Preview CQ 67.1

VOLUME 67.1

DAVID MOOLTEN

MARIA ADELMANN

BEN HINSHAW

LIZ PRATO

DEVON BALWIT

ANDREW JARVIS

DAVID ROCK

RAY BARFIELD

JILL KRESS KARN

ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

GEORGE BISHOP

GRANT KITTRELL

PETER SAPIRA

LISA BUBERT

DAN KRAINES

SOMMER SCHAFER

CHRISTOPHER CITRO

CODY KUCKER

BARBARA SCHWARTZ

CLAYTON ADAM CLARK

JENNA LE

NICOLE STOCKBURGER

DAVID CULWELL

JAMES MAYOR

NASTASSJA SWIFT

BENJAMIN CUTLER

RON MCFARLAND

ANNIE WOODFORD

ROSALI PEREIRA ESPINOSA

OWEN MCLEOD

ALIESA ZOECKLEIN

JOHN HARVEY

MATT W MILLER

Fall/Winter 2017

RAGE HEZEKIAH

V o l u m e 6 7.1

ELLEN ADAMS

FALL/WINTER 2017

Founded in 1948 P U B L I S H E D AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O RT H C A R O L I N A – C H A P E L H I L L

Fall/Winter 2017

V O L U M E 6 7. 1 E DI TO RS- I N - C H I EF

Moira Marquis Sarah George-Waterfield F I C T I O N E DI TO R

Laura Broom P O E T RY E DI TO R

Calvin Olsen N O N - F I C T I O N E D ITO R

Travis Alexander MA N AG I N G E DI TOR

Andrew Kim RE V I E WS E DI TO R

Ben Murphy C OV E R DE SI G N

Sarah George-Waterfield

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Contents

Fall/Winter 2017 | VOLUME 67.1

FICTION BEN HINSHAW Brazil and Back 14 PETER SAPIRA Glyphs 36 MARIA ADELMANN Unattached 50 SOMMER SCHAFER Leaving Home 85 LISA BUBERT Formation 170

POETRY OWEN MCLEOD

Visita Inesperada 9 Report from the Surface 10

GRANT KIT TRELL

No Emergency 12 Out Of The Wood 13

DAVID MOOLTEN

Loon 46 Alien Abduction 47

JENNA LE

Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends 48

DAVID ROCK

Raising Children 60

ALIESA ZOECKLEIN

Selling the Sailboat 61

DEVON BALWIT

Privy to Secrets 62 Punch Drunk 63

BENJAMIN CUTLER

The Geese Who Might Be Gods 64

GEORGE BISHOP

What It Was Like That Day 66

RAGE HEZEKIAH

Point Reyes 67

CODY KUCKER

Father of the Yard 68

DAN KRAINES

Cataract River 83

RAYMOND BARFIELD

Hail Storm 84

Traces in Creation, Like Knowing the Color

Blue 104

CLAYTON ADAM CLARK

Boy Passing Diogenes in Public Square 105 Zygo- 106

BARBARA SCHWARTZ

After Miscarriage 108

Panpsychism 110

ANNIE WOODFORD

Amid Incantations 111

CHRISTOPHER CITRO

Sunsets Like Strobe Lights 132

That’s Why They Invented Cheescake 133

NICOLE STOCKBURGER

Full Beaver Moon 134

MAT T W MILLER

Invocation at the Merrimack River 136

Zenith of a Given Place 140

DAVID CULWELL

The Homesteader 141

ANDREW JARVIS

The Pest 158

The Vessel 159

JILL KRESS KARN

Country girl 160

Elyria 166

ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

La Isla 168

RON MCFARLAND

Opening Day on Smallmouth Bass 190

ROSALI PEREIRA ESPINOSA Ezra Pound in Varadero 192

The Labors 193

NONFICTION

JAMES MAYOR The Last Vision 112

LIZ PRATO Return to the Kahala 117

JOHN HARVEY The Indiana Book of the Dead 146

ELLEN ADAMS If We Learn from Our Targets 162

ART

NATASSJA SWIFT

Artist’s Statement 70

Camouflaged 71

Concealer 72

She Was Light Enough to Pass 74

Sometimes I Wish It Was Like Hers 75

But My Skin Was Always Darker 76

Now You Can Touch My Hair 77

I Unpacked As They Played With Their Dolls 78

I Sat Still While They Rode Their Bikes 79

I Looked Away As They Held Hands Down the Hall 80

I Changed While They Watched 81

REVIEWS

ELISA FAISON The Lightkeepers by Abby Geni 194

TRISHA REMETIR Not One Day by Anne Garreta,

translated by Emma Ramadan 198

OWEN MCLEOD

Visita Inesperada Unbidden, pink winged, she arrives alone in her gilded boat, come down from her tower above the town, her heart a great pulley to the moon.

Hexagonal room, green with walls, we sit—she upright, clasping that hand of mine, me upside down in my head, bone white tablecloth map of unmapped.

She summons the stuff of my world: orange cat, blue tree, black sky, three ways to pray, an occasional daughter, topaz bottles of aging maybe hope.

I wish more for life than this she knows and starts my hand across the cloth, her sun somehow a smidgen in my palm, rising from nothing to syllable to song.

Night is gone. Pink wings fold, cold anchor hoists, the moon reels in its mind. Birds bring up the dawn. Schoolchildren gather for the pumpkin bus, a huddle of ghosts in fog.

OWEN MCLEOD

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BEN HINSHAW

Brazil and Back

One fire after another—that’s how I remember that summer.

Every time they’d put one out, the next would go from a couple sparks to full-blown inferno in an afternoon. The drought was a few years old by then, so nothing needed much persuading to burn. The names weren’t people’s names, not like with storms. Canyon Fire, Rim Fire, Rush Fire. Stanislaus Complex, Tuolumne Complex. When you hear complex you know those guys have their hands full. Smoke hung and drifted in the air. First thing you smelled in the morning, last thing you smelled at night. Even on the news they seemed nervous.

Five percent contained, they said. Ten percent, seven percent. Cause unknown, they said. Mandatory evacuations.

One day, I asked Sean what contained meant. Anything to get him talking. He’d been home a couple months by then. On the sofa, Raiders sweatpants, pale, clammy, scruffy beard, not shaky exactly but not steady either. It was eleven in the morning and I was still in my PJs. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t been to bed. Hadn’t moved, in fact, since I got in from work, except maybe to pee and grab snacks.

“Blocked off, I guess,” he said, eyes on the screen. Two nights later, I’d get the call from Folsom P.D., telling me where he was.

“Out? Like they’ve put ten percent of it out?”

He changed the channel to Tree Fu Tom, some kids’ thing he was way too into then. “More like that much can’t go any farther.”

“So it’s still burning just as bad? Just not moving so fast.”

He made an impatient sound. Then he scratched his head like it was urgent, behind the left ear, for way longer than you’d need for a regular itch. “You get bit or something?” I said.

He didn’t hear me. “It means it’s still kicking their asses,” he said.

He shifted, grimacing, which meant his hip was starting to hurt again where the bullets went in and messed everything up. I watched him dig the little plastic bottle from his pocket, shake out two pills. As he swallowed them, he held it up to count. Four left.

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“We’ve got bug spray, you know.” I got up to go take a shower.

“Help yourself.”

First time I put the feelers out, I’ll admit, I was nervous. Ask the wrong dude and word goes straight upstairs to Lawrence. Zero tolerance, he always said. And since everything tanked and the foreclosure wolves started sniffing around, keeping that job was more important than ever. But I figured I’d never had so much as a warning.

Plus, customers loved me. I had regulars blowing 5K a week, more, on the roulette wheels and poker tables. Besides, there’s no law against inquiring, right? And I could always say they weren’t for me.

As soon as I got to work, Gabe, a familiar face, rolled in with three fishing buddies. “Anita,” he said, “these gentlemen wish to feast like kings and be waited on by a princess.” So that kept me busy for a while. Things got slow around ten, and I leaned into the kitchen to cozy up to some slicers and dicers. Half were illegals anyway, so I figured I was safe. Plus the testosterone in there was so thick you could scrape it off the ceiling with a squeegee—I only had to squeeze a bicep or two and they were lining up to give me the lowdown. One, sweet little guy with a wispy goatee, offered to escort me right up to Beverly’s spot. Despues, he said, nodding at his boss. I know Bev, I told him. Or thought I did.

Bev had been around then what, four years? She had a son too, thirteen or so. Older by now, I guess. These days she doesn’t ask about Sean, and when I tell her anyway she gets this look on her face like someone put this poor bitch out of it. But she still gives me what I ask for.

At two, when I was done, I tracked her down. I let her deliver a tray of beers and grab her purse, then followed her past the slots and tables into the restrooms in the far corner, over by the shitty old machines that no one played. She peed and then we had to wait for this haggard old crone to finish farting and sighing and washing her hands like they were caked in her husband’s dried blood. Once she’d shuffled out, I told Bev what I was hunting.

“Perks?” she said. “Sure, baby. Ankle still giving you heck?”

BEN HINSHAW

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That was in reference to a night the previous year when I’d rolled clean off my left heel and torn some ligament or cartilage or other, not to mention taken a fresh plate of shrimp carbonara and smeared it all up and down some guy’s plaid fleece shirt. I nodded.

Bev produced the pills and took my money in a single smooth move.

Twenty-five in a little Ziploc baggy. Actually she tucked them right in my bra and straightened me up like she was wiping my nose before she packed me off to school. “You want stronger, I got stronger. Just holler, alright?”

I drove home with them right there against my chest. He needs it, I told myself, he needs it and they don’t give him enough.

Sean was, like always, awake. When he first came home, he’d just slept and slept, which later I discovered was a bad sign. Sixteen, eighteen hours a day. I’d taken the week off to settle him in, cook his favorites, do his laundry. Chicken chimichangas, pulled pork. Keep him company. That was one thing they warned us about. An uncharacteristic inclination towards solitude. Some other mother was all, Isn’t it all gonna be un-cara-tristic? Isn’t that why we’re here?

But no one mentioned too much sleep, so I just let him wallow. I mean, how tired must these boys be? Here’s us bitching about our memory foam being too hot or the neighbors cranking up their video games—meanwhile these boys are over there curled up in the desert knowing some little fucker is probably at that exact moment strapping explosives to the dog you just taught to catch a Frisbee.

That was one Sean told me, later, when I did get him talking a little.

The screaming kicked in his third week back. I heard him from the driveway when I got home from work. By the time I got up there he was quiet again, out cold but crazy sweaty. And then I smelled it and it was like the last sixteen years hadn’t happened and he was still six years old, trying to work the machine in the dark, trying not to wake me up, spilling detergent all over the floor, so mad and stubborn when I tried to help. Back then the pediatrician said it was his father walking out, the transition to life with an absent dad.

So this was just another transition, I figured. A phase. But he

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N A S TA S S JA S W I F T

Statement by the Artist I am a multi-disciplinary artist who utilizes fiber art methodologies to create work that addresses both my reaction to experiencing racism, and subsequently, the desire to construct the right identity in order to achieve acceptance. Alluding to feelings of doubt and anxiety, my work highlights struggles with skin tone, speech and hair that I experience as a black woman and artist, and how I process and cope with those struggles. Through fusing memories of my childhood with fictional responses, I am able to depict provocative yet playful self-portraits and narratives that illustrate my feelings of discomfort, otherness and invisibility.

Camouflaged

N A S TA S S J A S W I F T

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Concealer

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N A S TA S S J A S W I F T

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SOMMER SCHAFER

Leaving Hope When I returned, I hadn’t been to my hometown, Hope, Alaska, in five years. My son Samuel had already been dead for three, and I hadn’t been anywhere since. “Come up,” Mom called months before, eagerness in her voice. “It’s beautiful there,” my husband encouraged me to go. They seemed to think anything could be reclaimed.

I walked the same trails into the woods by the ocean. There was snow in the fields of the estuary, and the boardwalk was laced with ice. I had been on this trail when Samuel was one, and again during visits when he was three and five and seven, and despite all that passing time, the smells were the same. The salt from the estuary, and the pure cold air coursing down the canyons of the mountains, and the dense plants of the forest, not yet completely frozen, reanimated a spot on my brain that bleeped with recognition, like an alarm light soundlessly pulsing. My body knew these smells like those of my son, only more primordial, as these smells were also those of my own youth long gone.

Mom and Dad, as usual, had a place for me in their house, though it was one they had bought, after a string of rentals, when I was in college, and thus I had never come to it as those do to a house that they have been born and raised in. Still, there was some comfort there. I had the room with the double bed, downstairs. One night, I awoke in the middle of the night thinking I had heard Samuel’s longago baby cry, but instead heard the silence of the wilderness.

Dad was in the throes of a forced and early retirement, his position as head curator at the State Historical Museum of Tlingit Arts having been eliminated due to budget cuts five months ago. The City Assembly had also voted to close the public library three days out of the week, and had frozen all the city employees’ salaries. As Mom and I drove from the airport, stuffed into her gray ‘91 Honda Accord, the heat inside creating a world opposite from the crystal snowy one outside, I saw the library by the sea closed and dark. Also that the brown paint was peeling on town hall, leaving blips of piercing dirty white SOMMER SCHAFER

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here and there like raised scratches on an arm. “Oh that,” Mom said.

“They have plans to repaint it soon, before the tourist season begins.”

Otherwise, things were as I remembered: the downtown rooflines like a tracing of some fake early 20th-century western town against the ice-gray sky; St. Ignatius Russian Orthodox church at the downtown helm, its onion domes satisfyingly contiguous in their sloping, rounded lines; the two banks like point-blank shots of reality; the town’s second traffic lights at the intersection. “One of the big cruise liners bought up the hotel last year,” Mom said as we passed the Hope Hotel on the corner. It looked almost the same, perched on the hill with views of the ocean, except it had been re-painted a smooth dark green, like the wilderness just outside town across the span of the island, and another trinket shop and spa had been added to the shops underneath. The sign “Hope Hotel” had also been enlarged and done in a style to make the place look like an upscale wilderness lodge, though the old Nazarene minister had murdered his mistress and then stuck the gun in his own mouth there three years ago, and there was no way the locals would ever not associate the place with that. “We’ll go there for breakfast,” Mom smiled. “Even though their service gets worse and worse. Your father won’t eat there anymore.”

As we passed Larry’s Radio Emporium on the corner by the traffic lights, Mom said how Larry was in jail on the mainland. No one could prove that he had killed Mayor Marc Randal last year, but the police finally got him once and for all on drug charges. His parents were running the store, and it was doing better than ever. It looked the same to me: glossy, overlarge, pretentious. But I had to give it to Larry for going against the obnoxious Western Frontier Town theme the rest of the town had adhered to. The square stone and glass of it didn’t easily retain the constant moisture of the seaside weather, and so it seemed to glow among the peeling, moldy downtown buildings that were currently covered in patchworks of dirty brown snow. Everywhere I looked were shades of brown, gray, and black. It occurred to me that Hope remained one of the most monotone places I had ever seen, but I didn’t know whether that accounted for the annoying pressure, just this side of pain, that I felt behind my eyes.

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JAMES MAYOR

The Last Visitor I watch the fog’s remnants caress the river surface like a grateful, tentative, first-time lover; its languid retreat to the open bay—tentacles swaying in the cool morning breeze—like a slow waltz. As the diaphanous mist withdraws, a faded-blue motel just across the river solidifies and I can make out its dozen or so empty boat slips waiting like a row of homely girls at a dance. Resigned, but hopeful. I wonder if the last person to stand at this spot saw the same thing. I look down at William Pennewell’s grave and picture someone else standing in this spot, but at a different time.

Perhaps the last person to visit William Pennewell did so in 1965, the year Dick Clark introduced the world to Sonny & Cher and Sony to its ill-fated Betamax. The last visitor may have looked up from William’s grave to see—across the water to a little-used motel— vacationers laden with coolers, Frisbees, pillows, lawn chairs, buckets and shovels, fishing poles and diaper bags; the motel’s dock full of canoes, bait buckets, paddleboats, shrieking children, soggy, pee-heavy diapers and mothers issuing dire warnings. He or she may have watched the motel’s owners arrange picnic tables, sweep the walk, tidy the dock and rush room to room readying them for weekend anglers, beachgoers, and others eager to hear and see the ocean and taste the salt air.

Years later, forsaken for glitzy Ocean City high-rises and chain hotels with three-night minimums, the visitor may have seen the little motel relegated to temporary shelter and rooms-by-the week, its docks empty and bright yellow dandelion blooms and purple-adorned thistle poking through the gravel parking lot. Or, they might have been here years before that, when there was no dock and no tourists, just vacant foxtail-covered land, the little motel not yet an entrepreneur’s dream come true. Hard to say. The last visitor to this spot may have slightly pivoted and watched, less than a hundred yards upriver, on the same side as this little cemetery, the making of a champion. The famed racehorse, Man O’ War, trained here in the 1950s when this land was Riddle Farm, long before the current owners of Glen Riddle Golf Course

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turned it into a high-price hacker’s pastime, the cemetery a de facto resident. The long, straight, sandy track where Man O’ War trained still exists, but only as a bunker for hole #7. Is that what the last person to visit William Pennewell’s grave saw?

I pick up one foot, put it down, then d0 the same with other, back and forth like a penguin, and shove my hands deeper into my windbreaker. I envision blustery Eastern Shore winds shoving cold up under the clothes of William’s last visitor the same way. Standing with my eyes scrunched to make it easier to think in the past, I see in my mind’s eye a wife—perhaps a son, daughter, or both—looking up from their grieving, past the bay to the now-infamous barrier island turned All-American resort.

William Pennewell died in 1871. He died when there was no Ocean City; just a few brave souls occupying a barren, windblown, unfriendly, unclaimed strip of land—years before fishing shacks owned by those industrious or foolish enough to build so close to a sea chummy with hurricanes dotted the island; decades before shiny condominiums and florescent light poles silhouetted the skyline. When the grave at whose foot I stand was fresh and smelled like dirt, one could easily see upriver, out to and across the bay, over the island, and all the way toward the Atlantic Ocean a few miles away. In 1871 no one could have envisioned the barrier island swarming on a hot August weekend with several hundred-thousand tourists. The Ladies Resort to the Ocean (that’s what they called it before Ocean City) and its dozen or so semi-permanent residents had not yet been exposed to years of water damage to property intentionally built in harm’s way. The thought of hauling millions of cubic feet of sand from the sea bottom and using it to build high dunes and bulwarks in a Sisyphus effort to stop the ocean’s seasonal reclamation was decades off, the view to the sea from this spot unspoiled, no buildings or dunes to block the way. I imagine fresh flowers on some of the graves here—perhaps a freshly dug hole or two—and several buried children I suppose, for in those days they often died of known and unknown sicknesses, or by mishandled farm implements and machinery operated by a family member.

The little cemetery and its inhabitants are now mostly forJA M E S M AYO R

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RON MCFARLAND

Opening Day on Smallmouth Bass Fishing for smallmouth on the Snake, Idaho side in early April we luck into sun that might as easily in these parts be snow.

Dennis warns me to watch out for rattlers.

“Later,” he says, “the hawks will have a field-day, but this time of year they tend to be out and about.”

Dennis throws out a Muddler Minnow, strips it across the gray water, then lets it sink and twitches the feathery thing he says resembles a mottled sculpin.

He’s a bit of a purist.

Me, I latch on a simple Mepps Spinner— traditional treble hook, brass body, silver-plated blade, a bit of gray-black feather— in case the bass prefer something faster than his brownish bit of fluff.

I once landed a nine-pound northern pike on one of these babies, straightened out one of the hooks in the process.

I’ve brought along a white Styrofoam cup of surefire night-crawlers.

Eventually Dennis gives in, but the worms merely drown, and later, dancing around the gray basaltic boulders that line the riverbank, Dennis jumps nimbly out of his skin over a pair of rattlers out for a morning slither.

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“Almost,” he says, his hand still quivering, “got stung.”

It just turns out to be one of those days, so sunny you can almost enjoy getting skunked.

RON MCFARLAND

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Contributors

Fall/Winter 2017 V O L U M E 6 7. 1

E L L E N A D A M S writes essays and fiction. She was recently selected 2017 nonfiction winner of Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, The Southwest Review, The Literary Review, and Singapore Art Museum, among others. Previously, she was a resident at Hedgebrook, a Fulbright grantee, a McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction recipient, and a college instructor of writing and literature. She graduated from Princeton University and holds an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. Adams also composes and performs music as a singer-songwriter and is in the process of recording a new album. She now lives and works in Seattle, where she is revising a novel and developing a book-length work of nonfiction. Please see www.EllenAdams.net for more information.

M A R I A A D E L M A N N ’ S stories have been published or are forthcoming in Tin House, The Threepenny Review, The Indiana Review, Epoch, and the Southeast Review, among other magazines. She has a BA from Cornell University and an MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia. She lives in Baltimore, where she is working on a novel and a screenplay. Visit www.MariaInk.com for more information.

D E V O N B A L W I T writes in Portland, OR. She is a poetry editor for Minute Magazine and has five chapbooks out or forthcoming: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press); Forms Most Marvelous (dancing girl press); In Front of the Elements (Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books); and The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry). Her individual poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, Fifth Wednesday, The Stillwater Review, Red Earth Review, The Fourth River, Posit, Emrys Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and more.

R A Y B A R F I E L D is a Professor at Duke University. He is a pediatric oncologist with an interest in palliative care and medical humanities. He has published several books of philosophy and poetry, as well as a novel called The Book of Colors. Ray directs the Medical Humanities program in the Trent Center for Bioethics, Medical Humanities, and the History of Medicine at Duke.

G E O R G E B I S H O P ’ S work has appeared in Cold Mountain Review and Border Crossing. He is the author of seven chapbooks, Following Myself Home winning the 2013 Peter Meinke Prize. His recent full length collection One Dance was published in October 2016 by FutureCyclePress. He attended Rutgers University and now lives in Saint Cloud, Florida.

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L I S A B U B E R T is a writer currently living in Nashville, TN. Her work is informed by the place and people of Central Texas, where she was born and raised. Her poems and stories can be found in Barnstorm Journal, Spartan, and elsewhere.

C H R I S T O P H E R C I T R O is the author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books). His awards include a 2018 Pushcart Prize for poetry and the 2015 Poetry Competition at Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. Recent and upcoming publications include poetry in Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Best New Poets, Narrative, Blackbird, Meridian, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Boulevard, Quarterly West, Passages North, and Colorado Review. Christopher received his MFA from Indiana University and lives in Syracuse, NY. C L A Y T O N A D A M C L A R K lives in St. Louis, his hometown, where he works for Health Literacy Media, a nonprofit that helps make healthcare more accessible.

He also volunteers as an editor and board member for River Styx magazine. He earned the MFA in poetry at Ohio State University and is currently seeking publication for his first full-length collection. Some of his poems were recently published in Cimarron Review, Cottonwood, New Madrid, and elsewhere.

D A V I D C U L W E L L holds a bachelor of journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University. His fiction has appeared in Wisconsin Review, The Long Story, and The MacGuffin; his poetry has appeared in The Merton Seasonal, The Penwood Review, Anglican Theological Review, Think, and The Road Not Taken. He lives in College Station, Texas, where he works as a technical editor.

B E N J A M I N C U T L E R is an English and creative writing teacher at Swain County High School in western North Carolina and an advisor for the global educational non-profit Narrative 4—an organization that seeks to cultivate a more empathic citizenry through the exchanging of personal narratives. Benjamin was accepted into the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2017 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Series, and his work is forthcoming in Witness: Appalachia to Hatteras and Cider Press Review. When he is not teaching, writing, or playing with his four children, Benjamin is trying to keep his honeybees alive.

R O S A L I P E R E I R A E S P I N O S A was born in Havana, Cuba, and came to Florida at the age of ten. She veered away from medicine to study Classics at the University of Florida, where, out of curiosity for the craft, she also began to take creative writing workshops. She is presently finishing her MFA in poetry from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins.

CONTRIBUTORS

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J O H N H A R V E Y lives and writes in Houston, Texas. His poetry has been published

in Cleaver Magazine, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Red Ochre Lit. Weave Magazine and many others. His plays have been produced and performed by Mildred’s Umbrella Theater Company, including Rot, Night of the Giant and Rome. He’s received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Houston Arts Alliance and Houston Press. He writes about food for Edible Houston and maintains a blog about cooking, drinking and eating at magicfishbones.com.

R A G E H E Z E K I A H is a MacDowell and Cave Canem Fellow who earned her MFA from Emerson College. She is the recipient of a Saint Botolph Emerging Artist Award in Literature and was nominated for Best New Poets, 2017. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fifth Wednesday, Columbia Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Cape Rock, and Tampa Review, as well as other journals. Her writing is featured in various anthologies including Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out and All We Can Hold: poems of motherhood. You can find out more about her work at ragehezekiah.com.

B E N H I N S H A W has received scholarships to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Community of Writers workshop at Squaw Valley. His stories have appeared in The White Review, Lighthouse, and DigBoston, and have three times been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. He holds MAs in creative writing (University of California, Davis) and cultural geography (University of Nottingham). Born on the island of Guernsey, Ben later spent several years in London. He currently lives in Davis, California.

A N D R E W J A R V I S is the author of Sound Points, Ascent, The Strait, and Landslide.

His poems have appeared in Cottonwood, Evansville Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Tulane Review, and many other magazines. He was a Finalist for the 2014 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize, and he has received several honors from the INDIE Book of the Year Awards. He also received Silver Medals in Poetry from the Nautilus Book Awards and CIPA EVVY Book Awards. Andrew holds an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University.

J I L L K R E S S K A R N is the author of The Figure of Consciousness: William James,

Henry James and Edith Wharton. Her poems have appeared in Salamander and The Alaska Quarterly Review. She teaches at Villanova University and lives in the Philadelphia area with her husband and three children.

G R A N T K I T T R E L L lives in Roanoke, VA. He is the Poetry Editor of Flock, and his work has appeared in The Common, Construction, The Normal School, Heavy Feather Review, Magma Poetry, Barely South Review and Bridge Eight, among others. His collection of prose poems, Let’s Sit Down, Figure This Out, is forthcom-

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ing from Groundhog Poetry Press (2017). You can find him at grantkittrell.com.

D A N K R A I N E S teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology and City Tech.

You can find his poems published or forthcoming from The Adroit Journal, The Journal, Phantom, and Two Peach, among many other places. He is a PhD candidate, currently living in Brooklyn, NY. C O D Y K U C K E R ’ S writing has most recently appeared in Juxtaprose, The Opiate, and Edible New Hampshire. He received his MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and currently lives in northern Massachusetts.

J E N N A L E a daughter of Vietnamese refugees, now a New Hampshire-based

physician and educator, is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Anchor & Plume, 2016). Her poetry has appeared in AGNI Online, The Best of the Raintown Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, and Massachusetts Review.

J A M E S M A Y O R , retired after thirty-plus years as an Investment Advisor,

writes fictional short stories and non-fiction from his home in Reston, Virginia and Coral Gables, Florida. An avid runner, he often comes up with ideas while running the W&OD (Washington & Old Dominion Railroad) Trail that passes behind his Northern Virginia home. Mayor primarily writes about marital and familial discord: the push and pulls of marriage and the ways in which the routine and quotidian can erode it, and the lasting psychological effects of flawed parenting. His articles and stories have appeared in River Poets Journal and Growing Wealth Magazine.

R O N M C F A R L A N D teaches literature & creative writing courses at the University of Idaho. His most recent book of poems is Subtle Thieves (2012). His most recent book is a biography, Edward J. Steptoe and the Indian Wars (2016).

O W E N M C L E O D makes pottery and lives in Pennsylvania. His poems have recently found homes in Ploughshares, New England Review, FIELD, Boulevard, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.

M A T T W . M I L L E R is the author Club Icarus, winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and Cameo Diner: Poems. His third collection, The Wounded for the Water, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry (2018). He has published poems and essays in Harvard Review, Southwest Review, The Rumpus, Crazyhorse, The Adroit Journal, Narrative Magazine, and other journals. The recipient of poetry fellowships from Stanford University and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, he teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy and directs the Writers’ Workshop at Exeter.

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A native of Lowell, Massachusetts, he now lives in coastal New Hampshire with his family.

D A V I D M O O L T E N ’ S most recent book, Primitive Mood (2009), won the T. S. Eliot Award from the Truman State University Press. He lives & writes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

L I Z P R A T O is the author of the fiction collection Baby’s on Fire (Press 53). Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Hayden’s Ferry Review, Baltimore Review, Hawai‘i Pacific Review, Hunger Mountain, and Subtropics. She is Editor at Large for Forest Avenue Press, and teaches at literary festivals across the country. Liz is currently working on a linked essay collection that examines her decades-long relationship with Hawai‘i through the prism of white imperialism. www.lizprato.com.

D A V I D R O C K holds MA and PhD degrees in Spanish from Brigham Young and Penn State universities, respectively. His research focuses on Spanish-American and Brazilian literary avant-garde movements of the early 20th Century. He has creative work published or forthcoming in Pivot, Oxford Magazine, Hiram Poetry Review, Palooka, American Journal of Poetry, and others. He teaches Spanish at Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg.

E S T E B A N R O D R I G U E Z holds an MFA from the University of Texas Pan-American. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Notre Dame Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New England Review, and Puerto del Sol. He lives in Austin, Texas.

P E T E R S A P I R A received his MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has had short stories published in Anarchy, Inkwell, The Black River Review, The Literary Review, and Pleiades. He teaches composition and public speaking at Smith College where he also directs a creative writing program during the summer for high school students. “Glyphs” comes from his current novel-in-progress.

S O M M E R S C H A F E R received her MFA from San Francisco State University in 2013. She has stories in North American Review, Fiction, Ninth Letter, Monday Night, FRiGG, Hobart, Glimmer Train, Santa Monica Review, Room, and others.

She lives with her family in Northern California and co-edits The Forge Literary Magazine. Visit her at www.sommerschafer.com.

B A R B A R A S C H W A R T Z is the author of the chapbook Any Thriving Root (dancing girl press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Nimrod International Journal of

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Prose and Poetry, Quiddity, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Josephine Quarterly, Nerve Lantern, and elsewhere. In 2006, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Currently, she is a poetry reader for Ep;phany Magazine, and serves as the director of education for Boys & Girls Harbor in New York City.

N I C O L E S T O C K B U R G E R earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage, About Place Journal, The Louisville Review, Chattahoochee Review, and Indiana Review, among others. Winner of the 2017 Kakalak Poetry Award, she lives in Beulah, NC, where she and her partner farm two acres of organic produce.

N A S T A S S J A S W I F T is a multi-disciplinary artist holding a Bachelors degree of Fine Art from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) with a major in Painting & Printmaking and a minor in Craft & Material Studies.She is the owner and artist of D for Dolls, an online boutique of handmade needle felted figures. As the Gallery Co-Director for Mist Gallery, an online exhibition space, Nastassja has been curating online shows for the past two years. Outside of being a doll maker, she works with paint, print and fiber within her studio practice. Her work is reflective of childhood, girlhood and identity, specific to race and gender. In the past year, she has shown work throughout Virginia, in Tennessee, California, Pennsylvania and inQatar, where she was the 2015-2016 Artist in Residence at VCU Qatar and put together her first solo exhibition. Her solo show, “I Keep Repeating it Over and Over in My Head,” was published in Oh LaLa Magazine, Qatar Tribune, The Peninsula Newspaper and The Gulf Times.

Nastassja is currently living and working in Virginia Beach, VA. A N N I E W O O D F O R D studied poetry at Hollins College and is now a teacher

at Virginia Western Community College. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Louisville Review, The Nashville Review, Appalachian Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Texas Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She was awarded the Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets and a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Poetry for the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2017. Her first book of poetry is forthcoming from Groundhog Poetry Press.

A L I E S A Z O E C K L E I N won the 2014 Peter Meinke Award for her chapbook At Each Moment, Air. Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Water-stone Review, Peacock Journal, Cimarron Review, and The Lake among others. Aliesa lives with her wife in Gainesville, Florida, where she teaches writing at Santa Fe College.

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VOLUME 67.1

DAVID MOOLTEN

MARIA ADELMANN

BEN HINSHAW

LIZ PRATO

DEVON BALWIT

ANDREW JARVIS

DAVID ROCK

RAY BARFIELD

JILL KRESS KARN

ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

GEORGE BISHOP

GRANT KITTRELL

PETER SAPIRA

LISA BUBERT

DAN KRAINES

SOMMER SCHAFER

CHRISTOPHER CITRO

CODY KUCKER

BARBARA SCHWARTZ

CLAYTON ADAM CLARK

JENNA LE

NICOLE STOCKBURGER

DAVID CULWELL

JAMES MAYOR

NASTASSJA SWIFT

BENJAMIN CUTLER

RON MCFARLAND

ANNIE WOODFORD

ROSALI PEREIRA ESPINOSA

OWEN MCLEOD

ALIESA ZOECKLEIN

JOHN HARVEY

MATT W MILLER

Fall/Winter 2017

RAGE HEZEKIAH

V o l u m e 6 7.1

ELLEN ADAMS

FALL/WINTER 2017