ryan harPer

south river I. Kittatinny

In lighter years and quicker runs I draw about a foot. Squat effect: dense American alley, compressed relay of gated sound, neither silence nor noise, a national gap, where the hemlock folds darkly into white oak, river birch bows waterward into deep rhododendron—perchance conversion, recreation, late June on the Delaware, but a passholder scuttles through, thinking Jersey too much everything to be anything:

In even flow I am snagged in the dank rites of pursuit— ever hazard, ever my garden stocking the master’s storehouse, my runoff set for Manhattan despite myself, my song the transponder invisibly sculling the sky. Drift or shoot, so I ride. I was asking for specific measures: fleet thoughts arrived, of vague range. Now the second growth hems me quick, draws me low, feet spilling in—vast flows of claimed waters— I, the reserve.

II. Trenton

The deferring manic manifest at tide-head:

If for a moment I am making a mess of things, and you understand little of the body from the shot you are taking at the highway pull off, consider a turn into the marshes: reeds fiddling the cool morning air, aureole flutter on the surface deep beyond the traffic bow— the most exact stillness, the bittern stretching, unbeaten, skyward in the mallow sprawl, as day matures today, never dry.

It is just damp here with spirits, low camp of new and inner lights in vast supply: the souls incline unto divinity, the immersions, never total. More than one scraggly bishop has tripped the circuit of veiled and shallow pools; more than one bold friend has fumbled across Jersey’s hidden districts to minister in the union of caught waters. You, like them, put off your way, merely a mess, might do all right here. But if for this moment I seem in poor form, speaking of a healing turn in the jug handle state, where even rights are complicated, know there is a river, that even tide gives way, even highways come to term, even history, having braved the shoals, flows into mere lies for a time, reflecting.

megan lynn WilKinson

She Rises

Prestonsburg, 1958: “Divers go to the bottom of treacherous and swift Big Sandy River today to seek the bodies of 26 children and a bus driver, victims of the most tragic school bus accident in the nation's history.”

In the murk of my girlhood room let your thoughts swim no longer. Replace them with these dribbling words under yonder river’s lull. Come Mama to where I dream up goldenrods and drift.

Make our bed of rushed water. Sink your tired toes into the coalslurried silt which mudded that heavy morning into my winter dress, the one you made, found to hug my body the one

sarah benal

liKe rivers aFter a storm

Two things go up the first week my husband Tony and I move into our house in Missouri: our bed and Tony’s drum set. It is August 2020, but we quit our jobs months before we knew how bad Covid would become and declined to renew our lease, so the move from South Carolina to Missouri could not be stopped. We move from an apartment to a house, and even though our new place is much smaller, it is a house.

Our off-yellow house is packed onto a crowded, funky street. A neighbor has a disco ball on their porch. Another’s lawn is covered in political yard signs. Tree roots have cracked and split the sidewalk so it looks like arms reaching from below about to yank themselves aboveground. Inside it is hot, and sunlight warms the vinyl floors as we arrange the living room, unpack boxes in the kitchen, and set up the drums in the back room.

The back room is an obvious addition to the rest of the house. The walls are thinner, like the landlord used whatever he had on hand and tacked the wood in the shape of a room. It doesn’t hold onto sound the way the rest of the house does. In the winter we will learn that everything becomes cold to the touch. His set is made of drums from two other sets, one silver and one black, and they wrap around the seat like an uneven fortress. When Tony sits his knee dips in and out of the window of space between the snare and the tom.

Before I met Tony, I thought there was only one kind of drumstick, but I was wrong. Drumsticks, brush sticks, and mallets of every size and color are laid over the drumheads or packed away for safekeeping. Cymbals hover like halos and one is wrapped in bells for a more layered sound. The bells linger the longest and rattle like falling glass.

The first few weeks after we move are silent. Tony is a teacher, but his schedule is constantly rearranged when a student or another teacher comes in contact with Covid. When we are both working from home, the house divides us: my office at the front, his computer open on the table in the back. In the mornings sunlight rises in blue and purple before growing thick with heat, and we open the windows hoping for a breeze. The drumsticks float from one place to another as though a ghost tried playing discreetly while we slept, but I never hear Tony play. In September I suggest to Tony that he play as loud as he can while I walk around outside to see if his drumming can be heard by our neighbors. * * *

We have been married for five years, together almost nine, but I have rarely touched Tony’s drums. It is not out of any spoken or unspoken rule; the drumsticks feel clumsy in my hands. I don’t want to adjust the seat and disrupt Tony’s ideal setup, and my wrists resist each time I attempt to play.

I am not a drummer and I am not a musician and that has always been fine with me.

Before the pandemic I wondered what Tony felt when he played. I wanted to cross the valley of understanding to look for the similarities between his playing and the things I love: reading, long walks, writing, or cooking. In the valley, discoveries appeared to me like river tributaries that travel from point A to point B. During our nine years together I think of our relationship as one in constant motion, but I still don’t understand what compels him to play. What makes one drummer better than another? What sound does that mallet produce? Where does that tributary begin and end? I worry if I do not learn, eventually our motion will stop. This strange, stagnant, and frightening time will hold us in place, keep us frozen until the distance seems too far to cross.

Over the months of the pandemic I am on alert. The valley of understanding is more unfamiliar now, darker. I’m scared that one day I won’t be able to see my hand in front of my face as I try to make my way across it. If it gets dark, I will need tools, strategies, a plan. But the pandemic has taught me that tools must be made with materials we already have. We will only know if strategies work through trial and error, and often new plans must be formed after an error proves to be deadly. * * *

We lived in South Carolina for four years. The apartment was loud. We heard dogs, trains, drag racing, and fireworks in the middle of the night. When our neighbor dropped something the whole building shook. A woman laughed every evening, her voice rising in sudden soprano before disappearing just as fast. There were gunshots more than once, and the car radio from our downstairs neighbor. In the middle of all the noise Tony muffled his drums with towels.

I couldn’t stand how Tony kept his drums quiet. Everything was already so loud. I didn’t think his drumming would create more problems. Play now and apologize later if it meant he could play for real, just once. But the towels stayed. He was clearly disturbed by the limitation. At times I begged him to try hoping that even one moment of full drumming would loosen his spine and smooth the creases from his face. I tried not to imagine the way his arms must have had to seize to keep from playing too hard.

After four years in South Carolina we moved to Missouri and the drums were unfurled in the back room.

The windows were opened to let sunlight in. Tony could look over our uneven and weed-covered lawn and through the arching tree branches. I thought the problem had been fixed. I thought he could unclench his arms and play until blood moved through his veins like rivers after a storm. We’re here now. In a house. This house is safe. When we first moved here, we drove through neighborhoods and pointed out bars and theaters glowing under Edison bulbs and tried imagining people walking between the marquee shadows. But the pandemic stretched on, and we have stopped imagining. I remind him that music won’t die, and for every glowing theater there will be ten, twenty, thirty bands looking for a drummer.

In September people stand outside. Bars keep their doors and windows open. They install garage openers. In January the doors are closed, but we see shadows shaped like humans pull over the sidewalks from inside the bar.

What is grief when the thing that is gone is not completely gone yet? Is it grief? What is the space between point A and point B called when it is so still that the air hums? I imagine standing in a valley before a tornado, when the air is green and the heat so thick that either I or it must break. And it is always the air that breaks, isn’t it? It twists madly and whips our skin and there is nothing we can do about it. In retrospect, the stillness seemed like a warning, and it is always my reaction to grow angry at all the things I did not do in those moments before the storm. * * *

I suggest to Tony he play as loud as he can. I will walk around the house and listen. Don’t worry, I assure him, I will run in and stop him if it’s too much. He sits, drumsticks poised. It is late summer. The sunset is buttery and drips down the pink wall and over the wood floor. The silver drums sparkle. The black ones gleam. I close the back door carefully and stand on the hot concrete. It takes a moment. I imagine Tony’s face settling into his familiar, concentrated frown. In the moment before he starts playing, I think about how his dark hair is getting long and his beard must feel uncomfortable in the Midwestern heat.

And then it starts. The house does little to muffle the sound. I don’t know what he is playing, but I never do. A drummer sets the tone, pulls the other sounds along, and curves and spikes and warms the room. I walk down our driveway and the sound shrinks behind me. When I reach the front of the house the sound is barely audible, or maybe it mixes well with the rush hour traffic. I place my hand on the house and I feel dust melt under my sweaty palm. He keeps playing even when I am back inside. When he’s done he exhales and smiles.

“How did it sound?”

I explain.

“Maybe I can put up some blankets or something to block the sound against the wall?” He hands me the drumsticks. “Do you want to play? I’ll walk around and listen to you.” amy Davis restoration (in the san JOaquin VaLLey)

He takes a walk. I play the drums.

Although we call it grassland no meadows turn this valley green

Except for irrigated farms and orchards every swatch of ground in the irregular floor pattern assumes pale shades of arid land and sand

Layers of grit and dust flat tans and grays spread where water should be pooling *

When floods came aquifers long enough to reach far-off fields of apricots and tomatoes had not begun collapsing could still absorb and store the wet rivers still within their banks arrived downstream in great measure and when storms turned fierce they overflowed reached high enough to threaten towns

The new model (feel free to call it the original model) moves the means of control from gray concrete walls to the rooted greens of trees

It razes the levees quits barricading water invites floods onto flatlands they filled in decades past Missing rivers will flow again Wild ones lose their fury

eDges raDiate From the center

Shouldn’t we remember the hours—the during—and how everyone said day was any day and the season somehow burned up sooner than it should have? Each tight and tiny group of us: one or two, a legitimate lonely. We were here anymore and here we got tired of yearning for only. Perfect attendance, but the longest stretch of waiting, and waiting we tired of the walls and door, relapse, any reason. Our matter was no longer for answers. Babies outgrew and Gallup took a third stay with the Riot Act, then beaches opened simply to show every version. We didn’t go because we didn’t know where to put our bodies but danger. Even Walmart had shuttered and it was all something to figure. From screens we watched bucolic settings. Was there a before the middle of this? Not the end—

inFinite galaxy

I’ve done a lot of thinking about the velvet-blue possibilities that come next, the ancestral realm. He lies in his bed almost there. The rabbi enters and sits by his bed a bit hunched. Recites a prayer. My father’s mouth moves the smallest amount, echoing words he knows. Lambent language. Still a matter. Overhead, muscular bright lights. My father’s eyes are closed. He loved and no less did he mean by it. Today he is wearing his orange shirt.

To that crossing, we’re close; I agree to my side of the trench. The room fills with clues and that’s what there is. Birds in wind, the sound of a baseball game. Right now, losing my way.

simon WolF

i KnoW immeDiately

(WhO may stiLL care When tO break?) simon WolF

I want to cry like this city, at the back of the field disentangled there is a Madrone looking downriver. I name what comes undone: a dry valley, a sun’s dust. My ribs guard empty tidal flat building a different way home. I end up a black south, four paper birches bark blowing in the wind. Stuck looking out, I abandon myself.

Public access

The concrete factory along the Duwamish makes perfectly unnatural clouds.

Cuticles of smoke, pressure washed perfect lawned business parks afford peek a boo views.

Fluorescent orange spray paint on a rock

“high tide” written with an arrow.

Always in relation.

A man and a woman start a fire in front of a van.

A block south, four paper birches, peel of bark blowing in the wind. Smoke combines with the factories. The river moves out of my view.

Craig Beaven has received fellowships and scholarships to the Sewanee Writers Conference, The Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, and the Vermont Studio Center. His first collection of poems, “Natural History”, won the Gerald Cable Book Award and was published in 2019. His second book was awarded the Cutbank Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming in spring 2022. His poems have appeared in the Best New Poets anthology, Atlanta Review, Tin House, Prairie Schooner (Glenna Luschei Prize winner), Third Coast, Pleiades, Artful Dodge, and many others.

Sarah Benal grew up in Nebraska and moved to South Carolina to earn her MFA in Fiction Writing. She currently lives in Missouri. Her work focuses on bodies and dealing with trauma through earth and foundation. It can be found in The Watershed Review.

Wendy BooydeGraaff’s work has been included in SmokeLong Quarterly, Great Lakes Review, West Trade Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Popshot Quarterly, Five South, Nurture: A Literary Journal, The Ilanot Review, and MASKS Literary Magazine. Her short fiction has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the Best Small Fictions anthology.

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press), Winner of the American Fiction Award in Poetry and Distinguished Favorite for the Independent Press Award. Other honors include the Dorset Prize and a finalist citation for the Arab American Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Poet Lore and Ecotone, and her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com.

Terri Campion’s short story, “Thanksgiving 1974”, was published in the Washington Square Review. “My First Kiss,” can be seen at cafélit.co.uk. She recently completed a novel in fourteen connected stories: Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, which was inspired by her award winning solo show: Following The Yellow Brick Road Down the Rabbit Hole. Her plays have been read and produced at venues in the New York/New Jersey area including Women Center Stage, Emerging Artists, New Georges, New Jersey Rep. Her monologues have been published by Meriwether, Smith & Kraus, and Great Kills Press.

Elise Chadwick writes to reflect on and remember life experiences, with perhaps the greatest pleasure occurring when a moment of discovery or deeper understanding emerges during the writing process. During the many decades she has spent teaching and reading poetry with her high school students, her taste in poetry has evolved from enjoying the challenge of cerebral and abstract poetry to appreciating the poetry that her students lik to read—poetry by Sharon Olds and Li Young Lee and Rita Dove, poetry that her students found accessible and engaging because it told stories and raised questions. And so, perhaps it is not surprising that this is what she tries to do in her poems.

Amy Davis is a historian as well as a poet, with an AB from Cornell University and a PhD from Columbia University. She has taught at Purdue and UCLA. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, december, The Southern Humanities Review (honorable mention for the Jake Adam York Prize), The Free State Review, Levure littéraire, Crab Orchard Review, Spillway, Women's Studies, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2016. She was the recipient of a month-long writing residency at Yefe Nof in autumn 2018.

John Davis is the author of Gigs and The Reservist. His work has appeared recently in DMQ Review, Iron Horse Literary Review and Terrain.org. He lives on an island in the Salish Sea and performs in blues bands.

Erik Endress is a resident of Ramsey, NJ. He studied Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. On most days, Erik is out the door at sunrise on a hike or adventure. He has traveled all over the United States and has been fortunate to photograph many of the greatest parks and natural landmarks the country has to offer. erikendress@ gmail.com

Jamie Etheridge is a previous contributor to Inkwell. Her work has also been published in JMWW Journal, Bending Genres, X-R-A-Y Lit, (mac)ro(mic), Emerge Lit, and anthologies including Serious Flash Fiction 2021 and the forthcoming Parenting Stories Gone Speculative. She placed 2nd in Versification Zine's Mosh Pit CNF 2021 contest. She tweets at LeScribbler.

Charlotte Friedman is a writer, teacher and artist who grew up in Seattle and now lives in Princeton, New Jersey. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Connecticut River Review, Intima, Waterwheel Review, The Maine Review, Nightingale & Sparrow and in the anthology, A 21st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic. Her first book, The Girl Pages, was published by Hyperion. When she is not writing or painting, she teaches Narrative Medicine at Barnard College in New York City.

Timothy Fox is originally from Texas. He received a Houston Press Theatre Award for his play The Whale; or, Moby-Dick and a Vault Festival Spirit Award for his play The Witch’s Mark. His writing has appeared in, among others, Westchester Review, Gordon Square Review, and Passengers Journal, and is forthcoming in New Writing Scotland. He lives in London. www.timothy-fox.com.

Ryan Harper is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Colby College’s Department of Religious Studies. He is the author of My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018). Some of his recent poems and essays have appeared in Change Seven, Tahoma Literary Review, Wild Roof Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. A resident of New York City and Waterville, Maine, Ryan is the creative arts editor of American Religion Journal.

Jessica Hollander has published over sixty stories in literary journals. Her collection of short stories In These Times the Home is a Tired Place won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and was published by the University of North Texas Press, and her chapbook Mythical Places won the Sonder Press Chapbook Competition and was published by Sonder Press. Her stories have appeared in journals such as The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Quarterly West, Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, and Redivider. She received her MFA from the University of Alabama and is now an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska in Kearney.

Laura McCoy lives on the Rensselaer Plateau in New York State. Her poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in Seneca Review, William & Mary Review, and North Dakota Quarterly Review, among others. She is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Abhishek Mehta is a marketing professional from India with a discreet passion for putting words together in a way that they may be able to hold his short and sudden glances in their direction every now and then. He aims to make the paler things in life less apologetically pale.

Isaac Melum lives in Everett, WA and is currently teaching in Seattle on Capitol Hill. He is a graduate of Gonzaga University and Northern Arizona University. His work has been published in Santa Clara Review, Waterlogged August, Thin Air, and Temenos.

Laurel S. Peterson is an English professor whose poetry has been published in many literary journals. She has two poetry chapbooks, That’s the Way the Music Sounds (Finishing Line) and Talking to the Mirror (Last Automat), and two full-length collections, Do You Expect Your Art to Answer? and Daughter of Sky (Futurecycle). She has also written two mystery novels, Shadow Notes and The Fallen (Woodhall). She is on the editorial board of Inkwell magazine, the Norwalk Public Library Board, and served as Norwalk, Connecticut’s, Poet Laureate from April 2016 – April 2019.

Kenneth Pobo is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), and Uneven Steven (Assure Press). Opening is forthcoming from Rectos Y Versos Editions. Lavender Fire, Lavender Rose is forthcoming from Brick/House Books.

Coree Spencer has been living in New York City for thirtythree years, and when not writing, she works in the catering industry. She has been published online on Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Ducts.org and Sensitive Skin. She has most recently had a short story appear in the anthology, Rimes of the Ancient Mariner Silver Tongued Devil.

Brett Thompson has been writing poetry since his graduate days at the University of New Hampshire where he earned a M.A. in English Writing with a concentration in poetry. He has been published in various journals, including Plainsongs, Tilde, District Lit, The Literary Nest, and Peregrine Journal. He teaches and lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two young daughters.

J.T. Townley has published in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and many other magazines and journals. His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (three times) and the Best of the Net Award. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MPhil in English from the University of Oxford, and he teaches fiction writing at Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University. To learn more, visit jttownley.com.

John Walser is a professor of English at Marian University of Fond du Lac. He holds a doctorate in English and Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Plume, Posit, Nimrod, december magazine, Spillway, Lumina, The Pinch, Water-Stone Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Iron Horse, Thin Air, and Lunch Ticket, as well as the anthology New Poetry from the Midwest 2017. A four-time semifinalist