’s that mean?” I asked.
She looked down and rolled down her sleeve. Shrugged then rolled it back up. “That’s the date my son died.”
There was not much to say after that for a while.
“I’m not going to talk about that,” she said.
The island seemed only as wide as the headlights. Water battled the windshield like a porthole on a sinking ship. We stopped at the liquor store/gas station. “Hold on, let me compose myself,” I said. I lived behind this liquor store and didn’t want to start any small-town rumors. I slapped my face and said a few tongue twisters, “red leather yellow leather, red leather yellow leather… ok I’m ready.”
We walked into the bright store. Bill Withers was playing. The gigantic older lady was behind the register. She was chewing on something and immediately looked down. The place was packed; it was the only thing open on the island at that hour. Fathers with kids after sports games,
arguing crackheads, carefully manicured tradesmen, NPR types reading the labels on boxes of food. The checkout lady had seen me daily for months and had never spoken a word to me. She seemed to glean all the information she needed by observing my attitude. I felt an incredible pressure to foster a good image of myself in her eyes. Fleeting eye contact with her was sometimes the only communication with another human being I had for days at a time. I went and got paper towels and a can of fruit cocktail to try to conceal my drunkenness. Then as a theatrical afterthought I waddled over to the liquor. My new friend had a bottle I did not recognize. I got bourbon. Once at the register I made a swirly motion with my finger to indicate I would be purchasing all the riches on the counter. The cashier lady looked at me sternly, then at her, then bagged our bottles. I saw her watching us over the crowd in the store as we left. I pointed at my apartment a few hundred feet away, fearing a police call and a DUI.
It was a racist thought, but she, standing in my kitchen with her narrow hips, images and text on her skin and great height, resembled a totem pole. I, sitting on the bed, yellow and blue in places, resembled a Halibut. She used my new paper towels to erase my contribution to her great composition. She lit a cigarette and stared at me. I obediently didn’t look away. She maintained eye contact as she had a shot. There was no danger of drinking until the sun came up as it never did here.
She sat on my one kitchen stool, legs ajar, back straight as one’s posture usually is on a stool and flipped through her phone for a moment. “My mom says she likes you,” she said. “She says you are one of the few people who leaves change in the take-a-penny, leave-a- penny dish.”
I considered the comment. I realized her mom ran the liquor store and knew more about the island and human nature than I ever will… than I or my ex-wife or all the anthropologists at UC Berkeley. Than all the corporate execs at the grocery headquarters. To know the island was to know the world by proxy. I wondered what AI’s stupid analogous form was here? Maybe Pentecostalism. I also thought, it must be hard to like people when your grandson dies.
I kept these ideas to myself and maintained eye contact with her. I knew she was thinking too. To interrupt the silence would break the connection. She was right, don’t talk about it.
Goose Girls
I thought of my dad’s closets over the years as I cleaned my own apartment. How I stole his giant collared shirts in grade school, how I grew too big for his clothes in high school and how I hated to throw away his odd blazers, conservative dress shirts and army surplus when he died. When he died I had to call a sheriff to let me into the apartment to get his will. I could only take what I could carry. The apartment managers were vultures of Portland’s mutated and perverse HIPAA enforcement culture. How I wished I could have fit in those clothes and take them with me. My apartment was now tidied. I put a few things in a bag and went to Urgent care.
Urgent care looked at my pee and sent me to the ER, I declined the ambulance. The ER did some ultrasounds and said I’d have to go to Seattle. Waiting in a bed, mostly nude with bright lights to make my skin look even more yellow I began to panic. Being nude in public situations is a guiding life fear of mine. Perhaps it’s why I keep getting married, the need to have an ally for those rare moments between showers when I am not fully clothed. Sex is why god invented zippers.
Dr. Alex, younger than me with fresh freckles across her nose, looked me square in the eyes and said, “You need to go to Seattle or Anchorage. We can’t do it here,” she said and left the room.
This is when it all seemed to get frustratingly real. It felt like the silence in the room had been turned up. The lights were brighter. My months of avoiding the pain had bought me no alternatives.
The assumption had been for months I had pancreatic cancer. Pancreas enzymes and ultrasounds seemed to confirm this, and the internet said there was no cure, just treatment. And if seeking further medical help meant spending my last days half nude in strange buildings, I was avoiding it. Hell, I was almost enjoying living my last days in silent ignominy. Telling a stranger to “eat shit and die,” had a new sincerity to it. Telling a kid at work he was “a killer,” felt more like a diagnosis than a rhetorical remark. Every transaction at the gas station was poignant and profound. Sitting in that bed, under the harsh lights, worrying my scrotum was hanging out, I felt ok with the notion that I was approaching the last hours. Fuck you people and your Amazon Star Wars Harry Poter orgy, I’m going home. The nurse appeared.
She had face tattoos, I wasn’t sure how old she was. She too seemed relieved. I imagine she saw a lot of melodrama at our island ER. Administering to the dying must validate her career.
“What’s your pain level?”
“Five,” I said, fearing not being allowed to leave that night.
She stood resolutely, blocking the door. “Out of ten, your pain is a five?”
“Out of ten? Well. I mean, it’s a matter of ceiling and basal scores, isn’t it?”
“No,” she said, brushing my bullshit aside.
“If you are asking me whether I want pain medication, sure,” I said. “I don’t think I’m driving tonight.”
She approached me. What was left of my scrotum disappeared deep within my body. I squirmed. She attached a squeezie-cuff to my upper arm and some sort of plastic parasite to my finger. It seemed like some solemn Russian Orthodox religious rite.
I continued to hold my phone and said, “See, I have to go
Nard Claar
Standing Alone
to Seattle,” as if that were impressive or as if I had been looking at porn seconds earlier and this was my alibi.
She sat in the chair next to me. Her fingers and breath were cold. I glanced over at her as she pulled at the skin on my arm looking for a vein. Black hair was tucked behind her ears. I smelled a trace of some fried food over her floral perfume. Her small, cute button nose was a counterpoint to her capable large hands and broad shoulders. I thought of Bethany, a girl I knew in the fourth grade. She drew hearts on my arms and made bracelets from daisies for us both to wear. I used to seek her out at lunch recess, just to squirm away from her.
“One two three in,” she said and poked me as I squirmed away.
“Ya know, I grew up around this shit. These phones and I still have problems buying a goddamned plane ticket. Log in, log into another thing… remember codes. I can’t remember codes. I have space in my head for maybe five more things, I don’t want to waste it on a code.”
“You’ll feel cold,” she said, and side eyed me. Her lips were wet. She did not smile, but she watched me. I side eyed her back. It hit.
I did feel cold. It moved up my arm and then I felt… like when I was kid, we’d have competitions where we’d see who could hold their breath the longest. After a minute of swallowing gasps and the world around, turning gray, I’d finally breathe deeply. And color would return to the grass and the sky and the face of Bethany (angelic singing).
“Are you ok?” She asked, tossing an empty dilaudid bottle into the hazmat container.
“Yes,” I said.
She stood and paused by the door. “I’ll be back, buz me if you need anything.”
The room was beautiful and my guts didn’t hurt. Hospitals in Alaska don’t have stupid posters on the wall. You could appreciate the craftsmanship of the drywallers near perfect seams. This meant I could go home, didn’t it? Dr. Alex appeared, with forms and such attached to a clipboard.
“We can get you down to Seattle once we get the approval from the hospital. It’s that or Anchorage.”
I looked down at my hollow little phone. It seemed like a toy. A long silence settled between us. I really didn’t want to get emergency flown to another hospital. This sounded horrible. Like all this was really happening.
“What are you thinking,” she asked. Going in for the kill.
“I don’t know, cancer?” I said and cried. That gushing weeping I had made children do for years as a teacher. Their defenses conquered, their brave resolute denial of their crime overcame, they cried. And I cried too. Hideous gasping snotty pathetic 43-year-old tears. I wanted the nurse back.
Dr. Alex squeezed my arm as if to keep the drugs moving. I looked at my phone again. It was stuck on an incorrect password screen.
“Bilirubin can cause confusion,” Dr. Alex confusingly said. And this made me giggle now.
“Oh can he?” I said, now giggling snot, adjusting my hospital gown and squirming. “Fuck that guy. I hate Billy. I can’t figure out this fucking phone.”
“This will be easier, otherwise you’d have to get the flight, get from the airport to the ER then wait to be admitted.” All of this sounded like an adventure, especially if I could take the nurse. I bet she knew some amazing dives down there. I looked at my stupid phone again.
“Well, if Billy says it’s alright, and you think I should, I guess I’ll take the medivac.”
Dr. Alex produced the forms she had waiting for me, far more concise than any shelter entrance packet. I signed up for medevac insurance and for some sort of Medicaid supplement offered by the local tribal hospital. At least that’s what it all looked like to me. One said distinctly “charity” across the top of the form. It’s a lovely old word, isn’t it? Charity. When I signed the last one I heard a distinct sound. It was the heavy footed plop my cat used to make when jumping off the bed. This was a cruel hallucination and I cried again. “We are going to do some imaging and the plane should be here in a few hours,” Dr. Alex said, disappearing like the devil, to go file my soul somewhere.
“What kind of music do you like,” the guy guarding the MRI machine asked. They looked like they had a relationship going back years, he and that giant anus-like machine. He typed confidently at a screen attached to it.
“Anything old,” I said.
“Rock on,” he said.
I lay down, ignored some simple instructions and the guy put my headphones on. The melodramatic chords of “Turn up the Radio” by Autograph started. The singer insisted I “turn it up,” right as the jarring metallic MRI sounds cut in. I’d have to talk to Billy about this confusing situation.
Back in the ER bed, the nurse reappeared with two bags, she carried one in each hand. I wanted to tell her about a statue in Covington, Kentucky of a woman with a goose in either hand. But it didn’t seem like the time or place; however, I made a mental note to tell her about it later. This brought to mind my father’s obscure art history references he made later in his life… and how they came at inappropriate times. He once scolded a police officer about Rembrandt’s Night Watch late one night when the officer warned us about trespassing. Although my Goose Girl statue association was similar, it was actually an appropriate thought for the moment… as this nurse would be truly interested to hear about it, this is way different, dad. I also realized I was making gurgling noises and opening my mouth to this internal dialogue.
“This one is antibiotics,’ she began, attaching it to my IV, “and this one is fluids,” she continued as if she were on a cooking show, “And this one is for the pain,” she said, producing a secret ingredient from her smock. A relieved silence fell on the room as we both watched the bags do their magic. I believe in love at first sight. Goose Girl threw the empty dilaudid vile away and turned to leave.
“I’ll be back to check on you,” she said, consecrating our bond. I again heard the plop of my long-gone cat jumping from some long-gone bed. I determined the sound was coming from inside my brain. I’d have to tell nurse Goose Girl about the noise next time.
Dr. Alex returned after a time. By now I was luxuriously splayed on my bed, gown open to the world. I was cured. Chill. I was chill. I could probably go home at any time.
“I’d like to know how this turns out for you,” she said. I
noticed two paramedics waiting at the door. I was sad now; the party was over. “If you come back, tell me what happened.” She seemed to be telling me I was dying, but in a good way. This gave me strength. I got up and began to put my pants on. They were giant. I laughed.
“They’re too big,” I said.
Dr. Alex held out a hand to stabilize me. I recoiled at first but then took hold to negotiate a foot through a pant leg and laughed.
I had lost so much weight my clothes were giant on me. I was stealing my father’s clothes again.
[…to be continued and concluded in Part Two in Cirque #31]
Nazaré
Pamela Bergmann
David Cheezem
From "Entertain"
We pay people to entertain us. Weird. **
Pretend we’re a squirrel in a tree in a forest near a wheat field by a creek down a ravine.
We hear noise.
A boy on his back on a flat rock in the middle of the creek.
Playing harmonica.
Our tail bullwhips once. Freezes.
Play the sound of the gurgling creek: a watery loose chord
Play the sound of the sun spackling through the leaves: random, short notes, not quite staccato, just long enough to bend down and clip short.
Play the sound of the train leaving the station. But there is no train here.
It’s not music. Music is sound organized for an audience. There’s no audience. We—the imaginary squirrel with the bullwhip tail—don’t count.
Run away.
To the boy playing harmonica, we seem to fly.
**
Once, when I was fourteen, drowning my pancakes in syrup, I fell in love with a waitress. I wonder where she is now. I wouldn’t recognize her if I saw her. She’s hidden in a crowd of moving-picture tropes about small-town servers trapped in dead-end jobs. I’m sure she really did talk about getting out of town---soon as she graduates high school. I’m sure she wore a blue denim shirt with flowery embroidery.
She was speaking to someone. Who? The line-cook? My brothers? The telephone? Certainly not me.
My two big brothers split the check. I left the tip.
My tip was a dirty blues harmonica.
As soon as her hand touched my harmonica, she would know me—know the wheat fields, ravines and falling leaves I had played to. Or she wouldn’t. I would never see her again, but it pleased me to think she would know me.
**
Enter means between. Tain (tenir) means hold. To entertain is to hold a betweenness. When we entertain a guest, an idea, an audience, we are holding, clinging to their betweenness.
A guest. An idea. An audience. A customer.
**
Pretend we’re a sentient drone hovering over the windshield of a bright blue Oldsmobile in the parking lot of a small-town diner. Watch the little brother slide to the middle. Middle brother takes the passenger seat. Big brother takes the wheel.
Watch big brother gingerly remove a dirty harmonica from his pocket. “Did you forget this?”
Little brother takes it in, then takes the harmonica, makes as if to get out of the car. The car is already moving.
OK, Sentient Drone. We’re done.
Entertainment is a shadow life, apart and partial. When I entertain you as a guest, mi casa es su casa—but not really. The house I present to you is just a shadow of my house.
Service is friendly. Service is entertaining. Service is subservient. **
You is what Martin Buber says happens when I relate to you as a whole being. Buber:
-- What then, does one experience of the You?
-- Nothing at all. For one does not experience it.
-- What then does one know of the You?
-- Only everything. For one no longer knows particulars.
Spiritual moments are moments of recognition, of relation. I relate to you as a You when I recognize you as a complete being. How can I exploit a complete being? How can I break a complete being down into pieces to use or categorize? I can’t, so long as I relate to the spirit of you as an indivisible being. But I only get a glimpse of You. Spiritual gifts are moments of grace. We glimpse. Now we remember glimpsing. Now we’re grasping at the receding possibility of a re-glimpse.
Spiritual moments cannot be forced. If I try to relate to you as a You—if I try to create a moment with you, I risk pulling you back into the “it world.” You’ve become an it—an object to be manipulated for my own spiritual wellbeing. Grip too hard onto a spiritual moment, and it gets reduced to entertainment. What do we do with moments of grace? Where do we take them? Where do these gifts take us?
June 3, 2022
Kincaid Lake State Park
Falmouth, Kentucky
On one side of the road: Weary RV drivers. Anxious voices. “Come on. A little more. Right. RIGHT! WOAH! OK. Pull up. Try again.”
I’m across the street at a “primitive” campsite: just me, my bicycle, my tent. It was a long ride to get here. I have another long ride ahead of me tomorrow. I’m out of food. I’ve had dinner, but I won’t eat tomorrow until I find my first convenience store, which I think is about 25 miles away. I want to ride out early. I need to get some sleep.
The music isn’t overly loud. Neither are the voices. But the acoustics of that campsite—a downward slope, a hard road—invites these voices into my tent, as a presence haunting my thin-walled home. Eventually, I fall asleep, but then my visitors return—louder, freshly lubricated, meddling with my dreams.
Two stories float around in my mind. In one story, a biker is pissed off because he needs his rest. He should go out there and confront them. In the other story, a biker is alone, and kind of enjoys some company—even of disembodied voices.
Around midnight, someone mentions constellations in the sky. I quickly grope for my pants and socks, stumble out of the tent, and follow their voices across the road and up a small bank.
Connie Taylor Green Bikes
They look down to see a grey-bearded old man emerging from the dark, stumbling up the bank. I introduce myself, tell them I’m on a bike trip commemorating the Underground Railroad. And I ask them if they can point out the North Star to me.
Escapees used the North Star to navigate north to freedom. I’ve been riding for a month, and I still haven’t seen it. My noisy neighbors don’t know where it is, but they show me a star-gazing app. It’s clear on the phone, but faint in the sky. I can’t imagine having to navigate by it.
Someone offers me a beer. I decline, let it slip that I’ve got to get out early in the morning to “beat the heat.” I stand to leave, already regretting it. It would have been pleasant to sit with their embodied voices. Too late now…
When they wake me up the next time, it feels like a rare gift. Their numbers have thinned to just one couple, having a frank conversation about the lives they’ve carved out together. Simple stuff: How easy it is for him to cook and clean together (“All my other married friends are jealous,” she says). How things might change someday when they own a house.
It’s a privilege to have these voices here guest-performing in my tent. I feel warm, paternal. I send them a smile, and wish them good, happy lives.
“One can only hate part of a being,” Martin Buber says. Hate loses its footing when we recognize a being as whole. Life has given me a moment where I can let the parts go. I fall asleep to the music of their voices. When daylight comes, I am strangely energized, ready for the ride.
I can’t say that my well-wishing accomplished anything tangible. My campsite neighbors will never know I had warm feelings toward them. It might creep them out if they did.
What good are warm feelings towards strangers? If they find themselves buried in debt; if they find themselves climate refugees; if they find themselves the victims of online harassment, my bubbly euphoria will not comfort them. It will certainly not provide for them. But it made me a kinder person. Kindness has its limits. It won’t change the world. But I’m grateful for the gift, and the gift stays with me for a long time.
I’m listening to John Coltrane’s forty-minute masterpiece, Ascension, but I can’t keep up. I latch onto a line in Pharoah Sanders’ solo, where he blows breath and tone out of the reed, a screeching mass of dirty air, but then, in the same breath, he cleans it up, makes it pure.
All in one breath? How?
But before I can form the question, he’s somewhere else, on a beach, perhaps, picking up little crabs with big claws and dropping them back onto the sand.
When the CD finishes, there are pieces that stay with me:
• Coltrane begins and ends the piece with a motif, an ambling line, a shuffle, a movie soundtrack on a gleaming city street in the rain, quiet and reflective—or it would be, but the motif finishes with a high note that explodes from the shadows. The ensemble yanks the note away, casts it to the sky, bounces it against a brick schoolhouse wall, runs away with it…
• Elvin Jones, the angry drummer, banging hard, as if trying to reign everyone in, or that brief rhythmic hook, bang-BANG, alternating from one drum to another, HIGH-low—or is it low-HIGH? Now it’s there. Now it’s gone.
• The relaxed feeling I get towards the end of the piece, when first the piano, then the two bass players take over from the winds. One of the bass players bows, the other plucks, and the complex flavor that simmers between….
• John Tchicai plays these bouncy couplets, working their way up, a step down and a step up, another step down and a bigger step up, three of them, playful foam spraying out above the waves.
But it isn’t the snippets that keep me returning to the music. It’s the whole. It’s the realization that there’s a mysterious, unifying principle, probably too big for me to grasp, but I can sense it—or I can sense that they can sense it as their bodies give body to the sound.
15 No. 2
**
Pretend to be the ghost of John Coltrane, strolling along a Fred Meyers parking lot in Palmer, Alaska, only to discover a sixty-something-year-old white guy sitting in a Nissan Leaf, Ascension blaring from the speakers, John Tchicai is spitting out staccato couplets on his alto sax. The man in the car is twitching something embarrassing with his shoulders and arms, accentuating every note. Coltrane shakes his head, taps the window.
“Alone?” he says. “Are you really meant to listen to this music alone?”
Weird.
**
I’m on my bike a half-hour past sunrise. I wave at the RV, but I know they’re sleeping. I wish I had my harmonica. I could leave it at their door. Maybe this time I could write a note.
(###)
Works Cited
Buber, M. 1996. I and Thou. W. Kaufmann, Trans. New York: Touchstone. Coltrane, J. 1965. Ascension (Edition II) [Recorded by J. C. Orchestra]. On Ascension [Compact Disc].
(###)
Annekathrin Hansen
A Moment in McCarthy
Amy Holonics
The Fire
Bakonynána, Hungary
1984
Bodies squeeze together in the back seat of the little blue car. Plastic woven bags filled with bottles cover my young cousins who wiggle on my lap. Bags of bread, meat, and vegetables are jammed in between us. We cruise down the hill through the dusty streets of the village, past the store, past the bar, then up the hill, past the church. Where are we going? I don’t know. I don’t yet understand the language they speak. Hungarian. I am here to learn it. Just follow along, I think, just be cool. Try to relax. Cover the pit in my stomach. Strangers all, I just met them two days ago. I live with them now and call them unokatestvér, néni, bácsi, — cousin, aunt, uncle.
Camera strap around my neck, wearing odd new clothes my aunt made me buy yesterday from a woman in the next village who operated a shop from the basement of her house. I arrived to live at my father’s sister’s house with only four shirts and five pairs of underwear. “You
must have seven of each,” Aunt Lizi insisted as she forced me to buy three identical brown shirts with a Coca Cola logo, the only choice. “I wash clothes only once a week, on Tuesday,” she told me in German. This I understood.
The Soviet car belches smoke with our whole family piled in. It chugs away from the small village to the woods. We head to the same deep dark forest where I’ve already heard the Russian tanks practicing their maneuvers. It’s 1984. Hungary is occupied.
We pile out, women in polyester house dresses with open-toed high-heeled high-top sneakers. I wear hiking boots. The kids wear sport sandals and matching nylon track suits. My male cousins wear tight low-cut flared jeans. They take off their shirts in the heat and show their chests: tan and muscled from laying concrete all day.
I follow them all a long way into the woods. There’s no underbrush, the old women have picked the forest floor clean of sticks for kindling, carrying them home in baskets on their hunched backs. We cross the tracks of wild boar. My uncle points out how he and my father hunted them here, as children, with bow and arrow, before my father escaped.
I try to help start the fire, looking for twigs, organizing them in a lean-to, or a teepee, or log cabin style. “Nem Nem!” they yell at me; the young men laugh and shoo me away. My uncle takes me by the hand, nearly drags me up a hill. Higher, higher he pulls me up with him. Unafraid, I clutch roots and branches and ascend until the earth fills the space under my fingernails. My uncle lights his cigarette, and he beams as we sit way up high looking down on the flame my cousins have started, without accepting my help. My uncle pretends to hold up a camera, he points to the fire, and I realize I must photograph it.
My uncle yells down for more. His son drags a fallen tree and leans it up onto the fire, then another, then another. He builds a bonfire.
Finally satisfied that I shot enough pictures, my uncle brings me down. The women, faces round like mine, smile and hand me a cup of cold beer. I don’t like beer, in America. I don’t want to drink it. “Inni,” they insist. My uncle translates in German. “Trink Trink.” I expect the bitter taste of my dad’s Budweiser. This is not America. This Czechoslovakian beer tastes like it’s made of nuts. It’s woodsy and fills up the back of my mouth. It goes down smooth and cool. Delicious. Next, they start in with shots of Palinka, the brandy my aunt makes. It burns like the fire, going down. I am learning to handle it.
They bring out the bread, hot peppers, onions, tomato, cucumber, and white chunks of fat that they
Sheary Clough Suiter
Uprooted
skewer on sticks and hold over the flame. The fat looks disgusting to me. How can I eat this? I haven’t eaten bacon for years. Not because I don’t like the taste, but because I gave up eating animals. The pork fat sizzles in the fire. Grease drips, they catch it on bread. It soaks in deep. They pile on hot pepper and a slice of onion and hand it to me. “Egye,” they command, “Eat this.”
This is like church, I think: the forest, the fire, my family. “This is my blood,” I tell myself. “They are my body,” I tell myself, as I accept, taking communion. I look at them all. In their eyes, I see myself. As I bite into the soft bread, I look at the bare chests of my male cousins. I see my brothers. I crunch the hot peppers atop the greasy bread. Delicious. My eyes water from the blazing paprika. Through my tears I see my father.
Sweat pours down my face, sweat like tears of memory, like tears I shed for all the years I lived without these people, and for all the years I will miss them, in my future. I lick the salty grease on my lips. I will never forget this day. I will always remember this fire burning deep in the forest. Flames and sparks shoot up into the sky, almost high enough to be seen by the hungry Russian soldiers over the next hill, occupying this country, practicing for war.
Mike Hull
Arctic Spring: Glactic Fecundity
The new celestial body appeared a little north of the one that had commanded the eastern sky for some time, and both displayed a brightness that indicated they were most certainly planets. This was a new dynamic added to the night that dominates the Arctic winter, the winter that had just passed its mid-point; and although the sun had risen from its retreat below the southern horizon, still the nights were long. I watched the motion of the moon on its journey which seemed more varied from this vantage point on the top of the planet, and the aurora would sometimes softly dance across the sky in curtains of green and yellow, and at other times riotously explode in flames of red and purple along the horizon. And quietly, patiently, the arm of the big dipper would measure the passage of the night like the hand of a clock. But the tundra lay dormant beneath a vast shield of white where seldom did I see an animal move, and in the most intense cold not even the raven would stir the air. A stillness so profound
that while lying in the snow to watch the aurora the only sounds were the beating of my heart and the crackling of my breath as I exhaled into the night air.
When I had lived alone in the wild in a milder climate, I noticed how the seasons influenced my perceptions and orientations. Especially winter, when all life seemed to retreat within the earth. I wanted to experience that depth of interiority. Who are we, what are we, when life is reduced to its simplest, most basic elements? Only the Arctic winter could offer the experience I was seeking.
So when I arrived on the tundra, I did not build a cabin. I dug a cave into the hillside, faced it off with a wall of logs in which I placed a small window, and then buried most of the structure. I had to wait until the temperature reached forty-five below zero, and then I melted snow and threw buckets of water at the exposed logs above the soil. The water hit the logs and froze in place. I used winter’s tool to build an ice shell that sealed my shelter from any drafts. And, like the trees, I sequestered myself In Nature’s womb through a winter whose temperature dropped to eighty-five degrees below zero.
Each day I would try to get outside for a walk but sometimes that was simply not possible. Much of my time that winter was spent sleeping, but many of my waking hours were spent sitting on a stool peering out of my window at the stars. In time I noticed that the new planet was drifting towards the one who had been with me for a while, and when the sun began its timid climb above the southern horizon signaling that Spring was approaching, the two planets were threatened with being swallowed by the dawn. Then the new planet started to race across the sky and actually passed over the path of its companion. Raced is a relative term in describing the passage of time in the Arctic sky. This movement took perhaps a month or more to complete.
Bill Heubner
Early Ice, Campbell Lake
Knowing something of the distances between these planets as well as their distance from me, it did not seem possible that one could move that fast, but the planet I was riding on could. It was carrying me at 67,000 miles an hour to a new viewpoint so I could gain a different perspective of the arrangement of planets in my solar system. My planet was racing to the position in its orbit that facilitates the arrival of Spring. I had always perceived Spring as something localized on planet Earth, but now I realized it is part of a Galactic dance. And I not only watched it happen, I was a participant.
As the Earth travels along a trajectory that provides the Arctic with a more intense exposure to the sun, the warmth softens and gradually lifts away the cloak of Winter. The process is not linear, it is more like the sun kneading its warmth into this mantle. Sometimes new snow falls, sometimes extreme cold returns, but the warming is relentless. In time that sun lays bare the earth, and what it also exposes are the grasses and seed-bearing fruits that were covered over with snow before they could sink into the soil. The ground being revealed to me was not yet receptive, but daily the sun warmed and softened the earth and me with its gentle massage that slowly removed the frigid rigor of Winter’s touch.
Simultaneously the sun melted the ice on the frozen ponds and drew moisture up into the air, and with the long days of constant sunlight, temperatures on the tundra can reach into the eighties and nineties. Clouds form rapidly and billow up thousands of feet, and these towering creatures drift across the tundra and announce their presence and intention with lightning and thunder. And
one afternoon they released a torrential rain that pounded down upon me and the land and drove the awaiting seeds deep into the now receptive soil, impregnating the land that welcomed them with a nurturing embrace. And I, barefoot on the hillside, could feel my feet sinking into the mud along with those seeds—swept into this lifegiving ritual that became the most erotic experience the universe had ever offered me.
Within the womb that is the land, the seeds opened and roots reached out to anchor themselves in the soil while other emissaries journeyed upward through the earth breaking open this crust and reaching into the sky to find the light of the sun that offers warmth and nourishment in a relationship that is a wonder which we still cannot duplicate. And since that light lasted twentyfour hours each day, growth was rapid, for there is urgency in the Arctic in responding to Nature’s universal mandate for all of life—to grow.
As plants became sexually mature, pollination began and all green and growing things cast their fate to the wind. But just for reassurance, flowers enticed the insect world to assist them in this intimate process. Bright colors, soft welcoming environments, attractive scents, even free drinks were offered, and bugs by the billions flocked to participate in this orgy that brings together the plant world’s female and male contributions to accomplish conception. Seeds were formed on grasses and bushes and many of these were also distributed by the wind or by the birds and animals that ingested them. But in the Arctic many will be trapped in the cold and snow before they can penetrate the earth, and these will have to wait through
Matt Witt
Three Sandhill Cranes
the long winter for another spring when the Earth returns to this position in the Galaxy and as the stars align, the sun and the sky will again conspire to inseminate the land.
Birds arrived on the tundra by the millions. They come here with one purpose—to mate. And they, like the flowers, come dressed to attract. The tundra became a cacophonous colorful carnival with each species flashing its own colors and shouting its own song—because song was also the method for locating suitable species-specific mates. Spontaneous grouping turned the tundra into a symphonic orchestra that I wandered within to witness and listen to the contributions of each family: the geese and ducks, the loons, the shorebirds and songbirds, and the cranes. And within each group the ritual began for mate selection. They danced, joyfully. And none so elegantly as the cranes. And the flirting, the chasing, the rejection and the pairing—all aspects of this ritual of procreation played out across the tundra.
Are we so different? Nature is what it is. Plants express attributes the universe has granted them as plants, and animals are the expression of their specific attributes. We are just the human manifestation of the attributes granted us by the universe, and more specifically those fashioned by the planet we are gifted to journey upon.
But we seem to get confused because we also have reason. Its tools are math and language, and with these marvelous tools we are able to explain our experiences to ourselves—and to others. But because we give things names and explanations, we sometimes seem to think we are the discoverer or even inventor of many processes. We are not. We have inherited these from our host planet and from plants and animals who have existed, engaged in, and evolved through these activities for hundreds of millions of years. We are the come-lately child who has inherited all these attributes, these gifts, and along with them there is the invitation to become an active participant in the continuing process of creation. A terrifying honor, a huge responsibility, demanding heroic courage and profound humility. When we look at the world that Nature had fashioned long before our species appeared on this planet, it begs the question: Do we have the intelligence along with the will to protect and to carry the work of creation forward?
We are given the same mandate Nature gives to all creation. Grow. And specifically for us this means Become Human. Which is to acknowledge our place among all that preceded us and all who continue to sustain us. We are their child. Hopefully we will learn to do well by them. Hopefully we will celebrate life as they do and someday, perhaps, even dance with the cranes.
David Fewster
In Search of Richard Brautigan
“Is that you?” asked the little 3rd grade girl in the school playground where I had taken my 2 year-old daughter. She pointed to the cover of Trout Fishing In America, which I was reading While Hannah threw gravel at the monkey bars. It must have been my hair
And the felt hat I was wearing.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Yes, it is.”
And went home famous.
******************
I had my vasectomy done the weekend before I moved to Tacoma, which set the tone for the entire venture. Not to mention my entire life thereafter.
The topic of my vasectomy had been in the air for several months, the frequency and intensity of the conversations increasing after my wife’s periods began after the birth of our daughter. To spare Hannah’s feelings in the womb, I never referred to an “unplanned pregnancy,” but rather to “our planned on a subliminal/subconscious level pregnancy.” After a traumatic IUD experience, my wife had for the past decade relied on no birth control method other than an intimate knowledge of her life cycles. Amazingly, this method had only failed one other time, resulting in the birth five years previously of a son.
The boy’s father was born and raised in Rochester, New York, which was also the place of my birth and upbringing. I enjoyed pondering this fact like a dog worrying a chew toy, although I was never able to draw any solid conclusions from the coincidence.
Anyhow, two months after Hannah’s arrival (September 19, 1995), menstruation commenced, which was quite disappointing because the doctor had implied a longer time frame before the danger of unprotected sex would rear its ugly head. Like most men, I was perturbed at the turn our birth control discussions seemed to have taken, feeling that my request that the matter be handled with a simple pill to be a reasonable alternative to irreversible martyrdom under the blade. To this line of discourse,
however, I was treated to a veritable barrage straight from the Harvard Medical Journal regarding the chemical pillage inflicted on the female biosystem by the pill, along with side arguments about world population and my faith in our long-term relationship. Finally, in January (by which time Hannah was four months old), I agreed to make an appointment at the Country Doctor, a sliding-scale clinic on Capitol Hill where I had once had my chronic eczema treated.
The first step was to take the pre-operative interview as required by state law. The doctor with the ponytail grimaced when he saw my scrotum.
“Hm, how long have you had this varicosity?” he asked, fingering my left testicle which, to the uninitiated, feels all the world like a myriad of copulating earthworms engaged in a primordial orgy. “Sometimes these veins get wrapped around the sperm duct and it’s hard to tell what’s what. If we can’t find it, we’ll have to call a specialist.” Specialist? What’s he trying to say? My dick is being sliced open by amateurs? What the hell am I doing in the Capitol Hill clinic anyway? If these freaks were so good, why aren’t they working in real hospitals? I don’t care if the Stranger ad did say they’d do the job for $10—it’s all part of Dan Savage’s sadistic plot against breeders. Visions of Dr. Benway dance in my head as I imagine the operating scene, the surgeon popping amyls and screaming “Nurse! I can’t see worth shit through this muck—it’s like a fucking rainforest in there—“ while my cock, balls, appendix, prostate gland are lopped off and thrown, sliding in bloody trails down office walls. “It’s gotta be here somewhere…” Winter passed into spring which passed into summer. Fights about my reticence regarding the slice-and-dice thing were interspersed with screams of rage regarding
our landlords, the Blausteins. We were living in a nice neighborhood in West Seattle in what was euphemistically called a “carriage house,” i.e., a shack in the alley behind the main house where indentured servants from Sweden must have been herded like cattle a hundred years ago. 100 years was also the last time the roof on the deathtrap was patched, as evidenced by the rivulets of brown water that coursed down the walls into the electric socket by the baby’s crib every time it rained more than two minutes. This, however, did not constitute an immediate hazard according to the county building inspector, who informed us my notion that water and electricity don’t mix was unscientific superstition.
Our tragic, late-night demise from a fire started by a wiring short was miraculously averted, however, with the news of my wife’s surprise inheritance from her recently-deceased step-grandmother, a woman she hadn’t seen since the 70s. The 20 grand involved was our ticket out of Squalorville, the only question being “Where to?”
“Tacoma, of course,” replied my wife. After the first wave of horror had passed, I realized there was a certain logic to this response. True, Tacoma was to Seattle what Oakland was to San Francisco, a crime-ridden cesspool whose gateway was a row of porn shops housed in crumbling brick ruins that hadn’t seen better days since Coolidge was president. But, and this was a big “but,” you could buy a house there for under $100,000. And, and this was a bigger “and,” you could actually get ownerfinancing in the event you couldn’t qualify for a bank loan. (And who the hell would live in Tacoma if they could qualify for a bank loan?) In fact, to the old codgers who owned the property my wife wanted to buy, my $22K job at a telecommunications firm made me the epitome of a white-collar career guy.
The drawback of the plan was the fear that if we missed a payment by a day we would, like the slaughterhouse worker in The Jungle, be thrown screaming into the gang-ridden streets. On the other hand, there was the comforting knowledge that my wife’s best friend Michelle lived there. They had met when Michelle was a wild hippie girl living on Vashon. Then, she moved to Bremerton to live with the co-owner of a tattoo parlor who cheated on her. Now she was married to a fellow who hooked up cable tv and owned a house on S. 17th and Prospect, which was far enough away from the Hilltop that you had to really strain your ears to actually hear the gunfire. The point was, things seemed to be looking up for Michelle, and there was no reason to believe that they wouldn’t for us, too.
Jim Thiele
Hidden Life
In the midst of the excitement of dealing with slumlords, realtors, and estate attorneys, however, the problem of my sterilization was not ignored. My wife, in an empathetic moment, sensed my squeamish attitude of having my scrotum slashed by a pimply-faced intern even if it did only cost the equivalent of a night out at Burger King, and went to the trouble to find the veritable RollsRoyce dealership of vasectomy clinics. It was run by a legend, a man who was apparently the Einstein of gonad surgeons, a doctor so famous that other doctors had to take a course from him at the University of Washington just to be able to purchase the equipment used in his revolutionary new technique. My wife had generously (albeit not completely altruistically) offered to pay for this procedure, but it turned out my company insurance would cover it. (This created something of a personal milestone, as this was the first time I’d ever been able to combine a medical emergency with gainful employment.)
Unfortunately, this also entailed another series of “Why I Want a Vasectomy” interviews, the first with a bored GP in West Seattle who was required by my insurance provider as a referring physician, the second by the office manager at the clinic in University Village. While the intellectual part of these sessions was easy enough (“Yes, one child is enough for me, thank you, it’ll be a goddamn miracle if I can keep her growing girlhood supplied with hot dogs and spaghetti-o’s as it is without any further complications”), there was always that unvoiced, nagging doubt (“Gee, what if Winona Ryder wanted me to father her love child and then spurned me when she finds out I only shoot blanks…) The office manager turned out to be an attractive woman in her late forties, the only female bureaucrat I was required to tell my tale of woe. I scanned her eyes for a sympathetic reaction to my noble sacrifice, figuring my experience may make me one of those appealing, sensitive 90s guys that Cosmo is always telling us are hits with the babes.
Oddly enough, the question of potency didn’t constitute one of my fears. I knew enough about the procedure to realize the likelihood of the entire works being chopped off was remote (particularly since my upgrade from the public health ghetto) and, not being Norman Mailer, the fact that the possibility of impregnation did not exist with every act of intercourse did not present a reason for the permanent abdication of my libido. And I never even attempted to use the line “Because I never expect to ever have a partner other than my wife for the rest of my life” in the fear that, after the laughter died down, my inquisitor would mark me ineligible for the operation due to reason of insanity. (Also, with one divorce each on our
own scoreboards, our own marital record was not one to inspire confidence in most statisticians.)
At long last, the big day arrived. In a masterpiece of good life planning, I arranged for my vasectomy, a yard sale, and the packing, loading and transporting of all my worldly goods to an entirely different city to occur on the same weekend, so I wouldn’t have to miss any work. My first assignment, bright and early Saturday morning, was to skip breakfast (per orders) and get down to the clinic, where I would be the first customer of the day.
“Do you want to watch?” asked the Great Doctor, easer of pain for thousands of men a year. How could I refuse? And what kind of case would I have in a malpractice suit if I didn’t, for that matter? As it turned out, I had nothing at all to worry about from that end—the entire operation was a veritable work of art performed by one who seemed more magician than scientist.
Instead of using two incisions, placed on either side of the scrotum just above where the sperm ducts meet the testes, Dr. Wilson does with just one, an incision so miniscule that it doesn’t even require stitches. After injecting a shot of Novocain in my balls and waiting a couple minutes for it to take effect, he whipped out what looked like a tiny paper hole-puncher and punched a small hole in the middle of my scrotum. Taking out a thin, longish pair of tweezers, he reached through the hole, went down one side, and brought the tweezers back bearing what looked like the skinniest strand of angel hair pasta in the universe. Pulling out a good two inches of this fleshy filament, he cut a chunk off with a pair of scissors, cauterized the loose ends remaining with something out of an old wood-burning kit, and stuffed the mutilated works back into its sac faster than you could say “How in the love of Satan did he manage to find the right one so fast, what with all those other veins and tubes and shit down there?” The morning dew hadn’t even dried from the parking lot when I got back in my car, bearing a plastic canister for a follow-up sample, a handful of Advil, and the admonitions to take it easy and not use my dick for anything fun for five days. In retrospect, I couldn’t even remember seeing any blood.
My wife, not being quite sure how much the ordeal was going to take out of me, had arranged for me to spend a day at a cheap hotel where I could recuperate under more restful conditions than those provided by a yard sale presided over by an over-excited six-year old boy and his nine-month old sister. I helped move a couple of the heavier items out onto the cement driveway for the sale, and went in the house to lie down between the halfpacked boxes until it was time to check in. The shot was
starting to wear off, but the discomfort wasn’t too extreme, not much worse than the feeling that lingers about an hour after you’ve been hit in the balls with a hockey stick. The plan was for me to hang out in the rented room until early evening, come back to West Seattle to help put away any unsold stuff, and drive the whole family back to the hotel for the night.
Out of a perverse nostalgia, I had decided to stay at the Thunderbird Hotel, a fleabag on Aurora Avenue in Fremont that had also been my accommodations on my very first visit to Seattle a decade before. Standing on the second-floor balcony, I smoked a cigarette and admired the view of the city as it loomed over the bridge, trying to remember which skyscrapers made their appearance after 1986 and wondering what would have been more unrecognizable—the present skyline or my new life? Tiring of profundity, I went inside and fell asleep over an old Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis movie. Ah, cable tv, once again your comforting bosom provides comfort from our afflictions…
Around six, I was tooling down 99 to pick up the clan. If anything, my nap had only made me groggy. The pain seemed about the same, although my mindset veered from its original clinical observation, which tended to be fascinated by the novelty of my new sensations, into a maudlin self-pity. Before we’d even pulled into the parking lot of the Thunderbird, I’d managed to get into a screaming argument with my wife. Maybe I thought she was being insufficiently grateful for the gift of my sterilization. Maybe I wanted Chinese take-out instead of pizza. Whatever the reason, it was enough to make me storm off and jump on a bus, black clouds of justified rage trailing behind me along with the exhaust fumes. Hours later, I sat on the floor of the darkened, West Seattle house, pondering what my Existence had become. “My God, I’m the Anti-Matter Richard Brautigan!” I realized. Charting the trajectory of my life, I found it ran in a mirrorimage of the hippie novelist’s, almost as if viewed from one of those alternative universes Stephen Hawking was always typing about. Instead of leaving a squalid Pacific Northwest and facing the pressures of being an unprepared family man in the big city only to emerge as the literary beacon of the post-beat generation, I was taking the entire trip backwards to end up in the very same Tacoma surroundings that informed Brautigan’s ominous, early childhood memories in the stories from Revenge of the Lawn. The most noticeable difference being, of course, the “literary beacon” analogy as applied to my own San Francisco years, where “drunken little slacker poseur”
would have been more accurate. Still, had not a poem of mine appeared in an obscure anthology alongside that of a certified Beat Legend who probably didn’t get paid, either? Regardless of whatever might happen, they would never take that away from me, and the theme music from “Gone With the Wind” blasted through my head as I curled up on an old laundry sack to sleep the good sleep of the Perfect Martyr.
CODA
Of course, my wife called then, we made up and I was back at the motel a mere six hours after my initial departure. I have blocked out the events of the subsequent days in all but a vague way, sort of like what happens to women after childbirth (because otherwise they would never go through the experience ever again and the human race would have died out in its earliest stage.) On my first trip with the moving van to the new house, however, I had a strange epiphany. Once, when I was a college student in upstate New York, I was walking one twilight through an older, residential neighborhood between my campus and downtown Syracuse when I was gripped by the notion that if I kept on walking I would somehow be able to go back into time until I ended up at my grandparent’s house on Bancroft Avenue. Driving over the ravine to the Sprague exit, I had the same feeling of being transported back to that tree-lined working-class suburb that had never left my three year-old psyche. The golden light from the setting sun gave the very soot an enchanted air, and our new street was lined with oldfashioned street lamps that must have dated from the turn of the century and were unceremoniously torn down a year after our arrival. That night, I tested my equipment to see if it still worked. It did.
The next morning, my wife and I dropped the dryer four feet off the back of the van, missing the ramp entirely and having the top come flying off like a defective jack-inthe-box. And, a few weeks later, I learned from the pages of the National Enquirer that Anthony Quinn, aged 81, had knocked up his secretary and was expecting his 687th illegitimate child, while Tony Randall, 77, was expecting his first.
Sometimes, the portents just come too fast to make any sense of them at all.
James P. Sweeney
Balin
Balin Miller is on top of the world. Denali basecamp is buzzing with excitement when he returns from the 14,000-foot camp. The word is out about Balin’s achievements. He’s climbed Begguya (Mount Hunter) to the summit twice on this trip, once solo up the North Buttress in seventeen hours round trip, the other on Deprivation with Vincent Landry and now he’s climbed Denali by the trade route, the West Buttress.
Balin talks funny, it’s not bad considering the hard time he had speaking and hearing as a child. He’s welcomed and offered fluids and food by more than a few of the many camps here. His voice is endearing, he’s really happy and comfortable in his own skin and if you get a moment with Balin, you feel the magic.
His tent is on a little hill above basecamp. All his friends and partners have deserted the hill and gone home. He sleeps all day and only wakes up to eat. His father says, The West Butt kicked his ass
He gets up that evening and strolls down to basecamp. Everyone now knows about what Balin has been up to the last two years. The word is passed from guide to client to climber to climber, camp to camp. He’s on a climbing tear that most good climbers don’t achieve in their whole lives, much less by 23.
Last winter, he climbed Cerro Torre and Aguja Standhardt in Patagonia with Chris Labosky and Ethan Berkeland, his Fairbanks partner. Before he left Patagonia, he solo climbed Californiana on Cerro Chaltén (Fitzroy) 5.10c 700 m, then he flew to Calgary and quickly soloed Virtual Reality WI6 and Reality Bath WI7, an ice climb in Canada that hasn’t seen a repeat since it was climbed 37 years ago. Including his travel, he climbed all this in seven days.
I got a kiss, Balin texts Ethan in Fairbanks with the Inreach his mother bought for him.
Balin was supposed to climb the Cassin with Canyon Tobin and Frankie Dunbar, both from Anchorage, but they had already lifted off on their climb when he got to the 14,000foot camp and that’s why and when he climbed the West Buttress. Balin isn’t bothered that they took off without him, because now he is stoked for the opportunity to solo something big. He had spoken and questioned Matt Cornell last winter about the Slovak Direct and the route has been on his mind for a while.
Balin has been on the Kahiltna glacier for more than 40 days. He is in constant contact by text on his Inreach with Ethan Berkeland who is texting him weather updates and keeping Balin’s partners, Tristan O’Donoughue and Julie Costa in the loop. He debates flying out of the Alaska Range and going home. He questions whether he is actually going to go for the Slovak. The eleven mile approach up the East Fork of the Kahiltna is his biggest fear. He could fall into a crevasse and that would be the last of him. He cooks burgers and drinks beer on his hill.
Balin to Ethan—People weren’t meant to be alone in a two person tent for days. Not sure how Waterman did it. I guess the Slovak is calling after all.
Ethan to Balin—I’ve got between Oct 10 to Jan 5 off. Are we going to Patagonia or the Rockies?
Balin—I got laid last night by the climbing ranger.
Ethan—Damn nice.
Balin—Sitting out here alone listening to the ridge of madness.
Balin formulates his plan through a series of texts with Ethan.
Balin—This is the best weather window since March. Is it crazy that it’s day 46 and I’m still psyched?
Ethan—If I was 23, single and didn’t care about money, I’d be psyched too.
Ethan—I’ll be in Anchorage on the 19th. I’ll buy you dinner if you pull it off.
Balin—Sweet.
Balin goes for the Slovak. He borrows a pair of skis with Silvereta bindings and taped-on skins and he gets blisters. An uncomfortable pack and the heat of the day make it miserable, and he takes double or triple the time to approach the route as it should.
Balin—If I fall into a crevasse, it will be in the next hour.
Ethan—Please do not.
Balin—At the base. safe. Tired but psyched
Balin gets a good night’s sleep. He crosses the bergschrund before noon and speeds up the snow slopes to the crux on the lower wall. The lower part of the wall is easy for Balin. He solos everything but the headwall pitch.
Balin reaches the hanging glacier in four hours and the bivy and the weather window are excellent so he decides to take an early day; it’s before noon and he knows his body good enough to rest and recover from the labors of the approach.
Balin leaves his bivouac 19 hours later. He feels good and he’s taking the leisurely approach to big mountain soloing, except when he climbs. He free solos everything in this section of the route.
Balin—I’m at the aid pitch
Ethan—Sick.
Balin—I don’t want to high altitude solo. It’s not that fun. The lower ice crux was mostly sticky ice.
Balin—at the Cassin.
He spends fifty six hours on the Slovak Direct and 70% of the time sleeping. Balin runs into friends on the summit who let him eat some of their food. He descends to the fourteen thousand foot camp and doesn’t stay long. He wants breadsticks,
root beer and a decent bed so he heads down and spends an enchanting evening descending alone to basecamp.
When word gets out to the rest of the world that Balin soloed the Slovak Direct, Colin Haley calls it, Super badass. Mark Twight, Balin’s idol and Slovak Direct veteran says, holy shit. Walter Harper, Hudson Stuck, Harry Karstens and even the liar, Frederick Cook roll in their graves and take notice. Dave Johnston and Art Davidson, from the first winter ascent shake their heads in amazement. Daryl Miller, retired lead climbing ranger for Denali says, most of us will never be able to understand how extraordinary his accomplishment was in the climbing world today. Charlie Sassara says, Balin slept his way up the most impressive climb ever accomplished in the Alaska Range. Roger Kempell, eighty plus year old athlete/climber says, he won’t argue with me, if I call, Balin’s solo of the Slovak Direct the most impressive athletic achievement in Alaska history.
Balin Miller’s story hits me hard. Balin’s an Alaskan, grew up in Anchorage, learned to climb on the Seward Highway. That’s where I learned to climb. He died after he finished a rope solo of Sea of Dreams on El Capitan in Yosemite trying to unstick his haul bag. He went off the end of his rope. Someone filmed it from meadows down below and his fall is all over social media. I call Charlie Sassara, he mentions that my close friend, John Weiland knew his father. I remember that I had heard about Balin. I have a chance to not write Balin Miller’s story, but I call John and he reads me text messages from Dave Miller, Balin’s dad. He thinks I’m going to write about Balin. I didn’t think about writing about Balin until after our chat and then, I think about Balin all night.
In the morning, I text John. I want to write about Balin. He sends me Dave Miller’s contact. Why should I write about Balin? I don’t even read about climbing deaths, achievements and basically don’t follow climbing. I call Dave and realize I know him. We had one interaction. He chopped bolts that I put on one of his aid climbs that was actually a pretty good free climb. This is the first time we ever talked about it. He tries to apologize—fuck that! I won’t accept his apology. I don’t care one bit about bolt wars from thirty years ago, but it’s funny. Writing about Balin is an avalanche and a roaring giant of one. I’m free falling. I tell Dave, all I do is write about dead Alaskans and I promise to write the story right.
Balin was born on January 12, 2002 in Anchorage at Providence Hospital. His mother’s name is Jeanine L. Moorman. She was born and raised in South Africa. Balin went to Winterberry Elementary for grade school and 7th through 12th grade at Steller High School. Both schools were alternative.
Dave and Jeanine’s marriage didn’t last long and she ended up being one of five women that Dave Miller married over Balin’s short life.
Balin has seven siblings—brother Dylan, Danielle, Aisha, Jonas, Paige, Mia, Matt. It’s hard not to call Atticus Rosen a brother of Balin’s.
Balin struggled as a kid. He couldn’t speak or read well and had a hard time at Winterberry grade school and Dave or Jeanine often had to pick him up from the principal’s office. He was picked on by the other kids, life was a struggle and he was very isolated. He had an imaginary character Happy, who he communicated with. Sometime between first and second grade the doctors figured out he had hearing problems caused by weak eardrums. Jason Moorman (Jay), Jeanine’s husband after Dave and Balin’s other dad, had military benefits, and a very skilled ENT MD happened to be stationed in Anchorage and took a small piece of skin from Balin’s neck and grafted it to his ear drum and miraculously brought the world to Balin. Jeanine and Dave put reading into high gear. In the evenings after the surgery, Dave and Balin would go down to the basement. It wasn’t easy, Dave was hard on Balin, but he wasn’t going to have a kid who couldn’t read. He told both his boys he wasn’t going to let them be retards. Balin went to a speech therapist, and he worked hard so he could be understood. In a few years, Balin had caught up with the kids his age in reading, his speech improved, he quit visiting the principal’s office and quickly blossomed as a deep thinker. I surmise that Balin had a chip on his shoulder from getting picked on as a kid and climbing was the way to show them who he was.
CIRQUE
He read philosophy, he won a chess tournament at West High and he got along with almost everyone. Somehow his abrasiveness, brashness, goofiness and loud mouth charmed many kids. His favorite line to use in an argument was: to be fair. Balin had his opinions and he loved to argue. His father and siblings say Balin’s favorite book is, 100 Years of Solitude.
Balin inherited a deep love of travel from his mom and she took him to South Africa and on road trips in Alaska and the lower forty-eight. She gave him a credit card when he went to Europe with Dave’s second ex-wife, Silke. She was determined to show Balin the joy exploring the world past the confines of their own backyard. When reflecting on his childhood travels, Balin spoke with gratitude for the gift his mother had given him.
Julia, Dave’s fifth and current wife said one of her first experiences with Balin was when he told her that her own son was a pussy, because the cross country race he was in was only three miles long. Balin was quite the rascal, so irreverent and inappropriate but hilarious, goofy and brilliant. His Instagram moniker is: Halter top guy who pretends to climb. He earned the nickname from a woman who went crazy one night in Camp Four at Yosemite after ten days of listening to Balin’s loud voice at night while trying to sleep. Tristan O’Donoghue, has video of the confrontation.
Balin was cantankerous, argumentative, sarcastic, off the wall and ridiculous. His old Instagram handle was: Twink Climber. He inspired everyone he crossed paths with and was beautifully self-deprecating. His schooling, his parents and his climbing partners never held Balin back. He told his father a joke: What’s the worst part about being an addict?
Becoming a Christian.
Balin’s father took him and his brother Dylan rock climbing at Telephone Pole Rock when he was ten. He took them ice climbing right after this. Dave took them on the Bomber Traverse, a grueling three day hike in the Talkeetna Mountains and Balin loved every minute of it. Almost immediately, all Balin wanted to do was go climbing. Dave Miller was an aid climber. He says he turned to aid because he was too weak to free climb, which I don’t believe, so Balin was working on his aid climbing by the time he turned twelve. They went to the Alaska Rock Gym and they climbed peaks in the Chugach Mountains around Anchorage. Dave took Balin on a climbing trip to California and rock climbed at Taquitz and Mission Gorge in San Diego. Dave loved everything there was about climbing and he passed it on to Balin. Balin was soon climbing rock and ice at a high level even though he was barely a teen. Dave says he was an irresponsible father and I disagree vehemently. He passed on a love of the mountains and outdoors that was a gift of immeasurable value.
Balin wore black fingernail polish in high school. He befriended nerds and played chess regularly. He told his older brother Dylan, I believe I can be the best climber in the world.
Balin was not afraid to speak up at a young age. He knew what was right and wrong and in a family with five different women/mothers he could be the voice of conscience. His brother Dylan, tells me this with admiration of his younger brother.
When Balin was 12, his father took him ice climbing at the far end of Eklutna Lake and they stayed in the Serenity Falls Cabin. They climbed Miller Might, Serenity Falls and the Iron Curtain. They also went rock climbing and camping at Hatcher Pass. Dave bought Balin Petzel Nomic ice axes from Sarah Masco, after she busted up both legs ice climbing and Balin used the tools the rest of his life.
Balin did everything he could to go climbing. He read every climbing book he could get his hands on. He knew his Alaskan climbing history. He worked at the Alaska Rock Gym.
He idolized my climbing partners. He had very good manners and he liked girls and like his father, he liked them all.
His other father, Jay, took Balin hunting out behind Sutton and Balin shot a moose. He also took Balin to Prince of Wales Island bear hunting. He taught Balin how to butcher and take care of the meat. I tried to ask Jay some questions for this story when I was interviewing Balin’s mom, but he couldn’t speak, he was so sad. Jeanine, Balin’s mom said he walked out of the room. Dave Miller calls Jay, fifty percent Balin’s dad. Dylan says Balin never argued with Jay.
Balin soloed Bridleveil Falls when he was eighteen and soloed Greensteps when he was nineteen, both WI5 in Keystone Canyon outside of Valdez, Alaska.
I call John Weiland and curse him for giving me this story. I’ve been working on it for almost a month. I also tell him he owes me for my rope he took a fifty-foot fall on 21 years ago while climbing Weiland’s Evil Eye and even more for setting me up with Balin’s story. I tell him, Balin soloed Nemesis. John asks me in a quiet voice, He soloed Nemesis?
Yeah and Whiteman Falls. Sounds like he could solo anything that’s been climbed with rope.
Balin met Ethan Berkeland at the Spire Rock Gym in Bozeman, Montana where Ethan lived in his van and Balin was going to school at Montana State University. Their first climbing trip was to the Grand Teton where they got wet and met failure. The second trip they went ice climbing in Cody, Wyoming and tore it up. Balin complained about climbing in Cody. He didn’t like climbing in canyons and gullies and said that he’d rather climb ice on a big steep alpine face. They made plans to climb Mt Huntington that summer when they both returned to Alaska.
Dylan and Balin were roommates at MSU. They had a competition to see who could run the most miles in a month. Balin took the competition seriously and would text Dylan at school with the distance he had run that day. After school at night, Dylan had to make up the distance, because he didn’t want to lose to his younger brother.
Balin hated college and was depressed for many reasons. His friend Noah, another very strong climber and his girlfriend helped him through this difficult time and Balin never went back to college.
Balin and Ethan climbed the Harvard Route on Mount Huntington that summer after an attempt that included Frankie Dunbar. They made a video and it’s on YouTube.
I spoke with Balin’s mom Jeanine for two hours on the phone. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a son like Balin and really, no one else can either. Kids like Balin don’t come down the tracks hardly ever. His Slovak Direct climb is Alaskan legend. He walked up to climbs that were nearly impossible for almost everyone else and soloed the routes with ease. Balin was a warrior. Balin was a samurai. He’s Achilles, Beowulf, and Hercules.
Balin told his mother Jeanine, I might die before you. He also told her, I feel most alive when I’m climbing mountains. Balin still had the credit card his mother gave him when he went to Europe as a teenager and she wanted him to have the security of his mother’s support. She also paid the monthly charge for his Inreach. He put three thousand on the card for his Denali trip. He always paid his mother back.
Balin stayed with his mom and Jay for two weeks before he left for Yosemite and the Sea of Dreams. The woman he had sex with in Denali basecamp visited there and they spent time together. They went for a hike on Mount Spokane. Balin loved the forest up there and the smells and the way the light came through the trees. The morning he was going to blast off for Yosemite he was downstairs sleeping and his mother slipped into his bed and hugged him like he was a baby.
Dylan was miffed his brother didn’t go cragging with him at Index or Leavenworth on his last trip to Spokane, but went back to Anchorage to climb on the shitty rock of the Seward Highway. This trip he wanted Balin to go with him to the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho but Balin had bigger dreams and maybe some girls to chase. He must have felt bad that
he didn’t go climbing with Dylan because he did mention as some kind of consolation, that Dylan was probably a better rock climber than he was.
Sea of Dreams was not his first rope solo on the big stone, El Capitan. His first wall was Lost in America where he followed a one-legged climber named, Aiden Costa and he climbed South Seas solo. The mice had gotten into his Toyota Prius car while it sat at his mother’s place while he was in Alaska. The Prius stunk like shit.
I can’t say Balin died rappelling off the end of his rope. He died trying to unstick his haul bag. The top of El Capitan is a desperate place. Most climbers are dehydrated and famished when they reach the top and only want to get down to the valley floor and eat pizza and drink beer.
Here’s some words I find pertinent from Andy Kirkpatrick, who also soloed Sea of Dreams, in his story about Balin on Substack, The Kill Pause. And so, in spite of the content and the comments, I clicked play and watched it to the end, saw the tragedy unfold, as I’d already guessed it probably had, having been there, and nearly done that very thing more than once. It wasn’t a rookie error, it was the opposite, a master’s error.
Mark Dwight, Balin’s idol, wrote a moving, personal story, Slow Pulse Boy on Substack immediately after his death. He knew Balin, because after Reality Bath, he interviewed him to a packed room at the Beringia House in Bozeman. I still feel his sorrow and pain, three weeks after I read his column. Mark Twight, more than anyone knows Balin’s story, because he lived it.
I took a quote from another of Twight’s stories that seems appropriate.
Up there, in the mountains, the purity and happiness of his spirit was clear. Down here it appeared blunted, pressured by the demands of earning a living and figuring out how to spend more time up there.
I’ve spent a month learning everything I can about Balin Miller and I just read a great quote from a story about Balin on Substack. In his story, Balin Miller’s Influence by Luca Faso, whose friend was climbing Denali this summer said, Balin was the only truly nice climber he met on the Kahiltna Glacier.
Dave Miller gave me Ethan Berkeland’s, Tristan O’Donoughue’s and Julie Costa’s phone numbers first—Balin’s best partners. They’re Fairbanks climbers—Ethan was born in Minnesota but from four years old on, raised in Fairbanks. Tristan was born and raised in Alaska. They know who I am. I have two stories on alaskaiceclimbing.com. Plus my name is on many routes. I promise to honor Balin and write the whole story. We have a good conversation. They tell me about Balin wanting to solo the stiffest ice climb (Sans Ami) of my generation. They also tell me about Balin climbing overhanging ice on two hits of LSD. Ethan tells me, Balin thought he would die in the big snowy mountains, not on TikTok in Yosemite.
The social media posts about Balin’s death have me in a rage. It’s amazing how many fucking old, but not bold climbers, there are. I must tell seventy five posers to fuck off! He wasn’t live streaming, he wasn’t an influencer and his record is stupendous. I call the San Francisco Chronicle and tell them how much they suck for writing that Balin was live streaming. Tristan tells me everything he can about Balin. I can feel his love.
I’m lucky because Roman Dial and David Stevenson are the two main readers of my stories. If they like my story, I know I’m on the right path. They both lost sons. Roman sends me a bunch of texts he received from Balin asking him about Mount Hayes. David Stevenson is ready to punch some guy talking shit about Balin online. We circle the wagons around Balin and they all encourage me to write this story.
Balin climbed Reality Bath with glitter on his cheeks. When he was a kid, the neighbor girls, Katy and Moly Scoggin painted his face with glitter. He resumed putting glitter on his face a few years back after a summer of alt rock, a girl and
lots of partying. If he was just going rock climbing he wouldn’t put on glitter, but like a samurai, if he was going to battle a difficult climb he’d wear glitter.
After Balin’s 53 days in the Alaska Range, his mother Jeanine, comes up from Spokane because she and her husband Jay have a place in Seldovia. She takes Balin out for Eggs Benedict at Middleway Cafe. That is his favorite. He is thankful. They go for a hike around Blueberry Hill at Flattop Mountain and Balin tries to initiate an argument around politics, but she won’t take the bait. He takes selfies of her behind him on the trail and he’s wearing the goofy grimace that is in many of his pictures.
As a consolation prize to us mere mortal ice climbers, here’s a story about Balin’s and Dylan’s attempt on Wowie Zowie. On the approach, the weather was good but as they were hiking the final hill to the base of Wowie Zowie, it starts to snow. Balin leads the first pitch as the snow picks up in intensity. Spindrift avalanches blast off the top of Wowie Zowie and fall right behind Dylan and fill his hood with snow. Balin climbs right through the spindrift. He sets up a belay and spindrift avalanches keep coming down. Dylan is getting hammered. Balin reluctantly realizes the climb is hopeless and prepares to rappel. Dylan hustles away from the base of the climb while Balin eats the spindrift. Balin attempts the climb again, but conditions prevent him from the ascent. Balin never climbs Wowie Zowie and he complains about the shitty climb for the rest of his life. Wowie Zowie is a bad climb, he says.
Balin climbs Unknown White Powder WI6+ M5 on the Seward Highway just south of Anchorage. Easily, it’s the hardest climb in south central Alaska and a big step up from anything my generation climbed. He used a rope for this, but he solos Kingsbeard WI5+ at Victor Creek which is known to have every type of bad ice you could ask for, all of it steep.
Balin was no slouch on rock either. He climbs the notoriously dangerous Sandstone Samurai 5.11R/X, 210m in Red Rocks Nevada, on-sight with someone he met on Mountain Projects. Alaskan climber, Clint Helander said Balin said, it was pretty casual.
Balin has transformed himself in the last two years. He used to have dark spells and some anger. Since he’s been cut free as a climber, he’s found himself and is confident. The hard childhood and his stubbornness are now masked by the goofy, irreverent and really fun inspiring climbing machine that is Balin Miller.
After the Slovak Direct climb, Balin flies out of the range with Paul Roderick, owner of Talkeetna Air. Julie Costa is waiting for him in Talkeetna and drives him back to Anchorage. She spoils Balin with root beer and breadsticks and love.
Balin doesn’t have much time to bask in Julie’s world before he has to fly to Nome for the start of the crab season. His friend Atticus is already in Nome and has been very worried that Balin might not show up because of some climb or another. They are crewing on his uncle Adam Boekmann’s boat, the Anchor Point. Balin is whooped from his climbing trip but he’s so strong and he’s a balls to the wall worker. They head out from the Nome harbor, and the fishing is fair and the water is not too rocky.
Atticus and Balin weren’t friends until an eighth grade literature class. He found Balin’s goofy, abrasive, brash but not mean, persona admirable. He brought Balin home and his mother Rachelle Bachman took Balin in and he became family. Rachelle and Balin would argue (Balin’s forte) about pretty much anything: politics, music, people and relationships. To be fair, Balin would say. Atticus would sit back and enjoy the show.
Back on the Anchor Point in the Bering Sea, Balin has coffee, peanut butter and V8 juice for breakfast. The boat is rocking and rolling. They have a few crabs they are picking from the pots. Balin’s stomach is roiling with the Bering Sea. He races over to port side and blows chunks into the sea and then races back to Atticus yahooing to beat the band and resumes pulling crabs from the pots. He blows chunks three times and he’s so fast to the rail and back he never misses a beat.
The crab season abruptly ends eight days later due to low crab numbers. Atticus is bummed. He needs this money to live. Balin’s happy with the five grand he made. It’ll pay for his trip to Patagonia this coming winter.
Balin returns to Anchorage on June 30th. He stays at Julie’s place and is enjoying the break, but Ethan is asking Balin and Julie to come with him and Tristan to Nenana Mountain for some rock climbing. Rock climbing on the road system in Alaska mostly sucks, but with a long hike, a pack raft or preferably a plane or helicopter ride, Alaska is an unbelievably great place for rock climbing and Nenana Mountain could be the crown jewel. Balin is slow to commit. He didn’t make that much money crab fishing, he’s never experienced just rock climbing in the range and he’s tired. Julie offers to pay for his trip. She is a sheet metal worker, she makes good money and she wants to go to Nenana Mountain more than anything. Balin’s friends call her his sugar momma. She’s already buying food and packing gear. Ethan somehow convinces Balin to go. Maybe he calls him a whiny bitch, because that’s Balin’s favorite term whether he thinks you’re a pussy or he loves you. Julie also takes Balin to Alaska Mountaineering and Hiking (AMH) and buys him some new gear.
They fly in from Cantwell in a helicopter on July 2nd and land on the Nenana Glacier at 10:30 AM. They break into two teams and they’re climbing perfect granite with splitter cracks in no time. Flowers sprout from the stone. There’s even a few mosquitoes out.
In the evenings, they party in camp. They have camp chairs, a cooler, some beer and this is no expedition. Balin is not a real drinker, nor is he a pot head, except on this trip he is drinking Ethan and Tristan’s beer. He never buys beer and he’s always poor. On the Fourth of July, Tristan and Ethan break out a Karaoke machine and serenade Balin and Julie. The sounds echo up and around the granite walls and disappear into the mountains. They climb two routes, Relaxation Spire 5.10 D-, a total sandbag grade and another route on the Stimulation wall. The trip is a success, and they fly out of the Hayes Range full of dreams and aspirations. To be fair, their joy is not for me to describe.
Enlightened Dahlia Annekathrin Hansen
FICTION
Naomi Klouda
The Bridge Walkers
The new teacher comes from New York City, Tess Clark.
Village kids of Sunavik cast bets on how long it’s going to take Clark to leave on the four-seater bush plane that landed her. Fate doesn’t favor a big leap like this one.
Miss Eve, the last teacher in charge of combined seventh-eighth graders, scurried away after the first year. That happened when a grave opened due to erosion, and the skeleton rocked in high tide just as Eve took her walk. That and the fifty days of solid rain. And before, Miss James stood impatiently at the airfield, freezing in her high heels, after only six days in front of the class.
Culture shock is no joke.
Anna feels this truth keenly.
Her desk sits near the window, the smartest girl in the combined seventh-eighth grade class, that’s Anna.
If the remote village were a city, the school would sit in the downtown core. Foot and four-wheeler traffic usher past, going to the tiny grocery store or the picturesque post office, its American flag forever in a downcast droop. Not far yonder stands the Russian Orthodox Church, the pride of the village, with its golden domes and Suppendaneum cross.
Anna knows lots of things. Including that the cross is called that from the days of crucifixions—the persecutors put feet on the bottom rung to nail them there.
She stares plenty, mostly at Mrs. Clark.
The teacher’s magenta hair lands on shoulders that support a nearly six-foot frame, tall and skinny in a pair of Levi’s over which she wears an aqua minnie skirt and a black t-shirt that proclaims in white letters: “Essay: to lift. To weigh.”
She’s wearing brown Xtratuf boots, not high heels, so there’s that, Anna notes.
But it’s the makeup that’s most fascinating to the girls: they’ve taken to wearing blue eyeshadow outlined in thick liner around their eyes, too.
Anna likes the teacher. She likes the way her own squinty dark eyes look in blue shadow, lined by black and flourishing an upward squiggle at eye edge.
At times, she considers what it might look like if she dyed her long black hair yellow.
She hopes this teacher doesn’t leave anytime soon.
Plus, this one sings in a lilting voice. She knows the words to Stick Figure’s reggae songs Anna’s memorized, like: “Liar, liar, the world's on fire/ What you gonna do when it all burns down?/ Fire, fire burning higher/ Still got time to turn it all around.”
“Why’s it say, ASS-say on yer shirt?” Sam starts his mocking comments first thing after the bell rings. He’s oversized for 8th grade, a raw half-boy half-man creature sprouting stubble on his chin. Plus, he’s cross-eyed.
“Why does it say, ‘I ate oatmeal for breakfast on yours?’” Mrs. Clark says in what the kids call her New Yawk accent, not missing a beat.
Anna giggles and exchanges a look with Sadie, her cousin of the same age and best friend.
Gregory is in on Sam’s game of driving the teacher away. At lunch, he makes a show of heating his seal ribs for an extra-long time in the microwave, so it smells up the classroom. Imagine if you ate something mammal-like, like a Harbor seal that’s accustomed to a fish diet, so it smells like cow and salmon all processed together.
(Anna and the others overheard the old teacher, Miss Eve, describe it that way to a friend on her cell phone before she stood at the airfield in her high heels.)
Mrs. Clark doesn’t pay attention to Gregory’s passive-aggressive lunch or anyone else’s. She takes out a tuna
Deb Peters
Original Painting
sandwich on wheat toast that she eats in tiny bites as she reads what looks like news headlines.
Anna likes Mrs. Clark. She wants to keep her for the eighth grade. Better yet, what if she remains in high school? Mostly, she does not want more of the mealy-mouthed maids that usually came to teach.
What the village needs is a bridge walker: a person who manages between cultures. Her Gram speaks of them at times.
Bridge walkers can stroll in New York City one day and eat seal meat the next in Sunavik, equally comfortable.
“Try to understand other perspectives,” Gram tells Anna. “One day you’ll be a bridge walker too.”
Anna collects details. She tends to know who’s stepping out with whose husband. She knows Alex the tribal chief has a crush on Mrs. Clark, a widow.
And she worries there’s a stigma against magenta hair going way back to Iluguuk’s foredream of the white invasion.
“Well, it wasn’t magenta hair,” Gram Matrona explains to Anna one day after school.
“Besides, those days are long gone,” she tells the girl, passing her a grilled cheese sandwich. “Great-grandfather Iluguuk’s dream was an orange-haired man. That was Dimitri Yurnoff, first fur trader for the Russians.”
Anna doesn’t like the old stories. They’re grim in real tragedies. Blood spilled. Diseases where people died. Awa’aq —not to be spoken of places.
“Anyways,” Anna says to Gram, plucking cheesy strands from sandwich innards. “Mrs. Clark is interesting, nothing malevolent.”
Anna lives with Gram because both parents are in different places. Her mom’s in Anchorage and her dad’s in Seattle. They’re a broken family.
Gram says that’s not true; they have each other.
Every visitor has the potential to change the village, Gram says. Another saying: Be kind to all strangers. You never know who’s a visiting angel.
Which way should they look at Mrs. Clark? Anna asks.
“Time will tell,” Gram says.
Anna and Sadie watch as Mrs. Clark takes pensive walks on the winter beach, picking things up and putting them back down again, a sea star skeleton still orange, a shell with a busiik visible inside the pearly squiggles that depicts the Mother Mary and Baby Jesus if you look really close.
“She’s lost the man she loved,” Anna tells Sadie in sympathy. “Though that was five years ago. I know because Aunt Luella told Gram.”
Luella runs the post office and talks to people when they pick up mail.
On impulse, one night, Anna asks her teacher to come home and eat supper. Matrona is fixing chili and cinnamon rolls. “You’ll love the sweet sticky taste,” Anna tells her.
“Okay…” Mrs. Clark agrees. “Lead on!”
Gram Matrona greets Mrs. Clark when they step from the mud room into the living room of the little red and white house on the hill overlooking the village. It’s a crooked house from melting permafrost beneath its pilings. It looks like a listing boat to Anna from down below.
“Oh, please call me Tess,” Mrs. Clark says, fiddling with her stuck coat zipper as she takes it off.
Gram reaches out to help her unzip it.
“Yes, I’m happy here,” she says when Matrona asks. “Very different from New York, of course, peaceful.”
Talk stumbles along. No one knows much to say to connect the two planets, one from the New York corner of the universe, the other from what some folks call the Eskimo corner way up high on the globe. The proper name for Anna’s people is Sugpiak, pronounced Suk-b-ahk.
“How old are you, Mrs. Clark?” Anna asks. “I hope you don’t mind if I ask.”
“To you, I’m a hundred! So you respect me,” Clark says in her tough woman's accent.
Sadie and Anna giggle.
Gram smiles.
“I need help with something,” Gram tells her. “I’ve got a trunk I’m trying to figure out how old it is. You wanna see?”
The girls eagerly fetch the trunk, dragging it to the kitchen from a back bedroom. It’s greenish blue on the metal supports and aged dark wood on the rest. A rounded top opens to show newspaper lining.
“Where’d you get it?” Tess asks.
“It’s been in the village a long time. Had it in the shed.”
Tess uses her cell phone flashlight to get a closer look at the lettering on a hinge. “This is an antique, likely,” she utters, illuminating its parts. “Look at this! The print inside has 1867 in the dateline…”
Matrona already knows, Anna realizes.
Matrona just wants a conversation piece to bridge the gap between them.
“Dad had the trunk for years,” Matrona explains. “Left here by someone way back then, got passed from house to house until he claimed it. People used to leave their things behind—desks, dressers, beds. Couldn’t take it back with them or didn’t want to. We used to get whalers, army men, you name it, missionaries. They left things behind.”
“Like teachers?” Tess asks. “I moved a small household of furniture myself when I came here. I’m not going anywhere without my rocking chair.”
“You’re planning on staying then?” Anna asks anxiously. “I mean, since you brought your rocking chair.”
“I see myself spending a few years,” she says.
A fire alarm goes off though, as Tess – Mrs. Clark – is leaving. She sprints off in a hurry.
What if it’s the school? Anna thinks in panic, as she runs after.
Sam’s campaign against Mrs. Clark continues after school hours. He catches small rodents and places them in her house when she’s away. He and Gregory go through her things, a box of jewels that look fake but shine in blue and red baubles. They read her open mail. Cards mostly, from friends back home. They don’t steal anything.
When Tess goes home, Anna knows her teacher will notice the rummaging. Sam brags about his escapades. But she can’t stop him short of squealing.
She’s not going to squeal.
Mrs. Clark heard the fire alarm and sprinted toward the smoke to be the first one there.
It was Sam’s house.
A full-blown fire engulfs Sam’s house from a gas furnace explosion. Mrs. Clark gets them all out, including Sam’s mom and his baby sister.
“Maybe she’s an angel,” Anna tells Gram late that night as they finally put their pajamas on for bed. “Did you hear how Sam plays with lighters?”
“Aye wa thuk!” Gram exclaims, an expression close to “goodness sakes!”
“Well, if he caused the fire, he’s punishing himself about now.”
Anna notices that Sam’s bragging about his extracurricular activities stops.
They were lucky to make it alive because the blowing up part happened as soon as Tess ushered them out.
Tess suffered burns that kept her arm wrapped for weeks.
Sheary Cough Suiter
Migration
Storms rack Sunavik.
Days-long snow blizzards that knock you sideways while trying to walk. These are followed by rivers falling out of the sky.
Weather like that can drive a good teacher away.
Then the sun comes out all innocent, like nothing else ever happens in that sky.
It is all part of the changing climate that Chief Alex laments at village meetings. Anna invites Tess – now Anna calls her that silently in her mind – to the tribal hall where they’re having a meeting about bluff erosion.
Anna likes the meetings because people get excited. It’s better than the one channel that’s all you get on television. Plus, they serve donuts and spiced teas.
The hall is filled with the smell of wet boots and damp parkas. It’s illuminated by Coleman lamps since the electricity is off again. A wood stove warms the room.
Alex leads the meeting.
He’s dressed in a plaid blue and white parka shirt that men wear. He’s strung a beaded bear claw necklace around his neck. Tonight, his long-lashed dark eyes shine with a handsome charisma, Anna decides, his black hair combed back. He looks good enough to catch Tess’s attention. Charisma is a prerequisite to romance. She’d read all about it in romance books.
“Quyana! As you know,” Alex started, thanking everyone for coming. “We’re seeing a lot of flooding on the bluff lands where the old graveyard is. Erosion near the bluff is unburying the graves there. We’ve got to do something about it, or else… next summer will be like last.”
Anna pictured what’s next: same as what happened last summer. They found a skeleton on the beach after a grave came apart. Elders wept, and a few young people too. To see ancestors desecrated like that.
“What we need is as many people as possible to volunteer for help. To move graves uphill: We don’t have equipment, but might can get ahold of a backhoe. A sensitive subject, and I’m sorry for putting it on you, but we need every ablebodied person who can handle it. There’s grant money to pay a small wage. This is a village problem, and it needs to be solved by us.”
Tess looks uncomfortable.
One elder stands and tells a long story. This isn’t the first time the graves must be moved. Back in the 1930s they had some bad storms too.
Matrona can’t be out-done, as if it’s a global warming memory contest between elders. “They took that good land by the mountain for putting in the dump way back,” she says. “That squeezes us for room. Where you gonna move the graves?”
Alex points to land behind the school. “This splits the graveyard into old and new.”
Alex handles it all smoothly, Anna thinks, by sitting down and letting everyone talk it out.
Then he passes around a roster for people to sign up. Spring is only a month or so off.
The clipboard passes from hand to hand, and nearly everyone volunteers to help.
At the end of the meeting, Anna makes sure Tess is near the snack table when Alex stands there.
He looks at the teacher admiringly.
Tonight, she wears her Levis and a fluffy, flowered top with lace sticking out at the end of the sleeves.
“Climate change, I’m not sure what that is,” Anna lies innocently to the two of them. “Maybe Alex can come to the class and talk about what it means?”
“I’d be grateful for that,” Tess lands in Anna’s trap.
“I’d be happy to,” Alex plops in, too.
She leaves them there, smiling at each other, making conversation.
On the last day of school, Anna pockets twenty dollars in one-dollar bills. Sam is especially remorseful as he forks over his two bucks.
She won the bet.
Mrs. Clark, Tess, manages to stay the entire school year. She doesn’t leave screaming over rodents planted in her house or horrified at their foods or even angry at Sam’s mocking ways and Gregory’s passive-aggressive hints that she ought to “go back where you come from.”
“Yeah But,” Sam says to Anna, “Moving graves, that’ll scare her off.”
He says it like a dare.
Anna’s not biting.
“Why you hate her so much?” she asks bluntly.
“She don’t belong here,” Sam sneers. “Look at her hair.”
“Look what she did for you! Aren’t you glad she saved your sorry ass?”
“Sure,” Sam smiles crossed-eyed. “But that don’t mean she belong here. Plus, I want my money back. You wanna bet she won’t last the summer?”
Anna’s afraid to do that. Afraid for what Sam might do next. She considers it might come true.
“No,” she says flatly, then considers blackmail. “I’ll tell on you if you do anything to Tess.”
Meanwhile, Tess isn’t taking lonely walks on the beach so much these days. She’s seen holding hands with Alex, two shadows cast just so in the sand.
“Alex is head over heels,” Luella tells Matrona over tea. “He’s even coming to the post office with her. Any time now, he’ll pop the question! I just know it.”
Anna likes the sound of that.
“A woman that gets married stays in the village where her husband lives,” she tells Sadie. “Besides, there will be a big wedding at the church. Hasn’t been one so long now.”
They consider a Russian Orthodox wedding, its splendor and pageantry.
“Just what Sunavik needs! A teacher who don’t leave on the first flight out the last day of school,” Sadie says.
It’s a great shock, then, when just as the village plunges into the brave task ahead, moving graves, that Tess is found standing at the airfield.
Alex is nowhere near as the mail plane circles the village and comes in for its customary landing.
Word spreads to Anna when Sadie comes to tell her.
The two of them trip over each other in their hurry downhill. They race the dirt road to the airfield and arrive out of breath just as the plane lands.
Tess stands there carrying an oversized Louis Vuitton purse. She’s wearing Levis and, God’s the witness, high heels.
“Where are you going?” Anna asks her tough heroine. “Why are you leaving?”
“Oh, I’m not leaving the village for good,” Tess tells them. “I’m heading out to get fitted for—and don’t tell anyone! A wedding dress.”
Other villagers stand close enough to eavesdrop. Tess doesn’t bother to whisper. She speaks in a deep Arnold Schwarzenegger voice. “I’ll be back.”
Feeling silly, red-faced Anna shuffles the toes of her boots on the airfield’s gravelly pebbles.
She shrugs, trying to act casual. “Oh, just wondering where…”
As Tess easily walks the wing of the small bush plane to climb inside the door in her high heels, Anna feels admiration. Almost like Tess’s got bridge-walking skills.
Anna smiles and waves.
They watch clouds swallow the plane.
A few weeks go by, and no one sees Tess again. What happened to Mrs. Clark? Villagers ask one another.
Sam tries to collect $20 from Anna on a nonexistent bet.
“Ha! Your New Yawk teacher left for good. She can’t stand us or our stinking village.”
“No way,” Anna stubbornly tells him.
“Tess left her rocking chair behind,” Gram tells Anna. “Maybe you get ready for change. Might means she’s not coming back.”
Anna nearly caves.
She tells Sadie, “Next fall, a new teacher likely will come. She won’t know a word of Reggae music. She’ll wrinkle up her nose at seal meat, at our sorry ass storms and coastal erosion.”
“Don’t cry, Annie,” Sadie says, a true loyalist. “She told us she’s just going to town. But you know, everyone in this damn village is so gossipy. Suppose she has a secret she’s dealing with? Like an uncle got taken to prison or a brother committed suicide or a … ”
“Maybe,” Anna says, feeling her shoulders hunch in near defeat.
For three weeks, tight-lipped Alex won’t give up a word about what became of Tess.
He’s busy moving graves, including great-grandfather George.
Gram Matrona won’t speak to anyone while her dad’s grave is being moved. She sits in her chair, looking out to sea. Though she attended the blessing by Father Alexie, before and after the grave resettlement.
The rains don’t come.
It’s hot in the village.
Anna gives in and goes to the tribal office. She waits for the important fly-in visitors to leave. Then she approaches Chief Alex.
“Did Tess—Mrs. Clark—go to town to get fitted for a wedding dress?” she whispers. Tears leak from the corner of her eyes, melting a trail of black eyeliner.
Alex takes a seat on a folding chair beside Anna.
“You know,” Alex says, handing her a Kleenex. “It takes a while when you’re going all the way to New York to get your dress. She’s got a life too.”
Anna cries now, blowing her nose.
“She said she’s going to ‘town.’”
“Town—yeah! New York is a town all right,” Alex says, taking both of her hands in his.
“Anna, teachers come and teachers go. But you’re the one that matters, too. It’s not an indictment on our culture if a teacher goes home. Even if she left for good, it wouldn’t mean anything is wrong with us.”
“It would, too!” Anna’s sobbing now.
He holds her hands tight until the sky fills with the sound of the evening plane.
“Want to ride to the airfield with me?” he asks. “I think someone will land that you’ll want to see.”
Peter Lantz
Mary Ann Huntington Children’s Park, Port Orchard, WA
Laura Kalpakian
The Spring of Love and Death
LOVE! the singer onstage belts out across the speakers. LOVE chants the crowd, laughing, grooving, dancing in the grass at Philadelphia’s LOVE-IN this afternoon where musicians have gathered on an improvised stage, their wires running to amps, and generators, humming like the crowd, the sprawled enormous crowd before them here in Fairmount Park. LOVE! Electric guitars wail and rally to the cry, LOVE! The drummer tattoos it out, steady as The Battle Hymn of the New Republic Dedicated to the One I LOVE. Eighteen year old Maria Janvier joins, hand-holding, dancing, feeling and feeding a current of LOVE and peace and brotherhood with hundreds of other people she does not and will not know, lives that will not touch hers beyond this LOVE-IN moment, all of them commonly denominated by chronology, a generation conceived in liberty and the wake of the Second World War, and gathered Here, Now, May 1968, this single indelible moment of LOVE! Maria Janvier shouts, arms waving, body swaying like a reed in this new wind. Amid these tie-dyed and head-banded hippies she is the only girl wearing a chic black dress with a skirt of discreet length. However, the hat with the short black veil, the white gloves, they
have been flung off. Instead of standing at a funeral at Veteran’s Cemetery with her upright parents and her uptight aunts, she has joined her friend Karen in this outtasight escapade, escaping starchy Miss Butler’s Philadelphia School for Girls, and taking the bus to the LOVE-In. Her long brown hair, free of pins, has tumbled down, and swings around her face as she hikes up her skirt and unhooks her stockings from the garter belt, peels them (and the garter belt) down her legs to the cheers of the crowd, and leaves them on the grass, along with patent leather pumps. Her feet are free to explore the grass. Yes! She thinks, even the very grass, every blade ekes and yes, oozes the juice of happiness, extracted, swirling with the music, and the hundreds of upraised feeling-groovy hands and voices, smoking up the vineyards where the grass of wrath is stored. Let it all go up in smoke. Who can contain the grass? The throbbing communality? The peace and ecstasy circuiting, licking along the grass, vaporizing, invisible, and indivisible with liberty and justice and LOVE for all.
Maria and Karen seize the day, this day, and split a tab of LSD behind the rhododendrons with a couple of boys from Penn. Just enough for a buzz says Mike who holds the tab above her lips and drops it on her waiting tongue just before the four burst out of the shadows and into the sunlight and the music and the LOVE all around them. Soon Blakean insights flood Maria’s perceptions—the world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wildflower, a humble dandelion, a simple buttercup—fill her with consummate joy. At the edge of the crowd the Philly police, restless, wary, but not hostile, accept flowers from boys whose hair flowers over their ears, and girls whose flower-like, bra-less breasts bud through loose shirts and tell the police LOVE, brother. LOVE cries Maria to the music she can feel in every corpuscle, pounding through her body, pulsing through the ground, in the very grass that tickles her bare feet as she dances among her generation who have gathered here, swept up from the urban projects, and suburban picket fences, white and black and brown, young.
They are all young, and full of LOVE and alive (though Martin Luther King is dead, his blood staining the balcony
Brenda Roper
Camino Altar
of the Lorraine Motel, and fires from the ensuing rage and riots still smolder) though no smoke is visible here at the LOVE-In where peace reigns (though the Vietnam War will go on and on, racking up some 58,000 youthful dead) where all you need is to be alive (though soon Robert Kennedy’s blood will stain the kitchen floor and he will lie in the arms of a hotel busboy) in 1968, the spring of love and death.
Now though, here, all you need is LOVE-In where you can deny death, and insist on LOVE! Mike wraps his arms around her, and Maria rolls under him in the grass; he kisses her hungrily and she returns his LOVE. Mike already has thinning hair atop his young face, but he is beautiful and Maria gives him her odd, dreamy, contagious smile, so who can blame Mike if he LOVEs and kisses her again and again, kneads her hips and butt pleasurably, like bread dough. Not yet risen. Not yet finished. Maria is only in the process of being and becoming, of create and endow. Not like Danforth McCane who will be buried this very afternoon in Veterans Cemetery. His service begins at two o’clock and Maria Janvier should have been present with her father, the judge, her socialite mother and matronly aunts, all conventionally clad in black, present to say a decorous farewell to this relative, her father’s obscure cousin, the artist, who left not so much as a note behind before he took his own life. Maria met him only once, just after Christmas when he came to their home. Sherry, Danforth? Maria and her mother were stuck with him. Mother smiles, Oh, the Judge is in his study, too busy, I’m afraid. (Maria knows this is untrue; the judge cannot be bothered.) To Maria’s eye Danforth was dusty, dandruffy, elderly, lonely, and weird, unlike anyone she had ever met, absolutely, utterly unlike the rest of her starchy relatives. Conversation proceeded along the usual desultory paths (The weather. Family bits. Another sherry, Danforth?) until Mother fathomed from his conversation that Danforth McCane had come about money, that he was offering to sell a cache of family papers to his cousin, Judge Janvier for money. Mother quickly excused herself, and left them, but Maria found Danforth interesting, even fascinating. He spoke obliquely of odd, intriguing processes, of being and becoming, of creating colors and endowing things and people with qualities others could not see. He said that’s what artists did. Artists and lovers, they endowed things and people with qualities otherwise unseen. Danforth was an artist after all, well, a painter anyway. That’s what he said: I paint. Someone else has to say you are an artist. And now no one ever will say that because Danforth McCane is finished, and over, and done with and dead, a gun to
the head. His revels are now ended, his little life rounded with a sleep.
I am large, booms a baritone, hairy-chested poet from the podium, his voice and emotions amplified, I contain multitudes, cheering, grooving, tripping, dancing multitudes, rolling on the grass, rolling grass into glowing joints. Maria puffs, coughs, smiles, passes the joint to Karen and Bill and Mike and glowing on down the long, long LOVE line. The beat goes on, baby, twist and shout, making that ever-since-Beowulf time-and-chime, intertwine: rain and pain, cry and die, but Maria won’t. Won’t cry, won’t die. Danforth McCane shot himself into oblivion, and will be lowered into the darkened grave, but Maria Janvier embraces a boy with a tattered headband and Day-Glo shirt. He puts a daisy in her hand, Peace, sister,
LOVE, kisses her like a brother, LOVE contain multitudes while the democratic sunshine spills over all, rollicking in the lawless grass, just as indifferent sunshine spills over the manicured sod, crewcut hair of graves in Veterans Cemetery where a small company, dry-eyed, all of them, are here to bury what’s left of Danforth McCane after he put the gun to his mouth and blew his brains out.
Maria might have wept, might have mourned Danforth McCane—like Whitman’s lyrics and the lilacs blooming here in Fairmont Park—but not today. Today is Hello to the First Day of the Rest of Your Life (!) LOVE Is All You Need (!) The Times They Are A-changing (!). Maria can feel herself being reborn. Feel herself arise from the grass,
Mark Hurtubise
Split Decisions
sans gloves, sans hat, sans garter belt and stockings, sans all the decorous, correct accouterments required of young ladies at Miss Butler’s Philadelphia School for Girls. Maria is grooving in the park, happy to be stoned and singing raw and raucous lyrics, happy to feel rambunctious joy in every vein, happy to be fleeing the Old School, all those dainty expectations, genteel good manners exemplified by prim teachers, prissy classmates, all those well-bred people (her parents included) constipated, all of them, straining, all of them, toward the evacuation of emotion they cannot—and actually do not wish to—achieve. To all that she shouts Up yours! as the afternoon wears on and the quarter tab wears off, and Karen says it’s time to return to Miss Butler’s and the known world.
Maria Janvier glances at the happy faces of all her new friends from the LOVE-In (extras in her life, no more than that). She glances around at Fairmount Park littered with LOVE and bits of blowing trash. She listens to the last cheer given the last song before the musicians unplug their amps and melt away. She considers carefully because she knows a single sterling question lies before her: Does she return to Miss Butler's Philadelphia School for Girls? Or does she exercise volition, commit social suicide and swim out to meet the current, the floating island in the sea of mellow yellow? In her heart—young as she is—a new conviction gathers strength: the belief that the way to honor the dead is not to say goodbye, but to pick up the burdens they have laid down. To be brave in ways that they were not. To be willing to risk what they feared. To be and become. Create and endow. Maria tries out a new word, No, tastes that round hard jawbreaker of negation, No, so unlike the marshmallowy placating positive platitudes she has dutifully uttered all her life. No, I’m not going back.
Karen protests vehemently that they’re going to graduate soon, this month! They can’t risk social probation and…But Maria just gives her friend a sweet, conspiratorial smile, a kiss on the cheek, and turns away, arm in arm with new friends.
Karen wails, But what will I tell them at the school?
Maria calls back over her shoulder as she leaves: Tell them I am part of the solution! Bye-bye, Miss Butler’s! I am going up the Yellow Brick Road!
Maria, with Carol and Skip and Spyder, Paul and Patty and a bunch other half-stoned-still-happy hippies, waltzes away, down the street singing “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.” They get on a city bus, jostling down the center aisle to take up whole row at the back, across from three soberly clad, stout matrons, clutching their handbags.
Spyder drapes his arm across the back of Maria’s seat, and says “I’m Spyder with a ‘Y’ and I’m going to San Francisco. You wanna come with me? The whole fucking world is going to San Francisco with flowers in their hair. There’s this place called Haight-Ashbury, and it’s far fucking out!”
The matrons frown, and huff, bristle visibly as Spyder continues to sing the praises of the far fucking out Haight. The matrons rise in unison, yank the cord and step to the door muttering imprecations against filthy, disrespectful young people. The bus pulls to the curb, the doors hiss open and the matrons get off. Maria and her new comrades laugh into each other’s arms, and the bus pulls away, shaking and shuddering with good vibrations.
Gavin Andreoff
Look Away, Son
Mason remembered the exact moment before his father smashed in the rabbit’s head with a rock. He remembered the twitching of the rabbit in his young hands. It’s fur, pooling from seemingly everywhere with dark red blood, slid smoothly across his fingers as he stroked the rippled bumps of its mangled spine. Its back left leg was contorted, forcing the joint to bend in the opposite direction. Its paw, dangling by a thread of sinew, bounced gently against its own body while Mason rocked the creature back and forth solemnly in his arms. Small pebbles and sticks jutted out of its open wounds like the branches of a decaying bush. Mason sniveled as he poured the gurgling body of the rabbit into his father's hands. Mason’s mind ran blank as he felt the warmth of tears cascade down his sun kissed cheeks. He remembered the moment feeling out of place, as if he didn’t belong in that space at that moment in time. Mason recalled the moments before the impact. Mason’s father had picked him up later from school than usual. His father was driving home on the same back road he always took when the collar of his shirt smelled strongly of freshly sprayed cologne and his breath reeked of cheap liquor that floated in the back of dimly lit bars. Mason sat nervously as he always had when his father drove in this state. He watched out of the window as the trees weaved back and forth in the passenger window before he felt the sudden choke of his seatbelt around his neck. Then there was the thud. Masons body lurched forward on its own and moments later he felt as if he had simply awoken
with the rabbit twitching in his hands. Mason snapped back to reality, as his father fumbled around for a rock on the ground, actively swaying back and forth in his stupor. The air around him felt still. The world spun all the same, but the earth felt as if it had pulled itself up from its busywork to bear witness to the brutal scene in front of Mason’s vision. Tears fell from Mason’s eyes, splashing into the red mess coating his hands, revealing for a moment the curves and pinkness of their surface. In an instant his youthful palms were swallowed whole by the tidal wave of blood that coated his skin. His father had found a sizeable rock in his search, and in a single hastily drawn breath of air he hoisted it above his head. The silhouette of the rock blotted out the sun, revealing a dimly lit orange halo around his father's hands. A sharp droning buzz filled Mason’s ears before he found himself in absolute silence. The moment was sobering. In the silence Mason noticed the faint beeping noise of his father's car door that he left ajar, and the dull hum of the sputtering engine that sat canted on the road. Mason’s father looked him briefly in the eyes before saying,
“Look away, Son.” Mason’s father turned back towards the rabbit and brought down both hands on top of the rabbit's skull. A crunching yelp echoed out into air as viscera splashed through its tiny brittle skull. Mason found himself staring at the act of mercy, barely even noticing the splash of brain matter and fragments of skull that painted his lap in brushstrokes of pink and red.
Mason recalled the event from his past as his matured hands slid smoothly across the curves and edges of the woman who lay half naked across his lap. He had caught himself once again staring at the blank recesses of the wall in front of him, as his fingertips pulled the back of her loose shirt down modestly over her exposed rear. He danced back up to her soft head as his fingers combed through her slick hair. For a moment, he imagined holding the rabbit again. His hands softly twirled the woman’s hair playfully in his hand before he paused and curled his fingers into a shaking fist. He shook the thought from his mind as he rubbed his thumb against her temple and adjusted his posture on the couch. Mason sighed deeply before propping his feet up onto the coffee table across from the couch. In one fell swoop his calloused feet knocked over a collection of near empty beer bottles and half crunched hard seltzer cans. The clatter of the drinks stirred the rabbit in his arms. She arched her back slowly into the air as she yawned and rubbed the sleep off her eyes. The buzzing volume of drinks had finally reached Mason’s lips as he smacked them back and forth. The
room spun slowly in between his elongated blinks and heavy sighs. Mason sat still as the woman adjusted herself onto her couch. He tried to recall her name for a moment as he stared at her plain face. His mind bounced around through a spiderweb of different women that he had been with recently. Each one less memorable than the last. The name escaped him. He struggled to even recall how he had planted himself onto the couch that was currently supporting him. Mason threw his head back lazily against the pillows behind him as he rolled his head over to get a proper look at her features. Her face was a blurry smear of runny makeup and two rosy cheeks that sheltered a small shy smile in between them. Her neck was tattooed temporarily with the faint imprints of teeth and her shoulders bore the splash of light round bruises. Mason thought hard about if he had been the artist that left these markings. The woman smiled cheerily as she kissed him on the forehead. Mason’s eyes closed as he breathed her scent in. Tangs of sweet perfume and sweat swept across his nostrils. In between the sounds of slow pulsing music, he could hear her say something teasing how much he had drunk. Mason knew himself to be a rather avid drinker, a passion he owed to earning his manhood with his father during several “don’t tell mom” beers that he indulged in on camping trips as a kid. This time was different; Mason could feel the weight of the drinks in his stomach. Samantha. He was sure that was her name. He sat himself up on the couch as he stroked her thigh. A dull buzz vibrated against the wood of the coffee table as he slowly twisted his head around to the sound. Mason clawed around the table at the noise until he watched Samantha’s angelic hand float across his field of vision. Her painted fingertips scooped up the edge of his phone off the table and silenced the buzzing before offering it up to Mason’s slowly rocking hands. He grabbed it in an instant and opened the home screen. A trail of a dozen missed calls folded out onto his screen as his heart dropped. Mason rocketed up off the couch, flinging Samanthas poised legs off his lap and onto the hardwood floor. He thought of the missed calls as a single name echoed in his sloshing head. Ariana. He thought of the last several years he had feigned commitment to her. He recalled how many times he had been able to hide the truth from her. He sucked in a deep breath before thinking of the time it would take to get back home. Fifteen minutes. It would take fifteen minutes to get home. Mason knew that on his way home he would have to craft a story that would conceal his repeated infidelity. His hands slapped around his thighs for his pockets as he felt the pressure of time
press down on top of him. He realized at that moment he was only wearing underwear in the middle of what he could only assume to be Samantha’s apartment. The word ‘pants’ trickled off his tongue as he stumbled around the trash littered room. Samantha bit at the tip of her fingertip cheekily as she pointed off into the corner of the room where Mason’s pants had been flung. Mason stumbled over to his pants; he hoisted them up onto his legs, slamming his weight into the walls to gain balance and avoid crashing into the dozens of plants and flowerpots that were clumsily placed around the room. A pile of keys and charms attached to a thin lanyard with a singular key fob hanging from them sat neatly in his pocket. Mason quickly freed the keys from their containment as he patted his bare chest. He quickly tossed on his crumpled-up shirt and slid his feet into his sandals before he stumbled over to Samantha. Mason thought about calling her again later once the lineup of questions that his girlfriend had ready for him were answered. He leaned down and kissed her softly as she grabbed his wrist harshly.
“I can’t just let you drive like this, spend the night with me.” Her words bounced around in his ears as he recoiled his hand sharply away from hers. Mason knew he needed to get home, and he trusted himself to get there safely. He had done it dozens of times over the past twenty-five years of his adult life. Samantha slowly rose up off the couch as her faced transformed into a more serious and concerned look with every step that she took towards him. Mason needed to get home. At home was salvation. Home was a refreshing restart, a moment that would wipe the events of the day clean from history. All he had to do was make it back home into his girlfriend's arms and feed her a story that he would ensure is chewed up and swallowed. Samantha took one more step towards him as he darted for the door. He felt Samantha’s hands grip his tightly. The pressure of her grip angered him. Mason’s hand reeled back as he shoved his palm into her chest. The moment caught her off guard. She slammed down onto the ground and coiled her body into a ball from the pain of colliding with the floor. The sounds of screaming boomed in his ears as Samantha threw her finger up pointing at the door. Mason tried not to think about what he had done. At home it would all be over; all he had to do was get in his car and drive away. The door flung open as he poured his body down the steps of Samantha’s apartment. His feet slammed across the pavement; before he knew it, he was sitting behind the wheel of his car. A wave of relief poured over him. His vision went dark, and then as if no time had passed at all, they reopened. Mason quickly found himself
swaying back and forth on the back roads of his town. The boss had called him right as he got off work, a mishap with the filing system caused a backlog error and Mason had to head back in to fix it. That’s the excuse Mason would use, he was sure of it. No, no wait. The security officer “Mike” had found his pager on the ground and Mason needed to head back immediately to grab it, then he just got caught up in conversation and had a beer or two. Too fabricated. A good friend of Mason’s, one that joined the Army or something emotionally taxing like that, called him up and was thinking of ending it all. Mason, being the gentleman that he was, stopped by and consoled him. Mason made sure the only thing that was lost that night was a case of beer and bad memories. The plot sounded decent enough to Mason as he swerved his car across the road. He repeated the story several times in his head as he tried to think of minor details to slip in to convince Ariana of its legitimacy. Different names and avenues of questioning popped into his head as his hands scrambled for the window button on the panel of his door. In an instant, wind ripped through his car as he stuck his head halfway out of the window. Mason knew his father did the exact same thing years ago, attempting to force himself awake with cool air and high speeds. His hand reach over to the console and spun the volume dial of the radio. Music crunchily poured through the speakers at a volume that made the words being sung sound almost undecipherable. Mason took deep breaths and looked out of his driver side window as he passed a familiar grassy field. He imagined for a moment that his younger self was looking at him from the side of the road as he drove by. Mason felt wrong, his hands wrapped nervously around the steering wheel of his car as a single tear streamed down his cheek thinking about his father. He wiped his eyes quickly before noticing a vehicle pulling out of a side road around thirty feet in front of him. Masons' eyes opened wide as the entire world around him became clear and sharp. Mason looked at his hands and noticed their features were no longer blurry, his vision was no longer a fuzzy haze, and his body sat perfectly still as if he hadn’t had a single drink that night. He looked around in a jumble of confusion before noticing his vehicle was no longer moving. In a moment of panic, he checked his foot to see if he had applied the brakes. He looked down slowly to see he had been stepping into the floorboard the entire time. Mason's eyes darted back and forth as dread washed over him. He looked down at his speedometer and noticed it was set at sixty-five miles per hour. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed movement and he quickly flashed his eyes
over to the stir in his vision. His eyes adjusted to the light as he faintly made out the silhouette of a man standing outside of the car that was pulling out of the concealed roadway. Mason shook his eyes in disbelief as he stared at the man. From a distance, he thought the man could be in his late thirties with a thick trucker cap on supported by an orange beard that hung from under the man's chin. Mason blinked profusely trying to shake the image out his head. He was convinced he was dreaming. The man waved over at Mason, as if beckoning him forward. Mason stepped out of his vehicle slowly, feeling the weight of his body underneath his feet as the dull dinging sound of an open car door resonated in the open air. He stepped out past his vehicle and looked around at the open air. Mason knew it was rather breezy today, and yet the trees that flexed in the wind held their position as if they were frozen in time. Above his vehicle he noticed a bird in mid-flight cresting the peak of trees that surrounded the back road. Time itself had stopped for a single moment it appeared. Mason stepped closer to the man that called for him as he heard his voice ring out in the space between them.
“I’ve got my kid in the car, buddy.” The man called out. His words fell on deaf ears as Mason stumbled up to the trunk of the stranger's car and asked the man,
“W-what?”
“I said, I got my kid in the car, dude.’ The man repeated.
“Oh man, I’m so sorry, I don’t uh…I don’t understand what’s happening right now, I was—was just driving and then—” Mason sputtered before he was interrupted.
“And then I started backing out, yeah I know boss,” The man sighed as he pinched his forehead before saying, “You know there’s a stop sign you flew past back there.” The man stated.
“I’m so confused, nothing is moving and I jus—” Before Mason could finish, he felt the edge of the trunk bump slowly into his hip. He took a small step backwards in disbelief before staring intently at the bumper. He noticed it was creeping slowly out into the road. Mason spun around to look at his vehicle when he noticed its tires had rolled forward ever so slightly as well. The world was still in motion, and yet the moment had felt like a lifetime for Mason. He spun back around towards the man who stood there stoically with his arms crossed.
“You were going too fast bud. Way too fast.” The man spoke calmly.
“This one’s gonna hurt. Ya know, what’s your girlfriend
going to think now when you never get home to feed her that sob story of yours?” Mason stared blankly at the man as the questions bounced off of him.
“You’re right where you father was, ya know?” The man stated plainly.
“My—my father?” The words felt as if they were squeezed out of Mason’s throat.
“His crash was bad too, his ‘87 Rabbit flipped right there into that ditch, ya see it? The trees never grew back.”
“How—how do you know about that, w—what is happening, Oh my god, I—what's uh, what’s your name?”
“In this small slice of time you and I are forced to share, my name won’t matter. Hell, you won’t even remember it by the time you sit back behind that wheel.” The man said.
“No, no I’m not getting behind it again. I know I messed up, I can’t.” Mason exclaimed. The man grimaced softly.
“You don’t have a choice; the stone is already rolling my friend. Time waits for no man, and the moment is almost here.” The man said. Mason noticed the man’s vehicle ease even more out into the road. He looked into the back of the car and noticed the orange fuzzy head of the man’s son sitting calmly in the backseat. Panic set in quickly.
“Christ why aren’t we doing something! Help me push the damn car back off the road!” Mason pleaded.
“You’ve already set this into motion, don’t worry. In the end, my boy and I won’t even feel you hit us. We never do.” The man announced. The air in between the man and Mason felt cold. The man uncrossed his arms and swung his arms up into the air as if stretching before lifting a heavy weight.
“Ah—It’s about time you sit back in that seat now ‘ol boy.” The man said calmly. Mason stepped back with tears in his eyes as the man eased himself back into the driver seat of his car before turning around to his child and rubbing his fuzzy head with the palm of his hand.
The sight sat heavily on Mason’s shoulder as he turned his back towards the man he would soon collide with. Mason collapsed onto the ground as he flung his hands into the dirt, scraping up rocks and screaming at the hood of his car. His words of fury were drowned out by the warm hum of the engine slowly tearing across the road. Mason felt his body being tugged on by an otherworldly force. His mouth hung open as spittle and snot dripped from his face onto the dusty dirt road he had been driving on. The force pulled him off balance as he thudded down onto the ground, landing harshly on his shoulder. Mason sobbed softly as he tucked his knees into his chest and
scraped slowly on the ground on a straight path for his car. His body twitched and convulsed as he cried out into the open. There was not a soul around to hear his pleading as his body softly collided with the open doorway of his car. Mason scrambled to his feet slowly as his vision began to sway. He felt ill as a night of intoxication poured back slowly over his body. Mason fell backwards into his seat before placing both hands on the steering wheel and looking out of the driver side window. Out past the window was an open field of grass that sat perfectly still in time. As Mason’s body flooded with alcohol, he blinked heavily and thought of the orange haired boy sitting in the backseat of the vehicle in front of him. He thought of his Father and where he had been when he got the call that he didn’t make it. He thought of the rabbit that they both held. Then Mason’s eyes turned back to the road as he thought of the rock.
Instantly, the car resumed speed, Mason noticed the vehicle in front of him and tried to swerve. His hands drunkenly slipped off the steering wheel as the vehicles collided in a twisting crunch. The sound of crushing metal and glass exploded in his ears. Mason’s face smashed through the windshield in one moment, and the very next Mason found himself contorted on the ground gasping for air. A plume of grey smoke and warm dust swirled in the air above the spilled over cars. Mason awaited a crackle of flames or an explosion that would carry him away from the road and safely deposit him near death’s doorstep. Seconds passed by and the moment never arrived; the sputtering of one engine came to a deafening silence as Mason sputtered slowly and coughed hoarsely. To his left he noticed the hazy orange glow of a sunset peeking through the smoke of the collision. Rays from the sunset cascaded down on the soft breezy field of grass that was tucked just off the edge of the road. Mason tried to move his mangled body across the road and into the field of grass for brief rest. His body refused to move an inch. His face sunk into the dirt as his breath became shallow. In the distance he could barely make out the hunched over figures of two silhouettes in the back of the flipped over car he had collided into. Their arms hung freely down to the earth; Mason watched as the smaller silhouette spilled out of its seat and crumpled onto the roof of the smashed car. Mason coughed and yelled as he slammed his mangled fists into the dirt. He writhed in agony as he forcibly rolled his body over onto his compressed spine. The smoke swirled above him as he imagined looking up at his drunken father. He thought about the keys he so desperately looked for in his pocket earlier that night. He
thought about his father searching for a rock in the field. He thought of how desperately he wanted to get behind the wheel while drunk. Mason closed his eyes as his chest rose and fell slowly. He opened his eyes and thought of his father once more; there illuminated in his raised hands he noticed the rock. He thought of how badly he wanted to restart the day, how intently he wished he would have done things differently, how desperately he wanted mercy for what he had done. The ringing in Mason’s ears came to a sharp stop before the image of Mason’s father appeared again. Mason stared intently as he heard the low rumble of a whisper fall off his father’s lips.
“Look away, Son.” With one final shallow breath Mason sighed as the rock was brought down on top of his head.
Lucy Tyrrell Liberty at the Corn Palace
Eric Morlock
Salvage
Son of a bitch! I've been sitting here for at least fifteen minutes trying to pull off this goddam valve cover. Somebody never greased the gasket, so then the gasket just gets glued to the metal like it's welded to it. The joker screwed the bolts on way too tight, too. Why don't people learn how to work on their engines? They'd save a hell of a lot of time and money if they only learned how to do it right. But no, people are always too busy to take care of their cars. In a way, though, I guess I shouldn't complain too much. It's ignorant owners like that that keep this little junkyard going. Sure, we get our share of heaps, but you'd be surprised how many really alright vehicles people bring in here. I mean, we don't got what you'd call a real prosperous business, but we make out pretty good. Actually, I wouldn't even mind taking over this place someday. If my old man ever lets me.
Sometimes he talks about making me partner, but so far that's all it is, just talk. JUNKY JACK AND SON, SALVAGE— that's what the sign’s supposed to say. The thing is, it's only when he's in sort of a good mood that he even mentions it. And even then it's like he's just thinking it over, and not really taking it serious. Sometimes I wonder if he's messing with my mind, trying to get my hopes up just for the hell of it. That'd be just like him.
He sure is mean these days, my old man. And I know what it is, too. I mean, with that guy the tiniest thing can set him off. But right now it's the thing with my brother. He just got out of the hospital a couple days ago. The loony hospital. He was in there for five days, being kept under “observation.” My old man blames me for making Bobby go nuts, and he took it out on me big time, but I don't think it was all my fault. I mean, I feel lousy about what happened, but how was I supposed to know my brother would get so shook up about it? And the thing is I feel for the guy. It's not like I'm glad about the kind of shape he's in. But still, the kid’s got to find out sometime that life isn't always pretty. There's a lot of ugly shit going down in this world, and he's not going to have my old man around to protect him from it forever. Maybe it was a rotten trick for me to pull, but I feel almost like Bobby needed something to wake him up. He's such a little wuss. Still in all, it's not really his fault the way he is, I know that. It's the old man.
Ever since ma died, my old man's been kind of weird. He either sits in the office all day and mopes, or else he wanders around the junkyard like a zombie. Then again, he might spend hours in one of the sheds, testing out radiators for leaks or whatever. But you can tell, just by looking at him, that he’s not really inspecting anything. He’s just sort of going through the motions, like they say. The problem is he can't concentrate on anything. It's almost like ma took a part of him along with her when she died. But if she did, she sure as hell left something, too.
Here's the way it is. Before ma died, my old man pretty much treated me and my brother the same. Like if either one of us did something nice for him, he'd be cool and thank us, and if we ever did something to really piss him off, he'd beat on us with his two-foot piece of heater hose. We were both teenagers, and didn't even think about fighting back. Now, though, since ma passed, he treats us so different, Bobby and me. He treats Bobby like some kind of little angel or something. He hardly ever yells at him like he does to me, and he'd never even think of hitting him anymore, I know that. And every once in a while—God, it makes me want to puke—my old man takes to calling him “baby,” just like ma did when he was little. Christ, the kid's going on sixteen, and he's getting called “baby!” No wonder Bobby's such a wimp. My old man won't even be a real father to him. Anyway, that's one of the things ma left behind when she died.
Oh hell, don't get me wrong. I'm not jealous of Bobby or anything. I really like the kid, even if he is a spoiled brat. He’s got this kooky sense of humor which I get a kick out of sometimes. But you can't really blame me for feeling sort of bitter about the way my old man treats him against the way he treats me. It's not fair. Bobby gets whatever he wants and I get stuck holding the bag of shit. I don't care if he is a whiz kid, and he's a genius with numbers, and he can read a mile a minute, and he's already a senior in high school when I barely graduated. That stuff doesn't mean squat to me. What does matter is my old man doing me dirt by turning his back on me all the time.
That's why I know that sooner or later something's going to happen between me and my old man. I can feel it. Just like I can feel that old rubber hose on my body, even when he isn't using it on me. So sometimes I have these fantasies about getting back at him. I know I could take him easy if I wanted to. I'm taller than him and outweigh him by a good fifty pounds, ‘cause he's lost so much weight since ma died. I don't know, it just seems like something's got to give somewhere. One thing I do know, though—I won't beat up on my little brother. Never did, never will.
Anyway, I got to tell you about this thing with Bobby. Why he went loony and all that. He's better now, but I'm not sure how much. He's “recuperating,” like the doctors say. I know the kid needs more time to really get over it. But it was really something when he lost it, I'm here to say.
It was just last week that all the crazy stuff started happening around here. One thing right after the other, too. Sometimes it happens like that, you know? You get all the bad stuff going all at once. It's almost like the man upstairs is testing you to see how long you can take it. Well, he must have had something pretty special in mind for us because he laid it on heavy. All in the space of a few days.
First thing that happened was we found Major dead. Major was our guard dog. Big German Shepherd. Mean son of a bitch, too, at least to strangers. We were opening up the office and found him lying right in the middle of the room in a big pool of blood. My brother let out a real loud scream, and I really can't blame him for it. God damn! You can't believe how much blood there was! Poor old Major. He just laid there stiff as a board, with his mouth and his eyes open, and with a big hole in his ribs. Someone must have used a damn sword on him. Anyway, it didn't take long to find out what happened. One of the windows was smashed in, and the cash register was pried open. Some asshole broke in and took our money. Lucky for us there wasn't much dough in the till.
But the worst part was cleaning up all that blood. I had to do that, of course. While my brother sat bawling in his chair in the corner—he took care of the books and stuff—I had to pull that heavy dog outside and then pressure hose the place down. Took a long time, too, ‘cause the blood was all dried up and sticky like. So I had to turn that hose to full blast. And then of course it left a big stain on the wood floor afterward. Jesus, what a mess! And since the old man gave him the day off, my brother went and hid in his room in our double-wide behind the office, and cried and whimpered way into the night. My old man didn't help much either, though. He wandered around the yard all day, talking to himself.
That happened on Monday, I remember, because I was thinking: What a way to start off the week! Tuesday must have been pretty normal, because it was on Wednesday that the next weird thing happened. I know that because Wednesday night is my bowling night, and I remember telling all my buddies about what happened that day.
It was morning and I was working my butt off in the yard, pulling some parts out of an old Firebird. All of a sudden some guy drove up in this ancient and real beat-up Chevy Impala, and parked it in front of the office. The guy turned off the engine and got out of the car. He was an old bugger, probably at least seventy. Looked real ragged, too. His clothes were all dirty and wrinkled, and he had this scruffy beard on his face. Kind of reminded me of my old man, to tell the truth. Except he's not as old as that, and he doesn't have a beard. Well, anyway, the guy went into the office to talk with my old man. I figured he wanted to sell the car, so I went over to check it out. From the looks of it and the sound it made when he drove up—it was rusty as hell and sounded like it didn't even have a muffler, except that it did—I estimated it was worth a couple hundred bucks, tops. Really, that's about all it was worth.
Pretty soon I heard some commotion in the office. I went over and opened the door to see what it was all about. This old guy and my old man were really having it out! Outright yelling at each other. Seems my old man was only offering the dude a hundred bucks for his car and the guy didn't think it was enough. So that old bastard started stomping his feet and shaking his fist and stuff, and told my old man he didn't even take a look at it yet, so how could he make an offer already? My old man made a good comeback, though. Told the guy he didn't have to take a look—he saw it and heard it when the guy drove up, and he could tell it wasn't worth hardly anything. Well, this really got the geezer’s goat. He started cussing and telling my old man where to go and like that. He said it's a ‘64 Impala and a classic, and “if you don't know that, you don't know squat!” Finally I had to go over and sort of lean on the dude to get him to quiet down. Anyway, what finally happened was he took the nice crisp Franklin my old man got from the till, and stormed out of the room.
After he left, my old man and me sort of shot the bull a while about what a loser that creep was and all. Bobby was sitting in his chair, crying. I guess that argument got to him. Anyway, after a while I went back outside to drive that car on into the yard. Unfortunately that old bastard was back inside the car, nosing around. I went up alongside the car to see what he was up to. Jesus H. Christ! The old fucker was pissing all over the inside of the car! He was on his knees on the front seat just pissing all over the place. Obviously, now I was pretty pissed myself—in a different way. I tried to open the door, but then I saw the son of a bitch had locked all four of them. So I called out for my old man.
When he came out and got a load of what was happening, he went back right back in the office and came out again with a crowbar. He stormed up to the car, took a big swing at the right rear window and smashed it all to hell. Then he reached in and unlocked the rear door, hopped inside, and unlocked the front driver door so I could get in too. All this time the old bugger was still pissing!
Well, after we pulled that freak out of that car we sure as hell didn't waste any time dragging him out to the front gate and throwing him out on his ear! We even locked the main gate after him to make sure he couldn't get back in. He screamed a few more insults at my old man and me and finally took off. As we walked back towards the office, I couldn't help cracking up a little thinking about what happened. My old man didn't think it was too funny, though. He told me to shut up and get to work pulling out that front seat and spraying down the whole interior. Fuck a duck! You can imagine the kinds of thoughts I was having about my old man while I was disinfecting the whole vehicle. What was I—the damn janitor or something?
Well hey! Look at that! I finally pulled this stupid valve cover off. Jesus, what a deal! Sure as hell took long enough. I can see I got a lot more work ahead, though, ‘cause there's a lot of little pieces of gasket stuck to the engine and not just the valve cover. Looks like I'll have to chisel it all off with a scraper or something. Then probably use that pressure hose to smooth out both surfaces. As usual this is just going to be more hassle than it's worth. Just about any repair on a junkyard heap is more hassle than it's worth.
Anyhow, if you think the scene with that old freak was bad, you ain't heard nothing yet! The next day was the clincher, the day my brother went nutty. I keep running what happened that day over and over in my head, but I still can't figure it out. Sure, it was another really gross thing all right, but there is no way I could tell Bobby'd react like he did. If there was any way I could have known, I never would have set him up like that. But how could I predict what he was going to do? Well, I couldn't. I’d go crazy if I ever thought I could control everything that kid did.
It was around the middle of the afternoon that day when we got a call from the Kansas Highway Patrol. My old man came out to the yard and gave me the lowdown. Some teenage kid just had an accident a few miles up the highway, and totalled his pickup. The cops said the kid's parents didn't want the vehicle, so we could have the truck if we wanted it. My old man seemed pretty happy about the whole thing, said the cops told him the engine looked pretty good. So he was going to take the tow truck and go get the vehicle. He started walking back to the far side of the yard to get the tow truck. He was whistling, he was so damn pleased with himself. I started thinking how really strange the old weasel was. Some poor kid just had a real bad accident—maybe he was dead or dying, you know?—and my old man was strutting along, whistling all chirpy-like as if something truly great happened. Sometimes I couldn't help but hate the guy, you know? I just couldn't help it.
So he took off like a bat out of hell and came back about an hour later with that pickup. He unhooked it near the office and took the tow truck out back and parked it. He came walking back through the yard, stopped where I was working, and told me to help him with the pickup. I almost had the generator off the Firebird, which would be easy to replace, so I asked him if it could wait a while. He said no way, and did I think the Firebird was more important than a primo pickup engine? Well, I was feeling a little put out, so I told him outright that, yeah, I thought the Firebird was more important. I said even though the engine needed work the body was in excellent shape and we could probably sell it whole hog for
Nard Claar
Charting the Way
five hundred bucks at least. A Firebird Trans Am, I said. He said that was bullshit. So I said, hey man, don't I have any say about anything around here? Well, you don't talk back to my old man, even when he's in a good mood. I wasn't really talking back to him, but he didn't know that. He came over and slapped me hard across my face. That funny feeling started churning through my stomach, and I was thinking about hitting him back, but I didn't. What I did was I went and helped him check out that pickup.
The thing was demolished pretty good, all right. It was all twisted and crumpled up into about half its usual length. And the cab roof was smashed in so much that it was about level with the dashboard. The funny thing was that the whole front of the truck didn't have much damage at all. I wondered what in the hell kind of accident this kid had, to leave his truck in such a weird condition. Was he going seventy miles an hour backwards, or what? Mighty peculiar, for sure. I guess he must have gone into a spin or a roll, or something like that. Poor bastard.
Anyway, my old man lifted up the hood and showed me the engine on that thing. Some good stuff in there, no doubt about it. He said he'd start taking out some of the parts and told me to look through the cab to see if anything inside was worth salvaging. So while he went into the office to grab some tools, I went and checked out the interior. First thing, I had a bitch of a time getting the door open. Since the cab was caved in the door was stuck pretty bad. I had to kick it hard over and over to get it loose. Finally I gave it a quick jerk and it opened up all right. I crawled inside. Crawled is the word, too, because there was barely enough room for me to move around. I'm six feet, two-twenty, so it wasn't too easy as you can imagine.
I started poking around the dashboard. The radio looked good, and the clock wasn't broke even though the crystal was shattered. And all the controls looked okay—the turn signals, the wipers, the gear shift, and the emergency brake. I flipped open the glove compartment. Nothing inside, probably ‘cause the cops took the registration and stuff. Nothing much lying around on the floorboard, either—some loose change, a few matchbooks, and some gum wrappers was about all. Before I got out I pulled out the rubber floor mats, so we could sell them separate. First on the passenger side, then after I squeezed back out of the cab I reached back in to grab the mat on the driver's side. As soon as I did something fell down from under the dashboard. It was shaped kind of like a tube, so I thought maybe it was part of a cigar or something. When I fished it out, I took a good long look at it before it hit me what it was. Right away I dropped it to the ground in shock. Then I almost puked.
It was a thumb. A human thumb. That poor kid's thumb. It was all white and hard and cold, and there were these stringy pieces of meat hanging from the bottom of it where it got ripped off. Well, I wasn't about to pick that thing up again. So what I did was I took a pliers out of my tool belt, latched onto that thumb, and then crawled back into the cab and stuck it in the glove compartment. I thought I'd leave it there for the time being and get rid of it later. I guess I wasn't thinking straight, because I could have just as well taken it over to the fence and chucked it into the bushes. I guess I just didn't want to hold it or look at it anymore. I wanted to get it out of my sight, that's all. Also, it seemed right somehow to put a thumb in a glove compartment, right? No way any kind of regular gloves could've helped that kid, though. Maybe the ones that metal-workers use on assembly lines. Then again, maybe not.
I crawled back out of the car. I could hardly stand up, my legs were shaking so bad. My old man was coming out of the office with his tools. Bobby was with him. They came up to where I was standing by the engine. It looked like my old man was still in a good mood, because he started telling Bobby where all the good parts were and how you were supposed to take them out. I guess he wanted to start teaching Bobby how to use tools, ‘cause he was so lousy at it. He had hold of a lock wrench, which he adjusted, and started to remove the nut on one of the battery terminals. I was still feeling a little shaky, and I needed something to doyou know, to get my mind back into gear—so I went to work on that other terminal with my pliers. For some reason this bugged the hell out of my old man, and he reached over and whacked my hand with his wrench. He told me that was going to be Bobby's job, and he'd let me know when and what I should be doing next.
I didn't know what to do, then. My hand hurt and my stomach was all queasy, and my hands were still shaking from the thumb and all. I stood there looking at my old man, wanting to strangle him but knowing I wasn't going to do anything at all. Then I really started to feel sick inside. I felt like I was going to puke, and then I knew I was going to puke, so I headed for the office and made for the john. It took me a good five minutes to empty myself.
Afterwards, when I felt a little better, I started to thinking. Like, why did I have to put up with all the crazy crap that asshole dished out to me? And the whole time sweet little darling Bobby spends most of the day sitting in his safe little
chair and just watches the world go by. He never has to do any real work or see any of the ugly things I see going down all the time. No, little Bobby never has to hose down a room full of blood. And he never has to clean up the inside of a car filled with piss. And he never has to look at gross things like chopped-off thumbs, either. Well maybe he should. Just maybe he needed something to open his eyes for once.
Well, that's pretty much what I was thinking when I went back out of the office and joined up with my old man and Bobby again. I was planning how I was going to get Bobby inside the cab to grab an eye-full of that thumb. I'd start getting in good with the old man, tell him what a great job he was doing taking apart that engine and all that bull. Then, I'd sort of suggest that maybe Bobby would like to explore around in the cab. Since he was small, maybe he could move around better than me and find some things that I missed. That's the kind of plan I was working on as I watched my old man tinkering with the engine.
But hell, the kid did all the work for me. What was happening was that Bobby was asking all these dumb questions about why this thing went there, and why that part was no good when the other one was—dumb-ass questions like that. It made me wonder why, for being so all fired smart, Bobby could be so stupid sometimes. Well, my old man was getting tired of all the questions, and so he told me to take Bobby into the cab and show him around. How about that? Both of them played right into my hands.
Oh, I showed Bobby around all right. I told him to climb in and I'd point out what was good and what was junk. Well, the radio and the clock looked okay, I said. Yeah, and all the controls were in good shape. Oh, and the odometer probably worked all right—we could save it, too, and he could flip all the numbers around just for fun. No Bobby, we can't remove the brake pedal or the accelerator pedal. What was that? The glove compartment? What's in the glove compartment? Hell if I know, Bobby. Why don't you take a look?
So he did just that. He opened her up, saw the thumb, picked it up, and looked at it like it was a toy or something. And then he really saw it. Right away, he started screaming. I mean I'm talking screaming! Like a baby when it's born. He scooted out of there like he was on fire, opened his fist and showed me the thumb. I just put on a phony shocked look, then shrugged my shoulders all helpless-like. So then he ran around to the front of the truck to show the thumb to the old man. I poked my head past the raised up hood to see what was happening.
My old man was standing there with a real shocked look on his face, then it got all screwed up like he was totally grossed out, ‘cause Bobby started poking that thumb over and over right into his face. He stopped screaming, and just yelled out “Look! Look! Look!” Finally the old man just reared back and shoved Bobby to the ground.
Then Bobby actually started howling, like a mad dog or something. I could see that he still had that thumb tight in his fist. Then he crawled over to my old man, pulled one of his pants legs up with his free hand, and started to bite his leg. He was drawing blood! And the strange thing was he was still kind of howling while he was biting. Even though the old man was wincing with pain, he still didn't know what to do. He sort of tried to take a swat at Bobby to get him off, but he didn't have his heart in it. He couldn't hit Bobby for anything—he could only hit me. Finally he grabbed Bobby by the arms, yanked him off, and pushed him hard to the ground again. Bobby just laid there on his back, looking kind of dazed. At least he wasn't howling anymore.
But then he did something so fucking crazy that I was almost ready to puke again. He started sucking on that thumb! He had that thing gripped in his hand so that half of it was sticking out. And he was sucking on it! I almost thought he was going to put the whole damn thing in his mouth—maybe start to chew on it or something—but he didn't. Thank God for that. That would have been the end for sure.
Finally my old man called an ambulance. He didn't know what else to do. He wasn't the kind of guy who could hug Bobby, and sweet talk him, and try to comfort him or whatever. No way. And I guess I wasn't that type, either. Maybe I could've knelt down and put my arm around him or something, but I didn't. I kept wanting to do something to help the kid, but I couldn't figure out what he needed. I thought about belting him to see if he would snap out of it, but I couldn't get myself to do it. So we just stood there, my old man and me, and watched Bobby suck that thumb and go nuts. Lord knows what he might have done if we took that thumb away.
Well, the ambulance came after a while and picked Bobby up. A couple of guys dressed in white. They had a stretcher and lifted Bobby up onto it. Bobby didn't struggle or anything. He just sucked that thumb. When they got a load of that, those two ambulance dudes looked like they were going to crap in their pants or something. One of them tried to take the thumb away, but Bobby wouldn't let go. He had a vice grip on that thing. So we told the guys not to try and take the
thumb away. Anyhow, they took Bobby off to the loony bin.
Later on that night, my old man beat up on me with his rubber hose. He said how did that thumb get in the glove compartment? Who else but you? I didn't say anything. I could tell he was going to beat up on me one way or the other, so I just didn't say a word. I'll tell you something even weirder, though. I wanted him to hit me. I felt so bad about what happened to Bobby that, even though I didn't feel like it was all my fault, I wanted to take a licking for what I did. I felt like I deserved it. So I didn't answer my old man's questions. And when he started whacking me on my back and my chest and my butt and my legs, I didn't move a muscle. At least he didn't hit me in my face.
Jesus, is this job ever a bitch! Seems like no matter how much I scrape, I can't get all the little chunks of gasket off this valve cover. Getting them off the engine wasn't too hard, but this is something else. My hands are getting sore from all the chiseling and stuff, ‘cause I'm using the heaviest-duty chisel we got. Just got to take my time I guess. Concentrate on doing a good job and all that. I don't want to get mad and poke a hole in this valve cover. My old man'd really throw a fit if I did something like that. When we strip an engine, he wants everything that's usable.
My old man. He's such a fucking maniac. Why did I have to get stuck with a father like him? Sure, there's all sorts of different kinds of fathers. Some of them are probably pretty mean, too. Some of my friends also have asshole dads. But I have a feeling most dads are alright guys who care about their kids. Of course, there's others who don't give a damn about their kids at all—won't have anything to do with them. Or maybe they leave the whole family, ‘cause they can't take the responsibility. But hell, I'd take one of those any day, instead of a guy who's only way of dealing with you is to hit you and scream at you. Better to have no parents at all. Yeah, me and Bobby could be doing just fine on our own.
You know, I got this pal who went to high school with me. He's on my bowling team. His old man has this real weird hobby. He stuffs animals. No shit. And the thing is, that's practically all he does. When he comes home from work, he goes right into the garage and starts stuffing whatever animal somebody wants him to stuff. From what my buddy tells me, after dinner he sometimes stays in there all night. Doesn't come back into the house until it's time for bed. Well, hell, I know it's a rotten way for a guy to act, not taking any time to be with his family and like that. And my buddy's always telling me how he hates his old man for being like he is, and how he's never even known his old man. Well I sympathize with the guy and I listen to him and all, because he's my best pal. But whenever he gets to feeling too sorry for himself, I pull off my t-shirt and show him the bruises on my back. That shuts him up pretty quick.
Now I'm really getting frustrated with this job. Sometimes when I think about my old man, I get so wound up inside that I can't calm myself down to do any kind of job right. So I'm starting to hack away and sort of stab at this valve cover, trying to loosen all those pieces of gasket. I hack and I stab, hack and stab, and I'm getting nowhere. But it's all right, because I'm starting to pretend it's my old man's neck that I'm stabbing.
Speak of the devil! He's just come up alongside the car. I didn't even hear him, the sneaky old bastard. Oh shit, he's got his hose with him, too. Must've seen me losing it with the valve cover. Yeah, and he's got that spooky look on his face, like he always does when he's getting ready to hit me. It's kind of a nothing look, no expression or anything, but his mouth is all tight and sort of grinning like. It's a look of a lunatic, I'm sure.
He asks me what in hell am I trying to do to the valve cover, ruin it? I tell him I was trying to scrape off all the chunks of gasket on it. He tells me to hand over the goddam valve cover. I hand it over. It's easy to see all the marks and big gashes I made from where I hacked at it. He tells me I've ruined it, and tosses the valve cover away. He comes right up next to me and looks me in the eye. He's breathing hard. He tells me I'm a stupid, good-for-nothing loser, who's out to ruin his business. Then he backs up a step or two. He's slapping his free hand with that fucking hose. I know he's about to swat me.
I won't let him, though. No way. Not this time. He hasn't even lifted that hose yet, but I can feel that I'm not going to let it happen. My stomach is churning and my heart's beating like crazy. But the way I really know I won't let him do it is my hands. They're shaking. They're ready to do something I can't even control.
Well, he comes back up to me and in a flash his right arm goes up high in the air. I can see it hovering there for just a split second, but that split second is enough time for me to react. As his arm comes down with the hose, I reach out with my left hand and grab that hose right out of the air. I'm kind of amazed how fast I am. It's like my hand has a mind of its
own and knows exactly what to do. Anyway, I yank the hose out of my old man's hand and throw it off to the side. Then I start screaming at him. Just like my hand, my own voice doesn't seem to be mine. I scream: No way! No fucking way! Not this time, you bastard! Never again, you fucking bastard! Do you hear me?! Then to make my point I go up and start shaking him. I'd like to shake his fucking head off, but then I let him go.
Well, the old man's got this sort of stunned look on his face, like he can't believe what just happened. It's real strange to see that kind of expression on him—it's not part of his act, you know? He stands there a while, looking at me like that. Then he gets pissed. I can see his face turning red and his eyes getting all fiery. All of a sudden, he's coming at me with his fists. He hits me with a left jab, and I can see he's going to try a one-two on me. So I block his right with my left arm, grab his shirt top with my left hand, and haul off and bust him one with a right to the jaw. He falls flat on his back and doesn't move. That's it. I've knocked him out.
I bend down to take a look at my old man. There's a little blood trickling out of his mouth. I feel his jaw. The way it's swelling, I'm pretty sure it's broke. Then I feel his wrist—you know, like the doctors do—to make sure he's just unconscious and not dead. No, he's still ticking, which is a big relief. But it's real peculiar, the way I feel about what I just did. I feel good about it. No, I feel great about it. I know I shouldn't, but I do. I can't help it. I think about all the times he's beat on me, and I feel so glad it's all over now. It better be, anyway. Because I know that from now on, if he keeps trying to beat on me, I'll keep on stopping him. I'm going to do whatever it takes.
And as for Bobby, I'm going to be the best brother I can be.
Patrick Dixon
Tumwater Falls, Tumwater, Washington
Paper + Time
Cynthia Steele
PLAY
Michael Meyers
Smoke Your Secrets
The ‘Smoke Your Secrets’ Characters
Delilah—Mid-Twenties, pretty, petite and always smiling. Approachable and disciplined. Tony—Mid-Twenties, handsome, cocky and dominant, always looking for a good time. Frank—Mid-Twenties, the nervous friend Tony dominates even though he’s bigger. Twyla—Mid-Thirties, bohemian, playful and unabashed.
Props
A suitcase
A banker’s box
Some slips of paper and some pens
2 customized tee-shirts
A hand-held sign
A fanny pack with some cash
ACT ONE Scene 1
TIME: The Present. PLACE: A public park.
DELILAH stands smiling, holds a sign on a stick above her head that reads “I Buy Secrets.” She wears jeans, sneakers and a snug black tee shirt with grey letters that read “Smoke Your Secrets.” Around her waist is a fanny pack. She is flanked by a bankers box and a suitcase. The bankers box has a slit in the top. A small notepad and some pens are set next to the slit. She gazes around the park, waves and nods at unseen people.
DELILAH
Hello … How are you … What a beautiful day …
(TONY approaches, in jeans, a profane tee shirt and boots. Sizes up DELILAH with a mischievous grin. His friend FRANK joins them, in jeans, a Beatles shirt, baseball cap and sneakers.)
DELILAH
Hi. How are you guys?
We’re good. How are you?
I’m at peace and mindful.
TONY
DELILAH
Mindful of what?
She’s got secrets, bro. Mind’s full of ‘em.
TONY
FRANK
(DELILAH chuckles, lowers the sign, props it against the suitcase, hands a slip of paper and a pen to both TONY and FRANK.)
DELILAH
I’ll pay you to write down your secret, fold it and place it in the box.
FRANK
What secret?
Whatever’s burdening you.
DELILAH
TONY
What if nothing’s burdening me? What if we just stopped to talk to you because we’re curious what kind of person buys secrets?
FRANK
And because we think you’re good looking and might wanna join us for a good time.
DELILAH
Thanks for the offer, but this is how I have a good time.
TONY
Hanging out in a park collecting people’s secrets? I mean, who does that?
DELILAH
We all have secrets. Some are dark and destructive. Others keep us from feeling joy, love or connection. I buy ‘em, burn ‘em and ban ‘em from ruining your life. That makes me feel good.
TONY
Sorry, but I don’t think it works that way.
DELILAH
But it does. Social science has proven revealing secrets dilutes their destructive power. That’s how 12-step programs work. That’s how therapy and confessions to a spiritual advisor work.
FRANK
Tony needs a 12-step program. (FRANK mimes drinking, then laughs.)
TONY
Says the pothead. (TONY mimes smoking a joint and laughs.)
DELILAH
(TONY glares at her.
Look, not everyone has a confidante they can share with, so they keep their secrets hidden. They suffer. I’m sure you both realize your alcoholism and drug addiction are coping mechanisms caused by secrets. I’m inviting you to identify one, write it down and put it in the box. When the box is full, I’ll burn them in a big bonfire. (DELILAH pats her chest.) Like the shirt says, you can come watch your secrets become smoke, rise into the air and be absorbed by the universe. Their power over you will dissipate and you’ll experience a profound freedom.
TONY
Uh huh. And how much do you pay us for our confessions?
DELILAH
A dollar each, cash in hand. (DELILAH pats her fanny pack)
TONY
(Laughs) So we get rich, plus we’re liberated and will find true happiness. Wow.
DELILAH
Mockery, like what you’re doing, is a way people cope with fear. What are you afraid of?
FRANK starts to laugh, high-fives Delilah—)
FRANK
Oh! Nice burn! (—But she leaves him hanging. After an awkward moment FRANK lowers his hand, glances at annoyed Tony, turns to Delilah.) And what do you get out of this arrangement?
DELILAH
Guys, this is my purpose in the world. And isn’t fulfilling your life’s purpose the greatest feeling a person can experience?
TONY
I dunno. Getting laid has gotta be right up there. Am I right?
(TONY laughs, high-fives with FRANK.)
DELILAH
Sure. But honestly, guys, we both know your orgasms are over in a couple of seconds, right? (She holds up one finger, then a second finger then an open palm. FRANK and TONY swap embarrassed looks. DELILAH laughs.) On the other hand, I’m fulfilled all day and all night.
TONY
(to FRANK) Dude, there’s a con in here somewhere. Hot chick buying secrets? C’mon.
DELILAH
Jim Thiele
Hidden
Actually, the con is that you alone can handle your guilt, that you alone control your emotions, that your decision-making is clear-eyed, not plagued by regret and pain and all the traps we use to deflect what we feel. That’s the con, gentlemen.
TONY
Why do I smell a Bible verse on its way any minute.
FRANK
(Ignores TONY) So what kinds of things do people write down?
DELILAH
I don’t read them. I buy them, I store them in that box, and then I burn them.
TONY
(to FRANK) Let’s go, man. There’s hotter girls at the party who aren’t all freaktarded.
FRANK
You go on ahead. I’ll catch up with you.
TONY
Tellin’ you, dude, she’s got an angle. But you’re always a sucker for a pretty face and a tight little body. Later.
(TONY shoots DELILAH some daggers and exits).
FRANK
Sorry. He’s pretty cynical.
DELILAH
He’s armored up. Like most people. But he’s wrong. I’m not gonna sling any Bible verses.
FRANK
So, what do I write down?
DELILAH
Write down the secret you can’t escape, a memory that holds you back, a betrayal that haunts you, a shame that makes you hate yourself, maybe even a crime you committed.
(FRANK stares at the blank slip of paper.)
FRANK
It makes me nervous. Not like I’m a serial killer but I don’t wanna shock you.
DELILAH
I don’t read them so I won’t be shocked. I promise, I’m just committed to this process. I know it works. I watched it transform my dad after he got out of prison. He learned it from a chaplain who’d learned it from a shaman.
FRANK
So your dad gets out of prison, then hangs out in parks with a sign and a slogan on a tee shirt?
DELILAH
15 No. 2
(Laughs) Yup. And oh, he got his ass kicked. He even got arrested. But he kept it up. He believed it was his calling. And once he’d mastered it, he traveled the world sharing it. (DELILAH grins, points to the sign, the box, the suitcase and her shirt.) It’s basic setup because it’s a basic idea. To be human is to have secrets. To have guilt and shame. To be their hostage. Dad set people free, and by the time he retired he’d burned over twenty thousand secrets, smoked them into the sky. Saved hundreds of lives and eased so much needless suffering. Now I do that.
FRANK
(Studies the slip of paper.) Kinda hard to know where to start.
DELILAH
If a secret doesn’t jump out at you, think back. Most lies we tell ourselves start when we’re too young to fight back. We saw something. We did something. We allowed something to happen—
FRANK
I’m thinking, but it’s hard.
DELILAH
(Smiles) That means you’re doing it right. You’re taking it seriously.
(FRANK finally writes on the paper, folds it in two, slips it into the box. DELILAH unzips her fanny pack, pulls out a wad of bills, hands him a dollar)
DELILAH
Congratulations. You should be proud of yourself.
FRANK
I’m ashamed of it. I don’t feel proud at all.
DELILAH
Well, reflect on it. Examine how it changed your life, how it let fear take hold, how it forced you to second guess your instincts, and how, because of it, you stopped trusting people.
(FRANK thinks about it, shakes his head.)
FRANK
Nah, I’m not a deep person like that.
DELILAH
I disagree. You stayed and your friend left, so there must be something—
FRANK
Yeah. There is. You’re an attractive woman who’s interested in talking to me.
DELILAH
You’re attracted to me because you believe I can help you. Because you’re tired of secrets driving your decisionmaking.
FRANK
You say that but believe me, I’m a dumb animal. Like Tony said, I’m a sucker for a pretty face and a tight body. And you’ve got both.
(DELILAH laughs. FRANK grins at her like an embarrassed idiot.)
DELILAH
I think you underestimate yourself, but alas, go be free of that which plagues thee.
(DELILAH lifts the sign, waves at unseen people.)
FRANK
So when do you burn the secrets?
DELILAH
(Lowers the sign) When the box is full, I host a bonfire. Hundreds of people will show up. Some will watch quietly while others will laugh, dance, chant, however, they feel like celebrating their liberation. And, of course, you and your friend are invited to join us.
FRANK
I’ll remember that. By the way, my name’s Frank.
(FRANK and DELILAH shake hands.)
DELILAH
Hi Frank.
What’s your name?
FRANK
DELILAH
It’s anonymous, Frank. I’m not here to make friends or socialize. (DELILAH smiles. FRANK lingers nervously.)
FRANK
OK then. So hopefully I’ll see you when you burn my secret and, ya know, purge me of my guilt.
DELILAH
You’re already done the hard work so I hope you’ll join us. Many people find the bonfire to be truly transformational. Google our website for the day, time and place. (She points at her chest.)
FRANK
OK, I will. It sounds pretty cool. And I probably could use some, uh, non-herbal transformation.
DELILAH
You better go. I imagine your friend’s talking trash about me. And you too, probably.
(DELILAH laughs. FRANK nods, waves and exits the stage. DELILAH raises and waves her sign. FRANK returns with a frown).
FRANK
Hey. Um, what I wrote down … It’s big! I’ve never ever … It’s a little scary, actually.
DELILAH
(Lowers the sign, looks concerned.) Are you OK? Are you safe?
FRANK
Like I said, I’m trying to take this seriously. I mean, you’re kinda in my head now and—
DELILAH
No. I’m not in your head. What’s in your head is trying to come out Frank—
FRANK
—I mean, it’s true. I really do need to get my shit together and I do think this might help. But I don’t want Tony there and I don’t wanna go alone. So, will you be there? At the bonfire?
DELILAH
Of course! There’ll be hundreds of people there experiencing a beautiful kind of liberation.
FRANK
(Laughs nervously) So I’m picturing like an Old West public hanging, my secret up on the platform and everyone watching, right, watching that trap door. And the executioner pulls the lever and my secret falls and—(FRANK claps loudly)—its neck snaps! And everyone cheers!
DELILAH
Wow! It’s really got a hold on you—
FRANK
Snaps its goddam neck! And it just hangs there … dead and dangling …
(FRANK paces excitedly. DELILAH watches and nods.)
DELILAH
Wow! You have a lot of passion about this—
(Continues to pace)—Yeah, I guess I do—
FRANK
DELILAH
So often folks memorialize the internal change they want with a physical change. Some cut or color their hair, some shave their beards, and some—(DELILAH kneels, unzips the suitcase, pulls out a black tee shirt with grey letters that reads “Smoke Your Secrets.” She holds it in front of FRANK’S chest.) Some change their appearance with a shirt that makes a statement. You look like an extra-large?
(FRANK looks at the shirt, then DELILAH.)
FRANK
Oh yeah. I’m an extra large, baby!
DELILAH
(Laughs) Of course you are. Go ahead, try it on. You’ll see a lot of these at the bonfire.
(FRANK pulls on the shirt over his existing shirt. It fits perfectly.)
FRANK
(Grins) Wow. Over the years I’ve smoked a lot of dope. But I’ve never smoked a secret.
DELILAH
(Chuckles, zips up the suitcase.) Oh Frank, we’ll be smoking a whole stash of secrets. (She smoothes the shirt over Frank’s chest.) Fits perfectly, and it looks good on you.
FRANK
I feel something. Like some weird primordial power. (FRANK roars, pounds his chest.)
DELILAH
That’s good. That’s really good! You’re on your way to a new kind of peace, Frank.
(DELILAH grins and nods. FRANK beams, prances around proudly, pounds his chest and flexes his muscles.)
DELILAH
Uh, so, here’s the thing: I buy secrets. But the shirt, if you want it, that’s what you’ve gotta buy.
(DELILAH and FRANK share a look. His smile disappears.)
FRANK
And there it is. There’s the con. (FRANK chuckles, shakes his head.) So how much?
DELILAH
Well, what’s it worth to be free of the pain your secret causes you every day? Of the mess it’s made of your life? Of the relationships it’s torpedoed? You name the price, Frank.
(They stare at one another.)
DELILAH (cont.)
You think about that and watch my stuff while I go use the ladies’ room, OK? Here.
(DELILAH hands him the sign, pats his shoulder and exits. FRANK watches her go, glances around and shrugs. After a moment he raises the sign, smiles and waves in the direction of unseen people. TWYLA, enters with her Mona Lisa smile, sees FRANK, sizes him up.)
FRANK
Vivian Faith Prescott
Seeing in a New Light
Hi. I’m buying secrets. You selling?
TWYLA
You’re too late. Sold it the other day to a girl who was working here. It’s probably in that box.
FRANK
Oh yeah? Mine’s in there too.
TWYLA
And God, she was right. I feel so much relief, getting it off my chest. Know what I mean?
FRANK
Not yet. I just put it in there.
(TWYLA tears open her shirt, reveals she’s wearing a “Smoke Your Secrets” tee-shirt like Frank’s.)
TWYLA
Oh my God! You’re gonna love it! Seeing it on paper and then thinking about it, thinking about how it’s shaped my life, well, dude, it’s just given me this new kind of acceptance and self-love.
FRANK
Wow. I hope that happens for me.
TWYLA
She told me this thing which is so true: it’s easier to tell a stranger your secrets than your closest friend. Cuz they won’t judge, right? And even if they do, you’re like, so what, I’ll never see them again so who cares? Like, you’re a stranger and I could tell you my secret right now.
FRANK
But you put it in the box. And then it’ll get burned and your guilt will be released—
TWYLA
I did. But that’s just a device. A trick. Like the bonfire. They don’t matter. What matters is naming it. Writing it down. That’s when liberation really happens!
FRANK
You think so?
TWYLA
I know it. I feel it! And I’m giddy being able to say it. Listen, I’ll tell you mine and you tell me yours. And then we’ll go our separate ways because we’re strangers. It’ll feel great! Trust me!
(TWYLA bounces up and down. FRANK is reluctant, but her enthusiasm wins him over.)
FRANK
OK. Ok, but you go first.
TWYLA
Cool. Ready? I’m a submissive. I love having guys tell me what to do. It turns me on.
(TWYLA laughs, playfully pokes the words on FRANK’S chest.)
TWYLA (cont.)
I might be a weirdo, but I still love me! (She looks at him flirtatiously.) OK, now Your turn.
FRANK
Whoa! Submissive, huh? OK. Well … (FRANK looks around, leans toward TWYLA) I’m a kleptomaniac.
(TWYLA gasps, then grins widely. FRANK laughs.)
FRANK
You’re right! It does feel good. It does feel liberating! I’m a kleptomaniac!
(They laugh and hug. And when the hug ends, FRANK snatches the suitcase handle and loses his smile.)
FRANK
Grab the box and let’s go!
(There’s a brief pause, then TWYLA giggles, bends down, picks up the box. FRANK grabs her hand and they rush off stage with the suitcase and box leaving the sign by itself as the LIGHTS GO OUT.)
End of Play
Slugged! Janet R. Klein
POETRY
Christianne Balk
Stellar's Jay
Outside my open window, the Stellar jay yabbers, whistles, and skirls—an alchemy of griefs and grievances that ricochet from the blue spruce and into the old birch fissured with over six decades of swishswashing neighbors, like me, listening to this thicket of noise. What ails you now, my outspoken, indigo-blue-hooded, aquamarine-blaze-eyebrowed boon fellow? If only I could find words to match your electric-thrumming, svelte-tinged, feathered voice. Where is the wizard whose divine cross-staff nudged your Cretaceous syrinx to release such loquacious willingness to intone, despite the shadowed layers of your roost? Grateful, I sit here, reminded of why I look out from my still room, searching for claws to lift me from silence’s sinkhole.
My Father’s Chain Saw
How it landed with a soft thump and rattle when he set it on the ground, unscrewed the dusty filler cap and poured in the gas; how his gloved hands worked the starting sequence: flip the switch, pump the primer, hold the trigger, pull the cord.
The strong, smooth pulls— one after another— sputtering starts, primer pumps, pull after pull; how blue smoke and sound filled the air, and how I vibrated with anticipation along with the chain— eager and dangerous in its groove.
Pamela Bergmann
Estrangement
David Boose
Venus
Mark Hurtubise
How my hands buzzed as I held the logs in the sawbuck that his father had built, as the chain bar rocked, the teeth bit, and the noise and the work passed for conversation between us.
Those Saturdays, sawdust piled on the boots and overalls of this Monday-through-Friday, suit-and-tie businessman as length after measured length of cordwood dropped at his feet.
Then, the quiet work of stacking, and the link of smoke and resin that lingered between us until the next weekend.
Kristina Boratino
Wonder Bread
The dimly lit kitchen feels As run-down as I do. Our 80’s patterned Linoleum holds hostage the dusty footprints of Addicts known, and unknown to mom.
I watch the bread anxiously pop-up from the toaster, Witness the butter slowly melt away and Sprinkle cinnamon & sugar on top.
I hold my breath and carefully tiptoe past Mom and a stranger on the couch to Bring my three year old sister breakfast.
I return to clean up the mess, struggle to wrap Small fingers around slippery, soapy bowls.
I find the Wonder bread bag continually catching my eye; Vibrant, full of life.
When I’m finished with the dishes I instinctively Toss the damp-yellow dishtowel over my left shoulder. Several stuck sugar granules shake loose, and Fall to the ground.
Our sweet innocence, Lost forever.
Nicholas Bradley Baader—Meinhof Phenomenon, Also Known as Frequency Illusion
The truth that when you learn the pileated woodpecker’s name you will see the pileated woodpecker everywhere –as on that early
September afternoon in Ruckle Park at the end of a daylong walk when even unbinoculared we couldn’t miss
that fiery panache –and didn’t.
Wings of Pegasus Annekathrin Hansen
C.W. Buckley
Firmament
I’m cold, cold
Under a golden sky
That opens up above us And warms no one at all
They say that Once it connected us But I don’t believe it How could we lose the sky?
We must have Cut it to ribbons Torn away strip by strip Until nothing was left to steal
Sometimes I think I remember being connected But I can’t be sure In this light, without my glasses
All I remember is falling asleep
Seeing gray in my dreams Then finding upon waking Fog all around
Why do we seek what is lost? It goes against our nature
Why save when we Prefer to burn?
Don’t you see the telephone poles
Dressed in rusting chain mail Staples without a flyer Anywhere in sight?
They say in our four dimensions Time must be a place
If so, nothing is lost Feel the math
Maybe that’s why I imagine lives Like childhood aunts and neighbors Behind every glowing curtain Warming the dark
They’re nothing but strangers of course But it’s enough to reveal Red velvet maple trees On skyless nights
Jim Thiele
Red Sky at Night
Susan Chase-Foster
Boketto
During times of exhausting entropy when declinations of order safety predictability plunge this place this planet this population into malignant pathos diminished hope one needs strategies or breaks like boketto the Japanese idea of doing nothing just sitting somewhere comfortable on a beach rock or downed spruce log beside a trail or lake gazing out at the distance just watching without thinking so simple no worries only breath and perhaps a golden snow of heartshaped birch leaves will fall for you.
Connie Taylor
Flowing Waters
Kersten Christianson
Sight of Worm, Crow, Snow Crust Moon
It’s February and my mind wanders once again to our Sugar Moon friends, Carol and Jesse, that they would land soon, that their long journey from Australia would always step-stone to a quick layover in Hawaii, to then snow frolic in farflung northern-winter Alaska, to then land here to feather and reside in this temporary writer nest. Here, they’d impel us to consider the resonance of empty clamshells clomping when used as finger cymbals, or how beached logs could serve as vessels of found object mandalas: spirals of bull kelp a snare-spin of raven-gift shells, bits of glass, pre-bud twig. Or how we late-night partied at Richard Nelson’s house, and when I say partied, I mean, we read his clippings and notes taped and written on walls, played his didgeridoo, kept our glasses topped off, read our own verse with wine-flushed cheeks. We toasted their newly-constructed Ship of Fools, built with beach-dragged driftwood, piece by piece, to just below the tideline at Totem Park, meant only to sail in our minds, until park ranger rulers read them the riot act and ordered its immediate dismantling. Upon reflection, Richard Nelson’s very house became a wild woman’s beating heart, crimson and muscled, moose hooves tied with twine clopping along to offshore wind. Since, Jesse has sidestepped, walked a terminal path into the beyond, to the land of the wildblooms and neverlosswords. And since, Carol of wetland brew, of muskeg and bog, of real China teacup and salmon chowder at Beak, of cherry blossoms and hand-fed deer, has returned once, twice, to host late-night readings of spirit and spirits, of tinned oysters and pickles, oJim Thiele marrow. Such moxie, these women of sunshine words and kangaroos, legends and gems, truly. So lucky we are to know them.
In hand-pottered moon dish, Carol transferred earth stones from her hands to mine
Washed Up
Jim Thiele
Douglas Cole Two Poems
The Story of Fire
Part II
Tonight began with parts of last year's Christmas tree hot and happy to go— a perfect balance of burn.
Then I think-see this piece could go front left corner, pushing high the rest, but when I lodge it in it's a big dark smoldering block pushing the fire to the back, and when I stand away, it’s a gray-blue glowing granite block of budgelessness. We're gonna be here for a while.
I get in there with the tongs and wrench it all into an open V, now a righteous amphitheater of fire— let that burn like that for a while. But then I think, how about this one, a piece of apple wood, a crotch piece with wrinkled elbow anemone spouts and phantom branches—a big piece, but I don't want another granite block yet take a chance anyway and throw it on, and it becomes the holy gorgon head, skull of Ra, old dinosaur ablaze completely, a living thing intense and coming into full emergence so I look for the extinguisher, and I think-say, I appreciate you fire, I do, there, here, in this space, this way, I do.
After that I head out the front door, and I swear I see an Ichabod ghost go by. So I ran out into the street, and of course he was gone— nothing out there but the end of the year. Now I'm singing my way back. Old songs re-remembered: chords and rhythms, and whose voice is this? My God, do you see those stars out there? At the cold raw edge in this thin bandwidth dark of winter, as we say, a good fire going, smell of smoke floating over the sea air, and the seals barking, seals, you hear that? We're on the verge of something, feel it?
So I prop up my rope-sole shoes to dry, this darkest night, good fire going, bed of orange molten in its essence, incandescent, something alchemical at the core that the Yogis walk across. The night is pregnant with your wishes, your astrological, numerological lined up gears of fate, and for what? What else could you want? At the same time now these shoes are dry I think, there's a book out there, a magic book I'll read, and it’ll be a door I go through, nothing the same, this book, and I feel I had a hand in writing it, which I say with no ego, just the way labor is distributed across these many hands, many lives— so that as much as ever, though it's close, it's close, I know I’ve never seen a fire like this fire before.
Mark Hurtubise
Guest Appearance
Lost Luggage
Outside the door old Margo sits in her wheelchair singing, I don't know why I love you but I do— she's got that verse nothing else and repeats it over and over, then she's just talking, saying it as if addressing you or me or an imaginary other in the hallway— she's got a lot of energy for a dying woman— this is what Kay my dying aunt hears from her bed— Kay’s not saying much at this point, not eating, and only drinks water from a sponge. She whispers, something's wrong, and then she drifts, pulls off blankets, pushes the invisible away, pulls blankets back on, says, I'm tired, drifts, rises barely like she wants to go, says, what do I do? She barely breathes—I look for a pulse in her neck— she's still here—she says, I'm done. I know what she means, her arms black and blue and thin as sticks, the dark mollusk-like essence trying to shed its flesh suit— essence on a freeway of memory, dream, internal flight expansion then open eyes, here still, again, still, trying to go—Margo in the hallway singing, I don't know why I love you but I do—
Chelsey Cook
Old Vessels
The earth swallowed my friend whole last week. A snow bridge in Denali collapsed, revealing the belly of some great, ancient beast. One hundred feet he fell, Icarus into ice. His partner couldn’t see him, couldn’t reach him at all, crouched on the blinding edge of something too big to name. How frantic she must have been, safe top-side while he. . . he. . .
How blue it must have been, slipped between the cracks.
When the park rangers came with their helicopters and their long-lines, he was already gone.
* * *
The shock of grief has faded enough to wonder where his rubber boots are. Surely he had a pair. All the people I love most do. Maybe they’re still sitting on the stoop of his cabin, waiting to be stomped onto the runners of his snowmachine, revved back to town in a race that will never run. Maybe they’re packed away with the rest of his townclothes, waiting at the airstrip for someone to go through them, parceling out his possessions.
Or maybe they’re still on the Eldridge, buried under a fresh snow, joining the rest of the detritus we’ve cached in those mountains; good whisky, old espresso, books torn in two. My favorite shirt. Some of our favorite people.
I imagine myself finding them out there. Brushing off the snow and slipping my feet inside, the ten pockets from his climber’s toes still warm and worn.
* * *
If he were still alive, I would have seen him in them this summer. All of us kicking up our sticky, rubber heels at the Fairview, shaking off the mountains together. He would have smiled in that reckless, distracted way, and I would have wished I knew him better.
Bill Heubner
Potter Marsh Methane Bubbles- 2809
Mary Eliza Crane
All Saints Day
Perugia, Italy
She scoops a large spoonful from a tub and hands me gorgonzola—ripe, smooth, rich and pungent. I’ve just had a taste of creamed pistachios and inhaled the aroma of fresh ground fennel, paprika and anise.
Rows of potted heather and chrysanthemum join the crowds in the center of Corso Vanucci, and soon I encounter a vendor with wheels of lavender goat cheese, and sample pesto and tomato flavors aged into the milk of sheep.
Along Piazza Mattiotti are bins of olives, cured meats, heaps of flavored biscuits, truffle sauce and a multitude of sweets. Via Mazzini is reserved for chocolate.
Any day in Italy is a day for celebration, but today is a Holy Day of Obligation. So I buy the gorgonzola.
Chris Dahl
Pussywillows
I thought I knew my mother’s heart: the fifteen colors of African violets she lined on the dining room’s shelves.
The blackboard of chores directed me to water them weekly. Not too much. Never on their leaves.
The prohibitions worked their way into my fingers. Complicit, the copper-toned appliances gleamed.
We sat on the pulled down door of the wall oven, Vick’s rubbed on our chests. We thrived on the scent of eucalyptus, the scent of exotics, the mother who could sing away hurt.
She stood sleek in heels and slim dresses freshened with flowered trim. In those days, you could purchase it by the yard. I thought she would never stop working. How could I help but fret over my shortcomings?
Brenda Roper
Pink Rose
Fifty years later, it turns out that the pots in their precise placement were not the heart after all. It turns out
that my grandmother wouldn’t stop giving her daughter new starts she didn’t want, gifts that tangled inside her.
I had almost decided to begin with pussywillows, how they live inaccessible in ditches, newly velvet whips tipped the color of daily rain.
I thought I had something to say about how Johnny jump-ups thrive in their margins.
But I came into the story late and confused felted leaves, winter blossoms, with a more complicated exchange: a chain of daughters, stopping at each clay station with a watering can, devotional, trying over and over to tip an exact tablespoon of water onto thirsting roots.
Sheary Clough Suiter
Mending Mother Earth
Gene Ervine
Slava Ukraini!
Anchorage, Alaska
After filling the feeders at the end of the old year a black capped chickadee eats sunflower seeds this subarctic New Year’s morning.
This little survivor knows nothing of the hectares of sunflowers that will bloom this summer across the steppes to Ukraine’s far horizon, even though torn by shells, shredded by tank tracks, and scorched by rocket fire.
This bird is ignorant of the tide of evil washing across the steppes shattering children, friends, loved ones. It knows nothing of slick blood on ambulance floors, maternity hospitals leveled, basinets teetering from shattered apartments, grade school crayon drawings flap helpless.
The golden grains and sunflowers of the steppes will reach the blue dome of heaven again. The new Orthodox crosses in the graveyards will weather gray over the spectrum of the slaughtered: soldiers, civilians, elders, or babes as flowers planted in the old year bloom, and the fresh cut flowers fade on raw heaped earth.
Slava Ukraini!
Cynthia Steele Sweat Bee and Sunflower, Portland
Leslie Fried
Impossible
Night disrobes and I curl up against the chill dreaming about Lily she wants to live in a white house in a white place Iceland or Norway impossible she hasn’t enough and what about me can I leap into white before frailty slows me to a shuffle.
It’s work all week to protect the museum from fire, earthquake, terrorists to feed a crazy girl with crazy hair and no socks minus five in a no-heat trailer.
But in sleep I return to myself to a town that is all towns wondering could this be the end as winds wail over the sea as the sacrificed whisper above my bed declaiming their pain in all languages compressed to a hum engulfing my muscles and gut.
The next day it’s my birthday we go to the Reilly’s pub and I laugh and laugh and laugh choking as Dave cries over memories of Normandy boy soldiers falling like tiny gnats into white.
Bill Heubner
Potter Marsh, Methane Bubbles-2943
Rozalija Grace
1917
for Elizabeth Rose Shaffer
Уму — республика, а сердцу — Матерь-Русь.
For the head—a republic, but for the heart—Mother Russia. Nikolai Klyuev
When I tell my mistress not to clean up, she says she doesn’t want to be a chauvinist.
Her French is not so good as to impair her Russian. She has gone to the people and listened closely. She knows my people don’t suffer bondage well, wonders, doubtless, what barricades I mounted in 1905—
as though it is not my hand that feeds her, as though I do not sit at her feet
when she is at her vanity. She jests, then, that I am a golden retriever—loyal, gentle, eager to please—while she is a black cat— independent, clawed, and wary of the wolves in dogs.
The streets are full of them. And yes, I was on a barricade. I would mount another—give more of this blood
she has no idea is Rurikid. I don’t need bread or land, but peace and roses, for a woman does not live by bread alone, but by every word from her lover’s mouth: “I need you.” “Goodnight.”
“I’ll take tea at seven.” When the riots grow, she locks the doors, keeps me close, but pales
to remember where I’m from, wonders what I want— if I, too, am impatient, trying to get into the courtyard garden for a plot of earth. Silly girl! If I wanted the jewels at her neck, I could take them any night my fingers are at her throat. I want the sound inside—the guttural cry of freedom
the streets are learning—to pour from her chest like workers from the factories, the red of her lips
a banner unfurling beneath the strength of my hands. This is my revolution—a naked dancing
with the Ark down Ulitsa Shpalernaya; I will not betray it by picking a palace lock. I serve her tea,
straddle her hips. I have pressed no bolted door, stormed nothing and stripped no amber from the walls.
But in my whispers, I become the black cat mistress of a Petrograd apartment for the length of a moan
and a shudder, let her scream my name like a demand for bread, let it fill her head and her heart and her lungs.
This is my way of being inside her—gentle, clawed, and waiting for her to overthrow me
with the revolutionary yes that will smash both our chains, drape us both in copper links and lightning. We belong to each other. I tell my mistress not to clean up.
Farley Green
3 a.m.
I forgot the name of our son’s dog. One day I may forget to stop at the light, turn off the stove, eat, wipe.
Maybe I’m 90.
Maybe our children are lonely, drifting, poor, and maybe it was something I did or didn’t do.
Maybe I’m in a wheelchair. I’ve been in a wheelchair. I longed to walk.
Maybe I’m alone, Maybe I’m drugging on Netflix and booze. Maybe you go before me. Maybe I’m alone.
And maybe this church thing is a scam. And God is a scam. And I will just go black and…
Lucille. The dog’s name is Lucille
Jim Hanlen
Where Stolen Cars Go to Die
Across I-5 the other side, where police stay away, and you can find a comfortable place to smoke in the rain, and the radio still plays as long as the battery lasts, plays cowboy songs in the morning, Mariners’ ball in the afternoon
and some sweet song you can warm up to after dark. as long as the battery lasts.
Brian Wright Flowers
Ruth Carter
Abstract Reality
Amy Holonics
When the Swans Have Gone
When the swans have gone, and the leaves are off the trees, when the last apple has dropped, and the worms have dug down deep, when the ground feels frozen— solid under my feet, I will wait for you.
I will wait for you until winter’s darkness passes. I will wait for you until my hair is white as snow. I will wait for you until the last swan returns in spring.
I will wait, for you.
I am the earth, the soil, the decayed leaves, the rotted apple, the echo of the swan’s cry. I am the sky, the clouds, the flowing river, the blanket of snow you can’t uncover. You can only wait, until the earth turns, and melts me.
For I will wait for you, until I am gone. Until there is nothing left of me but an empty riverbed, a pink cloud on a mountain, under the shadow of a swan’s wing.
Cheryl Stadig
If You Know, You Know
Marc Janssen
In Conclusion IV
And it was morning, the air, clearer now that the smoke had fled, gave way to a clear blue the kind of cloudless sky that entices one to reexamine, revise, and set a new course; I pulled the car over and on a slightly crumpled gas receipt wrote a poem to you:
I can still hear your Words clinging to memory A soft reminder
I feel your hand on My face even though now you’ve Grown white breathless wings
I closed the door behind me and finding a path up through the salal and twisted pines, picked my way up the hill; behind I could hear the Pacific, ahead the branches cackle clacked to one another, and in that soft cacophony—I felt the wetness at the corner of my eye; this time I didn’t wipe it away, I let it linger and strode on toward the crest.
First published in Last Leaves Magazine
Tillamook Light
Jack Broom
Christopher J. Jarmick Two Poems
Damn Right I Like the Rain
You’re damn right, I like the rain. Everything smells better after a good rain. I sleep better when it rains. I like to read or watch a good movie. I want to cook comfort food. I think about what kind of homemade soup I’m in the mood for when it rains.
People get closer to each other and talk more when it rains.
If it’s raining hard, or sideways because of wind, if it’s been gray day after gray day and I’m starting to feel I’m stuck inside then I let my imagination take me to wonderful places; remember sunlight filtering through clouds, beautiful sunsets, our walks in the forest. Laughter.
Damn right I like the rain.
We, the Border
Hope can be tasted at the border of the land, of too much money. Just beyond is the magical place where money is wasted on designer collars and leashes for pampered cats and dogs. No, they don’t really rip children away from their parents. No, no, of course they don’t really put people in cages or let young women get beaten and raped, those are just stories told to scare you, told to keep you in your place, to stop you from trying to make something of yourself. to keep you away from the border of dreams.
Everyone knows only one nation on earth advertises its promise to help the poor, the tired.
The border is not a straight line. The border is a less than 10 items express check-out line. The border is a place to kneel and pray. The border is booby trapped. The border is crowded. The border is for sale as advertised. The border does not stop the wind. The border does not stop the river (and aren’t we all mostly water?).
We make the dust at the border, some of our ancestral skin is in the dirt, the dust at the border.
We are the border. You can taste hope at the border.
Patrick Dixon
Westport, Washington
Jill Johnson
Two Poems
Pioneer Park
Girls come cartwheeling into the park at the end of the school day sun shining through their upside down hair. Their brothers behind them run and leap into the full-of-life-things they are.
They race across grass planted over bones resting here a century or more— parents who lost their children, the children who were lost— to whooping cough typhoid fever, measles—
I imagine the sounds of today’s laughter vibrating down into the bony ground, dulled by quiet earth but still a transmission of joy.
I hope these old sleepers if they wake, reach their skeletal hands upward, palms flattened as though they could hold the sky, springboarding children into the laughing air.
I pray that they are not opening their bony arms, readying a hollow embrace welcoming a new generation of the unvaccinated to sleep.
Jim Thiele
Exposed Veins
Sunday Fishing
Casting a line just above the Main Street bridge but below the rocks, the drop, hoping this stretch of glimmering water has something to offer.
Downriver the church bells ring, others stream inside to stand in beauty, searching like me for a fish that may not exist.
John Kooistra
Joseph Enzweiler, Poet and Star Gazer, 1950—2011
Last night all the sky sheep you tended in the telescopes of youth searched the hills for you as for a lost lamb that you might be gathered up into the Great Star Web to become like antiquity and the voice of the present, more than a memory, more than a dream.
Brian Wright
One in a Crowd
Peter Lantz
Big Dipper above Port Orchard, WA
Jonas Lamb
44 Word Reflections on My 44th Year
after Erin Coughlin Hollowell’s Corvus and Crater
Routine
Some days I forget to medicate. Days I forget. Once, I tried to meditate daily. I forgot the elusiveness of routine. Take by mouth once daily. Easy to digest. Simpler than meditation. Requiring less focus, less flexibility. Fold legs. Fold into self. Fold memory.
Homing Instinct
A desire to return. An exercise in origin. Failing to return to the familiar. Home is a longing. Winter, forgetting itself, I watch it slip into December dementia. Fear of freeze-thaw cycles. Alaska, Michigan, the displaced persons camp (Bremerhaven), the Baltic coast of Lithuania.
The Kitchen Door Where We Mark our Sons’ Heights in Pencil
I don’t miss the diaper years. Maybe I do. I barely remember. Now there is high school and soon college. My boys barely need me now. The responsibility was heavy. I doubted myself. Will I ever be needed like that again? Please, need me.
Recognizing a Failed Attempt at Focus Time After an Hour of Chasing Wonder
It’s Friday, one meeting and some non-sparkly tasks. Yesterday my son turned 18. Yesterday he was six. Remember to check the July tides. Last night he thought there was time for a bike ride and shower before dinner. Time distortion. Softball at seven tonight.
Next Steps
Backwards design. Start at the end. Too messy at the beginning. I struggle with math, but not the order of operations. Scrape first. But then caulk or prime next? I’m certain about these prime numbers; 2,3,5,7,11. Less certain about 47.
Self Portrait
Brian Wright
Eric le Fatte
Two Poems
Release
I repeat a story to the last of the winter as she lies beneath white hospital linens and clings to the fringes. It ends as a fable of rather than falling, how snowflakes at night find homes in the stars. She feels on her cheek the warmth of my hand, and I tell her as a daughter it's time to let go.
"Let It Be Perpetual"
The morning that unfurls across the entire state of Idaho finds a moment to measure the shadow of a farmer and his hoe against unperturbed rows of fledgling potatoes. He appraises the sky with the notion it might be a jury, then fashions a hill around the first plant, and tamps down the nightshades and pigweeds in the furrow. The field seems to stretch from Wyoming to the Oregon border. He has a long way to go.
Silent Bell
Jim Thiele
Jim Thielel
Gnarly
Daniel Liberthson
Two Poems
Cure for a Teen’s Broken Heart
Gaze deep into the well of heartache, haul up the bucket, brimful of grief, set it on the well’s wooden shelf and study your reflected face, held within the rim’s iron ring.
Dash a hand into that face that’s yours and not at all yours and watch it disappear in bubbles and sparkles as oblique sun rays from its surface ricochet.
A Lose-lose Situation
When I say Please don’t to my dog as he is about to chew the new sandal he’s run off with while I do the dishes, he looks indignant—Why would you leave me a lovely toy and then order me not to chew it? But he resigns himself, drops the sandal at my feet, its sole slightly gnawed but wearable, and goes to his pillow to sulk. My words meant nothing to him, but my tone was command, so he knew he must obey.
When my wife told me she was leaving, I said Please don’t, but with pleading in my voice. I knew she understood the words, but perhaps I should have used a commanding tone, as she didn’t lay her soul down for me to take up and embrace, didn’t waver as she stalked out the door, didn’t once look back. Yet had I ordered her to stay, I know she’d still have gone, but hating me until her dying day, or mine.
I'm going to lie down on my pillow now and wait for the dog. He understands.
When your face breaks into pieces as you look down at it, floating on the sea of sadness that is life, in which all finally falls to pieces, do you disappear with your face?
Do you die? No. Look again now the water has calmed and see yourself whole and serene, even confined by the bucket’s cylinder, as a life floats in a vase of years. Emptied of the water
that preserves you and all lives around you, the bucket will sink once more to be pulled up full again and again, reflecting faces and souls for years beyond your years—broken, mended.
Barks Funny
Jim Thiele
Linday Lucky
The Cricket
Who is nature’s time-keeper That signals us the night Who waits for darkness to descend To magnify the light
Who lies in wait for geese to fly Toward sky in organization And listens to the muffled end Of honking conversation
Who hushes the mosquitoes ‘Fore their night of bloody feasting And watches silhouettes that fade Against a dull horizon
Who waits a moment’s silence ‘Fore its orchestration starts When earth and sky both synchronize, The cricket calls by heart.
Jerry McDonnell
Bones of the World.
The chill of an east wind rolls down off Mount Baker swaying the trees, scouring the valley, announcing Autumn's return.
I should be splitting wood, Yet, I sit and watch.
The walnut trees, the birches, and the lone madrone, drop deciduous leaves of summer and face Winter's world bone-bare.
The redwood, the giant sequoia, the more modest pines, firs and cedars shed needles while growing new like changing costumes on stage, never to face the world bone-bare.
Under the tin roof of the log shed, squirrels mine the gold of fallen leaves remodeling summer's nursery into nests for Winter's coming. I shall winter over with the trees counting my worth against the ages of redwood and sequoia, against my rapid reach of years, against my unsolved worldly mysteries.
The axe rooted in my hand, I judge my worth against the industry of squirrels and the resilience of redwood and sequoia, knowing I'm not green nor gold, knowing my bones can only bleach in the world.
Canadian Honkers, Nisqually, Washington Patrick Dixon
Maria Mecham
Fireweed
after Mary Oliver
my thoughts are loose on the breeze as the wisp of seeds reach across the field. I now know that all they want is to touch the sky, even briefly, before laying dormant in the winter ground.
like the moon who knows only the company of the stars, and longs to feel the warmth of day, I, too, wish I could stay.
so it has been, and how it will be— I am myself, except for when I am not, when my mind goes dark with the waning sun.
we are all subject to the earth’s tilt. even now, August finds me. I watch the fireweed gasp, open wide, and cast dying wishes into sky, hoping, hoping, hoping for soft landing in the fragile hands of spring.
so, for now, I will return home and, who knows, maybe you’ll see me breathing daylight.
Fireweed in Fog
Ruth Carter
Bruce Parker Two Poems
Wheat Harvest
for Russell
I’ve lost touch with you for years now, but don’t suppose your life is any more open-ended than mine. We were two of four nerdy guys, a team in bowling club, a working-class sport none of the cool kids in high school pursued.
Two summers later we drove to Oklahoma in your beloved white and red ’55 Ford convertible later ruined by someone who threw battery acid on the seats one night. We went to your uncle’s farm five miles south of the Kansas border.
You had your own combine and truck at 19 and you and your uncle custom-cut wheat from northern Texas to Scotts Bluff, yearly for a while until Hubert violated his own rule about never working on a machine while it’s running and Baker ran over his foot with his combine, crushing it. Those machines weigh a lot.
We slept in farmers’ barns. You’d wake up in the middle of the night needing a cigarette. Last time I saw you you had a ten-year-old Dodge with a dent in the fender you were too depressed to fix, you who washed and waxed that Ford weekly, kept it so clean inside.
Driving that Dodge, you told me how that man pursued you through the streets after bowling club and finally found you, how your marriage with two kids had not changed you, had failed.
You went on to keep books for an egg farm in the South Valley as far as I know. We slept in the farmers’ barns that summer and I never found out.
Amy Holonics
Infinite Beauty
Something Comes Along
Sometimes I can hardly breathe these days, at the top of the stairs, or in astonishment at you beside me at a meal or reading in bed.
I breathe because it is a choice between life and death, though sometimes, lately, it seems hardly worth the effort, but then something comes along, for instance, time as it slips through Douglas firs disguised as moonlight, and I catch my breath again, after all.
Timothy Pilgrim
Last Pause
I use kale to stop the teeter Seattle nursing home, lunch my slender salad fork rocking on plate rim, balanced there like a worn-out heart just above an aging spleen. Perched perilous like existence, one see-saw away from the void. A single green leaf with tiny barbs. Tucked like a page torn from an old family Bible or gold gossamer wing ripped from a butterfly. I slide it slowly in between china lip and curve of neck halt undulation, freeze the sway. Its shadow, too, stills, like death becomes a stain, motionless black on the white tablecloth my inked life at the final edge.
Comin or Goin
Mark Hurtubise
Vivian Faith Prescott
Two Poems
Imagery of the Coastal Environment
I’m considering how I’m going to fish the sea without my father this year. At some point he told me all the fish stories he could tell, showed me where to go, which bay and which way the currents flowed. He’s dead now. He trusted me to carry on among the islands tucked into sea and shoreline. I’m also going to harvest seaweed this year without my father,
without him leaning over our porch rail, “supervising” me like he always did, his adult child, stuffing seaweed into my basket, 12 feet below him, in my hooded sweatshirt and rubber boots, walking around barnacled rocks.
In his Elder years, my father lived with me for ten years by the sea, in a mutual care-living agreement
and when he’d watch me on the beach, I wondered if he imagined how he once held my toddler hand, and showed me the wonder of bullheads swishing through the tidepools. And if for a moment he worried about how easily his old and diseased body, could depart life that day, or the next, and did he realize how it was as simple as unlocking our tide-wet fingers and letting me go.
Sinclair Inlet, Port Orchard, WA
Peter Lantz
My eX gives Me Crabs
Side-walk your story, unafraid, along this shoreline down to the harbor dock. What was broken is now simply a shell, a pocketed token flung across the breakwater horizon or into a stack of crab pots rusting in rain.
Remember, someday you will be your island’s folklore. Maybe you already are, the way your grief once cascaded to fury
and you tossed him out of the house, hastening his departure with his duffle bag stuffed with sour halibut-slimed hoodies
and salmon-scaled shirts. It’s been 25 years since, and if you tried, you’d have to scour your core for the memories,
lift the shell off their bodies, rip them in half and shake off the guts just to get at them. And here he is—your eX,
walking down the dock, grinning, bringing you a five-gallon bucket full of dungies he’s fished from the sea on his crabber,
and you and your second husband are welcoming this gift, and for all his troubles, handing him cash
Emily Ransdell
Housebound
Three days of wind and the house growling like a trapped animal, shuddering as the summer furniture rudders across the porch. Junipers bowed down and the tops of firs, the gods testing each shallow-rooted thing to see what holds. I too am tested. The kitchen window’s black glass like a mirror as I rinse the dishes and scour the pans. For a moment I don’t know myself.
I see a honey-mouthed girl unfazed by storm, even a little thrilled by its power to harm.
A kind of joy ripples my skin— not love but something close to love’s origin, a deep reassurance that here is where I belong. Driveway iced over, last year’s apples in the freezer. A small bag of bones for soup.
Matt Witt
Clouds Over Salt Marsh
Don Rearden
The Official Language
we’re the only gringos at Tacos Roy but that’s okay I can’t say I noticed we felt welcome always have, in Mexico after twenty plus years of travel there
a waiter waves the three of us inside, to sit small worn table, handed menus our pale faces flush red with embarrassment at our toddler level Spanish we point and pick at the menu scenes from Mariachi concerts blare on YouTube videos crystal clear music from a giant flatscreen on the yellow wall, surround sound speakers unrivaled ambiance for the dinner to come twenty-eight pesos for each tortilla wrapped masterpiece arrachera, bistec, pastor con queso a dream come true mid-delicioso meal, the music stops you could have heard the taco drops there on the enormous screen video with American flags waving President Donald Trump walking past staircases then up staircases — I look away, try to tune out the Star-Spangled Banner might have been playing in the background, but I can’t say for sure, because the tone of the voice, harsh, unkind, a not-so subtle threat
stay home or you’ll be sent back—leave now maybe some other day you too can have the American dream
“President Donald Trump is making America safe again,” the voice declares—
tried to tune out the rest wanted to crawl inside my remaining taco
hide beneath the pastor I felt ashamed embarrassed, angry a profound sense of sadness, too
sad my young daughter had to hear something so awful so unabashedly un-American then I realized this is America now indignant, insular, and just ignorant enough to pay for propaganda advertising in a Spanish speaking country in the wrong language in language used the wrong way, as weapons
we ordered flan for dessert smooth, decadent a sweet soothing salve
It still didn’t matter that we were the only gringos in Tacos Roy I could only hope the only tongues who spoke English the three of us still felt welcomed, all of us sharing a love for what should be the real official language: tacos
Erratics
Sheary Clough Suiter
Richard Roberts
Naturally
The smallness of the earth has been forgotten, the intricacy of its balance. We have hold of the weather, props enough for shifting substrata, tidal umbrellas, electric driers for floods, universal bugbane.
As always, we survive by grace whose star is not yet shot, the beneficiaries of a miraculously prolonged orbit.
But heed the size of forces: Mild air holds cataclysm, summer night a splitting moon. A gathering bomb at earth’s core.
Who grows enraged at politicians, prices’ upcome, international insult? There is a mighty looking down and the lingering of a finger near the earthquake button.
Stan Sanvel Rubin
Blessed
The dramatic prayer of the rushing wind wakes me to storm. The imperceptible remedies of morning come like something remembered from sleep which no one knows the meaning of and whether to rejoice or not in the frigid air.
Jim Thiele
Rust Coming
Steven Schneider
Two Poems
Arroyo Seco
So what if this afternoon there is no snow on the mountain?
The sun is lighting up the storefront of Santos y Mas Across the street from the coffee and ice-cream shop Taos Cow.
Inside the Cow the music is all Grateful Dead, The walls covered with plein-air landscapes.
This is where the fun begins, Running my fingers across the keyboard.
I look out the window from this little nook, The leafless willow leaning over the arroyo.
This one-street village with its cantina and coffee shop, Rottenstone pottery store and funky Bella Mundi gallery.
On snowless days in winter, You walk down main street shouting at the top of your lungs.
Walking Rain
We walk out on the mesa at twilight Past the chamiso and sagebrush Looking for something.
We have a lurking suspicion that it dwells within. Still, we are transported to a distant place By the walking rain on the horizon.
Miles and miles in the distance, We know one evening The rain will find us,
Walking across the sky far enough To pour down on our adobes The secrets of heaven.
Walking Rain at Sunset
Reefka Schneider
Reefka Schneider
El Salto Over Arroyo Seco
Rob Schnelle
The Pieces of Wild Things
after Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things”
Weary of doomscrolling our national coprophilia campaign, I trade self-reproach for loitering by an ancient pine, lightning-struck twenty years ago.
Standing mostly upright, bark-naked and weathered silvercinnamon, cavitied along its vertical axis, the tree raises scarecrow stumps of blackened limb where once a bristling canopy sheltered flickers and Douglas squirrels, creatures given to skittering in diligent forays.
Along the heavier, fallen branches now, bark-beetle carvings undulate like human cranial sutures, hinting kinship in glib resemblance.
Harmony’s held in nature’s glove hand. It never holds back, acknowledging MAGA Billy next door to be as worthy, let’s say, as the late Fred Rogers.
Bias tells me we’re all one neighborhood, that nature relies on humans to find this crumbling husk of wildness, like Mr. Berry’s heron, a solace—
voiceless widow-maker, accidental gnomon marking paces of the sun, woodpecker pantry, undismaying ghost. But I could be wrong.
Heron, Next Generation Jack Broom
Ana Maria Spagna
Two Poems
Near Safety Harbor
It’s not as if just one pine’s rooted in stone on this long shore. Hordes line cliffs of granite and gneiss, clumps of a dozen, thirty feet tall or more, burned and blown. They lean toward frigid water or tower straight.
You can make a claim on hearsay, flotsam-to-be, order trees to leave, set rope to cleat and stalk the shore, if you must.
Up high cornices quiver, a winter’s worth of hard ice will charge the lake on a whim. A speedboat’s wake can tip the ferry on principle, but not for long.
Your leg drapes over mine in sleep. Your winter breath spills sweet. Somewhere tall pines still shade the surface, all trunk and needles, they dull the midday glare.
Expansion
Nard Claar
Rainbow Ford
To build a bridge, Even a temporary bridge With cables and clamps
A bridge that swings when hikers cross To bolt a bridge in place when snowmelt Roars jet runway loud, you must stand On one bank and I on the other And make yourself understood.
You hold a crescent wrench in your right hand Tied to p-cord coiled loose on your left. You make eye contact and nod, Swing your arm back once, then twice, And lob the wrench high Lofting against the blue sky Against all evidence.
Never try to catch the wrench, you said. Wait until it lands, then grab Fast and hold on tight. Later we’ll haul Half-inch cable hand over hand
Tighten turnbuckles, balance over the churn
It’s all theatrics once the thing is fixed.
But I remember most your eyes, blue as sky, Gray as gneiss, just before it all began. You nodded once and let the coil unfurl. You knew this would work.
Survival
Yellow flowers like pom poms thin stalks chest high. I don’t know their name nor how they survive the terror of the wind. The secret, they tell me, words falling like petals from their lemony mouths, is to bend far enough to survive, while every hair of your roots clings to the truth of your grounding.
Wild Peony Ready to Bloom Matt Witt
Kathleen Stancik
Mary Lou Spartz
From the drawing “Child’s Play”
A brown-haired kid with one tooth broken told me that since I was a girl and wanted to play I’d have to be the first one buried.
“Stretch out on the ground and put your hands like this.” he said, showing me how he folded his arms over his chest, and looked pious with his eyes closed.
“We’ll pull up the army blanket over your face and say a prayer. that’s being buried first.”
“Can I get up after that?”
“Sure, only remember, dead girls don’t follow boys around.”
Cynthia Steele
Offline Treehouse, Seldovia Bay
Sheets of wood, riveted metal rust together into a rooftop— a Pentagon in the wilderness, still chill in July.
We perch gingerly atop compost toilets, drop sawdust instead of flushing, learn too late I sit too far forward for separate compartments.
Beaches and seashells far below form the mountain’s flank. Snow runoff hits stone, trickles, runs.
Meanwhile a super Mophie charges Bar-free phones—just cameras now, no pinging, no ringing.
Brian Wright Juni Glass
Pigeon Guillemot Matt Witt
Whaddya mean no online off the skiff? We ask, try up the shore, up the hill— no Pinterest, no social networking. Just this earth. No bars to check
how dough rolls into basted birds, slides into a ready oven— only steps on steepening steps upward. The sustainable, the attainable: fish dinner, fresh made, the day’s chatter circling a table. People listening—eagles calling through trees, crows, water, life, stealing our attention back.
Afterward, we walk the sand. A portly beach dog begs, noses hands, finds nothing, retreats.
A baseball-capped boy machine guns with a huge, inswept driftwood piece. Children roam the seascape, unsupervised,
Live where rubber boots won’t dry overnight, newspaper shoved inside incites Prayers: an unlikely arid day, not rain. Settle for a second paper shove.
Incoming tide briefly eclipses beaches Rocky coves take their place.
Oystercatchers find thin sand— red red bills, red red feet, unrepentant, googly gold, gimlet eyes. Pairs—always pairs— nestling late along the water, long beaks against flat black.
A staunch duo, a foot apart, not for warmth but, it seems, to hold loneliness at bay.
The quiet is deafening. At night: soft, pelted bird calls, then still.
Muffled snoring from the man near me, for whom I hold no small degree of affinity, of warm-heartedness.
Next day the skiff motor steals the captain’s ears, obliterates sound. He roars at us: watch the eagles— posing, darting, soaring free.
Wind rises, rain sheets, reminds us to change boat-line pulleys, keep tie-outs from grounding low tide—
Captain paddleboarded out at high tide, To the boat that says, I rue the day. Hard to reach, against whipping wind.
The guillemots dunk, fly poorly but well enough for their world— entirely dull black, one white wing spot, deep red covering each foot and leg, working the cove in out-over-under.
I climb rough, craggy cliffs, rip wind pants in three places. Boots slog through deep water to see red-footed birds, incoming tide.
Photos snapped, stumble over stones. I wonder: without difficult descents, how would beauty overwhelm us? Legs heavy, sweat salted, eyes burning, disbelieving.
How to love having little by suffering winds, tides, needs— the low odds of warm water for all, the high chance of fireplace heat, thin hot chocolate, the remains of rationed half-and-half,
How to love sleep—bodies intertwined, wrapped tight beneath deep covers, Warming skin despite persistent chill.
Richard Stokes
Only Human
On this gray day at the dry edge of drizzle, scoters in a long skein bob on the calm sea. A fox sparrow flutters in and out of the fringe of beach rye behind me. His pointed snout appears with an explosive snort as a sea lion porpoises westward across the cove. Like wind-whipped black ornaments, crows cavort in lichen-encrusted alders.
Dashing my feel of being the only human on Earth, a floatplane drones overhead westward. Within the hour it drones back eastward. A skiff motors by in mid-channel, perhaps transporting someone off the floatplane.
The tide recedes and the crows congregate in the intertidal. An eagle soars over the beach, ascends to the top of a hemlock, shrills his laughter. The sea lion returns, heading eastward. The scoters dive like falling dominoes.
Again, I’m alone on the planet.
Rowan Tate
Two Poems
Before the Fence
I’m walking a trail my grandfather used before it had a name.
The pines creak like time-tired doors, hinges aching with old wind.
There were people here long before ours who called the rivers relatives.
A hawk carves its single vow across the sky then folds into the silence.
I pass an old cairn, squatting careful and low— time’s way of saying hello.
There’s a meltwater stream sunbathing ahead and deer tracks stitched along the banks.
The rocks are slick with their quiet faith. I stop where the sun spills through a torn seam
and lay my palm on the skin of a boulder. It holds the heat like an old grief.
I think about all the hands this stone has touched, and all the ones coming after.
May they still find beargrass and bees. May they love what takes time.
May they learn the names of what they do not own.
Eagle Feeding, Homer Cynthia Steele
For Those Who Will Inherit the Mountain
Let’s ask the elk what they remember. Let’s learn from what doesn't move. Let’s listen to the wind, that still speaks the old language of pines.
Let’s not see the forests only as timber or the rivers as routes. Let the fireweed bloom where we once did harm. Let the beaver teach us how to build with what’s already fallen.
Let’s plant things that don’t bloom for us. Let’s not call it ours just because it feeds us. Let the trail grow over if no one walks with care.
Leave the mountains unphotographed for once. Let the lichen keep its secrets. Sit quietly and let the rain come, the weather refuse our itinerary. Let us, for once, be shaped by the mountain.
Kelly Terwilliger
Two Poems
Under Rain
There’s the buck now, wearing his crown of sticks under the crabapple tree. A portrait of Tree and Son of Tree, the father’s feet sunk beneath the earth the son’s head twinned with branches.
He’s chewing, sideways, that jaw working, working. He looks my way assessing, ears feeling for sound, but there is no invitation.
He has no need for conversation. He preferentially chews to the left, an occasional twist to the right. The rain is harder now.
Princeling. King. A pink tongue curls, licks water from his coat.
I have not prepared.
Pink tongue, again, turning the private story over in the ceaseless mouth.
What can I say.
I stand at the required distance. I imagine my hands in that thick wet velvet.
Fern and Lichen
Richard Stokes
Nocturne
Now in the dark the wind comes up. The meadow has finished its work and offerings all the seedheads blown empty for now. Yes, by day they still catch the light, some so pale they are almost white but not white, the color of sunlight on cream, lit cloud. Bleached straw. Wind horse on a wind hill. The yellows— rubbed with tan and gold, and sometimes rust, dry flower heads, turning leaves— and the greys, with their faded greens, and the dark plum color with its bloom of cloud still on it. What happens after the greys? Silences. Silvers and browns. The meadow has finished and these are the last in their simple robes, the ones who sing so low it sounds like a whisper. The meadow I have walked through, looking for the sun, the shadow, the right word, the lifted hand. It feels like the end, doesn’t it? But ice rims the long reeds, makes them into staves, statues of themselves. And the sunlight steams. And the song begins right at the end of the breath, when the sky comes in. It’s dark now and the wind is blowing. May it sing again the morning in.
Matt Witt Moon Over Short Beach
Lucy Tyrrell
Sundance of the Coyote
The coyote ran across the road into the field just as I heard on the radio about a woman who began a business after her diagnosis of stage four cancer. Her slogan was Be here now.
When he died in his sleep recently, I mourned the loss and thought about how I missed any chance to get his autograph, the handsome artist-actor-activist. I have watched three of his movies so many times I can call out his lines before he speaks them on the VCR.
It’s too late to arrange the impossible— to meet him and tell him I have a degree from the same university that conferred on him an honorary degree in 2009 for his conservation work, how I’ve birded in Kenya with the same guide who took him by helicopter to go birding on the flat top of a mountain in Samburu after the filming in Nairobi and Masai Mara. The guide admitted he didn’t like the movie, but when I told him that in the movie Denys said, “The Serengeti and Samburu are still good,” the guide seemed more interested. “That was in the movie?”
On safari, weaving on the plains in our jeep, looking out for buffalo and gazelles, we could view the high promontory where the gravesite scene was filmed after Denys was killed in the plane crash and where the lion and lioness spent time.
I would have told him that I cut out his quote (when he was seventy-six) from Guideposts and placed it on my refrigerator with a magnet: The way I deal with arthritis is to keep moving. As long as you can play hard tennis, as long as you can ski or ride a horse—all kinds of things can come your way. As long as you can do it.
For at least today, I loped with the coyote through the field, under clouds scented with rain, toward the distant red maple singing its scarlet.
Mist Rising Nard Claar
Angela Waldie
How Long Do Forests Remember Fire?
Do they dream of growing back in time before the rain of lightning strikes when each tree shivered through the night fearing the embers at their roots?
That night of a rain of lightning strikes when no one in the forest slept fearing the embers at their roots even as dark grew silent and still.
No one in the forest slept fearing the heat that simmered in soil even as dark grew silent and still before the nervous chorus of light.
Fearing the heat that simmered in soil would soon erupt in angry flames even before the chorus of light offered a hint of refuge again.
Soon to erupt in angry flames advancing across the mountain’s skin the trees could offer no refuge, cover, shelter for birds to sing.
Advancing across the mountain’s skin the flames would soon consume the skies and spaces where the birds could sing or sleep or love or rest or fly.
The flames would soon consume the skies and ash would drift to earth for days no sleep or love or rest or flight within the dominion of the blaze.
The ash would drift to earth for days as ghost trees shivered through the nights, recalling the fury of the blaze. Do they dream of growing back in time?
After Fire
Connie Taylor
Taylor Waring
catch & release
in a different life we’re old men who spend their days fishing in a cheap boat on winnebago
paying no mind to the smelly water or the slime lining the backs of walleye & we laugh over fine pilsners until the sun kisses the horizon & i’m always wearing one of those oddly sexual fishing shirts with half-naked women
parading next to fish heads & i’ve worn them so long neither of us know if i’m being ironic anymore & every fish you catch you return gently to the soft gold water from which you reeled it & as that sun drops slowly down like the last drops of the soft gold water down our throats we return to shore
not because we are afraid of the always-coming night but because we know the sun will rise tomorrow & we’ll go out fishing but in this life
i can no longer stand the taste
Aquila
Amy Holonics
120 CIRQUE
of cold beer & find myself haunted in strange cafes so far from any body of water that ever held you & you where are you?
swimming in some dark far away lake waiting for me to float out on my own to catch you by the lip & drag you up from that infinite black water?
you know i’ve always hated fishing you know i could never catch a thing
Pavane for a Tufted Puffin
Standing on a granite ledge in his ebony tux, blond locks backcombed from eyebrows to nape, he waits for the flicker of fish in teal swells a cue to plummet to the sea below, no more a wallflower, sidelined and morose, but a sinuous dancer with smooth moves, beckoning young and curious fry to swift, surprising ends, a hunter in clown’s face paint, peach eyeliner and bright orange smile.
Tonja Woelber
Uncontained
Sheary Clough Suiter
Emmie Wuest
Summer Succubus
I am the summer succubus
My curves and wide smile invite you
And my skin is tanned, smooth
Dusted with freckles, just begging to be kissed
You never keep me longer than a week or two
Wide green eyes urge you closer
And long lashes send fleeting visions
Of sleepy weekends
Cozy holidays
And the possibility
Of little feet running through a garden
My red bikini is a siren song
And I prefer to lounge near water
To pull my prey into the deep
And wrap my legs around them
Pressing kisses to their neck
Praying that this one will be the one to stay
But as much as the sumptuous picnic lunches
And bright sparkling laughter on the water lures them in
They always leave
Like La Llorona, I become vengeful,
Applying a fresh coat of lip gloss
Picking a new river
Making them fall faster, harder
Licking up their honey-sweet promises
But it’s never enough
And I’m always left hungry.
Green
Annekathrin Hansen
Robin Woolman
The National Cemetery Recruits
The Government
Offers prime real estate. You served in patriotism
Let us serve you in perpetuity. Spouses and offspring welcome. The dishonorable need not apply.
Location Location Location
Dramatic hilltop with mountain views. Mature trees and gardens throughout. Fringed by native forest. HOAs protect the dead from: Glass, wires, withered vegetation, plastics,* and firearms.**
*plastic wreaths allowed dec.—march **firearms may be carried and discharged only as part of funeral honors
Building Up
Density matters.
Cement still drying on our tenth Columbarium. Modeled after famous War memorials, these sleek bunkers Curve seamlessly into the landscape. Visitors Stroll pathways between stacks of niches Each with its private 12X12 entrance. Residents’ bios neatly engraved— 40 words or less.
Announcing Acquisition
Parcel 180 east of Sticks Creek
Abuts New Sky Fine Homes
Development. We trust these Neighbors will overlook Our orderly grid of “tiny homes” And maintain their fences.
15 No. 2
Breaking Ground
—Always! Parcel 180’s new grass plots
Available Easter weekend and beyond. Casketed, cremated or plaque-only plots*** First come First served.
***No headstones in Parcel 180 as per contract with New Sky Homes
Sensitive Lands
Deer, rabbits, racoons, Birds, insects—all find sanctuary Here. Contrary to rumor, woodlands and Frog pond will not be developed. Homeless encampments, however, Will be dispersed.
Elk, Packwood, Washington
Patrick Dixon
Wet Nurse Brenda Roper
FEATURES
Cynthia Steele
Brenda Roper, Untethered: Artist, photographer, scribbler: An Interview from Alaska to New Mexico
Gifted and practiced in multiple arts, Brenda Roper does not seek permanence or notoriety in gallery shows or books. Rather, she is looking up, walking hundreds of miles on personal pilgrimages, seeking clarity and a grounded spirituality. She writes, photographs, and shares the moments created along the way in an online forum —whether lighting sanctuary candles for a mother she has made peace with or inviting fellow pilgrims to walk beside her. These acts and others are her art: a way of making sense of the world, an extension of her ongoing artistic journey.
Taking the Circuitous Route to an Artistic Life
A few years after earning an AA in Outdoor Education from Colorado Mountain College, Brenda Roper lived with Steve Weller, moving from Montana to Alaska in 1985 after a summer working at Golden Horn Lodge. “Steve and I owned Alaska Wilderness Journeys, offering river and hiking trips in Alaska. I mostly ran the office, drove the shuttle, designed menus and trip itineraries, and led guided day hikes and a few backpacking trips to Kesugi Ridge, a route through Denali State Park.”
“I left that relationship in 1998. [The emotional abuse of the relationship is alluded to in her poetry.] I moved to a small cabin in Indian for a few years.” She worked in hospitality at Alyeska Resort/Alyeska Prince Hotel, and at the Clarion Hotel Anchorage with Tami Phelps.
She later started her own company—Alaska Pathways—creating custom travel itineraries for visitors to Alaska until leaving for New Mexico in 2008. During her Alaska years, she juggled several jobs: art model; occasional guide for Bob Jacobs, leading day hikes on the Root Glacier and backcountry trips; server at Southside Bistro; and office manager for Discovery Voyages. “That was a great job, working with Dean Rand for eight years.
I worked remotely but also shopped for and delivered groceries to Whittier during the main season.”
She began a BFA at University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) in sculpture/painting in 2000. Four years later, Tami and her husband Kerry purchased one of Brenda’s paintings from her first Anchorage show. That painting—A Slip Through Time (acrylic, photos, and slip on board)— appeared on the cover of Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women (2009). The same issue featured two additional artworks, Wet Nurse and After the Party, marking early success.
Unwilling to Sacrifice Artistic Freedom
Beginning her art practice later in life may have made her more resolute. “It’s funny—you know, I didn’t even know I was an artist until I was in my 40s.” She approached different practices with voracious curiosity.
Formative Years, bronze
A Slip Through Time
At the University of Alaska, Anchorage she studied under Assoc. Prof. Hugh McPeck. She exhibited widely: at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art (IGCA)— where she also managed and assisted the director—the Bunnell Street Arts Center; APU Grant Hall; UAA Kimura Gallery; the Virtu Gallery (that closed in 2025), and in several statewide juried shows.
Mark Muro and Dawnell Smith reviewed Brenda’s work, noting the personal history and gender politics that run through it. Writing about her April 2004 Kimura Gallery show, Muro observed: “Roper’s assemblages, collectively titled A Safe Place to Mourn, continue her trajectory into a personal mythology that richly articulates the experience of growth and individuation… Roper exalts found objects by placing them in beautifully crafted wooden box-type constructions that feature brass bells, rusted iron hooks, velvet pillows, and her own lumpy bronzes—fist-sized objects suggesting soft, crumpled female forms.”
Julie Decker, one of the IGCA gallery directors, wrote of Roper’s February 2006 First Friday exhibition Family Secrets: “Roper uses worn clothing and found objects to contrast decidedly feminine hues and fabrics with rough seams and brutish objects. The pieces are a bit haunting: They suggest that more than just the clothing has been used. They suggest intimacy and sometimes damage.”
Roper says her work centers on sexuality, healing,
women’s issues, and bringing private or intimate events into public view. Family Secrets addresses “the myths we grow up with, the lack of information, the things untold.”
By 2009 she had left Alaska for Santa Fe. Much of her larger works date from 2000–2008, while she was still in Anchorage. She later showed Alaska-made pieces in Santa Fe, including Family Secrets Redux (installation) at El Zaguan and Formative Years (Bronze A to Z) at the Santa Fe Community Gallery.
Her residencies include El Zaguan, Santa Fe, and the Vermont Studio Center.
Brenda acknowledges she could have gone farther in certain directions. “I could have become this publicartist person, but I held myself back. I did get an offer here in Santa Fe to do a piece of public art from a patron who had purchased one of my bronze sculptures, “A Poet’s Heart: Reflections on Compassion” then on display at the Encaustic Art Institute, Cerrillos, NM, for a special 9/11 memorial. The proposed public art project would have commemorated a basketball player with a bronze cast of his shoe. “I remember calling Hugh McPeck shortly before he passed—he said he’d help me, read my proposal and everything. But I lacked confidence, and then I thought, this isn’t even what I want to do. I let it go. There’s some lingering shame in that decision.”
Family Secrets Nested, bronze
Mike Burwell recalls meeting Brenda in Alaska through their mutual friend, climber Bob Jacobs, who founded St. Elias Alpine Guides in McCarthy in the 1970s. He reflects with curiosity on her artistic evolution and is puzzled by her current absence from galleries.
“It’s not clear to me why she abandoned her visual art. She exhibited in and around Santa Fe in the early days. Then gravitated back to writing as her medium with a focus on Substack. Brenda was super active in the Anchorage art scene. I helped her set up a show in Homer (Objects of Curiosity) with these strange little burlap and plaster creatures scattered across the floor. An installation. It was pretty cool.”
Brenda is not particularly driven by money or possessions. She lives in a place she caretakes for rent, walks other people’s dogs, works as a personal assistant, and saves to develop a plan—and the freedom—to walk long distances in faraway countries.
Where she is now: Accepting ideas from the Universe, Having “Aha!” moments.
What Brenda Roper does, as an artist and writer, is complicated and brave. From nearly two decades in New Mexico and recent trips to Spain, the long-term Alaskan continues to create and share ways of interacting creatively with the world to cope and thrive. I hesitate to define her current practice. It’s safe to say this fearless delver and dabbler doesn’t like to be tied down.
Brenda’s creative life spans sculpture, fiber, installation, photography, poetry, prose, and long contemplative miles of travel. “I’ve been trying to find my creative voice over a variety of media,” she says. “It’s all part of the same path.”
She has taken photography courses but felt bogged down by details. “People tell me I have an eye. I suppose that’s a gift— something I have for certain things—not really for landscapes, [like friend and walking partner Monica O’Keefe], but more for the underbelly and dishevelment.”
She is also skillful with words—a vignettist—threading short,
Brenda Roper
Camino
Frances, Spain, village of Rabanal del Camino
Grace
Brenda Roper and Mike Burwell, Roving the Edge opening
evocative scenes that capture the essence of a place, moment, or situation. She blogs about life, art, food, and travel.
Brenda started a Substack a year or more ago called Rough Draft Productions. “But then I started doing it with intention to try to write once a month or more. Oh, so much fun. Time disappears.” As she culls photos from her journeys, she listens to the folk, bluegrass, and Americana of Patty Griffin, Van Morrison, The Wailin' Jennys and Gregory Alan Isakov.
The Substack is not about politics per se, but she does not avoid topics that arise. As her longtime friend, writer, and Cirque Journal editor Mike Burwell notes, “Brenda was a scrapper about free speech.”
Brenda explains, “I didn’t really want or think it was going to be about politics, but it was so enmeshed. You couldn’t get away from it this year. I do have a deep-seated sense of justice… and I tend to go for the underdog. The whole ‘power over’ thing has always been bothersome. So there’s a lot of that in my writing since January (2025).” Substack became a place for her voice to reach a wider audience.
Her art might be termed mixed media and assemblage. “I’m not working with power tools these days becuse I don’t have a studio, and because I’ve moved on. I like mixed media and fiber, plus creating art cards
for friends.” She taught herself to use a sewing machine during a self-directed residency in Florida—“the bobbin still baffles me. I call myself the Primitive Seamstress.” She favors recycled vintage linens and doilies, materials she came to enjoy while studying for a year at Maryland Institute College of Art.
In her Substack (5.31.25), she discusses a recent fiber piece using found, gifted, and recycled objects: a flag reclaiming democracy. She writes:
How will any of these insensitive, narcissistic, and wanton actions of cruelty… elevate the stars and stripes as a national symbol anyone wishes to fly? It won’t… And therefore, I am reclaiming the flag. I am reclaiming democracy…
She describes its origin: “I was walking home from the grocery store when I got a ping—an idea from the Universe… Make a flag. It came as an image of tattered white strips of cloth. Nothing more, yet the idea was planted.”
She believes the universe sends signs and gifts and she stays open to them. The flag becomes a bit beatnik, a bit Betsy Ross, and a bit of needed hope.
If only walking as a vocation were the path to creative and financial abundance
—Brenda Roper
Camaraderie forms on long walks, with bonds lasting hours, days, or years. “We weaved in and out throughout the day—sometimes walking together, sometimes meeting along the way. This is common on the Camino.” Brenda remains in touch with pilgrims she met on her first Camino (2017/2018), from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Santiago de Compostela—friends from Australia, Sweden, the UK, and the U.S.
She met Pepper Ernest a week into the Coastal Camino Portuguese (14 days from Porto to Santiago, 2021). “It was nice for a while, and because of him I probably did a few trips I might not have considered,” including the Camino Francés Redux/Camino Invierno (Pamplona to Santiago), the Central Portuguese (12 days from outside Porto to Santiago), and the Camino Inglés/ Costa Brava (fall 2024). “We had a window of time and it was good,” she said. “He enriched my life in many ways over the three years we walked and rendezvoused, but we weren’t aligned in the ways that mattered—different priorities, politics, and so forth.”
Brenda’s friend Monica O’Keefe, also an artist, joined her on several walks. They met in Alaska, where Monica spent 40 years before moving to New Mexico in 2022. Monica’s work focuses on painted and sketched vistas of the natural world. In 2019 they walked the Way of St. Francis in Italy together—a challenging 30-day pilgrimage from Chiusi della Verna to Rome. “We were walking out of town in the morning and the light and reflection were breathtaking. The water so still. It was perfect. What a gift,” Brenda said.
In 2023 they met at the Geneva airport, to walk the Via Francigena (Lausanne to Rome). Monica walked the first two weeks—over the Great St. Bernard Pass into the Aosta Valley and Ivrea—before Brenda continued alone to Rome, about 45 days, or roughly 60 days total. The full account appears in a Sloways interview in which she describes her first Camino inspiration “The Way” movie with Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez.
Solo journeys include a 40-day pilgrimage combining the Camino del Norte and Primitivo (May/June 2022), from Hondarribia to Oviedo to Santiago. “This was a favorite— especially the Primitivo, considered the ‘original Spanish Camino’—sweet towns, mountains, community. It had everything.” Most recently (fall 2025), she linked lesserknown coastal routes to walk continuously from León to Santiago: the Camino San Salvador, Camino del Norte/ Ruta do Mar/Cantábrico, and the Camino Inglés.
“It was fantastic—meditative and amazingly beautiful over 30+ days. The coast was wild, rocky, gorgeous, and remote. I loved it. After a tumultuous year, it was calming and a good reset for mind, body, and spirit,” she said.
“While every Camino is different—depending on the people, my mood, the terrain—what I find is joy. Freedom. Joy in the walking, discovery, interludes, and happenstance. It’s where I feel most alive and comfortable, despite the language barrier. It’s a kind of a homecoming, no matter the miles—a place my heart rests easily. I’m an introvert, and nature has always been my ‘go-to’ place—to escape, to think. Church for the non-religious, yet deeply spiritual. The longer the walk, the more settled I become.”
The Sea Beyond
Reclaiming Democracy, inset
"It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”
—Preface of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats
On her walks, Brenda takes numerous cemetery photographs. Sadly, her favorite place—Cimitero Acattolico we cannot share—though I’ve seen her photos. Here, cats walk undisturbed among tombstones. Sculptures abound, such as an angel having fallen into grief, laying over a tomb, the work of American sculptor, art critic, poet William Wetmore Story, sculpted for wife, Emelyn.
“Some of my favorite photos are from the nonCatholic cemetery in Rome.” Referred to as the Protestant Cemetery or the English Cemetery, this private cemetery in Testaccio asks that photographers not publish photos of it.
Those buried there include English poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as Russian painter Karl Briullov and Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci rest in the NCC. Candidates include foreigners and non-Catholics, including those who committed suicide, because the Catholic Church traditionally forbade burial in consecrated ground for these groups.
Cemeteries and sanctuaries compel Brenda. In her Substack of 9.24.25: “Missed opportunities said the dream,” she writes of the village San Andrés de Teixido— the second most important pilgrimage site for Galicians, famous for its sanctuary, the Chapel of San Andrés:
This morning, I go to the Sanctuary early to light a candle. I am alone. How lovely. It is five years on this date that momma died. I whisper, your spirit is traveling the country with me. RIP Betty Reynolds. And there are so many other reasons to invite the light. For my friends George and Bob still fighting for good health. For my friend Pepper for the same. For myself for many reasons. For the country of my birth. For all the souls filled with hatred that only long for love. For the confused, the unhappy, the lonely, the wise. Let wisdom reign. And I like it. The flicker. The quietude. I am not a religious person, yet I sit with it for a moment. St. James is there near the altar with his scallop shell… I ask for my heart to open to you and yours. I ask for guidance. For purpose.
Brenda’s delicate, fragmented phrases in this forum invite one into her experiences, making small acts universal.
Fountain
Piediluco Stillwater
San Pedro de Cangas Cemetery
Her Small but Mighty Poetic Oeuvre
Brenda qualifies her writing— “I’m not a true ‘studied writer’ (no MFA)”—but the caveat is not necessary. Though her poetry output is small, it has been published in Cirque, Ice-Floe, Inklings/Understory, and Alaska Women Speak.
She was part of an Anchorage writing group with Mike Burwell (Cartography of Water) and Jim Sweeney (Alaska Expedition: Marine Life Solidarity), occasionally joined by Doug Pope (The Way to Gaamaak Cove). She studied with MaryBeth Holleman, Bill Sherwonit, and the late Sherry Simpson; took poetry courses with Arlitia Jones and Linda McCarriston; and attended workshops at the UNM Taos Writers’ Conference, US Poets in Mexico, and the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference. “I’ve kept a journal almost daily since I was fourteen,” she says.
Given this background, it’s somewhat surprising that Substack eventually became the platform where her writing flourished, though she uses the format well. Earlier, she posted essays on her website under Ponderings of a Pilgrim: lover of beauty, wine, walking & travel. What follows examines a small selection of poems she shared for review.
In "The Sweet Scent of Cake” (Ice-Floe, 2002), Roper writes the poetics of quiet dailiness. The poem moves like a sestina without naming the form: lines recur with slight variation, mirroring memory’s recursive pull. Domestic gestures become rites of longing. Grief is circled but unnamed, invoked through baking and muscle memory. Even cupboards seem animate, “as if the tin cans and cardboard cartons will engage in conversation.” The tone is quiet, reverent, and haunted.
rain, glacier thunder, and water’s persistence. Lines such as “Thunder the ice song / boom twists in primeval prose” feel like breath in cold air. Here Roper writes as witness— not only to place, but to elemental force—where walking, weather, and perception converge.
“Monsoons,” published in Cirque (2016), was written during a 30-day online poetry challenge in 2015 with Jennifer Lighty, writer, mentor and traditional storyteller living in Hawaii. It is the most incantatory of her poems, driven by anaphora and moral inquiry. Each line begins with “Who,” forming a litany that echoes prayer, protest, or invocation. The poem widens from environmental violence to human frailty and political critique. In lines like “Who tear out the pages of banned books / to smear ink across the landscape,” the poem asks what destruction exposes and what renewal requires.
Her influences — Mendieta, Abramović, Kiefer, Tàpies—surface in tone: elemental, uneasy, and unafraid of risk.
The most painful and powerful of the group is “Cry Me a Bucket,” also the most overtly autobiographical. It received an honorable mention in a 2009 war poetry contest. With stark clarity, Roper writes about intimate partner violence, trauma, and compassion warped by war. The refrain “It’s not your fault” recurs, exposing its hollowness. She describes small violences—a plate thrown “like a frisbee,” a hole punched in a door—with the same steady voice used for “the death of his father” or “dead babies / in Vietnam.” The poem moves from shock to empathy to the necessity of leaving. It is not confessional excess, but shaped, pared, and precise.
"Inside the Day” leans toward lyric interiority, shaped by the desire to fully inhabit a single moment. Lines such as “I want to sit beside the wide window, / watch the white snow fall” express a wish to pause time. Ordinary details carry metaphysical weight— “the subtle curve of a spoon / pulled without thinking from my mouth in morning.” The poem reflects Roper’s lifelong practice of walking, observing, and attending to others who pass by. It shares an ethos with her mixed-media work: an insistence on the overlooked and intimate.
In “Prince William Sound: Wetness,” the language tightens into near haiku-like fragments. The rhythm mimics
Across these poems, her work shows emotional clarity without sentimentality; a refusal to look away; close attention to weather, kitchens, sound, water, and touch; repetitive structures that echo walking, memory, or ritual; and a sculptor’s instinct for weight, texture, and negative space.
Though Roper later shifted her focus to essays, blogs, and Substack, the poetry endures as a compressed record of her early creative life—fierce, intimate, attentive, and willing to excavate. On Substack, her voice continues to evolve, grounded in lived experience. The poetry, it seems, never left.
The Day the Trail Disappeared
In a 2024 Substack post, Living Between Worlds, Part 2, she describes attending a free generative poetry workshop with coffee, craft donuts, and Santa Fe Poet Laureate Tommy Archuleta—“even the Mayor took a seat at the table.” Responding to a timed 15-minute prompt, she writes:
Clouds separate and congeal as I too enter a negotiation —between matter and purpose. What path am I taking on the long road to authenticity?
Though she says she was there mostly for the donuts, the lines ring true. She’s a seeker.
On February 14, 2025, she wrote of believing her old journals and poems were lost—“MS Word no longer updating.” She wasn’t ready to let go of “herself,” or of poems she sometimes judged as “too cathartic, too confessional—no ‘The Red Wheelbarrow.’” When she recovered the folders, she reposted “Cry Me a Bucket,” an unmistakably strong choice:
The moment of his confession confessed my rage tumbles into compassion for this man-companion sitting in the dark, holding him loving him hating him fixing him, us knowing I was going to leave him soon.
The power of the poem is undeniable: the resilience of the narrator, the shock of recognizing an unforgivable
truth, the clarity of knowing she will leave. The loss of such work would be devastating. She knows her strongest writing.
I’m grateful for Substack as a forum that allows work like this to surface—and for the chance to meet the poet’s fragility, intact, on the page.
In December, she wrote, “I’d love nothing more than to spend all day walking, writing, being creative by making/ doing, appreciating beauty.” The point, she notes, is that work intervenes and subtracts from time. What she describes, though, is the life of an aesthete—something I understand and appreciate.
Brenda Roper’s mediums have shifted over decades. Her life is a practice of movement, attention, intuition, and reinvention. She follows what calls her, creates from what she finds or what is gifted to her, and trusts that the next step—on the page, on the trail, or in a studio—will reveal itself.
Neruda is a love poet in many people’s minds. I’ve had love poems of Pablo sent to me by my spouse, for sure. Until the Spanish Civil War of 1936-38, Pablo had been almost singularly celebrated as the great modern Spanish love poet. The war changed that. It drew Neruda into the center of politics. I don’t see that with most of my compadres and fellow faculty (former) and writing gurus. Their center is, unfortunately, pinpointed on angst or aging or the wildlife surrounding their greying years.
Neruda’s great poem, “I’m Explaining a Few Things,” like Pablo Picasso’s painting, Guernica, was created in response to the bombing of civilians by Hitler and Mussolini’s air forces at Guernica in 1937.
There would be no great leaps of consciousness to see what Pablo Neruda would do now in this time of genocide, as universities and libraries have been demolished, as poets and writers have been murdered.
I teach both Neruda and Palestinian poet Dr. Refaat Alareer, who was killed along with a brother, sister, and four of her children in a targeted Israeli airstrike on his sister’s home in Gaza on December 6, 2023. What would Neruda write? On April 26, 2024, Refaat Alareer's eldest daughter, Shaima, her husband, and their three-month-old infant grandson were killed in another Israeli airstrike.
If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer
If I must die, you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings, (make it white with a long tail) so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— and bid no one farewell not even to his flesh not even to himself— sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love If I must die let it bring hope let it be a tale
+--+
So, my days are jumbled and bounded up with the salal pickers in Lincoln County, Oregon, those Mexicans and Guatemalans who go into the forest to harvest the leafy green used in floral arrangements. Profound waxy bushy twigs that go to Amsterdam where the floral arrangers create bouquets for all of Europe, even for Tel Aviv, but never for Gaza.
CIRQUE
I have a radio show, and I have plenty of amazing radical guests on talking without fear against the regimes of death and destruction that define the Nakba perpetrators and the countless Western countries who have propped up that deathproducing country.
Ahh, Neruda, no, our true revolutionary poet? After he worked to get Gabriel González Videla elected as Chile’s president on his radical left platform, González Videla did a one-eighty degree and launched a campaign of repression that included roundups of leftists and labor leaders. The violent repression of workers’ strikes added to this thug’s infamy. In true capitalist boom and bust orchestration, as copper prices plummeted after World War II, the Harry Truman administration (CIA, bankers) convinced González Videla that he would need the United States’ economic help and that war between the US and Russia was looming. This prodded González Videla to ban communism in Chile.
In exile in Paris and across several continents, communist Neruda wasn’t safe; he was surveilled wherever he went and detained. According to historians and poets alike, Neruda’s saga marks one of the 20th century’s greatest literary chase scenes, and the Cold War’s first global manhunt. “It wasn’t a hunt for a nuclear engineer, a spy, or even a dissident journalist but for a poet—a poet!—whose love poetry had won him acclaim and book sales around the world, and later earned the 1971 Nobel Prize” (from Joel Whitney, “On the Run”).
When he was in Paris in 1949 to attend the First World Congress of Partisans for Peace, the news went back to Gonzalez Videla who called it “a fake news story.”
That canard is repeated by Netanyahu and all the squirming rats on the sinking mainstream media ship (stenographers of Zionist lies) about all lies spewed by Israel about Hamas or the 600,000 murdered souls in Palestine.
Maybe Neruda would be palling around with Chris Hedges or gaining an audience with Francesca Albanese. Certainly, Ralph Nader would be getting Pablo on his radio show:
It makes a difference in driving the greater intensity of political, diplomatic, and civic pressures to have a count of 600,000 rather than 67,000 or 200,000 children rather than 20,000 children murdered.
Neruda and Ralph would parse the war on Gaza with deep passion and knowledge.
Which stage would Neruda speak from if he were around today? Which epigram would he jump onto in agreement?
It is forbidden to kill: therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
—Voltaire
I don’t know of any army that does more than an Israeli army does to avoid civilian casualties. But incidental and unintended casualties accompany every war.
—Benjamin Netanyahu
The right number of civilian casualties is zero.
—John Kirby, former US National Security Council spokesperson
Does anyone teach Che-Castro and the glorious Cuban Revolution in schools anymore, as we now see the history of Palestine is forbidden in colleges throughout the land?
According to his compatriots, Che bought a cheap notebook on a trip to Tanzania in 1963 and would kickback, often up a tree, to write in it. The publishing house Planeta has refused to say how it obtained this green notebook but said that it spent two years verifying its authenticity before publishing.
“It is a very intimate anthology loaded with political poems and poems dealing with emotions, feelings. This adds another element to the myth of Che,” says Paco Ignacio.
“When Che was captured, the military searched his bag and found two notebooks: one containing secret codes to communicate with Havana and the green notepad,” says Mexican writer and Guevara biographer Ignacio, who wrote the preface to the book.
What did Neruda mean to Che? Among the 69 poems in this little green journal are some by Pablo Neruda, one of the greatest Spanish-language poets of the 20th century, Cuban Nicolás Guillén and Peruvian César Vallejo, who was one of the century's great poetic innovators.
Neruda:
The poet's heart is, like all hearts, an unending artichoke, but in it there are not only leaves of flesh and bone women, of true loves and persistent dreams, but also of all the temptations of life, as well as of vanity. There is no true poet without vanity, no more than there are great ones unpublished. Therefore, I shall be picking out the leaves of vanity for you and me to consume, since it has been asked of me. I hope that it is for one of the last times and that all the rest, the other leaves I pick from my heart, will be a pure product, vegetable or celestial or terrestrial nourishment—poetry.
Like Palestinians, Neruda was displaced. His poem exiled from Chile, in hiding throughout South America:
I left my country
I crossed the cordillera on horseback.
A petty tyrant, a fast dancer sold my homeland metal and minerals and all and filled with walls and prisons dawn’s domain.
I left through throats clawed by nature, galloping beneath the silence of a dark grove, dovecotes of a sudden hurled out of snowdrifts, frozen feathers, a purity of power: and quickly land and trees became harsh foes and scars,
Oh, those terrible CIA-invoked coups, against his friend and socialist and democratically- elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende:
I'm Explaining a Few Things
You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs? and the poppy-petalled metaphysics ? and the rain repeatedly spattering its words and drilling them full of apertures and birds?'
I’ll tell you all the news.
I lived in a suburb, a suburb of Madrid, with bells, and clocks and trees.
From there you could look out Over Castille’s dry face: a leather ocean.
My house was called the house of flowers, because in every cranny geraniums burst: it was a good-looking house with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raúl?
Eh, Rafael?
Federico, do you remember from under the ground where the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Face to face with you I have seen the blood of Spain tower like a tide to drown you in one wave of pride and knives!
Treacherous generals: see my dead house, look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows instead of flowers, from every socket of Spain Spain emerges and from every dead child a rifle with eyes, and from every crime bullets are born which will one day find the bull's eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land?
…and the blood of children ran through the streets…Change the words to evoke the same blood in the streets of Gaza!
Come and see the blood on the streets, this invitation, but now, in Gaza, the West Bank, all of it, torn up and immolated by Israel supported by and with the warlords of finance and military hardware. There have been journalists in the hundreds targeted and murdered, bulldozed by US-made E-9 Caterpillars. Doctors and nurses with stethoscopes sniped and KIAed. All those tents and hospitals and ambulances, bombed and burned by the Occupying Forces of this “state”?
Neruda was always for resistance and against occupation and despotism.
The quote, "You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming" is one of Neruda's most frequently cited phrases in the context of political struggle.
• During the Arab Spring, the quote was spray-painted as graffiti on the streets of Cairo in Arabic, serving as an emblem of the revolution.
• During UN discussions in 2025 regarding the conflict, the Permanent Observer for the State of Palestine referred to the quote while describing Palestinian resilience. The quote is a testament to the hope for an independent Palestinian state.
The question for me after decades of writing, workshopping and teaching is how can a fiction writer, specifically a poet, stay cloistered during political upheaval and human rights abuses like we have seen, or at least I have seen, in my lifetime?
I take care of the dispossessed, too, adults (and a kiddo, now) with developmental and behavioral disabilities. When need be, I even have to help with toileting, and so, the man with a plan, this communist who ran into Mexico over the borderline in the Huachuca Mountains at age fifteen old while tracking a pack of javelina, is the same man, now, ensconced in the revolution of Neruda, Garcia Márquez, Vallejo, et al.
Poetics and Robert Bly. Working the magic of words from William Stafford. I had his son, Kim Safford, on my radio show as a benediction to the Palestinian cause. Here, he read this short poem on my show, Finding Fringe, KYAQ.org, 91.7 FM:
Gauze
No one knows for sure if gauze comes from Gaza, that place of nimble-fingered weavers in early days who from silk or cotton made fabric so fine, so friendly to the skin it was forbidden by holy orders, but loved all the same, worn in secret under what could be seen, and long so essential for dressing wounds it remains what doctors reach for, after the shelling, after whole families brought their fallen, working even in the dark, even on the floor, while soldiers stalk the ward, the surgeon’s hand groping to staunch blood beating from a broken child.
Kim tells me he lost Jewish friends, old friends indeed, because of this poem. These are those times Neruda would be spieling on, for sure.
Indeed, everything changes but stays the same in that dream, those tigers of Borges’ dreams. Jaguars and pumas and ocelots, and alas, even in Vietnam, 1994, as a 36-year-old, I was tracking the then almost-extinct tiger along the Laos border.
Borges and tigers and extinction: The last one in Vietnam was recorded in 1997 on an animal camera.
Neruda has remained a symbol of Latin American (the jaguar is a huge part of Meso- and South America) anti-imperialism for many in Cuba and the wider left. What more of a political-poetic stamp on that 15-year-old’s brain (mine) racing through several of the 55 sky islands in Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico. Neruda fully supported the Cuban Revolution. His collection of poems, "Canción de gesta" (translated literally as Song of Great Gesture or Epic Song), was edited in 1960 in Havana distinctly supporting the Cuban Revolution. I got to read this collection at the University of Arizona at the Poetry Center when I was an undergraduate. At 18, I was already deeply radicalized (rooted) in revolution, supporting liberation theologists in Guatemala, Salvador and elsewhere fighting the imperialists called yanquis. This was one of the first well known works glorifying the Caribbean and Latin American people and their struggle for freedom, independence and life.
What would Neruda write in honor of Alareer’s life?
Jesus, what a big hypothetical, but this guy, me, now 68 years old in Oregon is still the combative, pugnacious questioner of the Empire’s hold on all factions of American society, including my brethren in writing. Would Pablo be less poetic and more prosaic as I am now in my regard for the genocide, the mowing of the grass, as the Jewish State of Israel calls murdering Palestinian children, wives, grandparents, doctors, teachers, farmers?
How do we write in poetic purity the sins of our complicity? How do we put one foot forward followed by the second walking the volcanic upthrusts of the Oregon coast, jumping from tidepool to harbor seal outcropping?
Is it the Palestinian in our blood when we see huge Oregon trawlers and crab-trapping ships hauling in harvests, when the very act of tossing a small net into the sea of Gaza precipitates Jewish Apache helicopters gunning down not just the boats but the humanity, the universal fishers?
Is there a poem for Palestinian resistance, those amazing women tending graves, children’s wounds, tears and the boiling pot of starchy pasta? Neruda in his love of remembering lovers:
I Remember You As You Were
I remember you as you were in the last autumn. You were the grey beret and the still heart. In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on. And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.
Clasping my arms like a climbing plant the leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace. Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning. Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul.
I feel your eyes traveling, and the autumn is far off: Grey beret, voice of a bird, heart like a house Towards which my deep longings migrated And my kisses fell, happy as embers.
Sky from a ship. Field from the hills: Your memory is made of light, of smoke, of a still pond! Beyond your eyes, farther on, the evenings were blazing. Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.
Is it a sacrilege to talk of love, the soul, the memory of a long-remembered lover when thinking about the death and destruction in Gaza and the West Bank?
Or do we course through a fiction writer’s journalistic mind this way? One Pablo (me) to another Pablo (Neruda):
Shajarat Zaytun Baladi…My Olive Tree
the sand pulls from it
Gazans, oil trees, hard pan and wheat, villages of white plaster, before the invasion monsters in the Naba, sicarios murdering even the British Mandate boys, hotels bombed by Jews who worship and now . . . Zionism
* is the state of Israel a place of starvation a hell-scape of murder a dungeon for rape and torture the proving grounds for the fascists
140 CIRQUE
* Silicon Wadi, Tel Aviv Silicon Valley, California the stories have already been written, daily, cell phones uploaded when the Jewish state fails to block the web stories from volunteers on Dunkirk- like flotillas
* the land of desert people Arab and Christian scholarship like a bombing range tools of electronic monitoring drones that whistle, sound like wounded puppies, children crying drawing out the compassion of Gazans, until some Zionist Talmudist taps the armed quad-copter another one at the ready for second tap third tap, they call children bug splat
* Murder Incorporated Jews of New York ran rum, and Jews of Palestine now run killing fields laugh and mock lie and deceive, honey trapping Trump-Princes-Clintons a world based on baseness
*
the ultimate weapon is now forgetting, looking at presstitutes yammering about Epstein or Kirk the brownshirts, my dear liberals were always there, even si se puede Obama hated Occupy Wall Street Kill List Tuesdays
* this is new, TikTok and Live Streaming 1,000 murders then 5 K then 20 thousand Killed, not KIA-ed – that’s for a war the action in these Gazan kills is their very desire for bread huddling in apartments clamoring for tents
* this is the New Jerusalem branded now almost all Jews globally are beyond eye for an eye as they hem and haw call the starvation and murder accusations
+--+
global antisemitic conspiracy as the number now reaches 65,000 but reality says 400,000 dead, 600K
* under rubble, and more tens of thousands to die after the two-year mark into that Christmas madness of America, Empire of Chaos Empire of Death Empire of Amnesia Empire of Hate/Hell/War
* as Gaza burns and implodes white phosphorus the smell of napalm in the morning
Lt. Colonel Kilgore: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" Smiling ordering helicopter strikes on a Vietcong village, destruction Happy Hollywood . . . . Empire of Lobotomies now USA.
Jaguars Rising . . . Pablo, oh, Pablo . . . Come to the borderline and join Borges’ el tigre:
"You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming." (PN)
Hey, Pablo, in May 2024 hundreds of people from the Tohono O’odham Nation—including students, elders and tribal members—voted to name the latest wild jaguar recently recorded in Southern Arizona. They named him O:shad Ñu:kudam, which means "Jaguar Protector" in the O’odham language.
You’ll like this Pablo: O:shad Ñu:kudam is pronounced "OH-shahd NOO-KOO-dum." Environmentalist scientists say O:shad is the most recent charismatic big cat to be documented in Arizona over the last 30 years—decades after the species was all but eliminated from the southwestern United States.
Other recent jaguars found in Southern Arizona include El Jefe, Yo’oko Nahsuareo (Yaqui for Jaguar Warrior) and Sombra.
Pablo, Viva Palestina. From the Blind Poet Borges, I see you Neruda in the night, following a blue moon along the Siuslaw Forest, and those Siletz tribesmen and women sing to the mussels and the smelt as coho chase the last rays of summer. It’s your new love poem to humanity.
From Borges, Pablo, for you and Gaza:
A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.
—from The Garden of Forking Paths
Palestina…You said, Pablo, "Love is so short, forgetting is so long." It is the journey of dreams and nightmares entwined like the night-blooming cereus.
REVIEWS
Two Reviews of Josie Gray and Tess Gallagher’s Surrounded by Weasels
Kim Stafford
Surrounded by Weasels by Tess Gallagher and Josie Gray
In the early 1980s I was working as a letterpress printer for Scott Walker at the nascent Graywolf Press in the tiny town of Irondale, Washington. The print shop was in the garage, where foil-backed insulation from the unfinished walls gave the shop a spectral glow, and the hiss of ink and thrum of the press set a musical tone for the heart and mind. We spent long days hand-setting type, running proofs, making elaborate “make-ready” with tissue paper and thinned glue to correct any details of uneven impression we surveyed with a jeweler’s loupe. In his quest for both printing perfection and book completion, Scott had two sentences he might speak when I brought him a proof page for inspection: “I think you can do a little more here…and here…” (as he circled tiny flaws with his needle-sharp pencil)…or he might say, “Run it!” Then the press would fly.
At the close of each day, the custom was to place a copy of Tess Gallagher’s Instructions to the Double atop the press platen’s tympan sheet to keep it flat for the next day’s run. This was both a practical task, and a ritual act, for Tess’s book had been Graywolf’s first break-out coup, a landmark for both the press and the poet.
Soon, Graywolf had moved to Minnesota, Scott had moved on to other adventures, and I had given up my printerly aspirations for a more prosaic teaching career. But the expanding list of Graywolf was to include nine additional Gallagher collections in poetry and fiction. In addition, to Instructions to the Double, these include Under Stars, The Man from Kinvara, The Lover of Horses, Moon Crossing Bridge, Midnight Lantern, Dear Ghosts, Willingly, Is, Is Not, and Amplitude. (In addition, she has published books by half a dozen other presses. Thus, Surrounded by Weasels walks with good company in a long parade.
But I keep circling back to that early book, for its inner dialog of instruction and desire. For Gallagher has always had a genius for finding inspiration in partnership. From the bifocal inward investigations of Instructions to the Double, through her twin loyalties to remote Port Angeles in Washington State and Ballindoon in Ireland, to her mutually enriching years with Raymond Carver. In Surrounded by Weasels she takes this knack for doubling creative luck by becoming attentive witness to the stories of Josie Gray, her late friend and partner. (She dedicates her book Is, Is Not “For Josie Gray and for Raymond Carver.”)
Gallagher has written her share of fierce elegies, a practice of prayer addressed to the lost, a way of honoring spirits, and a kind of spiritual practice to sustain relations past the end of a life. As she told Jakucho Setuchi in their book Distant Rain, “Writing poems was my expression of
religious life.” In an essay elsewhere she describes “the poem as a reservoir for grief.”
Against this background of loss, Surrounded by Weasels offers a local and timeless present. Over the course of a quarter century, Gallagher invited and nurtured Irishman Josie Gray’s practice of painting atmospheric scenes of land and dream (some included in Surrounded by Weasels), and became a hungry listener to his stories of Irish life. What I find so winsome about these tales is their lack of literary pretension, which fosters an immersive sense of getting the story straight from the peat fire, from the storm-struck hut, from the lingering ghosts of lively past time in a living place.
In her forward, Gallagher describes how she and Gray decided together to augment their earlier collection of tales, Barnacle Soup, with more stories to make this book. I find it a bit sly to hear her say that certain named characters are all now dead, and others all fictional. The implication: all you can do is trust the storyteller utterly.
In a kind of second forward, “”A Turn of Mind,” Gallagher explains how she listened to Gray tell his tales, prodded him for more, wanting to hear a story from Josie again and again, and from this sustained welcoming practice drafted from the air to the page a window into storied days gone by—but here not lost.
Gallagher explains how the trance of such a story worked:
With each detail, you were being moved inexorably into a stream of happenings that took you farther and farther toward some turn, which was not dynamic in any pyrotechnical way, yet in its very matter of factness, allowed the events being revealed to accumulate a nucleus of satisfaction.
The texture of “factness” in the stories consistently confirms their authenticity. The tales prickle with details of scent, color, proverb, thirst, sorrow, and other sensations habitual to a life of incandescent privation. Gallagher remarks that Gray “noticed things and told them in a certain order so they discovered their full energies and significance incrementally.” In this account, the stories are telling themselves, with Josie Gray as the voice obedient to source, and Tess as witness to the telling. As she says in this second preface, “The collaborative energy around this collection…involves two people—a teller and a
writer—coming together from separate cultures, Irish and American, with complimentary talents, to do something that could not have been done without the other.” (Instructions from the double.)
The stories that follow attend as much to the texture of a character’s life as to the narrative turns of a tale. We learn how nicknames arise to flavor a life, how drink twists or sobriety straightens the careers of characters both major and minor, and how memorable departures from the common round of days can inscribe an otherwise forgotten person in the living book of life.
Along the way, readers are gifted with a kind of alchemical transformation of dire events into treasured bits of wisdom. A stuck pig escapes the slaughterhouse to run for freedom as it bleeds to death, inspiring the narrator to remark in passing, “To this day I take that renegade pig as a sign that a blessing short- lived, is still a blessing.” This teller has the knack of making treasured insight from scant or unlikely material, like wresting potatoes from a stony field. In another tale, a castrated horse, young Josie notices, can express only “mute pain.” His job as teller is to make what is otherwise silent speak. And Tess’s job is to make stories almost lost last.
But in the end, how does such a book come about? After a conversation with Gallagher’s long-time friend Danielle Vermette, I see this process in a deeper way. The cadence of the stories, the final choice of emphasis, shape, and texture of the telling words comes from Josie but through Tess. Her instincts as a poet and storyteller provide what we here gratefully receive. The brilliance of Gallagher’s long interrogation of the double here serves in silence to convey Gray’s world of story.
By the end of the book, I have been a child neglected in a back corner of the pub, feasting on stories from the multitude. I look around at their faces to see them parade through the tales that would last long beyond their lives. This is the book that will give you that.
Reading through Gallagher’s career from Instructions to the Double to this book, I feel the double speaking back through her to her long-devoted readers. Early on, in that book resting on the tympan sheet at Graywolf Press, she had told her double, “Get me into some trouble / I’ll have to account for.” Surrounded by Weasels is that vow’s sweet fulfillment.
Douglas Cole
Stories in Motion: A Review of Josie Gray and Tess Gallagher’s Surrounded by Weasels Cirque Press, 2025
The growing body of work by Tess Gallagher, which features fiction and poetry collections, includes an interesting alchemy of work in her new book: Surrounded by Weasels, published by Cirque Press. This collection of stories is a continuation or second installment following her 2007 book, Barnacle Soup, a collaboration with her partner, the painter, Josie Gray. As she remarks in her forward, these are part of a collection of recorded “storytellings,” or “just a bit of useless amusement,” (1) as Gray would say. And what makes the stories so intriguing is the creek-source, the “two people—teller and writer—coming together” (4). And that is very much what we have in these stories: a kind of “autobiography for Josie Gray,” but a twin-voice storyteller moving through the pages, conjured Gallagher. In a particular slant of mind, we might see this as the kind of “negative capability” poet John Keats says is necessary for any creation of art. In Gallagher's new collection we have an added layer of negative capability at work: namely, what we see is not only Gallagher engaging the visual beauty of Joseph Gray’s artwork and the stories that he told, but an incorporation of the essence of his painting and storytelling, voice, mannerisms and such, which (not having known the man), I can discern mostly against what I recognize as Gallagher’s “traits” of writing while hearing the enhanced voice coming through. In that way, I see in the prose a lively spirit, neither Gallagher nor Gray, but a melding and branching of the two. And of course, this braiding of voices comes through in phrases like “straight as a rush,” and “pinches and bits of money”— comes through with a flavor of pub-talk, a color of the land, a definitive if slight Irish tinge. And this is not simply a linguistic flare; this is the power of Gallagher's writing at its best: open, apprehending, bringing in and blending tributaries feeding the stories right down to the DNA of language.
The stories come at us in quick, often humorous vignettes, where characters arise and in moments become more than simple characters. They emerge like visiting spirits, rising from the dream page. There is humanity: everyone is poor in some way, everyone in need of help, food, drink, but there is also humor, as in “The Undertaker,”
when one of the “Tommy’s” is throwing the ashes of a dead man overboard, there’s the moment where he says “Half the fecker is in my eye”(16). Or the moment in “Coffin Money,” when a body goes “spilling and Dominic had to pay for injury to some relative’s back, not to mention scooping the coffin’s occupant up out of the cow dung…” (73). I don't know if it's Irish, I don't know if it's Josie Gray, I know it's not just Tess Gallagher, but there is that mystery spirit that can't be denied. These stories, true to the bone as they are, with occasional changes of names to protect shy ghosts, nevertheless leave the reader with a grin and hint of the empty chair.
True these stories may be, yet they often carry a sort of O Henry twist. Partly in the stories themselves, such as “A Doctor in the House,” where two brothers are fighting over who shall take over the land after their mother has died. The conflict between them is presented, again, tragicomically, with beautiful dialogue:
The judge, deciding over the dispensation, says to the brother who went out to work,
“In what year was your brother born?”
“1901, your lordship.”
“Now what year did he give up working?”
“The same year, your lordship…” (79)
And while it isn't said overtly that the conflict may be a sad direction for these brothers go; nevertheless, when it comes to the possession of the land, the humor, the perspective, and the point of view show in the final sentence: “I do know that both of the brothers eventually died without a woman, and each arrived, without much trouble, to their own patch of land, neat and tidy over them” (79). Again, a hint of the land, a hint of Gray, a bit of transubstantiation in the mind of Gallagher.
Yet, I wouldn't say these are message-stories, though there is a bit of Aesop's fables in some. And while they are often light and humorous, they do put us down in the middle of some of life's hardest moments. And if there is a message, compassion and love seem to be a continual condition, for the Mickey Clooney’s “differently arranged
in the brain” (136), and the Maura’s, unemployable due to “TB” (149). But again, some mystery, some alchemy is at work here: a pinch of Gallagher, a pinch of Gray, a pinch of the spirit, and what stands out is that these stories are fun, they're humorous, they're lively…something you might hear over a dram on a blustery afternoon when you're in no hurry to get home.
Of course, the artwork of Josie Gray punctuates the book throughout, creating a fascinating counterpoint, a juxtaposition to the stories with their picaresque humor, sober truths and humorous trajectories. The images are mostly landscapes and abstracts, such as “Wave Turning Back Upon Itself,” “Voyeurs,” and “Last Light.” Take a moment to absorb “Moon Nest”:
The images create a quiet, almost Zen-like space within the storytelling, not simply nature images but a glimpse of another part of the storyteller’s consciousness, the one looking over your shoulder and taking in the bigger picture of the world than the story that held us entranced. We, too, turn to look on the world that now seems completely cleared of all our human drama and offers in contrast the other, unsaid part of the story here in the paintings and what has drawn the storyteller’s attention away.
Therefore, as well, in “Wizard at Work,” the question becomes, which wizard? The painter? The storyteller? The listener converting the bread of narrative into awakening? And awakening to what? The simple truth of our lives and our laughter and our suffering and our love? The images, in a way, are the voice you don’t hear but understand. What stands out most is that these stories come to us as intimate, remembered stories, walking stories from moments when two people are completely in the present and together, sharing a secret place. We get two minds, like words and paintings, melding into the quietest, funniest, saddest beautiful stories that we tell each other—so when I say an alchemy is at work, it is a conversion of these living voices and words and painted images and the presence they create, inviting you, that unseen other, to hear the storytellers walking beside you.
Moon Nest
Wizard at Work
REVIEW
Mary Odden
Pertinent, Possibly Crucial: A Review of Dan O’Neill’s The Impertinent Question: The Words and Adventures of a Liberal Columnist at a Conservative Newspaper in the Red State of Alaska, Cirque Press, 2025
So, a couple of guys walk into a university auditorium, and one says to the other…
Dan O'Neill was being interviewed on that September night because his new book, The Impertinent Question, a collection of newspaper columns he wrote for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner back in what seems like a long time ago, between 1998 and 2002. Besides the columns, the book includes op-ed pieces written for the NewsMiner and other publications spanning a period of over 40 years. The Impertinent Question had just been released by Cirque Press in Anchorage. The venue and the subject of the interview would be quite ordinary, a staid event at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, except that both participants are important history-keepers for their state and, arguably, the nation. Neither man is ordinary, or any kind of staid.
They have known each other for a long time. You can tell by the body language. The interviewer, Dermot Cole, slumps around in his chair, often looking at his notes. He has been a journalist in Alaska for over 40 years. In his current venue, a daily blog, Cole is an influential gadfly targeting political and regulatory boondoggles in Alaska and beyond. He appears comfortable in a wool suit coat with elbow patches, like some old reporter at the city desk. O'Neill, characteristically looking like he's maybe combed his hair and beard on the way in from his wood shed, wears the requisite homesteader plaid shirt. He sits with a bemused look on his face, waiting to field questions that often don't get as far as his side of the table. This is because Cole wants to talk about these matters himself.
After some time, O'Neill tells Cole that Cole likes to talk nearly as much as Cole's identical twin brother, the late Terrence Cole, a beloved UAF history professor and chronicler of Alaska statehood and politics, who was also a good friend of O’Neill’s. Dermot grins, but doesn't alter his style. A bit later, O'Neill asks Cole if Cole would
like him, O'Neill, to answer one of the questions Cole is asking. The audience erupts in laughter. The people in the audience on this night are old friends, too, and this is Fairbanks, Alaska, home to them all. These two men are "Fairbanks Famous," an ironic nod toward the injustice of crucially impactful people and issues being consigned to the merely sub-regional.
The Fairbanks interview was just one of the events celebrating the release of The Impertinent Question. O’Neill’s books and articles appear in the public sphere slowly, thoughtfully, an articulate voice we treasure when it is heard.
To characterize O’Neill’s writing is to throw a wide umbrella over Alaska issues that reverberate outward into national politics, society, science. His The Firecracker Boys, published in 1994, describes a 1958 plan helped strengthen Native rights and environmental awareness in Alaska, and increased questioning of status quo policies.
In The Last Giant of Beringia, 2004, O’Neill tells the lifelong inquiry by geologist Dave Hopkins of the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. Hopkins’ work, its details as intriguing as any detective story, finally confirmed the pulse of ice ages and warming that made the land bridge a migration route for plants and animals and ancient peoples into the Americas. A Land Gone Lonesome, 2006, is a canoe travelogue into the upper Yukon River region, literary kin to John Muir's Travels in Alaska and John McPhee's Coming into the Country. A Land Gone Lonesome also queries what is valuable in the remote river lives and the thorny issues around preserving those iconic lifestyles.
In contrast with his friend Dermot’s long career in journalism, O'Neill got kicked off his job as columnist with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner after a few short years. He had a major dust-up with the then-editor in 2002, after the Anchorage Daily News ran O’Neill’s story about a US military plan to lob poisonous and sometimes dangerously erratic Scud missiles into the Alaska woods from UAF’s rocket launching site. O’Neill had sussed out the weaponry, its range and impacts, and had carefully documented how the military had not disclosed the potential hazards of the program. When the News-Miner refused to give the story the kind of exposure it warranted, O’Neill sent it down to the Anchorage paper, which gave the story major frontpage play, with color pictures and graphics. The military, aware of the pending ADN publication, cancelled the missile launch. The subject of O’Neill’s column then became “here’s what the military and UAF intended to do,” O’Neill said when I asked him about this section of his book.
He said that taking the missile story to the Anchorage paper finished off relations between himself and the NewsMiner, relations already strained by the O’Neill columns frequently “doing battle with corporate and institutional entities the paper favored” in those years. Probably also at play, says O’Neill, was the Fairbanks paper’s unhappiness over losing the federal dollars the launch would have brought into the town. In any case, his columnist job was soon terminated. Several of the columns collected in The Impertinent Question discuss these events and O’Neill’s overall objection to UAF’s antithetical foray into secret weapon’s research.
The sub-title of O'Neill's collection, "The Words and Adventures of a Liberal Columnist at a Conservative Newspaper in the Red State of Alaska,” does some disservice to O’Neill’s positions in the columns. He does describe the reluctance and oftentimes refusal by the then blatantly partisan News-Miner to offer balanced accounts. In these years, the paper took almost exclusively
Republican and industry positions which O’Neill’s columns strongly opposed. And the columns do come down on the side of public, aesthetic, and humanistic interests. But O'Neill isn't a branded "Liberal" following the herd, and he opposes paranoia. Columns in The Impertinent Question oppose the zealot insanity of the weapons industry and Alaskan politicians’ willingness to support any project that brings money into the state, but O'Neill does not have "a side" that his allegiances would force him to carry into the support of conspiracy theories and lying. In "Nuclear Bombs Buried Near Point Hope? Nonsense," he reflects on how learning to be skeptical of the government should not degrade into a willingness to accept news about things that have not happened. Bombs did not get buried. Unjustified fears must be shut down with facts, even if those facts are difficult to dig down to.
O'Neill shows us how hard he works at digging for facts–filing Freedom of Information requests, researching claims from agencies and politicians. He makes it clear that telling the difference between conspiracy and actual nefarious government secret programs is not easy. That's the subject of one of the early columns in the book: "Truth or Conspiracy? Think You Can Tell?" Spoiler alert: O'Neill drops details of five "research" projects where the US government actually exposed unknowing citizens to harm. He says in that column, "My point here is not to encourage Art Bell and his ding dongs. It is rather to suggest that good sense would stand a much better chance of prevailing over paranoia in our society if our government didn't do such goofy things to begin with, and didn't lie or cover up afterwards."
Some columns are terrifyingly contemporary: “On Shooting from the Rooftops” reaches into the political messaging that promotes and excuses violence. This messaging, shows O’Neill, blurs the lines between secondamendment advocacy and the use of guns as a political tool. Especially disturbing, he says in the introductory paragraph, is “to see these vile imposters presuming to speak for those of us who hunt.”
An outdoorsman and hunter, O’Neill is also not an unthinking apologist for Alaskana. The Iditarod, iconic Alaska dog race memorializing the 1929 diphtheria serum run to Nome, gets the truth serum from O'Neill when he and wife Sarah Campbell devote their annual spring dog sled trip to mushing from Nenana to Nome, meeting up with some of the Anchorage to Nome racers at White Mountain, near the end of the race. After watching sleepdeprived mushers lose their good judgment and begin to abuse their dogs, O’Neill makes a plea for organizers and participants to restore “a sane and mature” perspective to
a sporting event.
Much of The Impertinent Question feels local and Alaskan: King salmon. Wildfires. Moose hunting. Airboats. Fairbanks politicians and personages. The Alaska Independence party. Ted Stevens. O'Neill is an Alaskan to his toes, connected to his state, his town, his family. His son is the unnamed catalyst for several columns and gets a kudo for his three-year-old self's honest appraisal of a rodeo he'd begged to attend. I was personally happy to learn that O'Neill washes his garden spuds after harvest, dries them, and stores them for eating and sharing all winter, reaping the reward of never having to buy a potato or next year’s seed at the store.
As a historian, O’Neill offers long-viewed accounts of subjects ranging from the Magna Carta to a reciting of various times and cultures’ marriage arrangements that blow up narrow contemporary orthodoxy. Logician and grammarian, he clearly describes the logical errors that define much of the polarized public discourse of the day: slippery slope, ad hominem, begging the question.
I asked O'Neill why he chose to publish these columns just now, though I suspected the answer: the havoc caused by Donald Trump and the MAGA crowd. The column that points out how 9-11 pushed the US towards authoritarianism is an “I told you so” in a year that citizen rights are threatened and de facto evaporating. And military initiatives for missile defense and classified research are back, along with existential questions for the university and its mission. O’Neill confirmed these motivations, but added, “It started with the idea that I put a hell of a lot of work into a lot of these little essays… And in a day’s time they become fire start. I thought some of them deserved to be reread, that their message still had value, that the thinking at the heart of them could profitably be engaged.”
Readers like me would wish to see column dates to provide historical context. I questioned O’Neill’s decision to omit these, even while seeing the difficulty of presenting readers with outright evidence of how old these writings are, no matter how apt. He told me that at first he did include a publication date at the end of each piece. “But then that seemed to advertise how far in the past they were. I thought, what the hell, why not let people see the relevance without me setting them up to treat the ideas as old news.”
What comes through clearly in spite of the lack of dates is O’Neill’s view that citizens bear responsibility for seeing the events of the past and the connection of those events to our own time. He wants readers to take both courage and action from the accounts.
Importantly, the book is not just a conversation between 20 years ago and now. It draws its observations from a solid place, one Alaskan’s viewpoint where clear thinking and good writing converge over a wide range of subjects. O’Neill’s voice has humor and humility and always that sense of place – our place. Is being grounded in place a limiting quality or is it something essential we the people keep forgetting?
O’Neill says, “There’s a kind of mantra I have – not original to me, but to the ancient Greeks…They talk about striving for the true, the good, and the beautiful. Applied to my writing, I’d like my work to be factually unassailable. And I want to carry water for justice, to celebrate the good guys, to expose the frauds and liars, and to do that with the community’s interest in mind. And if I can package that literarily, then that’s the artistic part.”
All of which makes The Impertinent Question important, possibly crucial—and a good read.
REVIEW
Sean Ulman
A Review of Shannon Gramse's Lost Last Poems, Cirque
Press, 2025
Sometimes a new kind of book finds its way to you. Completely unprepared, you're struck thinking—where did this come from? All it takes is a page or two. And that feeling only intensifies as you move through the book.
This happened to me with Lost Last Poems, the debut poetry collection by Shannon Gramse. I wondered, how have I not heard of this writer?
The variety of high-quality poems built the book into such an original artifact. A puzzle. I searched for clues. The Andy Hope Award Winner medallion on the cover. The lone blurb on the back — "This is a complete and cohesive single work, not just a collection. It doesn't let go — not even long after you put it down."
The title and Annotator's Forward only added to the intrigue. On that first page of text we are led to consider that while skiing, a student found a disk in the powder on Tanaina Peak. And on that disk were these poems!—this “alphabetized Wunderkammer" or "cabinet of curiosities."
An extensive Annotator's Bibliography finishes the frame. This 20-page historical section provides insights on the poems' numerous references to events, people, places and cultural stories and myths. Like a mini-companion book, this closing section advanced the special nature of the total text.
The first poem "Approaching King Island" stokes the wonder with its opening line, "I shan't speak of the time two shamans collided in midair." The next poem mentions a monk listening to chickadees. Soon after various personas seep in. By the tenth poem, "Chiang Mai Stories," a long one in four parts, I figured the opening note was a game designed by this mysterious poet. And I dug in, as ready as I was going to be to play.
With all the fun with form, Gramse gets serious examining heavy subjects like colonization, the Vietnam War and stolen Native Alaskan land. Invading ships ambushing shores is a repeated image. Facing some of humanity's shameful topics with icy honesty likely factored into this debut poetry collection being named a top five book of 2025 by Anchorage Daily News' Nancy Lord. Skill and heart, I'm certain, played big roles in achieving that honor as well.
Gramse, a long-time professor of writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage, has also taught courses in Vietnam. Histories of two cultures he has great curiosity in—Native Alaska and Vietnam—are explored throughout the book, often on side-by-side pages. His personal life shows up plenty too. Those stories provided sturdy handholds on my first read.
The music and mystery of the poetry was plenty fulfilling for me. On my second read, leaning on my study of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, I like to think I was starting to scrape at some of its secrets.
But to get toward the interior of this unique "mosaic,” and its origins, what I needed, and thankfully received,
was a chance to sit down with Shannon and hear him talk about how his book came to be.
From that rich discussion I learned that Gramse has never been very interested in publishing. He gained some guidance from an Alaskan poet from the pre-internet generation.
"I knew John Haines back in the day. And one thing he said to me was ‘Don't equate publication with success;’" Shannon shared this with me during an episode of Seward Sound Words in November. That clear message from Haines seemed to fit Gramse's Buddhist sensibilities. "Take your time. Take the work seriously. John was of a different generation. And Tom (Sexton) was really one of the last of those… A different dignity and stature… I really learned from that idea. And aspired to that. Where I wanted to take my time."
Even after getting let in on that set-up, I was surprised to hear that Shannon wasn't going to publish these poems. Because "Lost Last Poems" instantly feels like a part of art history. A very relevant fossil that has been around a long time already. And will continue to endure.
Gramse would share poems over the years with a friend who is a singer songwriter. Good thing he did.
Gramse explained, "He said you really have to get this out there. Same with being a songwriter or a comic. You need an audience. You need that piece of the equation. And so I kind of reluctantly did. I'm just not that interested in that game."
The poems point to a poet who has spent time in Bush Alaska and Vietnam but it was powerful to hear how numerous immersive stays with different cultures inspired Gramse and his collection.
"I really encourage people to visit there (Vietnam) if they get a chance. It's an amazing place. The layers and layers of history that go back thousands of years there is part of the inspiration for the layers in this book."
It was also insightful to hear Gramse speak about how he will continue to wrestle with such inspiration and take time and care with how his art reflects on cultures that aren't his own.
"I'm treading in a really sensitive area here in terms of appropriating other people's traditions," Gramse said. "Although this is delicate ground, I'm also trying to be as respectful and transparent as possible. It's another thing I think that that opening sets up. In terms of scrambling the potential identity of this person and making us think, what is ok and what isn't ok. And pushing on that a little bit, if that makes sense."
I had heard of the long-running literary journal and book series Ice-Floe. But I wasn't aware that Gramse and his wife served as editors through its 13 years.
"What the journal did was publish poetry in its original language and in English translation side by side from around the circumpolar north," Gramse said. "We published a lot of indigenous authors as well. From Russia, the Far East, Canada and Alaska. Always in the Native language… I was deep into that. Working on the translations in a collaborative way. That really was very much my education as a poet."
All that work in editing and publishing prepared Gramse well for when he finally decided to put out his own book. And in the meantime, his material had added up. Poems upon poems.
"I'm very much a Sunday writer. I teach writing and literature and so I often find that that drains the same battery," Gramse said. "At the end of the day after helping people with their writing and talking about writing I don't have energy to sit and do my own writing. As capacity allows I've been working on these for a long time."
I was happy to learn that Gramse really enjoyed the artistic act of putting together his debut collection. And hearing him allude to his next book caused me to rejoice.
"I think my next book of poetry will probably focus on Vietnam, is sort of my thought right now. That kind of intruded on this book that was going to be about Alaska. And ended up being something else. As much as I try to make it not about me, anybody who knows me, this book is really just a journal of what's been on my mind for the last ten years."
Next time Gramse lets us in on "the things that won't leave (him) alone" in book form, I'll be more prepared. As I begin my third read of Lost Last Poems, I'm already anticipating Gramse's follow up release, yet another new type of art.
REVIEW
Diane Ray
Cirque Press’s Nugget of a Masterpiece: A Review of Sara Berg’s Kissing
Kevin,Cirque Press, 2024
Sara Berg’s power-packed story of an American nurse in the Vietnam War grabbed me around the neck and squeezed my heart out from page one, never letting go. It is a story of stories reaching the classical high notes of
courage and valor, suffering and loss, pity and fear, a tale of healing heroes set in a field hospital thirty miles from Saigon.
The young and dedicated doctors, Berg noted, missed the “I am God” class in medical school. The team of nurses-doctors-corpsmen served in a field hospital perched on ten square miles denuded by Agent Orange. Meet Berg’s wry voice in her observation: the Agent Orange defoliant did an excellent job of keeping us from having any interactions with plant life. Which did not stop the military from ordering Berg and the other nurses down on their knees in the toxic earth to try to grow vegetables. What would grow, instead, off in the future, were a boatload of cancers and even birth defective progeny, which was all too often the future of many of the 10,000 American military nurses in Vietnam living and working, even for one year, on irrevocably poisoned earth.
To compensate for the field hospital’s woeful lack of certain standard medical devices, the nurses and corpsmen would rig up substitutions with flair. To stand in for desperately needed equipment, read about their ingenious rig of condoms attached to plastic tubing which you can then view in the accompanying photo.
Berg’s can-do spirit, prodigious tenacity, will, and genius for problem solving were well-oiled by what she called the defiant little part of me. When she felt something must be done, she pushed on to do it, undeterred by regulations or ordinary etiquette. Exhibit A is her eponymous act of kissing Kevin.
Who was Kevin? A dying soldier, paralyzed from the neck down:
I gave Kevin the juiciest most heartfelt kiss I had ever given anyone… my right hand imbedded in his light brown curls. He asked for that kiss, and I gave it quite willingly. It was the last thing he ever did, and asking for it were his last words. It was the most memorable kiss I have ever had. He was 21 and I was 22.
Only after she followed her heart did Berg bother to worry about the consequences for breaching the nursepatient divide and kissing an enlisted man, no less, as nurses arrived as second lieutenants. Her consequence? Read how Berg’s kiss changed the culture around her, as her actions would do time and time again.
Witness how with only three choice words Berg pulled a fellow nurse from the pit of despair, following the nurse’s own suicide attempt, catapulting her back into life and action.
Who was Berg’s first patient in Vietnam? A baby! Baby stories figure prominently in the book. Find out how Berg created a win-win for lonely babies and recovering GIs by involving them in baby care. Learn how she managed to move some babies from a horrific orphanage into the one she called the Angel Orphanage. Towards the end of her tour Berg took things a giant step further. For the nun in charge of the Angel Orphanage was desperate for life-saving equipment. Witness Berg going rogue in her Antigone moment, and how she pulled it off.
At the end of the book, Berg’s friend and colleague in Vietnam, Patti Hill-VanderMolen, contributed a searingly honest chapter of her own failure of compassion and her come back. In 1993, Hill-VanderMolen would be one of the twenty-five thousand in attendance at the unveiling in Washington, DC of the beautiful brass Vietnam Women’s Memorial, brought into being by Diane Carlson Evans, a Vietnam War combat nurse in a ten-year effort over immense opposition, including from the woman architect of The Wall!
Watch for free online the nurses’ exultant march of triumph at the memorial’s unveiling, captured in The Other Angels, a very moving, Emmy Award winning documentary, written and directed by former nurse anesthetist Patricia L. Walsh who served in Vietnam in a US Aid field hospital.
This was the long-delayed healing elixir in middle age for the nurses who, like Berg, came home from Vietnam in uniform to all too often be vilified for having served, no matter in what capacity. Berg wrote that she was scorned and even spit at, and that for ten years she
could not say the word Vietnam without tears or being chastised. The returning nurses were caught in a lonely limbo, filled with an immense experience and given the message to hide it and stuff it.
Adding insult to injury, back stateside, they were handed bedpans to empty in entry level nursing jobs, their military experience discounted, even though they returned with high-level skills. For many years they were denied any help for trauma from the VA. You can participate in the ladies auxiliary for military wives, though, some were told.
Here, at the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, decades later, a Vietnam veteran ran up to a nurse, telling her that because of a nurse like you, I am here! I have a wife, kids, and grandkids!
The creation of Kissing Kevin was bookended by great loss—a horrific family tragedy in the years preceding, and Berg’s own death on the heels of the work’s completion. Berg did not live to hold a copy of Kissing Kevin in her hands. For she was one of the many who served who did not die in Vietnam but from her tour of duty in Vietnam.
Read through this masterful page turner, then please pass it on to family, friends, and co-workers. Encourage them to do the same in a chain of literary salvation. Promote it to libraries and schools. Because, with a mere eleven reviews on Amazon, it doesn’t come up if you put in the search bar: books about American military nurses in Vietnam. Of which by now I have read many. And this is a standout work! Including the priceless photos. Nor does Kissing Kevin make it onto the bibliography at the Vietnam Women’s Memorial which hasn’t been updated in nine years and may no longer be actively staffed as so far, there has been no answer to my queries. Do this good deed for Sara Berg, for you, for Cirque Press, for literature, for everyone. So relevant in this time of troubles, where goodness is still the great elixir.
Joanna Streetly
A Review and Interview: Mending Holes by Patrick Dixon, MoonPath Press, 2025
In his poetry collection, Mending Holes, Patrick Dixon has a lot to say about slipping through the net. Dixon, who spent most of his life as a commercial fisher in Alaska, now lives in Olympia, WA. If Dixon’s 2022 memoir, Waiting to Deliver, conveyed the intense physicality of fishing— the way the long hours of work can result in exhaustion, euphoria, strokes of genius, poor decisions, tangled lines, tangles with the ocean, tangled relationships—then Mending Holes seizes those moments and extracts the poetic marrow. The poems gleam with fishing-specific descriptive details:
“cool, wet cotton gloves, stiff, rough, manila line and the cold chains of anchors covered in generations of mud.”
—"Mending Holes”
Fishermen confront mortality more than most. It’s an intensity that most will never know, so for readers of
these poems, it’s a gift to live these moments vicariously. Dixon’s net serves a two-way function. It catches the fish that make up the lifestyle, but in some of the poems, like “Overboard,” it also serves as a metaphor for the things that slip through the holes into the deep—from knives, wrenches and cellphones, to “your friend who tipped over the edge after the struggle / to hang onto the rail… ”
Dixon’s voice also echoes with loss for a lifestyle once lived, where,
“silhouettes of boats still glide past closed canneries and derelict docks. inside them, skippers still hold a coffee mug in one hand and steer the boat down a darkened river with the other.”
—“West”
I connected with Patrick this spring, to ask him about his work.
JS: Pat, did you have an audience in mind when you wrote these poems? If so, did it include other commercial fishers?
PD: Yes and no. I wanted the commercial fishers who might read it to hear the authenticity, but the book is about relationships and emotions, and fishing is the container that holds what the poems were really about.
JS: Have you had to apply the same persistence to the writing of prose and poetry as you applied to fishing, or does one skill come more naturally than the other?
PD: Yes. After we moved to Olympia and I started going to the FisherPoets’ Gathering, I began writing more regularly, but writing and studying the craft began after I retired from teaching. I started reading books on craft, enrolled in Ellen Bass’s Craft Talks Zoom seminars, and took workshops from established poets through the Olympia Poetry Network. I also found a great writers’ group to critique my work. All that has helped me become the best writer I've ever been, and it seems there’s no end to what I can learn about poetry. So persistence, yes, but more love of the puzzle of figuring out how I can accomplish a thing.
JS: Has your relationship to your fisher-self changed since you left Alaska? If so, are there unexpected benefits from this new, “distance” relationship?
PD: Initially, I found it amazing how clearly I could recall where I was fishing on a given day, how many fish we caught or what happened during a specific time or incident. All I had to do was look around, hear the sounds, smell the scents, feel the rain…all of it. Sometimes I struggled to write fast enough. Writing was my way of dealing with the absence of something I loved and thought I’d do all my life. I’m no longer young or fit enough to fantasize about going back to fishing. This poetry collection is a true love letter to a time of my life that has slipped over the horizon. After it was published, I stepped more confidently into writing non-fish poetry, having gotten the validation that comes with having a book published.
JS: You have a knack for the “telling detail,” like the importance of buttoning the top button of one’s oilskins. Is that something you work hard for?
PD: I can put myself mentally into the scene while I’m writing, so those details come easily. It’s in revision that I separate out the flotsam from the fish, and either change that detail so it fits the poem better or pare down the details so the poem flows easily in the direction it wants to go.
JS: When you look at the cover of the book, what do you see, beyond the hand, the shuttle and the net?
PD: I see my friend Wayne, helping me mend a hole in my net before a fishing day. I see him and my other friends, Dean, Don, Rob and Cosmo, all of us bullshitting and laughing and enjoying just being together doing something we love. I miss those times, those people. I also see how holes are mended in the fabric of our lives; how a vocation like fishing—something you love—can help you find yourself.
JS: Of commercial fishing’s many complications, which made life the most fulfilling?
PD: When I started, I was so ignorant of what I needed to know to be a good fisherman that when I finally knew I could do as well as anyone, that sense of accomplishment was extremely fulfilling. One aspect of that was my understanding of tides, currents, weather and the movements of fish. I was dealing with the natural world as opposed to the artificial one I inhabited during the school year, and I loved that part of fishing.
JS: What’s your vision for the future growth of poetry within the commercial fishing industry?
PD: I am very optimistic! If the FisherPoets Gathering is any indication, there are many new faces among the performers, and a majority of them this year were (for the
first time), women. Both those facts give me hope. Fish poetry, prose and song resonate with audiences, whether they are fishing folk or not.
FEATURE
Cynthia Steele
Cirque in Motion: Pacific Northwest Vignettes of People and Places
Cirque's biggest trip so far, over three weeks, traveling from Anchorage to Washington State and Oregon, included stops in Seattle, Bothel, Mukilteo, Kenmore, Sequim, Port Townsend, Port Angeles, Edmunds, Laurel, Bellingham, Ladd’s Addition, Portland, and Springfield.
Bigwig Space invaders. Aug. 15—Anchorage, Alaska
Our adrenaline had already kicked in. We were on the plane, ready to watch the little map mark our progress. Luggage was stacked high overhead, and, with no warning from flight attendants, and five minutes past our scheduled time, everything stopped.
Trump and Putin’s impending arrival in Anchorage— The Summit—delayed the start of Sandra and Cynthia’s North Pacific tour of writers and places. The whole cabin—not just us—groaned. We scrolled for news: no expectation of a “successful Summit.” Ukraine would remain unresolved. Jets skimmed the airport’s edge, guardians of a cleared airspace. Necks craned. Flight attendants dissuaded us from looking—we would not see their planes. They’d met at JBER military base and never intended to fly over the international airport where we sat—locked, loaded, and motionless.
Around this time, Trump urged Ukraine to cede the eastern Donbas region; Ukraine perceived betrayal. Putin’s International Criminal Court warrant for deporting Ukrainian children to Russia meant little—the U.S. was no longer a member. The plane filled with low, muttered dialogue. Disconcerting that Trump met Putin here. Mixed sentiment about how the Summit is now a Putin victory. As of early January 2026, the war in Ukraine stalemated. A heavy beginning for a literary tour, but one worth a historical footnote.
Then, release. Fremont, Seattle—our first stop.
Sandra’s son Michael Kleven and fiancée Stevee Nielsen were ready with a godsend of a homemade dinner: steak and fresh fruit. Poli-“tics” set aside, I helped serve. We turned toward friends and a multiplicity of readings, toward freedom and other thoughts, trusting the universe.
The Wise Convertible Choice
In Bothell, we rolled up at Sandy’s annual high school reunion at Inglewood Golf Club in a white Shelby Mustang convertible. This ride, which beats the heck out of a Malibu, was cheaper than the original rental. We grew excited and hopeful that someone might notice these two Gigis still turning heads— at least in an octogenarian crowd—in a groovy car on a sunny day. We recalled that the first ever owner of a 1964 Mustang convertible was schoolteacher Gail Wise who paid 70% of her salary, getting high-fives as she drove on the school lot. We felt like this.
Canadian geese honked at the nearby golf-ball-speckled pond. Full, heavily watered flower baskets hung plentifully around the grounds. My phone pinged with photos from my daughter and husband. The only ones to see us roll up were a few young caddies, kind enough to take our picture for memory’s sake.
Birthdays, Always. August 17—Seattle
My birthday—60—signified maturity. I reflected back on 21 and a flower speckled white tank top, a red miniskirt and tennies (pumps in hand), leaving from visiting Mama in Big Lake, Alaska. For the last few years, I've spent my birthday on this Cirque trip in Washington and Oregon. August fills with readings planned months in advance. We always find pockets of joy and meet many new people along with those we've done so much work with.
Sunday, we flock into the sparsely populated church Northlake Lutheran with its warm congregants where Sandra and her late husband Rich married. We attend partly out of gratitude for history, as well as the ability to hold readings there as part of the church's arts program Imagine. Like many churches, they have increased engagement with the community in creative ways.
We head to Woodinville to join friend Kay—and her boyfriend Don—who so often put us up at her home in “The Muk.” Kay, who Sandra knows from school and reunions, invited us to a party at niece Michaela and husband Erik’s home for their child, Leif. Kay’s brother Roger Fisher, longterm member of the band Heart, was there with his wife, Linda.
We all surrounded Roger and his grandson as he graced us with his singing of, “Hey Jude,” “Norwegian Wood,” and the Heart song “Love Alive.” We all joined the rock 'n roll guitarist twanging his grandchild's pink, electric guitar with a catch in his throat. I transcribed Heart’s lyrics at ten in a notebook—the year the Dreamboat Annie album came out.
“Magic Man,” inspired by Roger and Kay’s brother Michael, rang in our heads during the weeks of this visit. Michael had been as strong as possible, to be surrounded by relatives when he passed away from cancer during our visit. His illness weighed upon us during the trip. This time of singing with Rog was sad / happy—for the children and for being together.
We felt included. I still think of the lyrics of “Love Alive” a song credited to Roger along with Ann and Nancy Wilson: “The sky was dark this morning / When I raised my head / I stood at the window—darkness was my bane”
Roger Fisher and grandson Leif, sister Kay Fisher Meyers and Don Rogers
Michael Kleven, Sandra Kleven, Stevee Nielsen, and Cynthia Steele
We picnicked and walked down to the water at the Paradise Lake Conservation Area where Erik’s family first homesteaded this 100-acre property years ago; they still hold onto most of it. Our companions were Lynda Humphrey, writer of Miss Bebe Comes to America (Cirque Press) and her partner Forrest.
We visited with half a dozen people there before leaving for Seattle proper for more birthday festivities. The Seattle Great Wheel and dinner at Ivar’s awaited, along with a birthday song.
During the drive, I reflected on these years of winging it with Sandy on the road; she always knew at least most of the plan, but I only had glimpses of the road ahead. At some point, she said that many things are not yet set in stone. We’re both pretty game, it seems.
Our last bit of tourism included a boat ride under a cloud-mottled sky with the dark eyes of common ravens and cormorants looking on. Then, a lovely walkabout at Mukilteo Lighthouse Park where we met Irene Bloom, who we would shortly stay with in Port Townsend though we had just met her.
Lavender, Voices, & Coffeeholics. August 18–19
That evening, Christiana Balk and Karl Flaccus immersed attendees in a literary world at Cirque’s first and much-anticipated reading at their Northeast Seattle home. Food, generous hospitality, and familiar faces greeted us at Chris and Karl's, including Carolyn Wright, Mary E. Crane, Chris Buckley, Lynda Humphrey, Diane Ray, John and Nancy Morgan (of the now-famous Nancy Poems). This is the most intimate of readings, with true connections for writers. Conversations lingered over wine,
Cynthia Steele, Sandra Kleven and Irene Bloom at Red Cup Café, Mukilteo
Sandra Kleven and Diane Ray, Ballard
Christianne Balk, Karl Flaccus, Carolyn Wright, Mary Eliza Crane, Chris Buckley, Lynda Humphrey, Forrest Brown, Diane Ray, John and Nancy Morgan, and Tom Frodsham
flowers, and shared stories, the kind of space only friends who read together for years can keep.
We noted the lavender blooming everywhere the next day, moving with bees, as we strode into the National Nordic Museum in Seattle—boats and ship art celebrating Sandra and the area's familial history. Lunch followed at the home of playwright-poet Diane Ray. Cirque has published many of Diane’s writings over the years.
Diane introduced us to a Siberian kitten she had been acclimating. Joy and sweetness exuded from Diane’s house. Her Birkat HaBayit, her Jewish home blessing, says: “May sorrow never enter this gate. Distress never visit this place…” We lingered, savoring sunlight, the warmth of her kitchen, fresh food, supportive conversation, and reminiscence.
Last year, we had read her play, “The Man with His Finger in the Door”—on the topic of forgiveness—at one of the venues. Sandra and I had starred as mother and daughter and Diane’s husband as the father/grandfather. Diane directed. We even had a Zoom rehearsal ahead of time. The short play performance had gone swimmingly. Diane is a force—"eshet hayil”—a woman of strength but so much more.
Another evening, Sandra and I slipped away to join Chris Buckley, and attend the amazing Easy Speak Seattle—a 20-year mainstay of the Seattle Mic scene. Buckley read from his chapbook BLUING (Finishing Line Press). Chris had attended several of the readings we put on for the past couple years, so turnaround was fair play. This hip happening takes place the second and fourth Mondays at the Wedgwood Broiler, where people share a poem, prose, or song. Their motto is “We love the human voice, and we want to hear yours.” They don’t “do” feature readers—just five minutes each reader, names usually drawn.
The hilarity of other readers inspired me to be funny. I covertly refined something I’d scribbled about the flight experience. When I read, the humor resonated with the crowd. “So fun not to be running the show,” Sandra said. Adrenaline pumped, I echoed, “Groovy to be attendees.”
In the morning, I ventured out alone and discovered Coffeeholic House, Seattle’s first Vietnamese coffee shop—beans imported from Vietnam, roasted in Seattle. I was only sad they didn’t have T-shirts (still don't—a gentle prod). I ordered a cheese foam and hazelnut syrup treat to prepare for another reading.
Mary Eliza Crane, Kenmore
Dave Mampel, Kenmore
Doug Margeson, Kenmore
Denny Palmason, Cynthia Steele, and Joe Reno
This time, Sandra had set the soirée for Kenmore at Northlake Lutheran. So many friends and writers joined us at the welcoming church, and Lynda and Mary Crane helped at the door. The facility always has perfect sound quality. Mary read from her Last Call of the Dark joined by an original song by Tom Frodsham, about his mother, and these brilliants read: Dave Mampel, Diane Ray, Carolyne Wright, Judy Bjorling, Craig Smith, Lynda Humphrey, Chris Buckley, Doug Margeson, Sandra Kleven, and me.
Within a day, we would visit artist Joe Reno—who had gone to school with Sandra. Cirque featured Reno in a previous issue. We picked up Kathy Wells and Denny Palmason, friends from Sandy’s school days, to enjoy Ray’s Boathouse on the Seattle water. The sun beat down. We stopped for casual chats, they sang a school song, watched the waves, and joked about the chill in the breeze off Puget Sound.
Poets, Quakers, & Quimper Village, Port Townsend
We shared driving, cutting the work in half enroute to Port Townsend. Our tire slowly lost air. A window would not close. We coaxed it shut enough to feel confident, though the tire continued to concern us. We decided to wait to fix it.
Poet Irene Bloom gave us a warm, official tour of Port Townsend as museum tour guide. She then hosted us at Quimper Village cohousing. With all the Quimper named places, we asked about the origin. Spanish explorer Manuel Quimper charted the area in 1790. On the tour, we saw the strikingly fanciful 1909 Haller Fountain with cherubs, featuring the bare-chested Galatea nymph, originally shown at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Having been an artist's model and taken classes in drawing and painting, I stood in awe for several minutes, hearing little.
We made it to a local monthly poetry reading in the active literary community, supported by the Quakers at the meetinghouse and featuring poetry and fiction writers. It was a name in the hat affair other than the featured readers. Our names were not drawn, but we were more than honored to listen.
After overnighting in the Common House at QV, I attended a Quaker meetinghouse service—an experience I’d noticed other people enjoyed in my family genealogy. I sat in silence for an hour or so, feeling how difficult it is to be still, reflecting on simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship. I wondered if I would do it again. It was that difficult yet powerful. People spoke of what they had done to change the world in some small or larger ways. I found myself propelled toward a civic duty by these engaged people and their lives of sacred interconnectedness.
Irene, Sandra, and I supped at Sirens Gastropub on Water Street overlooking everything. It was a very Port Townsend adventure. Its highly literary community, and its history of boom, bust, and resultant Victorian seaside town and historic charm were not lost on us. We could've stayed another week just to get to know it on a deeper level, but it was nearly time to go.
Diane Knox
We left noting the early history of the S'Klallam (Coast Salish) people—the “strong people” with their cedar longhouses and the richness of clams, Pacific oysters, mussels, spot prawns, and Dungeness crab. We would be remiss not to quote a famous S’Klallam poet, fiction writer, playwright, and editor Duane Niatum (nee McGinniss).
“…I was born to a family wrapped /inside the wallpaper of two worlds, / drumming the other's disappearance…” from “Little Crow's Ear Nettled by the Slash-eyed Journey”
Thank you, Irene, for putting us up and for putting up with us. Two travelers looking for lodging. Thank you for reading your beautiful poetry, showing us the city, and telling us a little bit about the Coast Salish people on the tour.
Drawing a Crowd for Surrounded by Weasels August 24—Port Angeles
In Sequim we stayed with Dianne Lynne Knox, visiting with her and her English Springer Spaniel on her lovely back open deck near Dungeness Bay. We would all read in Port Angeles. Dianne’s first poetry book is Red Hot Pepper, which she published when she was 74; after a lifetime of work in business, she outed a 12-year collection of poetry.
I couldn't help openly ogling the popping colors in her garage: a British Racing Green Austin-Healey roadster and a vintage Roman Red Impala. In this, the visit felt more like Christmas than the smoking hot end of a bayside August.
This tranquil, small town, known most for events like the Lavender Festival, proved a relaxing experience for which we were grateful.
When we all arrived at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, the reading was crowded and radiant—surfboards, amazing art, and brilliant lighting. Tess Gallagher read Surrounded by Weasels, stories of Josie Gray, her late companion for a quarter of a century. It was standing room only, chairs spilling into the blocked entryway with no one minding. Smiles on faces from Tess and Josie’s tales made my cheeks ache. Readers included Gary Lilley, Alice Derry, Mary Eliza Crane, Doug Pope, Dianne Knox, Charlotte G.
Warren, Linda Myers, Nancy Fowler, Judy Duncan, Laura E. Garrard, and Nina Burokas. So many voices evoking emotions in rapt listeners.
Afterward, we searched for food as a group of ten-plus. There may have been karaoke. Animated conversation. Mary Eliza Crane wrote of the evening:
We walk a half dozen blocks to the only place serving food this late and tuck into a dive bar crowded with people half our age, the young women attired as we haven’t dared in decades—scant material body suits in pastel colors.
We take space at a table sticky from the refuse of its last occupants, and search for a menu. The lone bartender hustles behind the bar and the lone cook sweats in the kitchen. The pilot light is announced out in the fryer, needs to reheat and many orders are ahead of ours. Food will be in an hour.
The Associate Editor grabs a bar cloth, wipes down our table, signs up for karaoke, and, in front of flashing pink lights, she, the Main Editor, and Gloria Gaynor reassure us: we “will survive.”
The next day, we stopped to visit Tess and Gary Copeland Lilley (much-published poet, including Alpha Zulu and The Subsequent Blues, and an academic), who has been Tess’s sweetheart since about 2019. Also, Tess’s assistant, Danielle.
Tess was born here in Port Angeles more than eight decades ago (she also has a cottage in Ireland). We reflected on mutual friends and how happy we were to have spent time with poet Alice Derry, Tess’s longtime friend, on this trip, and on the phenomenal success of the gallery reading. Gary and Tess chatted with us for a while, and Danielle spoke about her work as an assistant, what she had learned from them, and served tea. As usual, I took photographs, wandering the seaside and spotting hummingbirds—a species Tess easily charms along with the multiple deer that wander through.
The Clothesline at Hurricane Coffee Company—Sequim
We ended up walking quite a ways to the Hurricane Coffee Company, which, quite pleasingly, had a wall of poetry. Instructions were posted plainly: write a poem and leave it. You may also take a poem.
Tess Gallagher, Port Angeles
Doug Pope, Port Angeles
I decided to riff off Eliot “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I grow old…”:
Shall I wear sandals all my days?
Do I dare keep my brazen ways?
I shall wear gray linen trousers, walk the long edge of the beach.
I have heard coyotes singing, each to each.
In the late eve, do I think they sing to me— at least a small part of me?
Others wrote too. Poems accumulated quickly— scribbles, careful script, pencil, pen, attached to a clothesline with wooden clothespins, fluttering slightly whenever the door opened.
One poem was by Saint Teresa of Ávila: “Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world…”
Another read simply: “Don’t let the world change your smile.”
Sandra and I read many, passing pages back and forth, talking with a couple vacationing along the water. Outside it was hot. Inside—cooler. Time evaporated. We waited for the car, staying longer than planned. Poems swayed above us like laundry, like prayers. Conversations meandered from writing to travel to past readings, everyone leaning into the warmth of the moment. It seemed a shame to leave.
woman and a more solid, darker man—sprayed hundreds of carrots in an orange-white-pink plume.
Upon hearing our tale of fruit-less-ness, they graciously gifted us a bunch. We offered to buy them, but they sold only to markets. We ate one at once, of course. Sweet as anything. Such kindness.
CB Nuts in Kingston brought a new peanut-butter favorite. On the ferry at Edmonds, double-breasted cormorants appeared again. A grocery-store picnic followed, complete with sandwiches, oranges, and laughter.
Theatre
Loose Horses and Street Tacos
One memorable night we stayed with Sandra's sister Gerrie-Ellen Davis (Gee Gee) and her grandchild, the preschooler Aurora, and extended family in Laurel, between Bellingham and Lynden. Her horses, bolted after toppling the fence. Frenetically, all the other adults dealt with the horse debacle. Also at a rapid pace, the extremely active Aurora took apart every item of luggage she could get her hands on. We laughed so hard trying to keep up with her. We finally slept soundly, awakening to the sound of Chihuahua barks, bacon sizzling, and this chattering young child. A perfect overnight.
We searched for fruit high and low and a bit off road. Other years, we’d had peaches drip down faces while driving—an annoyance to some but a joy to me. We tried to find some sort of market but failed. Too late in the year. At Dharma Ridge Farm, two 20 somethings—a lean, pale
In late August, in the posh Encore Room of the Mt. Baker Theatre in Bellingham, we experienced many gifted readers. Among them, Alan Weltzien read from Into the Khumbu (Cirque Press), a poetic documentation of his trek through Nepal’s Khumbu region, home to Mount Everest. A volunteer Wilderness Walks leader in Montana, Alan served 40 years as a professor and is now emeritus. A prolific writer, he founded a writers’ series at the University of Montana Western.
Joining Weltzien were Luther Allen, Chris Buckley, Jerry McDonald, Tim Pilgrim, Bliss Goldstein, Mary E. Crane, Sandra Kleven, Susan Chase-Foster, JI Kleinberg,
Carrots In Lieu of Fruit
Gee Gee's Horses
Luther Allen, Chris Buckley, Alan Weltzien, Jerry McDonnnell, Tim Pilgrim, Bliss Goldstein, Mary Eliza Crane, Sandra Kleven, Susan Chase-Foster, JI Kleinberg, and Richard Widerkehr at the Mt. Baker
CIRQUE
Richard Widerkehr, and myself. After the reading, Bliss took Sandra and me to Black Sheep Street Tacos near the theater for literary conversation. Bliss, a cross-genre writer, has two pieces in the current Cirque: “Holy Waters,” a contest winner, and the monologue “A Letter to the Woman I Almost Came to Fisticuffs with at the Food CoOp, The One Downtown, Not the One Near the Mall.” Bliss and I had worked via email to narrow the length of the monologue but ran out of time (a journalist joke). We can only hope she will someday submit a play.
Roses, the Feel Good Café, and Home
Aug. 31-Sept. 4, we checked into our Ladd’s Addition Airbnb in Portland—the first time we didn’t stay with friends old or new. Ladd’s is famous for hundreds of varieties of roses everywhere. Sunflowers abuzz. Pastini’s for dinner. Spielman’s homemade bagels in the mornings. Small moments of calm and plenty of walking in the planned community that was once a 120-acre farm but is now an eclectic paradise with no aerosol grip hairspray for miles. Small matter, since headbands became the gear of the day; otherwise, sweat dripped down our glowing faces.
Walking into the upcoming poetry reading at Ross Café was elbow-to-elbow, as always. Portland shows up, full of energy, conversation, and applause. A most enthusiastic group. Mary Crane, Eric le Fatte, Dianne Stepp, Judy Thorn, Patricia Ware, Ken Waldman, Leah Stenson, Dale Champlin, Robin Woolman, Ron McFarland, David Pickering, Katy McKinney, Diane Corson, Bruce Parker, and us, of course. Others added on as time allowed. We stayed as late as we could, and chatted as long as we could, making new connections and reconnecting.
In Springfield, another live reading at Lovely Feel Good Eatery—a community celebration of local literary voices—Rachel Barton, Marc Janssen, Eve Müller, Jenny Root, Ingrid Wendt, and Tim Whitsel (and others).
Dale Champlin, Ross Island Cafe
David Pickering Ross Island Cafe
Marc Janssen, Springfield
Ann Müller, Eva Müller and Jenny Root, Springfield
Eric Braman, who had helped a great deal with set up and publicity, did a stellar off the cuff recital as well as a reading from his poetry book published by Cirque Press: Bury Me in Cherry Blossoms. Janet Rubin also read from her book Crossing the Burnside Bridge (Cirque Press). A table was filled with books by Cirque Press authors and friends.
Hosts Sheary Clough Suiter, and husband Nard Claar, both artists more than writers but gifted at both, made us feel instantly at home. Walking enthusiasts who take full use of the Pacific Northwest environment, they reenvisioned their garage as an artistic workspace and gave us the tour. So intense, since we’d seen so much of their art in Cirque pages. We promised to stay and visit longer next year.
Tim Whitsel, Springfield
David Goodrum, Springfield
Nard Claar, Springfield
Eric Braman, Springfield
Janice Rubin, Springfield
Alaska's Fiddling Poet Ken Waldman, Springfield
Nard Claar, Sheary Clough Suiter, Sandra Kleven, and Cynthia Steele, Willamette River
CONTRIBUTORS
Gavin Andreoff is a 23-year-old Sophomore at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska where he is majoring in Biological Sciences. He has a special interest in writing stories about science fiction and macabre themes. In his free time, Gavin enjoys snowshoeing, cooking for his family, and writing short stories.
Christianne Balk’s latest book is The Holding Hours (University of Washington Press Northwest Poetry Series). She loves broken music, the rhythms of everyday street talk, and open water swimming. Honors include The Walt Whitman Award for Bindweed, and fellowships/grants from Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, and Jackstraw Studios. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Cirque Literary Journal, The Naugatuck River Review, Nimrod, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Poemoftheweek.org, Terrain, and other magazines.
Pamela Bergmann grew up on a farm in Nebraska, but migrated north to Alaska over forty years ago, where she fell in love with the landscapes, wildlife, and people. An avid traveler and photographer, after retiring from public service, she began sharing photographs, stories, and poems via her website, www.pamelabergmann.net. Twice a Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been published in Cirque, Alaska Women Speak, Poetry Breakfast, Diving into Poetry Forms, The Poems That Flow Through Us, and the Anchorage Daily News
David Boose is a biology professor and writer who lives in Spokane, Washington. Born and raised in Washington, he has also lived in the northeastern U.S., central and southern California, and Munich, Germany. An avid outdoor recreationist, he finds beauty, peace, and inspiration in the diverse landscapes of the Northwest.
Kristina Boratino is a poet, fiction writer, and painter that has lived in the PNW her entire life. She is currently working on a third book of poetry. Kristina has been published in Route 7 Review, Cirque Literary Journal, Sonder Midwest, The Zest of the Lemon, Erase MS, Compassion International Magazine, and more. She resides in Edmonds, Washington with her two children.
Nicholas Bradley lives in Victoria, BC— near Sitchanalth, in lək ̓wəŋən territory. He teaches at the University of Victoria and is the author of two books of poetry: Rain Shadow (University of Alberta Press, 2018) and Before Combustion (Gaspereau Press,2023).
Jack Broom is a Seattle native who retired in 2016 after 39 years as a reporter and editor at The Seattle Times. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Western Washington University in 1974. His work in photography began in the 1970s as a reporter/photographer for The Wenatchee World, where he worked before going to The Seattle Times in 1977. In recent years, his photographs have won awards at state-fair competitions in Washington and have been featured in previous issues of Cirque. He is a past president of the Edmonds-based Puget Sound Camera Club.
C.W. Buckley lives and writes in Seattle with his family. A fourthgeneration West Coaster, he earned degrees in Human Biology from Stanford University and Religion from Claremont School of Theology, following two years as a hospital chaplain. His poetry explores conscience, faith, and the natural world, offering gentle witness to precious things and what their loss can mean. His work appears in Image Journal, Cirque, Counterflow, Dappled Things, and the anthology Cascadian Zen Volume 2. He reads regularly at Easy Speak Seattle and is the author of BLUING, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press. His poetry collection, Redshift, is forthcoming from Cirque Press.
Patrick Carrico is an Alaska-based writer exploring themes of shadow, healing, and human connection. Drawing from his experiences in education, homelessness advocacy, and art, he blends poetic insight with raw honesty. Patrick’s work invites readers to sit with vulnerability and find meaning in life’s complexities.
Ruth Carter moved to Anchorage, Alaska, from Denver, Colorado and never looked back. She is captivated and held captive by the beauty of Alaska.
Susan Chase-Foster writes what she calls “poemoirs,” based on experiences encountered as she navigates the world. She has lived in Germany, Italy, Mexico, and spent sweet times in Alaska, Taiwan, New Zealand, Spain and Bellingham, WA, where she writes in a tiny cedar cottage surrounded by evergreens, a gang of crows, and far too many spiders. She is honored that her work has appeared in Cirque, Alaska Women Speak, Heron Clan, For Love of Orcas, and I Sing the Salmon Home among other literary journals and anthologies. Poems about adventures in Taiwan with her son appear in Xiexie Taipei
David Cheezem: I earned my MFA in Creative Writing at UAA in the late 1990s. Since then, I've had poems and essays published in Cirque and Platte Valley Review. I am a retired bookseller. I divide my time between writing and cross-country bicycling.
Kersten Christianson derives inspiration from wild, wanderings, and road trips. She authored Curating the House of Nostalgia (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2020), What Caught Raven’s Eye (Petroglyph Press, 2018), and Something Yet to Be Named (Kelsay Books, 2017). Her newest collection, The Ordering of Stars, is forthcoming (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025). Additionally, she is the poetry editor of the quarterly journal, Alaska Women Speak. Kersten lives in Sitka, Alaska where she keeps an eye on the tides, shops Old Harbor Books, and hoards smooth ink pens.
Nard Claar: I have been many things in my life. A few of my favorites are artist, guide, and teacher. I try to make the world a little better with my passing. Life is short so paying attention is important. Mixed media art gives me the option to express my voice in a variety of ways to be tactile and include the senses. I am a landscape painter. I paint in a direct manner using what I see and how I feel about the environment. I feel compelled, like my ancestors, to create symbols and use that language that document my existence for this brief span of time. Each work is a reflection of place and time in my journey of my life. I want people to pause and enjoy and appreciate life. The planet is a magical place of creation. I am delighted to offer and share my perspective.
Douglas Cole has published eight poetry collections, including The Cabin at the End of the World, winner of the Best Book Award in Urban Poetry and the International Impact Book Award. His novel, The White Field, won the American Fiction Award, and his screenplay of The White Field won Best Unproduced Screenplay award in the Elegant Film Festival. His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry, Fiction International, Valpariaso, The Gallway Review and Two Hawks Quarterly. He also contributes a column called “Trading Fours” to the magazine, Jerry Jazz Musician. He received the Leslie Hunt Memorial prize in poetry, the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House, First Prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway, and the Editors’ Choice Award in fiction by RiverSedge. He has been nominated Eight times for a Pushcart and Nine times for Best of the Net. His website is https://douglastcole.com
Chelsey Cook is an Alaska-based writer and mountain guide specializing in the intersection of the outdoors, conservation, and the human experience. She lives in a small cabin on a glacial-fed river, and spends much of her time in remote Alaska, working and playing.
Mary Eliza Crane lives in the Cascade foothills. Cirque Press published her latest collection of poetry, Last Call of the Dark in 2024. Mary has two previous collections of poetry published by Gazoobi Tales. Her work has appeared in many regional journals and anthologies and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She co-curates and co-hosts the monthly Duvall Poetry reading series in her home community.
Chris Dahl hopes to cup a handful of murky pond-water and reveal another world half-hidden in this one. Her book, Not Now but Soon, won Concrete Wolf’s 2024 Louis Award. Mrs. Dahl in the Season of Cub Scouts, a chapbook, was published after winning Still Waters Press “Women’s Words” competition. Her poems have been placed in a wide variety of journals— recently in the South Florida Poetry Journal and Panoplyzine— and she has had poems nominated both for Best of the Internet and a Pushcart Prize. A board member of the Olympia Poetry Network, she edits their monthly newsletter and shares her life with her husband and a tuxedo cat once named Minnow but now called Sylvie.
Patrick Dixon is a retired educator and commercial fisherman living in Olympia, Washington. Published in Cirque, Raven Chronicles, and National Fisherman magazine among others, he was also included in the Washington State Book Award anthology, Take a Stand: Art Against Hate (2020). Dixon is on the Board of Directors of the Olympia Poetry Network. He received an Artist Trust Grant to edit Anchored in Deep Water: The FisherPoets Anthology (2014). His poetry chapbook Arc of Visibility won the 2015 Alabama State Poetry Morris Memorial Award. In June of 2023 he won the Cirque Poetry of Place competition. His memoir, Waiting to Deliver, about 20 years fishing for salmon on Cook Inlet, Alaska, was published in 2022. Mending Holes, his full-length collection of poetry about commercial fishing in Alaska was released in June of 2025 from MoonPath Press.
Gene Ervine grew up on a wet hundred-acre woods in Washington State. His childhood was barely damaged by television. He read books and imagined. Gene split, stacked and moved a lot of firewood. All of that seasoned his poetry and helped keep him happy. His poetry was encouraged in high school and college writing courses; he became a National Park Service exhibit planner and interpretive writer after other adventures. His delight in nature continues to grow since making Alaska his home. He writes poetry and lives in Anchorage with his dear wife, Nancy. They have two grown children.
David Fewster was awarded at TAIP grant by the Tacoma Arts Commission in 2003 for his book of poems Diary of a Homeless Alcoholic Suicidal Maniac & Other Picture Postcards. His work has also appeared in the anthologies Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapalooza 94 (Manic D Press, 1995) and Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader Vol. 2 (Black Sparrow Press, 2000.) His most recent book is A la recherche du temps perdu, or GET OFF MY LAWN!
My name is Leslie Fried. In the winter of 2011, I moved from Seattle to Anchorage to become the Curator of the Alaska Jewish Museum. I was born in Israel, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who settled in New York’s Lower East Side. The history of my family - its trials and tribulations - has been an ongoing source of fascination for me. Soon after settling in Alaska, I started writing in a more focused way. I began my work life as a visual artist, so writing for me is like doing a drawing – falling somewhere between gesture and detail. Wrestling with the “truth” in historical accounts and stories passed down is also a part of my process.
Tim Gillespie landed on a long career as a public school teacher in Oregon after sampling lives as a galleyman on an oil tanker, a warehouse worker, and a parts truck driver. Recent poems have appeared in Rise Up Review, Willlawaw, Abandoned Mine, Passager, and Oregon English. His collection Old Stories, Some Not True was published by MoonPath Press during the pandemic.
Dan Goldstein is a published painter and poet. His art has appeared in Penumbra, Judith Magazine and exhibitions. He enjoys painting creatures and people, real and imagined. Visit his world at DanGoldstein.art
Rozalija Grace is a Russian Canadian writer with roots in Alaska and Quebec. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Room, Rust & Moth, So to Speak, and other periodicals, and her translations of Soviet poetry have been nominated for Best Literary Translations. She currently serves as a poetry editor for Psaltery & Lyre and lives in Minneapolis with her novelist fiancée, arguing which of them is the better writer. (It’s her fiancée.) You can read more at her website and on her Bluesky @rozalijagrace.com.
Rozalija “Reyzl” Grace is a Russian American writer from Alaska (the border crossed her) whose poetry and prose have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Room, Rust & Moth, So to Speak, and other periodicals. Her translations of early Soviet literature have been nominated for Best Literary Translations and appeared in In geveb, Pakn Treger, and elsewhere. She currently serves as a poetry editor for Psaltery & Lyre and lives in Minneapolis with her novelist fiancée, arguing over which of them is the better writer. (It’s her fiancée.) Read more at reyzlgrace.com and follow her on Bluesky @reyzlgrace.
Farley Egan Green, from Spokane, rediscovered poetry a few years back after retiring from a communications career. She has published in Halfway Down the Stairs, Emerge Literary Journal, Boomerlit Magazine, Assisi Journal of Literature and the Arts and elsewhere. One poem, “Hope,” was nominated by Trestle Creek Review for the 2023 Pushcart Prize.
Paul Haeder is in Oregon slipping closer daily into the wrack line while continuing to fight in this gangster state called America. He's writing newspaper columns as an antidote for his local readership's amnesia. He's got a radio show, weekly, Finding Fringe: Voices from the Edge (kyaq. org), where he riffs with science, arts, society, geopolitics, and confronts America's hard right spasm into fascism. A thousand wasp stings/ pressing vision into clouds/ Gazification of all lands/ so few admit/I am closer to wretched of the earth/ than nobodies plowing fields of capitalism.
Jim Hanlen has a BA in Literature from Gonzaga University and a Master in Reading from Eastern Washington University. Jim wrote 17 Toutle River Haiku and also Postcards from Jim with his friend Jim Thielman. Jim is retired and lives in Anchorage, Alaska. He won the First Place, William Stafford Award from the Washington Poetry Association, 1992. He has had poems recently in Abandoned Mine, Willow Review, Salal Review and Reflection
Annekathrin Hansen grew up near the rugged Baltic Sea beaches in North East Germany. She attended Waldemar Kraemer’s drawing and painting classes at Art School in Rostock and Heiligendamm, Germany. She studied and received an Engineering degree and worked in Germany and Australia. Anne interpreted aerial photos and created many types of maps in land surveying and for architectural offices. She is skilled in sculpturing, photography, print making, painting, mosaic and mixed media. Anne graduated from various workshops. Further self-studies led to her recent artwork. In 2010 she moved to Alaska.
Bill Heubner is an Anchorage based photographer, who in a former life was a Civil Engineer with the National Park Service. Bill has been a member of the Alaska Society of Outdoor and Nature Photographers and the Alaska Photographic Center since the late 1980s. He has been featured in numerous juried photography exhibitions and has received several awards for his work, the most recent being a Best of Show in Rarefied Light 2025, sponsored by the Alaska Photographic Center. He has also had seven solo shows in Anchorage.
Kathleen Holliday’s poems have appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press, New Ohio Review, Nimrod International Journal, Poet Lore, Poetry Super Highway, SHARK REEF, The Write Launch, and other journals. Her chapbooks, Putting My Ash on the Line (2020), Boatman, Pass By (2023), and A Cage in Search of a Bird (2025) were published by Finishing Line Press.
Amy Holonics came to Alaska from New Jersey to be a park ranger in Denali in 1985 with her watercolors and journal in her backpack. Three years later she settled in Anchorage where she raised two daughters and had a long career teaching art to children. She received an MFA in nonfiction at UAA. Her love of nature, people, and wild places continues to inspire her to create.
Mike Hull grew up in Carmel, California and spent much of his time exploring the beaches, and pine forests of the area. After college he taught high school for a time but felt called to return to Nature to regain a sense of balance. He spent ten months alone in a secluded canyon in the Coast Range. Looking for a greater solitude and more dramatic seasons, he built a small cabin in a remote area of Alaska’s tundra and spent 16 months. Later he married, and he and his wife spent 27 years teaching in the Native villages in rural Alaska.
Mark Hurtubise believes if one accepts all time is now, then simultaneous worlds abound around us. During 1970s, numerous works were published. Then family, graduate school, two university presidencies and a foundation CEO. After four decades, he is creating again like a pregnant bird. Recently, his offspring have appeared in such locales as LIT Magazine (cover photo); The Vassar Review; Recognitions: MonoVision, Monochrome, Dodha Magazine - Fine Art Awards 2025; NY Center for Photographic Art; Aura - Artist Spotlight, Penumbra - Editors’ Pick; USF, Alum News; Bard College Center/Study of Hate, filmed interview; Aji Magazine, interview; Stanford Social Innovation Review.
What is there left to say about Marc Janssen, other than he should eat more vegetables? Maybe his verse can be found scattered around the world in places like Pinyon, Orbis, Pure Slush, Cirque Journal, Two Thirds North and Poetry Salzburg also in his book November Reconsidered. Janssen coordinates the Salem Poetry Project - a weekly reading, the occasionally occurring Salem Poetry Festival, and keeps getting nominated for Oregon Poet Laurate. For more information visit marcjanssenpoet.com
Christopher J. Jarmick owns BookTree bookstore in Kirkland, WA. He has curated readings and special events for nearly 30 years. His latest collection of poetry is Not Aloud (2015, MoonPath Press), His mystery novel is The Glass Cocoon. Recently poems have appeared in anthologies: I Sing the Salmon Home (winner of the 2024 WA State Book Award for Poetry - Empty Bowl Press), Purr and Yowl (World Enough Writers - 2023), several issues of the 'zine Spread; The Examined Life & Interesting Time (East Point West Press 2024/25) and others. He is a founder of WesternWashingtonPoetsNetwork. org which lists approximately 82 readings, open mics and more throughout the region. PoetryIsEverything Blog.
Jill Johnson came to Alaska in1981 to work as a seasonal ranger at Denali National Park and was hooked. She continued to work in various Alaskan parks (best job ever!) until called to study medicine in 1994. She returned to Anchorage to work as a PA at Neighborhood Health and local shelters (second best job ever!). Then detoured to Eastern Oregon to care for an aging parent (yes, 3rd best job in the world!). She goes back and forth to her little home in AK and knows that she is lucky. And is thrilled whenever Cirque chooses a photo or a poem of hers to use in their gorgeous publication.
Laura Kalpakian is the author of many novels and five collections of prizewinning stories. Her short fiction has appeared in literary journals, magazines and anthologies internationally. Her most recent novel is The Great Pretenders (PRH/Berkley, 2019). Her first book of nonfiction, Memory Into Memoir: a Handbook for Writers (University of New Mexico Press, 2021) was a Gold Medalist in the 2022 Independent Press Awards. Forthcoming in 2026 from University of New Mexico Press is Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father’s Battle for Justice, a family memoir. Laura has won a Pushcart Prize, the PEN West Award, an NEA Fellowship and the Anahid Award for an American writer of Armenian ancestry. She has taught at UW. Educated on both the east and west coasts, she holds a BA and a Masters in History. She lives in Washington.
Katherine Kennedy is a retired journalist, writer and attorney, living in the Olympic Mountains of northwest Washington State. Her poetry and short stories have been published in Tidepools literary magazine, several Olympic Peninsula Author anthologies, the 2024 Ekphrastic Poetry collection, Inspired by Art, The Empty Bowl's Madrona Project, and Amethyst Review's 2024 volume, Thin Places and Sacred Spaces, as well as the May 2025 issue of The Braided Way's online magazine.
Naomi Klouda is the author of a novella, Anna's Whale, set in an Alaskan Sugpiaq village where a whale beaches itself during this time of climate change. It was selected as a 2025 Favorite Book 2025 by Anchorage Daily News reviewers (Dec. 6, 2025). She also wrote the Alaska Glacier Dictionary, an encyclopedic compendium of 700-named glaciers, their vital statistics, and histories. Klouda has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage and a BA in Journalism from Gonzaga University. Her short stories appeared in magazines including Amphibian Literary Magazine, After the Storm Magazine, Foreshadow Magazine, and Hope in a Grimdark World Anthology. She lives in Homer, Alaska.
Robin Koger, Alaskan - born and raised - is a poet, photographer, and fiber artist holding a B.Ed., membership in 49Writers, and the Alaska Writers Guild, where she placed 2nd in the 2025 Poetry Contest. Her work appears in KTNA’s Susitna Writer’s Voice, the FisherPoets Gathering, Alaska Women Speak, and Cirque Journal, as well as judging Cirque’s “A Moment in Time” Poetry Contest. Doing much of her writing in the Upper Susitna Valley, approximately forty miles from the summit of Denali, and at a remote fish camp at the base of the active volcano, Mt. Iliamna on the West side of Cook Inlet, memories, sensations, and observations of nature and relationships inspire Robin's work.
John Kooistra’s first book, Long Voyage Gathering Light, was the winner of the 2021 Vern Rutsala Book Prize for Cloudbank Books. A former commercial fisherman and university teacher of philosophy, he’s served as the artist-in-residence for Denali National Park and Holland America and published poetry and essays in various journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Artful Dodge, and Salt
Jonas Lamb lives in Juneau, Alaska with his wife and sons. When not practicing the parenting arts, waiting for winter, drinking in the laundry room or investing sweat and blood equity into his south-facing, storm blasted, 110-year-old house, he works as a librarian and at being a better middle-aged human. He is the author of the poetry collection, What Turtle Blood Tastes Like (2025, Finishing Line Press). His work has appeared in Tidal Echoes, The Kent Collector, and Juneau’s Poetry OmniBus among others.
Hello, my name is Peter Lantz and I am a photographer out of the Greater Seattle area. I have been doing Photography, with intention, since 2019. I took a Masterclass by Nigel Danson to hone in my skills in 2020. I started on a Canon T6 and eventually upgraded to my current 90D. I love to take pictures; it's one of my favorite things to do! I believe that a picture is worth 1000 words and that's been my aim with photography!
Eric le Fatte was educated at MIT and Northeastern University in biology and English. He has worked correcting library catalog cards in Texas, and as the Returns King at Eastern Mountain Sports in Massachusetts, but currently hikes, writes, teaches and does research on tiny things in the Portland, Oregon area. His papers have been published in journals including Nature, Cell, Virology, and the Journal of Molecular Biology His poems have appeared in Rune, The Mountain Gazette, The Poeming Pigeon,The Clackamas Literary Review, The Raven Chronicles, Windfall, Verseweavers, US#1 Worksheets, Perceptions, Clover, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Clade Song, Deep Wild, Pangyrus, Cathexis Northwest, Canary, the Oregon Poetry Calendar, and happily enough, in Cirque
Dan Liberthson, PhD has published five books of poetry and many poems in small journals, including The Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, South Coast Poetry Journal, Chaminade Literary Review, Encore, Cirque (forthcoming), Triggerfish, and Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine. He also has written a middle-grade fantasy novel and a spy thriller. Dan’s awards include second place in the William Stafford Memorial Award Poetry Contest (2020), the Maine Poets Society contest (2022), and the Poetry Society of Texas Award (2025). He was Secretary of the Oregon Poetry Association (OPA) from 2019-2022, and currently lives in San Francisco, CA and Cottage Grove, OR. Website: www.liberthson.com
Linda Lucky is an enthusiastic mixed-media artist from Huntington, Long Island, NY working on the 23rd year living in Alaska. She is a long time member of the International Gallery of Contemporary Art, a Museum Docent, a many year member of Poetry Parley, and has had four poems published in Cirque
Jerry Dale McDonnell is a retired wilderness and bear viewing guide, horse and mule packer, and Alaskan bush teacher. A collection of short stories, Out There in the Out There, was published by Cirque Press. His fiction, nonfiction, poems, and plays have appeared in Cirque Journal, Catamaran, South Dakota Review, Over the Transom, MungBeing, Alaska Sampler 2015, at the Last Frontier Theater Conference & others. His play “Engines of Time” was a finalist in the Tennessee Williams Literary Conference. McDonnell presently lives with his wife of 56 years a tad south of the Canadian border in the state of Washington.
Katy McKinney divides her time between her home in rural Trout Lake, Washington and in the winters, a sailboat on which she and her husband can be found cruising anywhere from Mexico to Panama. Her poetry has been published in a number of journals: The Sun, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Windfall, and others, as well as in several anthologies. Her first book, Fireproofing the Woods, was published in 2013 by Dancing Moon Press and was the winner of the 2019 North Street Book Prize in poetry. It’s available through www.katymckinney.com
Maria L Mecham is a poet based in Juneau, Alaska. Her poetry explores integration, embracing struggle, uncovering light, and the oddities of this spinning globe. You can find her work in Prosetrics: The Literary Magazine, Humana Obscura, and the Upon Learning That anthology.
Michael Meyers’ ten-minute play Smoke Your Secrets premiered at Portland’s 2024 Fertile Ground Festival. His one-act plays Underground Live! and Flint and Stone were staged at Fertile Ground in 2025 as well as at Oregon City’s Osterman Theatre. Michael is a playwright and screenwriter whose contest-winning feature film script The Iditarod Band was inspired by his years living in Alaska during the 1980’s. He co-wrote Willamette Writers’ 2025 short film Milestones and has earned many contest accolades for his feature screenplay Blue Eighteen and short film scripts The Subtext and Time Piece. He lives in Portland and can be reached at www. blueeighteen.com
Eric Morlock is a 73-year-old prose writer and playwright from Bainbridge Island, WA. He has published six short stories and three essays over the past couple of years. A one-act drama received a podcast performance in October 2024 by the Talking It Out production company (NYC), and a one-act comedy received a staged reading in August, 2025at the McLaren Memorial Comedy Festival (Texas.) Eric is an avid cyclist, volunteers as a driver and companion for fellow elders, and greatly enjoys his quiet writerly life on cool and beautiful Puget Sound.
Linda B. Myers traded snow boots for rain boots and moved from a marketing career in Chicago to Washington's Olympic Peninsula where she is now part of the old growth. She has Indy published ten novels, writes a monthly op/ed piece for the Sequim Gazette, and is a co-founder of Olympic Peninsula Authors, a group devoted to promoting the many fine authors out here in the wild. Her poetry has appeared in Cirque Literary Journal, Poetry Breakfast, Unleash Lit, publisher Empty Bowl's Madrona Series, and several other anthologies. Her first chapbook will be published in the spring of 2026.
Mary Odden has lived in roadless and rural Alaska places, working as a wildfire and aviation dispatcher, teen counselor, small newspaper owner, and writing teacher and cheerleader for local books. Odden’s book of memoir/essays, Mostly Water: Reflections Rural and North, was published in June 2020 by Boreal Books/Red Hen Press. Upcountry Cranberry, 2024, is a collection of lingonberry recipes, with poems and stories celebrating the gifts of Alaska’s woods. A novel, Sky Wheels, hopes to greet the light in February 2027. Check her out at maryodden.com
Bruce Parker has published two chapbooks, Ramadan in Summer (Finishing Line Press, 2022) and Tears for Things (Plan B Press, 2024). He holds a BA in History from the University of Maryland, Far East Division, Okinawa, Japan; and an MA in Secondary Education from the University of New Mexico. His work appears in Triggerfish Critical Review, The Field Guide, Wild Roof, Cerasus (UK), New American Writing and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner. Married to fellow poet and artist Diane Corson, he lives in Portland, Oregon.
Timothy Pilgrim, a septuagenarian Montana poet living in Bellingham, Washington, has several hundred acceptances from U.S. journals such as Seattle Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Cirque and Santa Ana River Review, and international journals such as Windsor Review in Canada and Prole Press in the U.K.-- and two books of poetry. See timothypilgrim.org
Sandra Porter: I am a retired writing teacher who has taught in Alaska for 40 years. I have taught secondary, college and spent time at Denali National Park facilitating nature writing courses for teachers. My publications have been mainly professional through the Alaska Writing Consortium, Bread Loaf School of English, and Orion Magazine. My journalistic publications include the Patagonia Regional Times and KTNA, our local public radio station. I have also had poems published online by 49 Writers.
Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised on a small island, Wrangell, Kaachxana.áak’w, in Southeast Alaska. She lives and writes in Lingit Aaní at her family’s fishcamp on the land of the Shtax’heen Kwáan. She is a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi and a founding member of Community Roots, the first LGBTQIA+ group on the island. She mentors Alaskan writers in two writers’ groups: Blue Canoe Writers and Drumlin Poets and just finished mentoring six Wrangell writers in the Snow Goose Island Writers Fellowship. Her work has previously appeared in Alaska Women Speak, Terrain Magazine, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She’s the author of several full-length poetry collections including Silty Water People from Cirque Press.
Emily Ransdell is the author of One Finch Singing, winner of the 2022 Lewis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Rattle, Terrain, New Letters, and elsewhere. Emily divides her time between Camas, WA and Manzanita, OR, where she teaches poetry workshops at the Hoffman Center for the Arts.
Diane Ray is a Seattle poet striving to keep her soul afloat in this unprintable time by crafting and getting out there poems of political protest. While Cirque is her home in poetry, her work also appears in Poetica, Canary, Sisyphus, Women's Studies Quarterly, Beyond Nuclear International, a number of anthologies, and elsewhere.
A novelist, screenwriter, and sometimes tundra poet—Don Rearden wrote the critically acclaimed The Raven's Gift, which made The Washington Post Notable List for Fiction, calling him “a master of the cliffhanger.” He co-authored the best-selling memoirs Never Quit and Warrior's Creed
A Professor of Writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage, his recent honors include Rasmuson Project Awards, a UAA Chancellor’s Award, a Contributions to Alaska Literacy Award, the Alaska Literary Prize for Fiction, and a finalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Screenwriting Contest. He grew up in Bethel and the villages of Akiak and Kasigluk and currently lives outside of Anchorage in the quirky mountain community of Bear Valley. David James with the Anchorage Daily News called Rearden’s latest book of poetry, Without A Paddle, “an unsentimental but compassionate volume for anxious times,” and “the tonic many of us need right now.”
Richard Edwin Roberts (1919-2007) was always a poet. He published an anthology in 1944 (Spring Comes in Many Ways) and Duty to Death, LD. in Oscar Williams’ The War Poets. His later poems appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Educational Forum, High Country News, Big Sky Journal, and Cirque. He was a Montana native and spent his life there. Through his poetry, we feel his connection with nature as he experienced it living in the woods of Montana.
Brenda Roper works as a Personal Assistant to interesting women in Santa Fe, NM where she relocated from Alaska over 17 years ago. A visual artist/writer who loves beauty, wine, walking and travel also enjoys taking photos to document her journey. She has walked several Pilgrim paths in Spain/Italy and recently started writing on Substack. https://brendaroper. substack.com,https://brendaroper.com
Lorna Rose is a Pacific Northwest writer and speaker. Her narrative nonfiction and poetry have been recognized by Pacific Northwest Writers Association and the Oregon Poetry Association and have appeared or are forthcoming in About Place Journal, Painted Bride Quarterly, Writers Resist, Huffington Post and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a grant from Artist Trust to further her project. A recent graduate of the MFA program at Augsburg University, Lorna is at work on a memoir about going from LA party girl to trail worker in rural Alaska. When not wrangling her two children, she fantasizes about being interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air. More at www. lornarose.com
Stan Sanvel Rubin’s poems have appeared in Agni, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest and many US magazines as well as in China, Canada, Belgium, and Ireland. Four full-length collections include There. Here. (Lost Horse Press) and Hidden Sequel (Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize). Born in Philadelphia, he has lived on the north Olympic Peninsula of Washington for more than twenty years, during which time he was essay-reviewer in poetry for Water Stone Review out of Hamline University.
Reefka Schneider, artist, is the co-creator of three well-reviewed ekphrastic exhibits, Borderlines: Drawing Border Lives/ Fronteras: dibujando las vidas fronterizas, The Magic of Mariachi/ La Magia del Mariachi, and most recently Last Poet in the Woods. The paintings “El Salto Over Arroyo Seco” and “Walking Rain at Sunset” are watercolors done in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico and featured in Last Poet in the Woods. You can learn more about her and her exhibits and artwork at the website https://poetry-art.com/
Steven Schneider, poet and scholar, is the author and co-creator of the ekphrastic books and exhibits Borderlines: Drawing Border Lives / Fronteras: dibujando las vidas fronterizas and The Magic of Mariachi/ La Magia del Mariachi. His poems “Arroyo Seco” and “Walking Rain” are featured in Last Poet in the Woods, a new ekphrastic exhibit he co-created with the artist Reefka. In 2023 Steven received the Distinguished Career Award from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where he is Professor of Creative Writing. You can learn more about him and his books and exhibits at the websitehttps://poetry-art.com/
Rob Schnelle is a multi-decade resident of Ellensburg, Washington, author of Valley Walking (Washington State UP) and Shiver with Me Warmly (Bootpath). My work has been featured in the Seattle Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Weber Studies, the Bellevue Literary Review, etc.
Ana Maria Spagna is the author of several books including Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going, Reclaimers, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, and Pushed. Her poems have appeared in Bellingham Review, Pilgrimage, North Dakota Quarterly, Split Rock Review, and What Rough Beast, and are collected in Mile Marker Six. She lives in the North Cascades and teaches at Wenatchee Valley College and in the MFA program in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University.
Mary Lou Spartz is a poet, playwright, and long-time Alaskan and Juneauite. Poetry, writing, or reading never ceases to challenge and delight her. Capturing the joyful and the not-so-joyful never loses its appeal.
Cheryl Stadig currently finds herself inspired by the forests, fields, and waters of Maine and New Hampshire, returning to Alaska for an extra jolt of joy and creativity whenever she can. She enjoys exploring life’s infinite details in her photography and writing. Her work has appeared in several previous issues of Cirque, Inside Passages, and other publications.
Kathleen Stancik lives on the eastern slope of Washington’s Cascade Mountains. Her work has been published by Cirque, Portland Review, Typehouse, Shrub-Steppe Poetry Journal, Yakima Coffeehouse Poets and others. She was awarded the Tom Pier Prize by the Yakima Coffeehouse Poets in 2018 and 2024 and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023 by the editors of Cirque
Cynthia Lee Steele is a writer and photographer based in Anchorage, Alaska. Her nonfiction and poetry appear in Cirque, Entropy Magazine, Blue Mountain Review, Pensive, and other journals, as well as the anthology When Home Is Not Safe. She serves as Associate Editor and publicist for Cirque and her memoir Thirty Before Thirteen is forthcoming. She is a Poetry Judge for the 43rd Annual UAA/Anchorage Daily News Creative Writing Contest for 2026.
Richard Stokes is a Juneau resident of over 50 years. His prose and poetry work usually reflects his love of nature, his aging or his boyhood in the sharply defined black-white world of rural Georgia in the 1940-50’s. He graduated from Emory in Atlanta in 1961.
Sheary Clough Suiter grew up in Eugene, Oregon, then lived in Alaska and Colorado until her recent relocation back to the Pacific Northwest. Her encaustic fine art is represented in Anchorage, Alaska by Stephan Fine Art, in Camas, Washington by the Attic Gallery, in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado by Stones, Bones, & Wood Gallery, and in Colorado Springs, Colorado by Auric Gallery. When she's not traveling in her camper van along the backroads of America with her artist partner Nard Claar, Suiter works from her home studio in Springfield, Oregon near the Willamette River. Online at @shearycloughsuiter and www.sheary.me
James P. Sweeney is the author of two books, The List and Alaska Expedition Marine Life Solidarity. His stories have been published in Cirque, The Alpinist, Homer News, Alaska Public Radio, Anchorage Press, to name a few. He lived in Alaska for 35 years, but currently, is taking care of his mother, her dogs and cat in Chico, California. He still skis and climbs and is an avid vegetable gardener. He is currently working on a series of short stories about dead friends he loved and admired he hopes will become a book. His Substack account carries much of his recent work. https:// jsweeney295.substack.com/publish/home
Mary Ellen Talley’s poems have appeared in journals including Louisville Review, Deep Wild, and Trampoline as well as in multiple anthologies. Her chapbooks are: Postcards from the Lilac City from Finishing Line Press, Taking Leave from Kelsay Books, and Infusion online at Red Wolf Journal. She resides in Seattle, WA and is a retired school-based speech/language pathologist (SLP.) Her website is www.maryellentalley.com
Rowan Tate: I am a native Oregonian born and raised in the woods near Mt. Hood. I have never been afraid of "the big one."
Connie Taylor was an Alaska commercial fisherman for twenty years. Then a printer, art gallery owner, paralegal, auctioneer, bookkeeper. Now a photographer, webmaster, author. Her poems have been published in Alaska Women Speak, Litmora Literary Magazine, UCSF Meri Center Poetry Anthology 2024, and Lombardi Voices. https://fathomtwist.com
Kelly Terwilliger is the author of three collections of poetry, with a book of poetry, prose, and paintings forthcoming. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in the US, Canada, and Britain and she won first place in the Guernsey International Poetry Competition—which means, to her great delight, her work has also appeared on buses and in an airport in the Channel Islands. She was awarded a residency at PLAYA in Central Oregon to work on a collaborative writing project about swimming in wild places. Kelly also teaches and performs as an oral storyteller. Jim Thiele worked as a photographer for a biological textbook company for several years before moving to Alaska in 1974. He has worked for The Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the University of Alaska as a biologist. He is a recently retired financial advisor. His photographs have been seen in several publications, including Alaska Magazine, Alaska Geographic, and Cirque. He lives in Anchorage with his wife Susan. Taking photos forces him to stop and really see the world.
Lucy Tyrrell’s writing and photography is inspired by nature and wild landscapes, outdoor pursuits (mushing, hiking, canoeing), and travel. After 16 years in Alaska, she traded a big mountain (Denali) for a big lake (Superior). Lucy lives the spirit of Alaska deeply, even in Wisconsin. She was Bayfield Poet Laureate 2020–2021. She has been published in a variety of local and regional poetry anthologies. Her essay “A Special Kind of App” was nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize by Alaska Women Speak. She serves on the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission (2023–).
Sean Ulman's children's book, Whimby Shines will be published by Circles, an imprint of Cirque Press, in 2026.
Angela Waldie is a writer, editor, and university instructor, living in Treaty 7 Territory, in Calgary, Alberta. As she grew up in Creston, BC, her poetry often crosses and recrosses the Continental Divide. Her first poetry collection, A Single Syllable of Wild, will be published by Frontenac House in 2026. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Fire, Grain, Event, Feral, Freefall, The Antigonish Review, The Willows Wept Review, and various anthologies.
I'm taylor d. waring, a heavy metal musician, mystical surrealist, and educator dwelling in Spokane, WA.
Matt Witt is a writer and photographer in Talent, Oregon. His work may be seen at MattWittPhotography.com. He is the author and photographer for the book, Monumental Beauty: Wonders Worth Protecting in the CascadeSiskiyou National Monument, and author of Make Holidays Your Own: Celebrate Holidays Throughout the Year in More Meaningful and Inclusive Ways. He publishes a free online bulletin called World Wide Work on books, films, and music you may have missed. He has been Artist in Residence at Crater Lake National Park, Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness Foundation, CascadeSiskiyou National Monument, Mesa Refuge, and PLAYA at Summer Lake.
Tonja Woelber is a long-time Alaskan who loves the mountains in all weathers. She enjoys nature-themed and Asian inspired poetry.
Robin Woolman has long been a performer and teacher of physical theater in Portland, Oregon. She loves backpacking in the high country or strolling the neighborhood while playing with words in her head. She dates her passion for writing back to Miss Mataroli’s second grade class… More recent works appear in Deep Wild, Poeming Pigeon, Westchester Review, Red Shoe Press’s Oregon Poetry Calendars, Ecotheo, Tiny Seed, Of a Certain Age, Song of Eretz, and of course Cirque. Robin loves participating in Cirque’s live poetry readings!
Emmie Wuest graduated from Arizona State University with a Bachelor's in English and Anthropology in 2024. After dipping her toes into politics, Emmie quickly realized she was afraid of large groups of angry senior citizens. She now works in operations and enjoys keeping systems and people on track for success. When she isn’t sending follow-up emails, Emmie tells stories about the feelings and images that haunt us in delightful ways through poetry. Emmie has been published in Canyon Voices Literary Magazine and The Chicago Writers Association. You can follow her on Instagram @emmiethepoet
Brian Wright is a photographer and writer residing in Coastal Alaska whose goal is to evoke the feelings of life in the last frontier. He has degrees in creative writing and literature from Colorado Mesa University and has written for national publications such as Rock & Ice and the Mountain Gazette. When not tromping through the fantasy-like Alaskan backcountry, he is usually at home with his beautiful wife, amazing daughter, and shaggy mutt.
Falls Creek
Bill Heubner
Kissing Kevin
an american nurse in the vietnam War
by sara berg
War is hell for men. We’ve always known that. As you read this book, you will discover that war is hell for women too. Sara bravely walked into that hell and made a difference. Then she bravely wrote her deeply personal memoir. I applaud her raw honesty, her courage to relive the mud and blood of the Vietnam experience exposing the emotional price paid by her and her sister veterans while documenting the immense contribution and sacrifice of women in military uniform during the Vietnam War.
Diane Carlson Evans, Captain, Army Nurse Corps, Vietnam 1968–69. Author of Healing Wounds: A Vietnam War Combat Nurse’s 10-Year Fight to Win Women a Place of Honor in Washington, D.C. and Founder, Vietnam Women’s Memorial
In this compellingly readable narrative, Sara Berg describes improvising tools in a wartime field hospital to ease the pain of badly wounded American soldiers and helpless Vietnamese orphans. Her searing account would be almost too much to bear if it weren’t for the emergence of an extraordinary counter-narrative: the constant struggle by Berg and some colleagues to hold onto compassion and love. She tears her heart out and shows it to you. These memories of war pulsate with the fierce glow of life itself.
Tom Kizzia, author of Pilgrim’s Wilderness and Cold Mountain Path
Available on $15
Surrounded by Weasels
by Josie Gray and Tess Gallager
Surrounded by Weasels was compiled by Tess Gallager for Josie Gray, her companion for a quarter of a century, who told her these stories at Lake House, and before their hearth at Abbey Cottage in Ballindoon and in America at large. During the collection period, between 1994 and 2006, Josie often told stories while in motion, walking with Tess by the Morse Creek near her home in Port Angeles, Washington, riding ferryboats, and on treks to the Pacific Ocean. Shortly before his death, he recalled the many stories they had kept back from their initial book, , in 2007, and asked Tess to bring those together in Surrounded by Weasels
Sandra Kleven Michael Burwell Editors & Publishers
About the Authors
The late Josie Gray was born on the shores of Lough Arrow and has lived in counties Waterford, Wexford and Sligo. He worked as a fruit salesman, barman, farmer and rate collector, and in various family businesses, hauling turf, fruit, sand and gravel. He started painting in the mid-1990s and exhibited in Ireland and the US. In his retirement he fished, gardened, painted and told the odd story.
Tess Gallagher, poet, essayist, short-story and screen writer, was born in Washington State. She has published eleven distinguished collections of poetry, including Dear Ghosts in 2007. She was encouraged by her late husband, Raymond Carver, to write short stories, which were published in The Lover of Horses (1986), At the Owl Woman Saloon (1996), and another collection of selected stories called The Man from Kinvara (2009).
This beautifully rendered memoir of grief and hope, Out of the Dark, is available at local bookstores including Mosquito Books, Title Wave, River City Books, Fireside Books and on Amazon.
Forced Landing
“David McElroy does exceptionally well what the best poets do: He �inds the extraordinary within the ordinary, and he does it often and with apparent ease. He possesses a sharp eye for detail, an artist’s eye, and a keen ear as well (if not a musician’s, then at least a music lover’s), and he speaks eloquently in these poems over a broad range of experience that re�lects his careers as teacher, bush pilot, smokejumper, and observant, insightful, and passionate world traveler. Consider “Paris Blues” where he brings in old �ilm, jazz, crazy weather, and (from his home in Alaska) bucking �irewood. Turn the next page and you �ind yourself in a rice paddy in Laos. Eschewing the travelogue, McElroy demonstrates his gift to make the exotic worlds of his travels, notably to Southeast Asia in this superb collection, accessible and human.”
—Ron McFarland, author of A Variable Sense of Things, Confessions of Late Night Librarian, and The Rockies in First Person
Sandra Kleven
Michael
Editors
Burwell
Forced Landing Forced Landing
& Publishers
David McElroy
About the Author
David McElroy lives in Anchorage, Alaska. He recently retired as a bush pilot in the Arctic. He has worked as a smokejumper, teacher in Guatemala, and taxi driver in Seattle. He attended the Universities of Minnesota, Montana, and Western Washington. He has been published in national journals including Antaeus, Cirque, The Nation, Poetry Northwest, The Chicago Review, and The Alaska Quarterly Review. He has four previous books of poems: Making It Simple, Mark Making, Just Between Us, and Water the Rocks Make. He is a recipient of grants from the National Council on the Arts, the state of Alaska Council on the Arts and Humanities. He was given the Andy Hope Award for poetry. Like wiping a foggy windshield, these poems are my attempt to clarify what experience means and where it might be taking me. In�luenced by my life in Alaska working as a bush pilot, as well as foreign travel, they deal with the state of nature, love, death, aftermath of war in Southeast Asia, rebirth, and, again, love, old and new.
From Torrey House Press, 2026, The Divination of Salmon
Grounded deeply in Southeast Alaska, salmon, and a way of life that is inextricable from them both, Divination of Salmon is poignant, timely, and evocative. It provides an unparalleled window into what it is like to go to sleep dappled with fish scales, to hear the zing of a line, and to live in the “gray rainlight.” Evocative and powerful, Divination of Salmon brings the reader deep into memory, a changing present, and the unknown future and the work to keep salmon swimming up our rivers for generations to come.”
~ Mary Catherine Martin, Communications Director at SalmonState
Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised on a small island, Wrangell, Kaachxana.áak’w, in Southeast Alaska where she still lives and writes at her family’s fishcamp on the land of the Shtax’heen Kwáan. She is a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi and a founding member of Community Roots, the first LGBTQIA+ group on the island. She mentors Alaskan writers in two writers’ groups: Blue Canoe Writers and the Drumlin Poets. She’s the author of several full-length poetry collections, a short story collection, and a foodoir.
Also from Prescott, Silty Water People, Cirque Press
Last Call of the Dark POEMS
MARY ELIZA CRANE
I opened the door and walked into this collection of poetry, immediately moved, and deeply connected to Crane’s pureness of observation through the stunning simplicity of her words. Her poems are in part a lullaby to the earth, both existential and paradoxical. Simultaneously, we are fragile and mighty, joyful and sorrowful, consumed with hope and hopelessness.
No matter how far she roams, Crane takes a deep dive into life and treats us to gorgeous places.
– Monica Devine, author of Water Mask
In Mary Crane’s new collection....twin themes of vulnerability to the human impulse to destroy plus her resulting alienation weave through the poems.
These are brave poems by a brave poet, celebrations at the edge of the abyss.
– Peter Ludwin, author of An Altar of Tides and Gone to Gold Mountain
Mary Eliza Crane is a western Washington poet who has resided in the hills above the Snoqualmie Valley for nearly four decades. A regular feature at poetry venues throughout Puget Sound, she has read her poetry from Woodstock to L.A., as well as with Siberian poets in Novosibirsk, Russia, and has been translated into Russian. Mary has two volumes of poetry published by Gazoobi Tales, What I Can Hold in My Hands (2009) and At First Light (2011). Her work has appeared in many literary journals as well as several regional and national anthologies. Mary is a cocurator and co-host of Duvall Poetry in her home community, a monthly reading series which has been running continuously for over twenty years.
Cirque Press proudly announces
Give Me an Endless Range by John Baalke
In Give Me an Endless Range, the vast and the detailed balance: ice and monsoon, tundra swan and sandhill crane, car and coracle, adobe and lighthouse. The sweep moves slowly through hidden details where unknowables wait to be known.
Wang Wei and Li Po hover over Baalke’s whole collecti on, acknowledged familiarly in his adaptati ons of their poems.
John Baalke takes us on a pathless trail to the temple of nature as itself… in this endless range we’re given, we know ourselves inseparable from its heartrending “whelm and wonder” of the all that is, right here.
—Jeanine
Hathaway, author of Long after Lauds
On Amazon and Bookshop.org $15.00
John Baalke was born and raised in Wisconsin, but has spent most of the last 40 years in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. He has served as tribal administrator for Pedro Bay Village, located in southwest Alaska on the shores of Lake Iliamna (Nila Vena), for nearly 30 years.
Sandra Kleven-Michael Burwell Publishers and Editors
“An
PATRICK DIXON
Alaskan Fisherman with Considerable Poetic and Storytelling Gifts”
Kathleen Flenniken, former Washington state Poet Laureate and author of Plume and Post Romantic
We were alone on the boata green deckhand and a middle-aged Norwegian riding emerald rollers sprinkled with drops of gold in the late afternoon sun.
“Patrick Dixon draws on decades of commercial salmon fishing to bring his world vividly to life—its grit, beauty, and hard-won wisdom. In this moving collection, he reflects on a life shaped by sea and memory, asking, “How did I get to be so lucky?” We’re lucky he chose to tell it.”
Nancy Lord, author of Fishcamp and Beluga Days
Cirque Press proudly announces
GOD TALK OF THE GORGE
by ERIC GORDON JOHNSON
Reading Eric Johnson’s poetry in God Talk of the Gorge takes us beyond the alpenglow. From the icy waters of Baxter Bog to a hospital bedside, we swoop up with the Great Horned Owl and linger overhead with the sweet ache of seeing a little free library in the snow and hold our breath as a grizzly saunters near. In this collection, we pause with the poet at the edge of a gorge for the ritual of intentional listening about what it means to be human.
—Vivian Faith Prescott, Poet, author of The Divination of Salmon and Silty Water People
On Amazon and Bookshop.org $15.00
Eric Gordon Johnson was born in Fairbanks in 1948 and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. He is a retired geotechnical engineer, a mountain runner, a cross-country skier, a clarinet player and a tenor. He sings in the Anchorage Concert Chorus and the Anchorage Opera Chorus. He and his wife live adjacent to Chugach State Park on the mountains above Anchorage.
Sandra Kleven-Michael Burwell Publishers and Editors
The North Face of Summer
by Russell Tabbert
It’s June, 1979, and many Alaskans are furious. President Jimmy Carter has “locked up” 100 million acres of federal lands in the state, severely limiting what can be done on them. The Kantishna Hills just west of Mt. McKinley National Park are now in a national monument, and long-established placer gold mining operations are subject to Park Service rules and oversight. However, the miners are refusing to cooperate and are angrily protesting. Equally determined environmentalists, led by the Sierra Club, are demanding that the Park Service shut down the mining.
Over the summer, tension and threats of violence in the Kantishna community increase. The story unfolds through the eyes of miners, Park Service officials, lodge operators, and visitors who are caught up in the conflict. Several of them are also dealing with personal and family issues. As they interact with each other and react to events occurring around them, they change and grow. However, the controversy over the mining remains stalemated.
Set in Interior Alaska in 1979, The North Face of Summer vividly portrays the clash between gold miners and environmentalists in the newly created Denali National Monument. Russell Tabbert’s story dramatizes the impact that this conflict has on the lives of an extraordinary cast of characters. It opens up a fascinating world of adventure, beauty and conflict in the shadow of North America’s highest peak.
—John Morgan, author of The Hungers of the World: New and Collected Later Poems, and The Nancy Poems
“The North Face of Summer” offers a compassionate look at the people inescapably pulled into what happened. It’s an unusually mature book for such a fraught topic, but by choosing the difficult path of broadmindedly exploring a volatile time still contentiously fought over, Tabbert serves a monumental piece of Alaska’s history well.
—Review by David James of the Fairbanks Daily-News Miner and the Anchorage Daily News
✴ Escape the summer heat with the ultimate wilderness adventure. Available on Amazon in paperback or e-book. ✴
People disappear in Alaska. The edge can smudge out those who challenge it–even if they do everything right.
A
true story of triumph and tragedy along Alaska ’ s maritime frontier.
“He was Jack to family and friends, John to those who knew him in Alaska. Her family called her Carolyn. To friends she was Chester West. In Alaska she became Ginger. They were both from Pennsylvania and met at Seward in the late Sixties.”
Ambitious and self-reliant, John and Ginger Davidson were admired as picture-perfect archetypes of Alaska’s back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s. Their legend only grew after their tragic end.
Tom Kizzia, author of Pilgrim’s Wilderness and Cold Mountain Path
Doug Capra writes a powerful, captivating, and honest tale about two young dreamers on their soul quest in Alaska unflappable in their vision to forge a more authentic life in peaceful solitude, far away from the torment tearing America apart.
Kathleen Tarr, author, We Are All Poets Here
A WONDERFUL-TERRIBLE GOD
BY THE REV. JUDITH W. LETHIN
A Journey of Spiritual Awakening in Native Alaska
With deep reverence for Alaska Native wisdom, Judith Lethin shares a powerful story of faith, courage, and healing through her service in the Native villages of Kachemak Bay and the Lower Yukon.
Judith Lethin’s tremendous spirit, love for all beings, humor, and compassion fill her memoir like a cup of communion wine. Her stories—which flow from her ‘cowgirl’ beginnings to her community service as a healer to her long devotion as “church lady” along the lower Yukon River—are infused with wisdom learned from Alaska Native elders and cultural practices, A Wonderful-Terrible God is a book about faith that is, at its heart, an exploratory and rewarding journey into the many ways of knowing.
—NANCY LORD, AUTHOR OF FISHCAMP AND BELUGA DAYS, FORMER ALASKA WRITER LAUREATE
The Reverend Judith Wegman Lethin is a writer, Episcopal priest, and retreat master. She holds a Masters of Arts in Teaching, Masters of Divinity, and Masters of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction. Lethin has published poems and stories in Chaplaincy Today, Alaska Dispatch News, Cirque, and Manifestations Journal. She lives with her husband, Kris, and two golden retrievers, Ruby and Winter, in Seldovia, Alaska.
Cirque, published in Anchorage, Alaska, is a regional journal created to share the best writing in the region with the rest of the world. Cirque submissions are not restricted to a “regional” theme or setting.
Cirque invites emerging and established writers living in the North Pacific Rim—Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Hawaii, Yukon Territory, Alberta, British Columbia and Chukotka—to submit short stories, poems, creative nonfiction, translations, plays, reviews of first books, interviews, photographs, and artwork for Cirque’s next issue.
Issue #31—Reading Period -- September 22, 2025 to September 21, 2026
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Eligibility: you were born in, or are currently residing in, or have previously lived for a period of not less than 5 years in the aforementioned North Pacific Rim region.
-- Poems: 5 poems MAX
-- Fiction, Nonfiction, Plays: 12 pages MAX (double spaced).
-- Artwork and Photography : 10 images MAX accepted in JPEG or TIFF format, sent as email attachments. Please send images in the highest resolution possible; images will likely be between 2 and 10mb each. If you do not submit full-size photo files at time of submission, we will respond with an email reminder. No undersize images or thumbnails will be eligible for publication.
-- Bio: 100 words MAX.
-- Contact Info: Make sure to keep your contact email current and be sure that it is one that you check regularly. If your contact information changes, make sure to inform us at Cirque. To ensure that replies from Cirque bypass your spam filter and go to your inbox, add Cirque to your address book.
-- Submit to https://cirque.submittable.com
-- Replies average two to three months after deadlines, and we don’t mind you checking with us about your submissions.
-- Cirque requires no payment or submission fees. However, Cirque is published by an independent press staffed by volunteers. Your donations keep Cirque Press going. You will find donation buttons on Submittable and you can also support us via PayPal to cirquejournal@gmail.com.
Thanks for your poetry, prose, images and financial support.
