Lions-on-Line
Cover Art: Intoxicated by Audrey Dailey
Falling Poem by
Helen Rohlfer
We are taught that fall
Is a time of change, transition, preparing to depart, transform.
Now what are we changing into?
Are our leaves clinging to branches on rotted trunks
Of stagnant ideals?
Are our leaves twisted and dry?
Deaf to all but ourselves?
Or vibrant, enthralling those who encounter us? What sound do we utter as we are stepped upon?
A shrill crackle, A hushed murmur, Or silence?
Do we shelter the fireflies
Of the year to come?
Nurture them with our mortality?
Or do we burn?
Taste our smoke.
Glory in our shout.
Gather in our warmth. Connect.
Transform. Rest, but grow, Breathe in the ash
Of the leaves that came before us,
As we breathed in the ash of those That came before us.
October
Poem
by Margaret Utley
I am looking at a dark six o'clock sky with the world still bustling as the dreary moon peaks out from behind a rain cloud.
The sun does not show her face for long these days and neither do I.
I catch her only in subtle passing at the beginning and end of my days, mourning and eve, and I miss her.
Everyday she is here a little less and everyday my skin grows a bit paler and colder from the lack of her scornful gaze.
I am looking at the bright autumnal leaves, rich with the reds, oranges, and yellows that my tree friends now bleed.
Where did your blossoms go old friend? Where are your bright green leaves so lush with life?
Now your fallen limbs remind me only of the inevitability of death, and when your bleeding severed hand grazes my paling skin as you fall to your grave I wonder, am I looking at mine?
Praise the Sun, Photograph by Megan Thompson
In the Library
Fiction by Joseph Knizner
Shelves of books reach to the ceiling, packed with texts of knowledge and value. As the years turned by, the same chorus dotted these trips to the library, these sunny afternoons.
“You can’t read that.”
“Maybe when you’re older.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“It would only confuse you.”
“Good people don’t read things like that.”
“It’s a sin to read that.”
“Put it back.”
“You just don’t understand.”
And he did, every time. But his skepticism grew as he looked closer, and the titles offered no real omens of evil or inherent offense. The back of the books whispered to him, describing the stories, hinting at what they guarded within. Some certainly seeme d unpleasant or strange, but that only made the allure stronger –the promise of the wisdom contained in the unknown or unfamiliar.
He resolved to know, to know for himself just what danger awaited him in these texts he was forbidden to read.
High school came. He worked to keep up, taking hard classes, putting in the work. Absorbing as much about sophistication and complexity and literary analysis and criticism as the curriculum allowed. He prepared himself, steeling his mind for the implied th reat and deception that lurked in those books.
Then came impatience, the temporary license, books and classes, driver’s tests, remedial courses, and the driver’s license. Good grades and fortunate circumstances applauded him, offering him access to the old car when he needed it.
And he returned to the library–with no one looking over his shoulder–to fulfill his childhood promise. In the great oxymoron, he read in secret. He read all those books people had tried to keep him away from. And he was fine. He didn’t die. Neither did his morality. His mind wasn’t scarred. Though he struggled and squirmed and shed tears at times, he brushed his mind with empathy and flexed his critical thinking. He certainly learned a lot too, both historicall y and emotionally, prodding subjects and topics he had never been allowed to know existed or know much about.
He may have spent those days in the silence of the library, but he visited many other places, nonetheless, entering other circumstances and contexts. Some experiences the books offered would later recur in his life, offering him some insight. Others didn’t exactly but still taught him something. Important truths about the world and history and human nature.
Checking the next title off the list, he tucked away his notebook. Shuddering, he swore he would never commit the same sin and drag others from the altar of knowledge, insight, and empathy, like he had been. Read banned books, kids.
Night Life Outside, Photograph by Sophia Motz
Nature Never Falls
Poem by Alex Getz
The smell of maple hits the roof of my nose
I look around and the fog seems to glow
As the light of dawn fills the forest abound
And yet all is silent no sound to be found
As dew falls off of the leaves of the trees
I feel the moisture, the cold peaceful breeze
The trail goes on, seemingly forever
But where it ends, that’s not my endeavor
Alone but secure, as I walk along the path
Admiring god’s gifts as they allow me to cross
Not only the sun but also the moss
On the trees and the love that nature never lost
Wildlife, Artwork by Audrey Dailey
Elegy
Fiction by Ethan Geiger
It is on nights like this one that I wish I had never abandoned her (I would never be satisfied). To anyone else, her limitlessness and perfection would have been perceived love incarnate. But, in my eyes, she never stretched into the horizon in the same way that you’ve always seemed to. Boundless and eternal. I often find life to be far more beautiful when the showcase is charred and impossible to swallow.
I know now, the trees have lined up, and your flames have scattered. I once wrote of blue and red peacock feathers and a thousand other pages of my soul that will die in a graveyard of forgotten words and dilapidated remarks. And as our grey sky starts to extinguish your heat I know not whether I may continue hiding smoke signals throughout my pages, I know not whether I will leave markings where the flesh of my heart dies and the leathery parchment begins. I know not whether I still remember where that threshold is crossed.
I collected my thoughts in a manner much resembling the way farmers collect livestock before they butcher it prep, stun, slaughter. I was starving but I could not eat. Every bit of information I learned of your death zapped me in a thunderous blur. In wake I wrote, “knowledge is stunning, like a taser.”
It is scary having feelings, that is. We, as people, stare into the radiant summer sky with a hopeless optimism, the twinkling sunlight is just too damn compelling. Perhaps this is a moment of closure for me but it’s far too late to prevent shaky hands fr om leaving an inconsistent seam on a yellow heirloom quilt. Could this mean your fiery blue eyes fade out? Or, maybe, they just won’t blaze in the same way they used to? I hate that idea (enter total annihilation; oblivion).
but chasing someone who cannot even imagine you as a person in your own right grant me eyes, a mouth, a face you left me unpainted. Grant me the right to exist next to you I should have pleaded sooner. I begged you to decide the ground you stood upon. I c annot live a life
founded on uncertainty. I cannot pitch a tent on an uneven surface: contradictions. I am only a man, I am exhausted I am exhausted and I yearn to be seen.
It is, of course, at this time, when I am struck with the same Walt Whitman quote that I’ve been echoing in my mind all week. We “contain multitudes” in spite of the fact that I wish some things were just simpler. And what is to become of all my decaying w ork? Of course, we both already know the answer to that: a poet exists most efficiently when his heart is a torrid hurricane (perhaps the rain will douse your remaining coals?).
O’ ember, anticipate a coming spectacle. You were no you will always be a slurry of blue and red flames, dearest.
In light of the swirling and fading incandescents, sweat droplets have accumulated on my brow. It trickles my eyelids and tickles my nose. I will continue to embrace the heat of the fire, never sure if the magnificence of the conflagration justifies all of the burn marks and scars. Dearest flame, burn nevermore, burn out. Sear me into an inferno of you, ashes and broil and burn it out of you, your softness.
You were a plague of fire and heat.
Carousel Horses
Poem by Sebastian Isaacs
Like carousel horses on rusty rails that never end, we are caricatures of what we were meant to be beautiful stallions gliding through the breeze. My brothers live on my heels and I’ve never seen their eyes under bright carnival lights, or the setting sun as it filters through the cracks in the rafters; I wonder if they see it, too.
We run on rails that never end, only cycle through the seasons and the rain. I dream of running free through fields paved with soft grass and mud enough to cake our horseshoes, hardening in the winter like the steely squelch of iron beams keeping us hardened to the attraction. We run on rails that never end, and dream of stretching our legs to the ground, of following the Southern winds beside one another, no one left behind, eyes meeting in mutual understanding
for my freedom is nothing without theirs. We could run through the plains, the forest, the sand with our heels to the soil and muzzles to the open sky, as we pray that one day these metal bodies may die.
Joan’s House, Photography by Cecelia Rice
The Yellow Duck and the Severed Girl
Fiction by Margaret Utley
I don’t remember anything about last night or last week, only that I have landed here in a room with blank walls, kneeling in a puddle of saltwater tears that soak my bruised hands and knees. The purple across my skin is a sharp contrast to the yellow duck that floats before me. She is my only friend here and speaks to me often. At times, she is critical, accusing me, saying, “You got yourself into this mess,” and, “Just couldn’t keep your mouth shut, could you?” But there is care in her voice as well. “Use this feather to dry your eyes, dear,” she squawks as she reaches up to brush a tear from my cheek. “Let’s get her some ice for those bruises.”
In here, the walls are so bright that I can rarely bring my eyes to rise and look at them. Instead, my head hangs heavy, staring into the puddle at a reflection of me and the blank walls. I don’t recognize the girl who looks back at me. There is blood dripping from her lips, and cuts litter her cheeks. What happened to me? I am so cold. Her eyes are so tired.
The duck swims up and touches my cheek with her wing. Her feathers are soft, but my cuts sting, and I flinch away. She reaches again, this time holding my chin with a surprising strength. “You must wake up soon, my daughter,” she says. “Wake up, and all wi ll be forgiven.”
When I open my eyes, the puddle is gone, and with it my friend the duck. In her place stands the queen mother dressed in a muted yellow gown. It makes her hand look sickly as she takes hold of my own. There is too much to take in the glaring hospital lights, the ice wrapped around my bruises, the ache in my raw eyes, the unnatural numbness in my face and throat and I am so weak. I look to my mother for answers, but there is only a strange mix of tension and relief on her face that I do not yet understand.
With my mother suddenly speechless, the doctor, a man who had been standing so still that I didn’t notice him until he spoke, explains it to
me instead. “Your highness,” he addresses me, his voice cold, “the bruising and the cuts will heal, but I fear there is nothing we can do to repair the severed tongue.”
The Beast and I Poem by
Zoey Ward
The Beast and I ascend upon the rocky hill. We walk until no end for we have time to kill.
The Beast and I, kin-bound allies well prior to the Aftermath, we suffer under empty skies atop the vacant asphalt path.
The Beast and I, a pair unloved, we trail behind two blokes. Things emptier than night above, they mimic all our strokes, Yet we push on until the Beast marks each of seven barrows few, I dare not waver from the East and loyal Beast stays true.
The Beast and I are not alone, and I speak not of mere shadows, the Beast and I can hear the Drone, echo all around the meadows, hear it whir also hear it roar, hear it bark also hear it breach, hear it moan also hear it soar, hear it creak also hear it screech,
The Beast and I, we hear the Drone descend low into the valley. Cresting over hills and forests, it’s blown,
born of yon Eternal Rally. Far-flung steel machines contend there, and there they croon as one. Their crooning drones across the air: a fusillade we can’t outrun.
A lonesome place, the valley is, save for the endless droning songs. Pistons jerk, and old engines whiz: we meet them with our Psalms. The Beast and I, we cry aloud, pleading for our release. The Beast and I, we ask God, “Why?” “Let us lie down in peace!”
The Lord did not listen we shall not sleep tears fall on my teeth, they glisten; the Beast but stares, yet I must weep. Once I cease, we prepare to march, but hearts rest deep within our bowels, for we spot It beneath a larch: terror, the white-strake horror growls
The Beast and I, we flee post-haste away from It, creature of night. Its freakish foulness emanates and maddened death lies in Its bite. Lucky for we, escape is swift, though It is never truly gone. The Beast and I we cross the rift, at once we land upon the lawn.
Despite the frightful wights outside, we’ll live and toil another day. Another night, as well, we’ll stride amidst the danger and the gray. Until then, the Beast and I lie, stirring restless through the morrow. To God or Drone, our souls we’ll ply, beg granted rest; shriven sorrow.
Black Cat, Watercolor by Audrey Dailey
Waiting Essay by Eric Reeves
January 4, 2003. Two days’ notice to prepare and deploy. Seventy -six days before the invasion would begin.
We touched down in a country holding its breath, the desert quiet and expectant. A few dozen soldiers and specialists greeted our arrival advance elements sent to carve order from emptiness, to build a base that would soon pulse with the movement of hundreds more. Ours was a combined joint special operations task force: combined meaning many nations, joint meaning every branch of America’s special operations braided together. We were there to prepare, but mostly, in those first weeks, we were there to wait.
The flight itself had been a prelude to unreality. To reach our seats we threaded past military trucks and stacked communications vans chained to the cavernous belly of the C-5. Assault rifles and machine guns rested casually across seats and in the aisle s, a metal forest of dormant power. When the doors finally opened, a mild desert breeze slipped inside dry, mid-fifties, welcoming after the minus-two degrees we had left behind in Dover, Delaware. The air’s softness felt dreamlike, as though we had stepped into another season, another life.
On paper, my assignment was straightforward: counterintelligence. Travel to the embassy and speak with U.S. agency representatives already in-country. Forge ties with host-nation security services. Begin the quiet work of weaving a human network - sources who could serve as watchers and whisperers, an early warning system for the storm that would inevitably break. Conduct surveillance and countersurveillance on those who would do us harm. Clear, precise tasks that quickly dissolved into a slow rhythm of small steps and long pauses.
Days unfolded in measured increments. Mornings filled with briefings that confirmed how little had changed overnight. Afternoons stretched across the base like the desert light itself bright, patient, endless. We checked equipment, rewrote contact lists, reviewed maps until
the streets and alleys became as familiar as the lines of our own palms. Each evening the sun sank into a sky that never hurried, and still the invasion hovered just out of reach.
I remember the sand most of all. It worked its way into everything between the pages of notebooks, into the creases of uniforms, dusting our cots, filling our boots until every step ground with grit. The desert seemed intent on claiming us, insisting we c ould not be there without carrying a piece of it home. When the periodic sandstorms rose like walls of orange light, we sat inside our tents and waited, the wind’s howl wrapping the canvas in a restless drumbeat that made time feel both suspended and endless.
Waiting became its own mission. Time stretched and contracted, a quiet pressure beneath every action. We lived inside that pause, sharpened by rumors and dispatches, dulled by the long silences that followed. The desert around us understood. Its stillness was not empty; it was a vast, watchful breath.
Then, on 20 March 2003, the waiting broke. Helicopters and aircraft that had been lifting off for weeks multiplied their runs, the tempo quickening until day and night blurred into a single roar. Morning and evening briefings no longer speculated; they ta llied. In forty days, coalition forces would report the deaths of 9,200 Iraqi combatants and 3,750 non-combatants. One hundred thirty -nine U.S. and thirty-three U.K. service members would not return. For them, there would be no more waiting.
What I learned in that long interval is that war begins before it begins and lingers long after it ends. The world remembers the dates of invasion and withdrawal; those who were there remember the waiting - the slow, invisible weight that makes the first strike inevitable and ensures it is never entirely over.
Tribute to Arlene, Mixed Media by Tori Orbegozo
Poem by Ethan Geiger
You aren’t a doctor (and my malleable flesh has only just reformed)
But the way you look at me (and the way you talk to me)
(thump)
I’d let you split my rib cage in two.
You are unqualified (and last time I was dissected I became septic)
But when your name lights up my phone screen (once or twice every day) (thump)
I liquify my
And your non-indulgent replies
Your brevity infests my body, a thousand roaches gnawing at muscle
(thump)
Unrequited all the same, I want to hold the scalpel and cut my heart out to give to you but you’d never accept.
Instead your smile thaws the extra heart I left in the freezer until it decays so much for a spare. Now I only have a heart, of which you’ve poisoned.
The damned thing is faulty, only pumping blood when I think of you. please, please, PLEASE dissect me already
(thump)
Lights in Taipei Poem by Sebastian Isaacs
What does Taiwan have that we don’t?
You’ve pushed me as far from you as the rest of the world, can’t you explore the foreign land of my body instead? Open up my bleeding heart with your silver scalpel or traverse the ends of the Earth between my thighs. Suture me up when you’re done with me, clothe me again with a toe tag, then disinfect me for the next time you feel like dying. The next time you want to leave all the life in Cincinnati let me be your getaway car. Ride me until you see the stars, I wrote the night sky sparkling for you.
Tell me, will you still see the stars in Taiwan? Will I still see the sinister shine in your eyes, the burning blood in your cheeks as we wait for sunset to bathe our bodies naked in the night sky? Will I still see the knotty scars on your chest, the cold sweat slicking your spine as we wait for sunset to perform the most intense procedure of them all -unsex me, here, and harvest me, now, take me with you to Taipei, don’t leave me behind, looking up at the unmoving vault, an endless gap between our breathing cadavers; a sky, full of stars I have sent up like paper lanterns.
Will you hold the light in those leathery hands? Will you look for my letters, grip them with unfeeling emotion, cannibalize my confessions, let them dissolve in you like a supernova I wrote the Northern Lights down in Taipei for you.
Did you see them? Did you eat them? Did you cut them, skin them like a rabbit? Pare them like a heart? Will you leave mine there, beating, bleeding, battered, and blue, bursting like a shooting star, all of the stardust, I left it there with
Caretaker, Photography by Cecelia Rice
The Birth of Aphrodite
Poem by Margaret Utley
Somewhere, there is a poor little girl hidden in her closet with a dim light pressed to her chest finding shelter in her book as her parents clash and slam and rage through the opposite wall of their small home.
Venus was her name.
In her blistering hands lay a tear -stained copy of Hesiod’s “Theogony,” where Ouranos and Gaia, titans of the world, love and fight and hate with a passion so fiery that Gaia must employ her son to castrate Ouranos, her lover, husband, and enemy.
Cronus, the child arbiter, takes revenge for his mother, defending her against his father’s abuse, and throws the severed organ into the sea, where the unlikely mix of godly blood and seafoam meet to birth a radiant, scornful daughter.
Aphrodite, anthropomorphic goddess of fertility and marriage, sea and seafaring, war and love, beauty and lust. Venus, strong as she was, strong as she may be, was too just a girl born into violence as her parents clashed and slammed and raged in a world too alike to our own.
I Pine for Decomposition
Essay by Tori Orbegozo
I want to go outside and walk in the drizzling rain. Cooling down my blazing skin with every drip. Dripping down my face and covering my glasses until they fog from the heat of my body. I write in this cold, dark classroom, staring out at the rain, yearnin g to be in it. I want to lie on the ground and look up at the sky as she cries her chilly tears. I want to close my eyes and listen to the cars kicking up water on the road, skidding quickly past me.
I sit in this quiet room and picture myself in another part of the world, in a forest. Listening to the frogs hollering and squirrels scampering up trees. As the rain bounces off the leaves of the tallest redwoods, plunging to the earth below, it coats the moss with a fresh layer of moisture. I lie on a bed of green ferns and sweet grass, and the earth below begins to accept me. The millipedes and isopods climb onto me, discovering new terrain.
As the seasons change, the leaves float over me, hiding my body and camouflaging me as a part of the forest. And the rain drips down, trying to keep me awake, but I sleep anyway. I drift off and savor my eternal time here. Covered with coral, crimson, and ochre leaves, fungi begin to sprout from the parts of me that decay. The mushrooms multiply, and connect me with something deeper that runs throughout the soil of the Earth. All the mushrooms communicate through infinite webs of mycelium, joining them all together. This is how pieces of the forest interact, and I always long to be a part of it.
Should Hephaestus Scorch Me
Poem by Ethan Geiger
Should hephaestus scorch me, my bones whittle down into splinters of my brain
My soul dries into a placenta, and is eaten with milk
Should hephaestus scorch me, my passion flickers as if I were shot with a cattle gun
My arms and legs retract into my skin, into a leathery hide
Should hephaestus scorch me, I tear my optic nerves from their spongy wet sockets
My painted lines of blood and mucus form a sticky puddle
[and if my blood pools just right, your reflection stares back]
Should hephaestus scorch me, I will dehydrate into a flask of vodka and salt
My brine sterilizes a plague of on-lookers
Should hephaestus scorch me, he will need to puncture my larynx and scratch my voice
My songbird will collect my broiling ashes and I will hum an offkey melody;
should hephaestus scorch me, I reciprocate;
into the sky with a battered and broken, to rise into the clouds,
Summer Sunset, Photograph by Megan Thompson
The Tempest
Fiction/Memoir
by Sebastian Isaacs
My mother and I learn tonight how one another handles grief after the moon disappears from the sky, leaving our city in a brewing tempest. The search parties have been running out for days. Tonight they stop. The town is covered in a white blanket of silen ce, only a howl punches through the snow. It comes from the deep pit of a mother’s belly that aches in remembrance of when her child was safe there. He is safe no longer, as police officers with pale faces shoo off volunteers, spit flying from their mouths and freezing as it hits the hard ground. You can see it in their eyes, frigid and frightened: yes, the boy has been found. Yes, they excavated his body from the pond behind his apartment complex this evening. The snow was still falling. He was seven years old, limp and cold and shivering in his death from the storm that came today did nature know who she was taking? Does she weep with us in sheets of snow, or does she drown the rest of us, too, in her chilling embrace? My mother and I talked at midday about joining tomorrow’s search party now she sits beside the toilet and wills herself not to vomit while I cry from a wall away for a boy who I do not know, a family I have never met, in a town where things like this do not happen, in a world where much, much worse occurs every day. But tonight, this is the worst thing that has ever happened to any of us. Tonight, we all feel the tragedy. Like a swift stream. Like a deep lake. Like a dark ocean rushing to take us, too.
True Father, Drawing by Audrey Dailey
The Myth of Fate
Fiction by Joseph Knizner
Between the pinpricks of stars and stretching expanses of galaxies dwells the Foundries of Fate.
The foundation of the spiraling tower rests above the abyss. The spire stretches into the material dimension distant and unseen. Up and up the polished stones rise, untouched by time, and expanding constantly. Openings in the wall fill the passage with the light of the Universe, of every star casting its light towards it. The smooth steps wind along, and stone walls are interrupted with alcove after alcove, each containing a Template.
Each notch guards an archetype of a possibility, the embodiment of influences and ideas and virtues and vices. Of possibility. Of a certain fate. The Pattern for warriors, kings, prophets; managers, parents, laborers are sculpted out of the nothingness bel ow the tower by the unseen hammers of Fate, sewn with the intricate needlework to design the psyche and the sear to impress the values.
Alongside each Form in the forever-ascending stairway are the appropriate tools and objects, reflective of each Template’s purpose. Swords of conquest, scepters of steel, weights of justice, glasses of insight, texts of truth, shovels of industry, weapons of destruction, shields of defense adorn the wall beside each Form. The spire contains an exponentially growing collection of lifeless Forms kept in stasis.
As the tower builds itself on and on, up and up, unceasing, a single one travels its stairs.
The Oracle, with an unhurried, measured step ascends the spire, appraising each Template it passes. Considering the whims of the Future, studying the dilemma of the Present, and recalling the proceedings of the Past, the Oracle selects the appropriate Form s.
The Model is imbued with a provisional consciousness. The Oracle leads to the Template to the Fountain at the base of the spire beyond Time.
The pearl base shines, the rushing water scintillating in the spotlight of the stars, the silent sentinels of the tower.
Dropping their weapons, their scepters, their books, their tools, the Oracle presses the Template’s hands into the basin, cupping them full of the glittering water. The elixir trickles out of their palms, pressing through the gaps of the Model’s fingers, tracing the lines on their hand. Their engineered heart and passions throb in their veins and the luminance of the water whispers everything those hands are capable of to the Oracle.
The Oracle must decide.
If the water’s revelation of the full nature of the being –of all it could be, of all it can do, of all it will do if only given the chance at existence –does not please the Oracle, the Model is returned to its alcove and deprived of the Spark that enlivens it. It waits. A reserve for the Future, a tool for later. If the Oracle is pleased with the Life such a Model w ould live, the way it would shape the Future, the Form is Blessed.
The Oracle has decided that the universe that is bound by Time requires this Form. Instantly, its Model begins to grow in that place named reality, and a child is born. From the manipulations of Luck and Chance and Desire and Virtue and all the hidden and unhidden forces–this Form takes a mortal Body, growing and developing the skills and dispositions it was chosen for. All the actions it fulfills are within the range the Oracle foresaw that it was capable of. And eventually the mortal Body dies.
But the Oracle does not watch Existence and study what each Form is doing. Returning to the selections, climbing the stairs, assessing the inert Models, the Oracle continues, persisting in pondering which vessels to use to manipulate the Present.
The Oracle pauses, studying the shimmering light stretching through the window separating the alcoves of two ancient Forms–one clad in mail with a sword besides, the other in a suit with a telecommunications square at its side. The light illuminates the to wer, the Templates.
The light, indeed, for that is the whole point . To place the right players at the right moment to keep the Light aflame and resist the everencroaching darkness. The Oracle walks on, looking to the next Form,
looking for the enduring traces of the Light in each, studying what that Light may compel them to do. After glancing at the Present, the Oracle decides if this Pattern is appropriate. If the Model is truly sculpted of the Light, the Fountain will confirm i t.
Billions of incarnate Forms are ablaze in Universe, chosen by the Oracle. Exponentially more have been. Exponentially more will be. Without such manipulations, the Darkness begins creeping back onto the Stage of Existence, threatening it all. Chaos builds, and Evil proliferates. But the Oracle is aware of this and is working. The Spire infinitely grows, providing as many Templates. The Oracle continues to peer into them, testing the Pattern’s heart in the Fountain, and Blessing the Models when the right one has been found. The Light shines on.
Submission Guidelines
Initiated in January 2005, Lions-on-Line is a literally collection of works by the students and alumni of Mount St. Joseph University published online with the cooperation of the Liberal Arts Department. Lions-on-Line is published online twice yearly, duri ng the fall and spring semesters. When our budget allows, Lions-on-Line goes “in print”. We take submissions during all twelve months of the year.
If you are currently affiliated with Mount St. Joseph and you would like to see your work published, you may submit your work to LOL simply by emailing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction or artwork to LOL@msj.edu. For full submission guidelines, consult our website.
Lions-on-Line is always looking for new staff members. If you’re interested in joining LOL, please contact faculty advisor, Elizabeth Taryn Mason, Ph.D. at the following email address: elizabeth.mason@msj.edu.
Editors and Staff
Co-Editors-in-Chief: Sebastian Isaacs
Avione DeVond
Editors:
Ethan Geiger
Sophie Hirt
Joseph Knizner
Tori Orbegozo
Alex Taft
Margaret Utley
SGA Club Rep: Sebastian Isaacs
Treasurer: Margaret Utley
Klohie Hinds
Denzel Kirkland
Kristine Leonard
Zachary Smith
Megan Thompson
Mary Pat Zink
Faculty Advisor: Elizabeth Taryn Mason, Ph.D.