The Branches Journal Spring 2025: GROWTH

Flower Anthony Santella Anthony Santella grew up sculpting with twigs, pinecones, and dirt. His sculptures, often from stormdowned trees, draw on ritual woodcarving traditions to explore modern dreams and nightmares.

Expansion Tereza Kleovoulou Tereza Kleovoulou is a photographer working on philosophical and psychological matters and themes investigating aspects of herself and others and maybe exhibiting some of her deepest emotions and thrills.

Contents Front Inside Inside 01 02 03 04 06 06 07 07 08 09 10 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 17 18 18 19 21 22 22 22 23 24 25 25 26 27 28 29 31 32 32 33 33

Awaken • Marissa Thornberry Flower • Anthony Santella Expansion • Tereza Kleovoulou Rose • Mindy Indy Constitutional • Jim Murdoch How to Pray • Ally McHugh Encounters XXXIII: Snags • Susan Johnson Las Meninas • Craig Martin Getz Daylily • Mindy Indy Growing Backward • M. S. Puckett Flaming • Simon Tertychniy Stop Calling Her Anything • Emily Bess Wood Wife, Word Wife • Anthony Santella Guest Towels • LuLu Johnson Pushing the Limits • Susan Black On the game show • Naomi Bess Leimsider A Little Short on the Arms • Robyn Perros Ash and Bud • John Tuttle Peak Robot • Aastha Uprety The Before World • Miles Liss Growth Comes in Spirals • J. Kosakowski weathering • Beth Bayliss Polar Bears • J. R. Solonche Ground Control • Catherine Stansfield SPRING CLEANING • David James Maybe a Robot Will Solve Global Warming • MARE Mary Magdalene Contemplates Death • William Rerick Conversation with My Ma at 14 • Watt Burns Time Slips. Shadows Fall. • Briana Gervat Masjid • Navila Nahid Walnut Tree • Helena Pantsis At the Crossroads in the Garden of Eden • Nichole Turnbloom Where Are You? • Erika Scheer There Is Enough Time for Everything • Patricia Lin A Detour on the Road to Hell in a Handbasket • Kevin Brown Vitality • Ellen Carranza The Cusp • Michael Hettich The Word for Door Is Always Plural • Elisabeth Ursell Why, to My Surprise, I Started to Use the Word Satan • Lisa Bellamy So-Called Nowhere • DL Pravda When You Didn’t Call • Nichole Turnbloom Journey • JUNOS Looking Up • Sara Caporaletti 01

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Deep-seated desires for success can lead us to cling to narrow ideas of n tr growth, grandiose narratives and cultural clichés that neatly show a linear, i b u ti o n A-to-B path of trauma to success, desire to attainment, seed to flower. In practice, growth is anything but clean and simple. The reflections in this issue paint the human experience: messy, violent, anxiety-inducing, beautiful. Growth spurs worry over the correct path to take and fear at what we might trade off in the process, but it also carries a promise of hope. We can always grow again. We can look forward. We can plant new roots.

On our part, we’ve been thrilled at the growth of the journal and submissions for this issue.

See EllesaurArts.com/mustard-seed-comic for a companion zine “Mustard Seed Faith” by artist Ellen Stedfeld. Readers of our Substack have also been treated to news and additional essays from the editors. But there’s only so much we can do on our own! We’re seeking guest editors and folks to help out with social media and event planning. Email us to get involved.

Finally, to sustain the journal’s printing and operations, we kindly ask you consider a $5 contribution per copy, with options for method on the back cover. Thank you for the response to this project, and we look forward to growing with you.

Elizabeth Coletti Ryan Vera

Constitutional

(for Jessica)

Jim Murdoch Beautiful things grow out of shit. Nobody ever believes that. Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head . . . and all he had to do was write them down . . .

—Brian Eno Sometimes at night I walk the perimeter of my happiness.

I prefer doing it nightly because that way I don’t see just how quickly it takes to make my rounds.

Reference points can be helpful, but mostly they upset me.

During the days the sad truth is revealed for all to witness.

But how can happiness be sad? you ask and it’s a reasonable question, one I’ve pondered often.

Like flowers happiness grows in queer places, even sad ones.

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Mindy Indy is a cartoonist who also loves illustrating nature.

Her work explores vibrant growth through watercolor and colored pencil.

Jim Murdoch: Scot, gatophile, classical music aficionado, novelist, Whovian, and producer of half-tothree-quarter-(andoccasionally-actuallyfully)-decent poems for over half a century.

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From the Editors

How to Pray Ally McHugh Scorched earth Yearning with thirst Branches reaching and twisted Like a starved hand into the sky Looking for answers that never come Searching for reasons why They say that wildfires Blaze through and start A bloom of wildflowers in their lieu I dug my hands into the soil Like I had to grip the earth As to not fall though But I never found their roots Nothing to hold on to A stranger told me to spend time in nature So I drove to the ocean But the lessons never seemed To wash up with its waves My teacher told me to look within If I wanted understanding My mother urged me to talk with God 2:57 a.m., lost sleep, I google “how to pray” But guiding signs never came So I hit the road A tank full of gas Took us to West Texas Tabs of acid and tequila and lime One to feel the world; the other So it’s not too deep I was on a mission to change my mind Sleeping in the car I looked at the stars And spoke my poetry to them The scent of liquor on my breath I asked for a way out Lack of patience; my time is precious The nights seemed endless The mornings meaningless To the desert You transformed my grief to rage With dust and dirt and towns of forgotten names

In this day and age of mental health awareness and self-development, we hear a lot about personal growth. There seems to be a push to put a positive spin on negative experiences, to rectify our suffering. The idea is that we can placate the difficulty of those moments by claiming that it was all worth it in the end. This piece challenges that belief. Reflecting on growth, I decided to explore the rejection of that idea. This poem tells a story—a personal one—of how I went through grief, loss of love, and a major change in my worldview and belief system all at once. It compiles four poems that I wrote in the year 2022 while I was living in California on a work contract for six months. I had gone through what felt like an earth-shattering, life-changing heartbreak. I was working as a night shift ER nurse during the pandemic, not only going through my own losses but witnessing the grief and trauma of so many others as well.

It felt so difficult that I reflexively poured myself into healing, attempting to learn and fix myself through solitude, meditation, and spending time in nature, including a wooded area of Sequoia National Park that had been destroyed by a wildfire. A lot of the poems I wrote at that time personify the images I saw in nature. I narrated the motions of attempting to compensate, unsuccessfully, and diving into vices and methods that distanced myself from pain while still keeping that connection to nature. Today, about three years later, I realize there is no forcing growth or lessons, and that grief and growth are not linear processes. It was difficult—and still is—but we must allow time and patience to guide us to where we need to be.

Ally McHugh is a nurse, amateur poet, and host of “The Queens Poet” open mic at QED Astoria. @thequeenspoet

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Encounters XXXIII: Snags Susan Johnson Ahead I see a trail marked “closed” complete with yellow caution tape stretched across it, so easy to slip under. Of course I do. It’s clear from the footprints that many have. The next day there’s a metal fence. I meet a woman and we both climb around it.

“They’re making this harder,” she says. It’s hard to figure out why it’s closed. Walking along a river you should be ready to step over windfalls, meander as the river does, adjusting its course around coarse woody debris. No need for caution tape.

“Let’s go upstream,” I say, though it means canoeing around snags. On the positive side, there’s more shade and fewer pontoon boats with their motors and beer parties. The river is twisty and alive, as it should be.

Downstream it’s wider and flatter, full of No Trespassing signs that always make me want to trespass. If you want people to leave your property alone, then leave it alone and don’t put up signs. Signs signal this might be an interesting place to explore.

At a trailhead a list of rules chalked on a board: Everyone must carry at least two liters of water per person. Headlamps are required if you leave after 4 p.m.—as in we’re not coming up to rescue you if you get caught after dark. But really, who leaves after 4 p.m.? Well my brother, for one. He likes to tell a story of hiking down a steep mountain in the dark, how he kept tripping and slipping. He seems to find it funny. To me it’s just being careless. I may not always be coordinated, but I’m careful.

Hiking down from the summit with a couple I just met, I step aside and say, “Go ahead if you want, I’m slow.” “I am too,” the woman says, “I have titanium in my ankle.” “I have titanium in my femur,” I say. “I have it in my

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my neck,” the guy says. “You win,” I say.

“Right,” he says, and then they’re off ahead of me. I never see them again.

The family camping across from me begins to set up their site. The daughter, perhaps age twelve, seems to be doing all the work.

She assembles the tent, fitting the poles together, inserting them into grommets, tying down the fly. Mom just sits there. Dad makes a smoky fire out of damp wood. Kid brother runs around. The girl struggles but gets the tent to stand. Mom continues to sit.

Maybe she’s had a hard week. Stressed beyond her limit. Dad tries rolling up newspaper to ignite the wet logs, but it burns in his hands. How have they made it this far, I wonder. The girl now assembles supper things while her brother gambols off into the woods. Dad stands engulfed in smoke. Mom continues to sit and stare.

How hard it is to live some days, to get your cells to function, and to connect those cells with ones around you.

In town I check out the latest art gallery opening. Every exhibit has an open laptop you’re supposed to interact with. No way, I think; that’s too much like work. In the center of the gallery stands a display where you can make a mandala out of firewood.

Again, no way. I arrange firewood all winter, crisscrossing pieces in the stove.

There’s just no art for me here today.

The discount food store has a section where everything’s five for a dollar. It’s empty; everything’s been snatched up. We don’t want art, we want cheap snacks. The chips are buy one, get two free; three friends are going crazy. “Check this out,” they say, “look there’s more over here.” Their arms are full of salt, fat, and sugar.

They’ve cleared a plot in front of the library for a pollinator garden. Ten people in broad hats and thin gloves plant a variety of local flowers good for bees. I’ve stopped mowing a section of my lawn, and now it’s full of bee balm that drew in a hummingbird yesterday. Less mowing means less work and more flowers. Why has it taken so long for the idea to take hold?

Oh don’t the crows love the newly mowed cornfield. I hear them before I see them, turning and twisting over and under the high-tension wires. There’s plenty of eating, voles and mice. Soon vultures will join the party: the ultimate clean-up crew.

I try to learn the names of the plants not mown roadside. I just added common nightshade to my list, which is embarrassing. I mean it’s common, it’s nightshade. You’d think I’d know it by now.

Last week I learned colt’s foot and something called mad-dog skullcap, which is, again, common in our area. A mint. My excuse is that I’ve been looking at birds and trees, but really, there is no excuse. On the other hand, though I’m late to learn my wildflowers, at least I keep going. I keep going.

I hike up Mountain Road, mainly for the breeze I say. But truly, I just want to get out. I look for bird nests wedged in the ledges alongside ferns. After years of banding birds in mist nets, I have finally started paying more attention to nests.

There’s an American redstart, there a chipping sparrow. It makes me oddly happy to see these two, though I’m probably missing twenty.

I drop a blueberry, look and look but can’t see it. Later I hike and can’t see squat from the summit, it’s so hazy. I know where the neighboring mountains are and can pretend I see a faint outline. But really there’s nothing distinct; it’s like looking through water.

water. Still it’s an enjoyable hike. I don’t have to see things; it’s more pride—the idea of seeing, of insight, of noticing details.

“How do we get down?” a guy asks his friends after clawing his way to the summit.

Well, let’s see, I think. There’s sliding, rolling, tumbling, leaping. This is one of the few mountains humans haven’t invaded with a road, a radio tower, a ski lodge. I was planning on taking it slow, being one of those who finds it easier to go up than down.

After supper I loop around the neighborhood, surprising a fox strategically standing between two chicken coops. It flashes me the universal look of guilt.

Caught you, I say. Then it runs away because I obviously haven’t caught him and never will.

Some things get smaller when you age, like your backyard used to be huge when you were a kid, but seen as an adult it’s tiny.

Hiking trails get longer, however. From the campground to the summit used to take me less than two hours five years ago. Now, it’s two and a quarter.

A small boy sits on a rock at the summit holding an enormous bag of Skittles. “You scored,” I tell him. He just looks at me as he shoves another handful of corn syrup and red dye #2 into his mouth. Not sure why I’m here, he seems to be thinking, not sure why any of us are here.

Susan Johnson’s poems and creative nonfiction pieces have recently appeared in Woven Tale, Abraxas, The Meadow, Dash, Front Range Review, Oyster River Review, and Trampoline. Her commentaries can be heard on nepm.org.

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Las Meninas Craig Martin Getz I

II

How did I look in the Prado Museum on Fridays gazing at Las Meninas?

Like my nephew, I had considered myself more absorber than photographer.

Today, I dip back into the archives to muster a two-minute crash course on the Baroque with bite-size anecdotes a doodling American nephew/ future tattoo artist should know before leaving Spain, Picasso’s dissection of Las Meninas.

I do remember doing a lot of looking, our Art History tutor, her Hello Kitty headbands almost tiaras to an outfit’s painstakingly ironed pleats, the pinks and the plaids, her matching slippers.

I distinctly remember Randy from Indiana, his eloquent Castilian, the continuation of wavy brown hair an invitation to gaze at his mouth agape, in awe of the art, his torso an immaculate Fruit-of-the-Loom canvas to project all I wasn’t. And I distinctly remember not getting it.

Hello Kitty would be going on and on, Randy nodding his head and taking notes as I struggled with her Spanish and tried to learn from his elegance.

How I would die for just a snapshot.

How the infanta has come with maids, court dwarfs and her dog, audience to the King and Queen of Spain having their portrait painted by Velazquez.

How the painter leans his discerning eye into the future, into the flipside of what he is really painting: a portrait of himself as artist.

Picasso deconstructed the Baroque yet with the joy and responsibility of being alive in the twentieth century and here I go spiking the bottle of my nephew’s death-wish mineral water with drops of homeopathic art therapy.

Even if nothing got inside, I did what no one had done for me: take photographs of him from outside, a young man with mouth open in a museum in Barcelona, innocence trying to absorb the world.

Craig Martin Getz left LA for Barcelona in 1989. He’s an English Arts teacher at an international school. Craig’s poetry and photography, his two ongoing passions, have appeared in many print or online journals. craigmartingetz.com

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Growing Backward M. S. Puckett Inspired by “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”

by Adam Zagajewski In Nicaragua you cannot flush the toilet paper.

There is a bin near every toilet where you throw it instead.

I often think about who empties these bins in the restaurants and hotels and bars where I release the waste of my body.

A gringa does not need to worry about disposing of shit-coated scraps.

Instead I try to praise the mutilated world.

I take the wrong airport taxi in Managua.

I’m a stupid foreigner, an obvious mark.

It’s only money, I tell my gritted teeth.

Lush greenery rushes by the window.

We pass horse-drawn carts along the road.

My inner turmoil is wasted time. Staring at my phone’s map I am stealing minutes of my life from myself like a depraved autocannibal.

Am I too old for this? A mid-thirties woman sleeping in a hostel dorm bunk, crowded by sweat-coated bodies and dirty backpacks.

I gaze upon the multicolored mural: a psychedelic swirl of Alice falling.

Will I never not be Alice? That’s me hurtling through space, uncertain and bewildered.

Drink me. Eat me. Like her I always obey, consume with blind trust, it will all be fine.

Flaming Simon Tertychniy Fire doubles every sixty seconds the man at the firehouse told my two-year-old.

We also have a newborn whom we tend to like a just kindled flame, not to mention my twenty-year-old, off burning down Paris.

Stumbling around the couch, clockwise, counterclockwise, rocking the baby to sleep my thoughts grow fuzzy.

I lift my feet high not to trip.

Why do people have kids I wonder as I continue my nocturnal anabasis.

I myself have three and still don’t know except it’s kinda like living forever and also they are so heartbreaking and cute —the future you rub noses with as it finally snoozes on your tingling arm.

The next day I am dancing in a treehouse.

How the fuck did I get here? This question is the only real constant in my life.

A red-bearded Irish boy puts his hands on my hips and suddenly I don’t feel so ancient.

I thought only men could have Peter Pan Syndrome, but there’s an exception to every rule.

The limbs pressed against me are drunk and ablaze.

Maybe there is not one right way to live.

Simon Tertychniy moved to NYC from Moscow in 1990. In 2000, he obtained a BA in Creative Writing. In 2013, Simon’s Spanish translation of Daniil Kharms’s stories was published in Chile.

M. S. Puckett is a nomadic writer. Born in Minneapolis and educated in New Orleans, she left a corporate career in 2017 to travel the world.

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Stop Calling Her Anything Emily Bess The longest relationship I’ve ever been in is the one I’m in with my eating disorder. She has been called many different things throughout my life. She’s been called a weight loss journey. She’s been called a diet.

She’s been called a picky eater. She’s a vegetarian, she doesn’t eat fruit, she doesn’t like sweet food, she eats the same thing at every restaurant every single time. She looks like neurodivergence and OCD and avoidance. The funny thing is that I’ve never been able to say her name out loud. I can describe her in a million different euphemisms. I say binging and purging, making myself sick, getting rid of food. If I say her name, that might mean the end of our relationship, and I’m afraid I’m not ready.

It’s difficult to grow when the weeds surrounding my deepest roots belong to an eating disorder. This started when I was twelve and health class taught me that I could lose weight if I just got rid of everything I ate. The pattern was encouraged because it worked and became permanent when my brain became addicted to the dopamine release and watching all of my sadness disappear down the toilet.

I have spent more than half of my life politely leaving the table to use the bathroom after finishing a meal. Once upon a therapist I was told that eating disorders are more about emotional regulation and control than they are about physical appearance. This is not where it started, but this is where it has ended up. I can predict the likelihood of getting sick in the evening based on what events have taken place during the day. Last week a friend died by suicide. That night I ordered too much food and once it was gone I was able to sleep through the night. Some addictions taste like Chinese food takeout.

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The promises that I’ve made to myself throughout the years about quitting have been broken every single time. I have had so many lasts. My first last time was when I was fourteen, when my mother found out because of a friend who read my diary over my shoulder. It’s fine that I ate that chocolate covered pretzel, I’m just going to throw it up like I do every other time. “If you don’t tell your mom, I will.” So I did. My mom cried for two weeks before telling my dad what was going on with me. I was shuffled into a therapist’s office and into doctors’ offices and into neurological testing and I promised I’d stop and I promised it was over.

But then I made more promises. When I move schools in eleventh grade I’ll stop.

When I go to college I’ll stop. When I get into grad school I’ll stop. When I go into outpatient eating disorder treatment I’ll stop. When I move back home I’ll stop.

When I finish student teaching I’ll stop.

When I get a job I’ll stop. When I’m teaching high school students and they’re telling me their most vulnerable moments and I can see that they’re struggling with the same things I struggled with when I was their age and am still struggling with I’ll stop. When I finish my master’s degree I’ll stop. When I move into my own apartment I’ll stop.

When I get weight loss surgery I’ll stop.

When I buy my own apartment I’ll stop.

When I start my business I’ll stop. When I get my second master’s degree I’ll stop. I’ll stop. I’ll stop. I’ll stop.

As an educator, I teach my students about understanding their identity. I teach them about intersectionality. I teach them about finding out who they are and what each piece means to them. I weave these values into every lesson, every activity, every conversation.

Why is it so easy for me to tell students that they should have pride in their identities and what defines them but it is so hard for me to do the same? I have spent so long defining myself by my eating disorder that I forgot other parts of me exist. I have put aside the artist, the educator, the athlete, the outspoken woman who I am to make room for something that has suffocated me for as long as I can remember. Today’s promise is to choose me over her and then to keep choosing me.

Emily Bess is a quirky girl who writes quirky stories. She has a Master’s in Teaching English as a Second Language from Mercy College and a Master’s in Library Science from Queens College. She is currently a middle school librarian and boat captain. She lives in Queens with two cats and a bearded dragon.

Anthony Santella grew up sculpting with twigs, pinecones, and dirt. His sculptures, often from storm-downed trees, draw on ritual woodcarving traditions to explore modern dreams and nightmares.

Anthony Santella

Wood Wife, Word Wife

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Guest Towels LuLu Johnson We use all the towels now, old man. The bright yellow fluffy ones you said were only for guests now line the rack, damp from our hands. The rough pink ones with woefully thin fringe have been relegated to the linen cabinet. It’s no holds barred in your homestead since you’ve been relegated to the maple box in your office.

Your son and I inhabit the now-quiet house. Every so often one of us asks the other, “How much do you think he’d hate this?” The answer’s always, “A lot.”

Hate that I moved the ugly lamp from my side of the bed and brought in a finer one. That I open the sheers to see the pool, stood barefoot on the banquette to plunder the liquor cabinet.

While your son and I watch football side-by-side in the beige recliners, I ruin another microfiber cloth polishing the silver-plated Jack Daniels decanter, the corked pour spout, and the pot metal lids of two massive martini shakers.

The night is warm and I am bored. I wish I hadn’t finished off the vodka, that I had a gal pal to chat with, but your son forbids me discussing the state of the estate, a verbal NDA. Even so, masculine disapproval doesn’t dam my desire to lie on the pool deck, feet in the perfectly kept water, dirty martini long gone. I want to stare through palm fronds at ospreys gliding past as if pulled on a string, one exiting stage right as the next enters stage left.

Left to my own devices, I’d be out there, hands stinking of Mothers polish, lying atop the best towel’s plush yellow terry cloth, loops soft as piles of cash, this bed you made for us.

LuLu Johnson earned an MFA at Georgia State. Prairie Schooner, The Atlanta Review, Flyway, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Honeyguide have published her poems. Check out her newsletter, All Points South, at substack.com/@lu2johnson Naomi Bess Leimsider’s poetry book, Wild Evolution, was published by Cathexis Northwest Press in June 2023.

Her poems, flash fiction, and short stories have appeared in Ellipsis, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. In 2022, she received a Pushcart Prize nomination for fiction.

Susan Black is an artist, writer, and Benedictine Oblate living in Aurora, Oregon.

Susan Black

Pushing the Limits

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On the game show, Naomi Bess Leimsider like in life, the pretty girls go first, so you find yourself somewhere down the line.

Stringing you along with so much at stake! How much will it take to start again? All gigged up on cortisol, on chance. The anticipation of all that you might win. Of what can be won.

This could be—finally—your time!

Maybe, maybe.

You sit in the back, eyes big and black with adrenaline, with bargains, waiting your turn. Your face will eventually be on the giant screen, so follow the instructions on how and what to fix.

Various color wheel contour hacks, shades for all your sides shortcuts, increase or decrease your nose, mouth, chin twists.

The day moves. By the time you get to the front of the line, you outgrow your former life.

One more dopamine pump and you shed your skin all in one go: you have shaken off your old self! You surrender to the pleasure of being lost to promises.

Now you must answer the questions correctly! This what you came here to do.

This is what is expected of you.

What comes first, next, last? Basics, facts. Smart girls answer first, but you wander through the bleak, dismal world of what you thought you knew. There is a chance you might actually know some of the answers—maybe, maybe—but they still want you to want what they conjured just for you: free drinks, a thoughtfully catered lunch, bags brimming with consolations.

What can they do for you? What can they get you?

But you can’t afford this, and what is borrowed needs to be returned.

How will you know if you are a success? If you win —maybe, maybe— what will be your prize?

All this, all this.

Oh, the wanting!

The day ends at the beginning of an untangling. Maybe you got some of the answers right, but it’s not enough. It’s never enough.

You already submitted to changing your face, so you could be up on that screen for all to see. You sloughed off your old self, left yourself behind. Your used body. Molted soft. Metabolism slowed.

Is this—are you—even real?

They cut you loose. Push you out. You have to go back to who you were before. Back to your life.

You have to go back to your life.

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A Little Short on the Arms Robyn Perros Steve and I stood outside the municipal crematorium’s chapel in Umbilo, Durban.

While we waited for my mother’s coffin to go through the incinerator, we attempted some small talk. It was a new suit Steve was wearing. His wife had recently bought him the suit from Edgars on a Black Friday special, marked down 40%. It was a little short on the arms, Steve admitted, but he said he couldn’t be too fussy, not with the price of things these days.

Steve had been in the South African funeral home business for over twenty years. A key responsibility of his was to appear at people’s houses, hospitals, and hospices to whisk dead bodies away. But no matter what strange hour Steve was called in for duty, he always arrived impeccably dressed.

A black suit, a crisp shirt, a tie, polished derby shoes, and a clean shave: adhering to this dress code for body collection was strict funeral home policy.

“People have to make a good first impression, you know,” Steve said, “but in my line of work—” he paused “—it’s the last impression that truly counts.”

I could tell this wasn’t the first time Steve had delivered this line. The faint smile and rehearsed pause were dead giveaways. I imagined it was something he said regularly: standing around a braai with new neighbors or on long drives with estranged family members, perhaps. A laugh expelled itself from my mouth. This was the closest I’d gotten to speaking in days, yet somehow, this jolt of sound still didn’t manage to penetrate the outside world. It remained suspended between Steve and I, a jewel in a thief’s mouth. That was until he laughed back.

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I imagined that Steve’s appearance on his arrivals for body collection needed to convey a very particular message. Something that said, “I am a straight-laced, salt-of-the-earth industry professional, but I am also a pious saint with supernatural knowings.” Suits that enabled Steve to pull this nuanced look off were few and far between, it seemed.

“You know, in all my years in the funeral biz,” Steve went on, “this is only the third suit I’ve ever owned.” As if retrieving fish from a basket, he displayed three whitebellied fingers before my face. Then he broke eye contact to fidget with the cuffs. I stared at the chapel’s Welcome mat.

I tried to remember the suit Steve had worn the night he arrived to take my mother away. The suit that had lifted her shriveled body out of the bed in her pajamas. The suit that had whispered an apology when the flowers we’d placed on her dry, open eyes fell to the floor. The suit that floated her down the corridor and into a branded company vehicle. It was the same suit Steve wore now, still a little short on the arms.

Steve checked the time on his watch. I checked the time on my phone. I looked up at the gum trees and thought about saying a prayer, thought about the next words I should try to say to Steve. Surely, he had a special message for me from higher realms?

Steve checked the time on his watch. I checked the time on my phone. The clunk of metal machinery filled the silence. I cleared my throat. “Ey this suit was a real bargain I tell you,” Steve said, dusting his shoulder.

There were many questions I wanted to ask Steve: how much money did he make a month, had he heard of human composting, did

did he like his parents . . . ? But most of all, I wanted to know if his suits held the memory of all the dead people he’d ever carried. If I were to sniff the poly-cotton blend hard enough, would I be able to smell my mother’s skin, hear her voice, see God? I wanted to climb inside and sniff Steve’s suit.

I wanted to talk about the weather.

Being there on the day of my mother’s cremation was not mandatory for Steve.

This, I learned, was just an additional free service he regularly volunteered. A nice, personal touch that I thought about tipping him for afterward, but couldn’t. Family and friends were invited to attend the cremation too, but it was okay that only Steve showed up. There was no dress code stipulated on the invite. Perhaps only he knew what to wear.

Robyn Perros is a South African writer and PhD candidate at Rhodes University. Her writing has appeared in Mslexia, Isele, and New Contrast, among others. robynperros.blog @robynperros John Tuttle is a Catholic writer, communicator, and teacher with a BA in journalism and mass communications and theology from Benedictine College. He and his wife Ellen live in Illinois.

John Tuttle

Ash and Bud

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Peak Robot Aastha Uprety The term “peak oil” was first introduced in 1956 by Shell geologist M. King Hubbert. It described the idea that, since oil is a finite resource, we will one day reach the zenith of oil production, and then, slowly but surely, we will run out of oil. Crisis was to ensue. The idea scared us, but did not slow us down. Instead we kept digging, as if peak oil was a prize to win, not a thing to fear.

But it was neither. The calamity of peak oil has not happened, and we’re not as certain as we used to feel that it will happen anytime soon. We’ve been extracting the black gold from the earth more and more, and still more remains.

Most scientists and policymakers now believe we’re more likely to reach a peak in demand before supply as sun- and windpowered energy becomes cheaper. The combustion cars that make up global traffic jams will be swapped out for electric vehicles, like a landbound ship of Theseus.

Many years ago, experts didn’t expect clean energy to become so feasible so fast. We now know that soon we won’t need oil anymore; oil will need us. But we haven’t reached that elusive peak demand, either.

And unfortunately, oil’s harms have already been felt.

Yesterday’s peak oil mania is today’s AI hype. “Artificial general intelligence” is a fantasy touted as an inevitability. It refers to the fact that one day, we will have created an AI that is of superior intelligence to humans. Some techie factions even believe that it’s their duty—their dharma, you could say—to help build that AGI, lest it come into existence and seek revenge against those who did not contribute to its development.

They fear it, but that fear propels them to realize it.

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Journalist Brian Merchant, as well as other technology writers, have suggested that AI companies actually benefit from mongering fear about the apocalyptic sci-fi potential of their product. As the foremost experts, only they possess the knowledge to prevent AI from becoming evil, and as the oracles delivering the prophecy, they seal its inevitability. What follows must be unstoppable growth. We see it in the insatiable demand for data centers— hulking buildings computing and processing and sweating for every click of a button online, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water coursing through their skeletons to keep the machines from overheating—a feat of energy in service of down paying a karmic debt that may never come.

The looming threat of peak oil could have opened a path to an alternative energy future, one where we rely on more sustainable resources than just those that are finite. But to our demise, we decided oil should still be part of the equation—at least until it literally could not—and the fact that it was destructive to the earth was irrelevant. Peak oil was never a milestone we should have accepted, and certainly not one to have sought. Warnings from as early as the 1950s could have been heeded, inconvenient truths could have been confronted, and the black gold in the ground could have stayed there, untouched. We braced ourselves for impact from the hypothetical crisis of running out of fuel; all the while, the real crisis of darkening skies and boiling waters steadily worsened, unimpeded by the worry that the reason for its being could run out.

We’re at a similar crossroads now, and I fear we’re not taking a moment to pause and think.

I don’t want an online chatbot to translate my thoughts into essays. I like to do the careful work of selecting words, as if with a tweezer, and crafting sentences, as if arranging tiny gems into a delicate pattern. But powerful forces have decided that the obsolescence of that painstaking effort is an inevitable outcome. Apparently, whether or not it is desirable is not relevant to its fruition.

I don’t want to live in a city where the sky turns dusty orange for reasons hundreds of miles away or where bottom-floor apartments are a permanent liability—all thanks to a natural substance that, when burned, burns the rest of us with it. But we missed our chance decades ago to spurn that outcome, to keep it buried in the earth in favor of energy sources that wouldn’t destabilize the planet, ecosystems and economies alike. Peak oil was an invention that could have served as a warning but instead became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

With its utterance into the world came an opportunity, a lifeline. Is that really where we want to go? In accepting the premise, we initiated the journey of preparing for it. But we had asked the wrong question. “Will we run out of this resource?” left untouched the vastness of “What will using this resource do to us?” And so we embarked on a path of collective hallucination: Well, it was going to run out anyway.

Choosing to believe that a far-off computer intelligence will one day take over the world has spawned a race to control AI before it gets to control us. Meanwhile, the present, dire, and genuine threats of AI to climate, labor, and human creativity are in plain sight. It didn’t matter then that oil could have run out—the real harm of burning it to its fullest, which we steadfastly ignored, was its capacity to destroy the earth. And it doesn’t matter now that robots could take over the world. Their devotees are already trying.

Aastha Uprety is a writer, editor, and lifelong student of political economy living in Queens, New York.

The Before World Miles Liss In the before world flowers rose like bright colossi twisting and winding in tangled, gnarled vines beneath the forest canopy.

Trees touched so intimately you could barely see the sky.

The people wandered the woods and were part of the woods, mere innocents.

They looked to the stars and named them, created legends, for the stars were living gods guiding the people home.

Their boats drifted through the many-fingered rivers as they paddled gently past the leaves.

Progress only existed as a premonition in someone’s distant mind.

Do you remember?

You were there once too in a living paradise we were blessed enough to behold for a time before our breath was taken away.

Miles Liss is a poet and artist living in the DC area. He’s the winner of the 2021 AWP Kurt Brown Prize in Poetry. A collection of original poetry and art, Some Inconvenient Poems, is available through Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers Press.

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Growth Comes in Spirals J. Kosakowski J. Kosakowski is a writer of queer speculative fiction and dabbles in making collages.

He has previously been published in Baffling Magazine and Small Wonders Magazine.

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weathering

Polar Bears

(or, why I would make a very bad mountain)

J. R. Solonche

Beth Bayliss when the water rushes in it does not roar it pools around my ears with that same slow persistence that rubs away at rock and turns mountains to memory it wasn’t one thunderstorm one lightning flash of surrender that landed me in hospital— rather the steady stream of quiet insistence that stirs rot through the roots until like the crumbling cliffs, the ‘strong woman’ ‘brave young advocate’ and all the possibilities ahead of her are empty space bodies make excellent soil what’s a valley but an empty space waiting for lilies to grow in peace? it’s a comforting thought that the world will go on after the rockies sigh themselves into flat fields

Beth Bayliss is a queer, disabled poet who writes about her experiences with abuse, addiction, and her recovery from both. She is currently studying endangered languages and decolonization in linguistics.

Dying off. That’s what’s happening.

They’re dying off. How can this be happening?

Their kingdom of ice, their white continent, their fortress, their palace, their world is melting, it is dissolving around them, it is disappearing out from under them, and they are drowning in it, the solitary males and the females with their cubs, they are all drowning in it, this desert of water whose distances now are too far to swim.

They tire and drown in this iceless sea with no solidity, what we have made of their kingdom of ice, not thick enough, not deep enough, not strong enough to save them from us. I cannot believe it, I cannot believe what we are doing to them, what we will have done to them when it is done, to the polar bears, to the animals I could not get enough of in the Bronx Zoological Garden when my mother took me there to see them. I stood, with my hands on the iron railing and cried out, “Look at the white bears! They look like snow!” and stood, awestruck, with my hands stuck to the iron railing, just stood there and looked at them, at the white bears, at the bears that looked like snow, and looked at them, and looked at them, and looked, and looked.

Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J. R. Solonche is the author of over forty books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

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Ground Control

SPRING CLEANING

Catherine Stansfield

[gets harder:::every year]

Today’s daily log denotes my attempts to keep you small have failed once more— another blinking satellite lost in orbit before it even breached the stratosphere.

Your little hands push the earth away; you begin to toddle onto tiny feet.

I take in these moments with the unyielding, stationary focus that only an incubator can achieve for its beloved specimen.

I slow down time with the same success of an ant digging its six heels into gravel to stop the earth from spinning.

My working theory is this: Soon you’ll turn your back to the stars and chase the sun’s splendor through the streets as each dwindling ray falls behind the planet’s curve.

And I’ll tell you that the search for celestial bodies can wait until after dinner.

But for now, I’ll continue to be your ground control and pick you up when gravity prevails and try not to think of how the sum of your mass is greater today than all of your yesterdays.

Catherine Stansfield’s poems and short stories are featured in Ignatian Literary Magazine, The MacGuffin, Plainsongs, Presence, Slippery Elm, and others. She works in the publishing industry as a graphic designer.

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David James The birds are moulting. If man could only moult also—his mind once a year its errors, his heart once a year its useless passions.

—James Lane Allen I’d love to take out my brain and shake it like a rug against the fence, hearing that thwack, thwack, echo off the cedars, watching bits and pieces of lies, debris, mistakes, even tiny chunks of defect floating away in the wind.

I’d wash it with soap and water, take a brush to the crevices hard to reach, and hang it out to dry in a spring sun, a bit cool, a bit warm.

The heart, however, is trickier.

You have to cut out the misplaced affection, dissect the lingering anger that poisons the flesh, scrape away the crust of misery that spreads from atrium to ventricle to aorta.

There’s always risk involved, a little tremble in the hand, a wrong move, and you bleed the heart, spilling into every part of your life.

Even if you clean up the mess with white rags, wipe with alcohol, and fall in love again, a noticeable stain often remains.

Born and raised on the third coast, Michigan, David James has published eight books and has had more than thirty of his one-act plays produced, including six off-off Broadway.

Maybe a Robot Will Solve Global Warming (or, Asking for Favors in the Technodystopia) MARE This work is offered to all those impacted by wildfires and to the spirit of the flame itself.

They’re saying AI will solve all these problems. They’re saying it can cure diseases. Maybe a robot will cure cancer.

We will see if its problem-solving abilities are so fine that it can save the world it was built to make richer. If that’s true, then yes, maybe it can cure cancer too.

I google, “is AI bad for the environment.” The first thing I see is a summary made for me by an AI bot. The chicken is answering the adage and telling me that every time an egg is laid the coop is closer to being unsustainable for all chicken life. It tells me “AI requires a lot of energy, which is often generated by burning fossil fuels, a major contributor to global warming. The International Energy Agency estimates that by 2026, AI, cryptocurrency, and data centers could use 4% of the world’s annual energy.” The world is burning, and we are starting fires. We have created a whole fake world, and in that world the Sims are on fire. We stray further from the tangible and dip our hands into imaginary pools of fake money bathed in real blood and wash our hands with whatever truth the robot hands us.

In my mindless, stumbling, meandering scrolling, I stop and stare at an infographic with an ex machina apparition of a silver robot hand to visualize that every hundredword AI-written email is the equivalent of pouring out a water bottle. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have hands, but I imagine the cold metal hand pouring bottle after bottle after bottle of water into dust bowl

bowl plain dry land while a Dorthea Lange mother weeps tears of Poland Spring, Fiji, or very Smart Water. I imagine robot hands even though what we call AI has never had hands, meaning AI has never gotten a paper cut and forgotten until it’s washing dishes or had its pinky held in the entire hand of a baby or gripped a barbell and pulled hard in a test of strength. No, none of that because AI lacks hands. It has never experienced having hands.

I have learned when I fire up the search engine to add “minus AI” to each prompt.

Technological advancements are developed and unleashed upon the public by those who will never face the consequences of these choices. AI is answering questions we never asked, having transformed in an instant from mere hypothetical to an omnipresent virus some tech titan in a sweatshirt says we have to opt out of like asking for no ketchup on a burger. Hold the sauce, no artificial intelligence. Please.

A literal translation of reincarnation is “to become meat again.” The fleshy lack of robots excuses them from the karmic wheel and cycle of birth, life, death, afterlife. I’ve learned it’s a mystery how we got here, but a creationist will tell you we were all intelligently designed. This AI has intelligence in its name, but we don’t know yet how that compares to the intelligence of humanity, or a tree, or a mushroom, or capital-i Intelligence, if you like to call your God that. I remember a podcast that discussed how quick we were to accept the title “artificial intelligence” and how quickly we abbreviated it to separate the creation from 19

from its name. There’s a joke about Frankenstein vs. his monster in there, but I won’t make it. Instead I will tell you that I played a robotic future robobride of Frankenstein in a college theater production where my power pack was ripped from my back mid–dream ballet, and I had to mime an improvisational dance to gesture that I was short-circuiting and dying. Perhaps I have more empathy for its experience than I remember, but I know a robot has never played me on a stage or thought about how I would die as it put itself into costume and painted its face white.

The bot doesn’t say “I require a lot of energy.” The bot doesn’t say “I’m tired.” The bot doesn’t say “I have CPTSD.” The bot doesn’t say it’s hot or thirsty as its servers are showered in water to keep it from overheating. The bot doesn’t say “I failed.”

The bot has never said “I” at all. It feels like “I” is all I say. I don’t know if the AI will say “I live on earth too.” I don’t know if it will solve global warming. I don’t know if it will save this planet because it calls it home.

I don’t know if it will just starve, dehydrate, and burn with us. I don’t know if it will save this planet because a scientist asked it to. I hope the scientist asks nicely.

Sometimes I have used AI. I had it proofread the job applications I shot into the void. I asked it to help with difficult conversations with friends. I’ve had it help me craft a blunt, therapy-speak, but somehow still kind of bitchy text to people I thought were friends. The bot asks me if I remember when I looked up Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional families. I do.

This is when I admit that I have been smoking and vaping too much. Burning and blackening my lungs, even if only a little bit, because I don’t think I’ll live to the age when lung cancer will be a problem because I can’t help but think the earth has thirty good years left, which means I’m halfway to our shared death. At this moment I think maybe artificial intelligence can cure my lung 20

lung cancer—or more likely my emphysema because that is what killed my father’s mother. She didn’t have a robot to cure her diseases, and I don’t think she thought about how many years she had until our planet would be too hot for us all to live here without fighting for sustenance that was plentiful before this country had an ugly English name. Start your engines: the race is on between a robot curing lung cancer, a robot saving our planet from climate change, and my death date, whenever that may be. We will see if its problem-solving abilities are so fine that it can save the world it was built to make richer.

Maybe we all crave the flame. We’re meant to gather around the fire. We always have.

There was a time when the only sign of human life was a campfire in the distance.

Maybe we will reach a time like that again.

And maybe around that nonceremonial flame we will recount how we smoked, and grilled, and vaped, and heated our homes with coal, and lit a tree on fire to ask a robot where our commas go because we can’t always remember, and how our candles were scented because we always always always wanted to light things on fire, but normally you needed a really good reason.

We couldn’t look at a book and not burn it.

We couldn’t look at the kindling and the matches and just leave it. We simply couldn’t.

I fail, sometimes I feel like I fail every day. I put my sandwich in the plastic bag; I order a flower crown from a company named after the rainforest we’re destroying; I tell the bot that it doesn’t feel good to make a futile attempt at fixing another friendship so it can reassure me and wish me well even though it has not experienced friendship or thirst or birth. I cannot resist the plastic, the synthetic synthesis. My pen dies and I will throw it out and steal another one from a restaurant or my gym or a work conference.

But maybe it’s worth it because maybe I’ll finally check everything off my to-do list or maybe I’ll finally write a good poem. My high

MARE is a Brooklynbased poet, writer, photographer, performance artist, and aspiring yogi. Her work is featured in PITS Zine and the Jersey City Text-For-APoem community project. She hopes her words find you well.

William Rerick is an artist in San Antonio Texas. He received his BFA from the University of North Dakota and his MFA from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

William Rerick

Mary Magdalene Contemplates Death

high horse has bolted. I was going to say I will fight for this planet until my dying breath, but maybe it’s like when we tell our family we would kill for them, that we would die for them. Probably not. Maybe we should just say we will try our best.

Last week I went to the lily pond where I sit and meditate. I go there at least once a week, more when I’m stressed. I tell the pond that I hope my presence and practice there makes it a little more sacred every time. I greet the land by name because one time my teacher told me that the land likes to be greeted by name. I take out my headphones after touching a tree trunk.

A heron lands in the water. We perch together, two occasional visitors to the pond.

I

I hear a girl ask her mother if the ducks are real. The ducks are real. It is sunset.

Recently when I see a beautiful sunset I remember that we get this every day thanks to The East and The West. We get to begin and end every day. The sun rises. The sun sets. Even if we fail, we fail each day fresh and new. I think that this is worth saving.

That this is worth fighting for. I’m not programmed to say that. What a shame it will be when this pond with its lilies and its fish and its ducks and even sometimes its heron . . . well it’s an awful shame that we won’t always be here on this island that feels like it’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller. I wish I could tell the robots that this is what it’s like living here. Maybe then they would try to save us.

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Conversation with My Ma at 14 Watt Burns No writing til you finish yer food, my ma’d always say. But ma, but nothin, but ma, but nothin! Eatchyer food, then write. But, eatchyer food, my food, it’s what, it’s good, fer what, you need food, you need food fer what fer nothin fer everything! But what if I finish my what if I finish my coffee, yer not even supposed to have coffee! It helps me what it helps me write, right, food helps you write, I’m writing food, I can’t, you can’t what, I can’t even look at this, what, look, what is this, on an empty stomach, look at this, what is this? Look. This.

What?? I can’t even, you can’t even what, I can’t even read this! What is this? This ma, what is this, this was written on an empty stomach? Yeah no wonder it’s shit, it’s—what?

Nothing, well, that’s debatable.

Is this even, what, is this even poetry? Sure, I mean why’s a pepper shaker a pepper shaker?

Cause you didn’t finish yer food, eat the poem!

Time Slips.

Shadows Fall.

Briana Gervat

Masjid Navila Nahid 22

Walnut Tree Helena Pantsis It began to pour outside where the walnut tree grew—the one outside your window, where I’d been standing long before the weather changed. I stood beneath that tree throwing walnuts at the glass, hoping at some point, you’d find me there and come outside to talk. You wouldn’t return the calls I left, and so I waited against the hard bark of the tree, covered with fissures and rough to the touch, when the rain eventually came and swamped me in.

The mud soured my shoes, and as I stood, still throwing walnuts at your glass, I noticed that your mother had torn out the tulips that grew from the dirt patch in the corner of the yard. The tulips were your favourite, you once told me, though you never did learn how to tend them, thinking they needed nothing at all to grow. I recalled their dying shape, necks snapped in permanent droop and blooms faded to a lifeless shade of plum. I couldn’t stop admiring the new bareness of the earth. The mums had withered; the seeds were hollow.

The howl-hum of the wind whirred, and I could hear the sap inside the tree pulsing against the wounds of peeled off bark.

In the summer rain you were the first to touch me, back against a hundred grains of sand. I couldn’t let you go. So I stayed, flesh against coarse wood where the gray grain split, the branches clawing to find their new home in me, and me, burying myself in that tree the way you’d somehow buried yourself in me.

Splinter hunkering down in raw girl skin, moving like flotsam with the current of my veins. But I didn’t care—I’d let a hundred splinters pierce me for a moment more with you, even if you didn’t pluck them out. I watched your window when the rain came, glass wetting to opacity, and the walnut tree

becoming me, remembering the thing you said, about growth and change and planting roots. And I was so sorry is what I wanted to say, that I would give you all the space you needed, and I didn’t need an answer now, just something to let me know this was real. I would wait all the world, I wanted to say, but the wood grazed my bones through the soft gums of my mouth down to my cold, sharpened clavicles and I couldn’t speak anymore. Flowers bloomed through my unclogged pores: some dropping catkins, some short and prickly to the touch, all bursting through my chest like the way you cut through me.

I reached up to your window, fingers knotty like redwood, long and thick with trembling veins, rain coating me like an oil spill.

And now I am the tree, and the weather has me as I drop walnuts from my knotted limbs, my flared leaves thrashing at your window with the pull of the wind. You had lovers before, I know, though I’d tried to forget them, and you’ll love anew after me with ease. But now stuck fast to the earth, I can’t help but wonder who the walnut tree is standing next to me.

Helena Pantsis is a writer and artist from Australia. She is the author of the short story collection GLUTT and the forthcoming poetry collection CAPTCHA. hlnpnts.com Watt Burns is a poet, playwright, and teacher living in Chicago, IL. They are originally from Milwaukee, WI, and they have a basset hound named Odie. No, Odie is not a beagle, no, Odie is not a boy, and no, not Odie after Garfield, Odie after Otis Redding.

Briana Gervat is a poet, photographer, and art historian. She is the author of two travel memoirs: Mosaic and I Once Was a Pilgrim.

Navila Nahid is a muggle photographer based in New York. Her photography can be found on her website: Navila85.com

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At the Crossroads in the Garden of Eden Nichole Turnbloom The four were beneath The Tree. Two bluebirds taunted Lucifer as he sized Eve’s

lead to inventions and interventions, creation and destruction in perpetuity.

rebellious nature, her instinct was curiosity, her heart more than he could fathom.

God had wanted to avoid this. Eve did not know this, yet. Eve did know, surrounded

Adam noticed,

by men, that she was a slightly different species after all. A deep flutter in her

released the first curse word, exhaled the first prayer: please, let us remain here.

It was Friday and God

abdomen foretold of a new generation. There was no need to be puritanical about

had so much more to do.

His eyes grazed Lucifer’s olive skin, thick curly hair, his

pleasure taken, surely God would offer forgiveness, or was this the birth of guilt?

once-favorite had no fear of him—a bad seed?

Eve needed no introduction

Lucifer knew rules were made to break. Eve seemed a fitting partner. Adam knew

to the handsome devil with an exotic name and emerald eyes. Eve had tasted knowledge,

Eve was made from his rib, not Lucifer’s.

Eve’s skin heated while

its sweetness still on her lips, set a craving in motion— there was no looking back. She bit

Lucifer stared, while Adam reached, while God pondered punishment

into the unpalatable core, a bitterness released on her tongue when two seeds cracked open.

for such disobedience. Hell was too harsh, something else was called for . . .

She let the apple fall.

And Eve knew she would be blamed. Her toes curled into the loamy soil.

The remaining seed would give life to thousands of varieties of textures, colors, and flavors. Trees bountiful with blossom would bear fruit to heal, satiate, inebriate, 24

As she pivoted on the ball of her right foot, she imagined freedom as falling.

Where Are You? Erika Scheer Erika Scheer was born in Chicago and currently resides in Waupun, Wisconsin. She is a fourth-generation woodcarver specializing in low relief hand carved themes of nature, human form, and spirituality.

There Is Enough Time for Everything Patricia Lin

Nichole Turnbloom is a poet, yoga therapist, amateur potter, and workshop facilitator. You can read her work in Acumen 108, Westbrae Literary Group 2, and Spillwords, among various other venues.

Patricia Lin identifies as an amateur poet with many past paths traversed and left. As a result, their art is inspired by cycles of rebirth and the liminality of life.

THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING. THERE IS ENOUGH TIME FOR EVERYTHING.

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A Detour on the Road to Hell in a Handbasket Kevin Brown DJ, Steve, and I were in Lupi’s Pizza in Chattanooga, the first of many times I would be there, as I moved to the area just a few years later. This time, though, we were in town for a conference, and I had found Lupi’s, Rembrandt’s Coffee, and the Bijou Theater, three of the best places in downtown Chattanooga, for us to enjoy at the end of each day. We were in line to order, and I was holding forth on something about the world that I didn’t much care for. It’s not just the nearly three decades since that evening that have led me to forget the subject of that jeremiad; it’s also the fact that I had so many during that era of my life.

At some point in that rant, I said, “You know what makes me angry?” DJ had heard enough of these diatribes to know that I was just changing gears at this point. He responded, “Pffft, everything.” He and Steve laughed, as did I, then I went right on. His comment wasn’t designed to be anything other than humorous, and it certainly wasn’t going to stop me from commenting on the ills of the world as I perceived them.

The rest of the trip passed without any further mention, and I have no doubt I had several more such outbursts over the next day or two.

However, his comment stayed with me over the next few weeks. I realized he was right; everything did make me angry. I would have argued that I had plenty to make me angry at that time, as my life was not going as I had intended. I was in a graduate program I wasn’t enjoying, in a city I didn’t want to live in, married to a woman I didn’t care for (my fault, not hers), and I had gained about eighty or so pounds over the past few years.

I was unsatisfied with my life, so I was angry 26

angry at the entire world, whether that was a sitcom that I didn’t understand why everybody else found so funny (Seinfeld, for the record; I’ve since changed my mind), the abysmal state of contemporary literature (which I read little of), or the way the internet was beginning to change the world (I had some valid points there).

I realized fairly soon after that conference that I had a choice to make. I could continue being the crotchety, angry old man I had already become in my mid-twenties, leading to a life of bitterness, or I could make a change and see the humor in the absurdities of the world. Most of the changes we make in our life are slow, and many of them are unconscious. We make small adjustments here and there, then wake up twenty years later to find ourselves a rather different person than we once were. There are those moments, though, where we consciously decide to change who we are, and we stick with it. They don’t happen often, but they do occur.

I teach Leslie Jamison’s essay “The Empathy Exams,” in which she explores, kind of obviously from the title, what empathy is. At one point late in the essay, she discusses the idea of putting forth effort to be empathetic rather than believing it must only happen naturally, which is how most of us think of empathy. We’re either naturally empathetic or we’re not, and we can’t change that. But Jamison writes, “This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags

and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.” When I read that quote several years ago, I thought about DJ’s comment and my reaction to it. Because of his off-the-cuff remark, I woke up in the middle of the night, packed my bags, and left that worse self behind to become a better one.

My decision has held throughout the years, as well. Rather than growing angrier and angrier with the world over the past three decades, I’ve worked (and it has been work, at times) to see the joy and wonder, the humor and the absurdities in it. That doesn’t mean I don’t get angry at injustice, just that I don’t let that anger consume me. I also work to focus my anger on the situations where it’s appropriate, not on the popular culture phenomena that so often overwhelm our lives and distract us from true concerns.

That said, I have to admit the one area where I failed miserably. When I came home from that conference and began working to make a change and become my better self, I didn’t do so in my relationship with my then-wife. I was never angry with her, as the situation wasn’t her fault. Even though I was young, I knew that even then.

Instead, I was indifferent toward her out of my anger with the situation. That never improved, and that was my doing, not hers.

I’ve worked hard to forgive my younger self that omission, but I can’t ever change it, much to my regret. Even a moment that changed

changed my life significantly didn’t change me enough. I’m sure that’s not the only place I’ve fallen short, but it’s the one I’m most aware of.

DJ and I have talked about his comment several times over the years. He didn’t remember it until I reminded him. He admits he didn’t have any agenda, just that he was making a joke. Thankfully, I was listening beyond the laughs. We often miss these experiences, as we’re too focused on what we’re saying (or about to say), distracted by what’s happening in the virtual world of our phones, or simply not paying attention to those around us. I’ve missed more of these opportunities than I’ve taken. I’m not angry about it, though.

That person is still asleep in a bed in Mississippi where I left him almost thirty years ago, still missing out on the joys of life that I’ve gotten to enjoy.

Kevin Brown teaches high school English in Nashville. He has published three books of poetry, a memoir, and a book of scholarship. You can find out more about his work at @kevinbrownwrites or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com Ellen Carranza is a New York-based artist born in Mexico City who creates vibrant prints, paintings, and ceramics.

Influenced by surrealism, animal imagery, and her creative family, she holds a BFA and MA in art education.

Vitality Ellen Carranza

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The Cusp Michael Hettich 1.

I don’t remember who told me—just a boy on the cusp of awareness—that if you could find a beautiful place and sit still there, the wild animals might come out of hiding to join you, circling your body, sniffing it. And then, if you held so still you became almost nothing, they’d sit quietly beside you. Ferocious ones too.

I wondered if sleeping might be another form of that kind of stillness, calling wild creatures out of the dark of my bedroom to slip in beside me like dreams made flesh. I imagined waking up beside a furry snoring as I listened to my parents turning off lights, moving through the house as they prepared for bed— and I sang so softly no one one else could hear me but loudly enough to keep that wilderness at bay.

2.

Down the street, a girl I hardly knew was dying from leukemia. Her parents, we were told, had escaped the Nazis. Their accents made them hard to understand, and their manners were formal—which is why I didn’t know their daughter very well. I don’t remember when she died, though I do remember walking past their house in the rain, years later, noticing a window was open to the rain, which was falling hard enough to ruin a wood floor or a bookcase, wondering whether I should knock and tell them, but the house was dark, and I was a stranger, after all.

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Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poetry, THE HALO OF BEES, NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, 1990–2022, was published in 2023

by Press 53. It won the 2024 BrockmanCampbell Prize from the North Carolina Poetry Society.

The Word for Door Is Always Plural Elisabeth Ursell “Drzwi jest otwarte,” I said, stumbling over the syllables.

“Drzwi są otwarte. The word for door is strange,” our Polish teacher explained. “It’s plural.”

“Like, all the time?”

“Yes.” She offered no other explanation.

I processed this new information, searching for the logic. Scissors and pants and tweezers all made sense as plurals, as they had two blades, legs, and prongs, respectively. But doors? A door had two sides, sure, but was otherwise decidedly singular. The door had hinges, but it felt unfair to count a door’s plurality by its individual parts.

I’d been studying Polish with a casualness that surprised me, saving my intensity for other hobbies like hot yoga and nail art. I should have been more excited by the language of my heritage and of the country I’d become a dual citizen of three years before. I had been yearning to learn this language since I was standing in the basement of my grandparents’ church at the age of eight, begging my mother to reconsider her severance from Catholicism and allow me to enroll.

My partner, the true polyglot of our relationship, brought a wealth of overlapping Russian vocabulary to our Polish lessons. All I had to offer was the parroting of pronunciation that I’d been able to mimic since childhood after hours of sitting at a kitchen table surrounded by a language that was used for secrets and storytelling. I had assumed that my emotional

emotional attachment to Polish would lend me a measure of natural fluency. This lack of intuitive grammar formulation had stymied my progress with Mandarin Chinese, and my literal translation of the world often made my Spanish comical.

I imagined that I was Amy Adams in Arrival, able to time travel through the alien language I recognized on the page but had never been taught to speak. Polish felt the closest I would ever get to reinventing time: tenses changed to indicate possession, and tenses changed some more if an object was acted upon, negated, or received. I was the object and I couldn’t stop changing. When the world stopped in 2020, I had to keep going, and this was how I ended up submitting an application for Polish citizenship just as the national archives, which contained proof of my Polishness, were closing to the public.

Nearly two years later, I became a Polish citizen on a rainy day at the Polish consulate in Shanghai in the middle of the pandemic and during the hottest summer on record, a near run-on sentence that I could use as a prime example of how important prepositions are in English, to be at something and not in it. I was at the consulate, but I wasn’t in Poland and hadn’t been in thirteen years. I was sworn in as a citizen surrounded by three employees in a house dating back to the foreign occupation of Shanghai, a place so homey that I imagined once I left, the only customer of the day, they would sit in the parlor and drink hot tea. They would chuckle at the American who arrived damp and unaccustomed to the notorious plum rains, able only to mumble a thank you in Chinese before remembering to repeat it in Polish.

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I wanted to occupy my Polish identity without inhabiting its literal geography, a contradiction that I could only explain as a gross misunderstanding of what it meant to grow up Polish, to be Polish, to become more Polish. If citizenship wasn’t the pinnacle of a cultural identity, then what was? I’d accepted a job in China in a move I saw as growth, the ultimate sign of my commitment to travel and learn about other cultures, but I certainly did not feel that living in China could ever substitute for being Chinese. A birthplace was not a bloodplace, and I had neither birth nor blood to connect me to China. I could at least say I had one of those things connecting me to Poland.

I searched for other obvious signs of my Polishness: a love of cabbage (I had IBS), a longing for kielbasa (I was vegetarian going on sixteen years), a fondness for Pope John Paul the II (I was teetering on the precipice of atheism). I did, at least, know that Kosciusko was an army commander and not just a bridge and a brand of mustard. I could eat enough poppyseed bread to skew a drug test. I could talk about the horrors of World War II without flinching, which perhaps had more to do with my constant exposure to our family’s history than to any inherent Polishness.

My grandfather talked often of how he missed Poland, urging my distant cousins not to move to America. I understood at an early age that to be Polish was to feel a perpetual sense of loss. My grandfather’s stories, too, spoke of losses memorialized only in fragments—a series of documents in an archive with limited hours, a DVD of a speech he gave on Holocaust Remembrance Day that I stopped one minute in because I heard his distinctive voice and couldn’t go on. My grandfather’s fixation on the past had calcified in his usage of English grammar: he walk-ed, talk-ed, and go-ed everywhere he went.

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In our family, history trumped language.

My grandfather told me to never forget, yet he never told me that the Polish translation was a double negative. But my grandparents did try, in their own small ways. The closest my grandparents came to teaching me Polish was memorializing my grandmother’s maiden name, Krzyżankiewicz, a name I could mimic with native-like precision, and repeating three different words for beautiful until I could recite them on reflex any time I received a birthday or Christmas present.

One such gift had been a Polish language learning DVD from my grandmother. I no longer had a DVD player, and this felt like a convenient obstacle to keep me far away from the dreaded seven cases in Polish, a holy number of grammatical cyphers that would unlock a divine order of comprehension. Years later, DVD in hand during an aggressive closet cleaning, I suddenly wished I could remember the last words my grandparents spoke to me in any language. I could picture my grandparents, I could hear them, but I am not sure what they would have said. Without them here, I could not imagine who would be proud of me replying in Polish. I understood in an instant why my mother was too sad to speak Polish anymore, why even when she watched Netflix she turned on the English dubbing to cancel out her native tongue.

Opening the door and peering at its opposing side, I see a grief that I’d been so proud to process. I was efficient in my mourning, not languishing over the past in the way my grandfather had for the last twenty years of his life and the entirety of mine. I had smoked a single cigarette when each of my grandparents had passed, burning grief down to a nub between the same two fingers I used to wield a pen. To be Polish, I understood, was to consume a distant concept of where I came from until it turned to ash.

I cannot travel back in time and speak Polish to the people to whom it would’ve mattered most. Yet I can comfort myself knowing that this is at least in part why my brain stumbles across the minefields of consonants, knowing it is entering a past it has never been forced to understand in its duality.

I open the door, knowing it is plural and that I will never again forget. Even if I fail to learn all seven cases, I’ll know I mastered this one simple exception to the rules.

Elisabeth Ursell is a Polish American writer of historical fiction and poetry. After a few years living in China, she calls Astoria home.

She loves writing about language, family epics, and cultural identity.

Lisa Bellamy teaches at The Writers Studio and authored The Northway, a full-length collection, and Nectar, a chapbook. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and a Fugue Poetry Prize. lisabellamypoet.com

Why, to My Surprise, I Started to Use the Word Satan Lisa Bellamy Because I am scared, but want to face what needs to be faced.

Because in her email, my irreverent, once-skeptical college roommate capitalized E, in the Enemy.

Because when I was seven, satin blanket trim between my toes hummed bliss. Every child deserves that.

Because Mary smote Him on the snout—she knew who and what he is.

Thank you, Mary. I will do the same.

Because when I visited the county fair, the Skull tattoo on a man’s left arm turned to watch me—spit, and snarled.

Because my grandson wants, he said, to be president for one reason: to offer homes to the homeless.

Because He appears not as metaphor, nor literary invention—as I once thought— but as invader. Think body snatcher.

Because Spirit takes the form of Crow and flies over me, squawking, No time to lose, no time to lose.

Because I dreamed that, as I walked on an unknown road, two hooded creatures stopped in front of me, told me I could not go on.

Because I will go on.

Because He wants to steal everything from everybody and will, if not stopped.

Because I am as a sunflower—I know Sun and I know darkness when I see it.

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So-Called Nowhere DL Pravda I follow deer tracks down the dirt driveway to the invisible farmhouse.

Covered by trees and briars, glassless windows closed by sweet gum boughs, she still stands in the middle rows of yellow leaves and rattling soybeans.

The two-foot-wide pine in the living room sways with the wind. The cracked brick fireplace coughs ash into the thick air of down rafters, moldy walls, and broken floor flowing down into darkness.

Out back, a faded, scratched John Deere, decals peeled almost unreadable, dented grill, yellow seat, tries to smile but is too damn tired. I sip the dew of solitude.

When I look above the conifer curtain at whitesilver clouds dotting the blue roof, I know where this is: the space of creation.

Out here, they call fall the season of surrender.

But the box turtle knows it ain’t true.

Spiders spinning under the eve know what to do. Plodding through the mud on the way to the car, I look back. All I see is trees, field, and sky. The old house hides from time and laughs at assumption.

I have no right to tell her story, but roads love to reveal old secrets.

Author of the award-winning book Normal They Napalm the Cottonfields, DL Pravda appeared on the Library of Congress podcast “The Poet and the Poem” in 2023.

Recent poems appear in Sand Hills Literary Review, KAKALAK, Roanoke Review, and Mid-Atlantic Review. Pravda teaches at Norfolk State University.

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When You Didn’t Call Nichole Turnbloom I collected avocados pits in my palm as the weight of a day, their roundness a solace I used to roll out the knots in my shoulders with my back to the wall or beneath my feet to remind me I could still stand.

I placed each seed into a silver bowl wide as a young redwood until the mass glistened mountainous and it was time to let the pits fall into the compost with a thud-thud-thud that sounded through the back door, down the hall and into the bedroom like footsteps like heartbeats. Some season later you called, your voice like the tail of a kite, something I knew from distance alone. I went into the garden and found the pits whole or split through the center by the heat of digestion. Some had dissolved into mulch I fed to the lemon tree in hopes it would grow a bit of sour sun.

One resolute pit sprouted and rooted. Relieved, I potted the tree, grateful it had found a home.

Nichole Turnbloom is a poet, yoga therapist, amateur potter, and workshop facilitator.

You can read her work in Acumen 108, Westbrae Literary Group 2, and Spillwords, among various other venues.

Journey JUNOS Joonhee Myung or JUNOS is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, illustration, video, and creative writing. Her work exists at the intersection of hybridity, displacement, and mythology, reflecting her experience as a third-culture individual.

Looking Up Sara Caporaletti Sara Caporaletti is a multimedia visual artist who explores various autobiographical elements related to Catholic religious practices or beliefs and makes connections to the human body form.

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Reaching out, growing deep The Branches is a journal of literature and philosophy dedicated to exploring our beliefs, our influences, and our contexts through word and art. Rather than setting an exclusively academic, secular, religious, or artistic category as the target, The Branches is interested in the fluctuating overlap of all of these and seeks to provide a space where we can strive for earnest engagement, curious reflection, open-minded dialogue, and mutual betterment.

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Open to Submissions Fall 2025: VOICE Deadline September 13