Show & Tell aims to provide a new outlet for members of the Kingston community to share their creative work. Our goal as the creative team is to produce a high-quality print publication that is engaging, inclusive, and accessible to all—contributors and readers alike. We continue to be inspired by the diverse talents of our neighbors, and we are grateful to the Kingston Library and the Midtown Kingston Arts District for helping bring our collective vision to life.
—Erin
Greene
TEAM
Editing & Writing:
Nick Carroll
Erin Greene
Brian James
Lisa Neilson
Lilly Sherman-Godfrey
Design:
Jason Hart — jasonhart.cargo.site
Megan Billman
Printing:
Aurora Brush
Cosmic Dog House Press — cosmicdoghousepress.com
On the cover & above: DRIVING IN THE NIGHT LANE
by Melissa Fleckenstein
CONTRIBUTOR S
Michael Arthur, p.2-3 @Inklines — Insta & Threads
Jerrie Basile, p.24
David T Budd, p.21
Becky Burns, p.6-7
Lance Cushman, p.18-19, IBC @thecush — Instagram
Nova*Darkstar, p.13-16, 28
See p.28 for the trans coloring page project!
Priscilla DeConti, p.17
Jennifer Edwards, p.2 — Unfettered Arts Gallery
Maeve Erickson, p.22
Melissa Fleckenstein, cover
Estrella Frankenfeld, p.4, 25
Lilly Griffin, p.8-10
Dana Iova-Koga, p.18-19 @elementalvessel — Instagram
Brian James, p.11
Danica Louie, p.20
Mobaggy, p.5
@vamoosegoose, p.23 — Instagram
CONTACT
Email: showandtellzine@drawkingston.org
DISTRIBUTION
Show & Tell can be found at the following locations in Kingston:
—The D.R.A.W Studio: 22-24 Iwo Jima Lane
—The Kingston Library: 61 Crown Street
—LGBTQ Community Center: 300 Wall Street
People’s Place: 17 St. James Street
Half Moon Books: 35 N. Front Street
World’s End Comics: 319 Wall Street
Neighborhood Print Studio: 49 Greenkill Ave.
SUBMISSIONS
Show & Tell is looking for contributors in the greater Kingston community. All experience levels are encouraged to apply. No submission fee required!
We’re accepting: —Nonfiction —Fiction
—One scene plays —Poetry
—Graphic art/illustration
—Multimedia art
—Photography
—Sequential art/comics
Scans or well-taken photos of:
—Paintings
—Collages
—Textiles
—Sculptures
Send written and visual pieces to: tinyurl.com/show-and-tell-submit or scan the QR code above. Full submission guidelines are available at the same address.
CALL FOR CREATIVE TEAM MEMBERS
Looking for a new creative project?
Interested in helping to bring an exciting, engaging publication to life?
Willing to volunteer your time to celebrate the artistic and literary talents of your Kingston neighbors?
Join the creative team behind Show & Tell!
Help us produce a high-quality magazine and connect with other local creatives.
Apply at: https://forms.gle/MYFiBn4y54RYJxFK6 or scan the QR code below
KARINA, AND CHRIS FROM BACKSTAGE
by Michael Arthur
MARCO,
by Michael Arthur
JAY COLLINS
PETER, ZACH, AMY AND CONNER by Michael Arthur
A LOVE POEM BETWEEN WILD WOMEN
by Estrella Frankenfeld
We sat
cross legged on her bed
Red light and a dark pink blanket
She held my hands in hers
Palms up
Loved pooled
We lay
In fields of grass
Old women
Looking up at the clouds
Itchy where our skin touched the earth
But grateful to be naked
We swang
First crushes
On an empty playground
Glowing magic
Pouring out of us
As our toes reached up
Pointed towards the sky
We passed
Each other flowers
One small sticky hand
To the other
Moving so slow
We could see them grow
But for us it was only a moment
We sang
As wild mothers
Seeking out warm rocks
By cool creeks
Silent in our companionship
Touching edges for eternity
And still we sat
Holding all that we are
Pooled in our cupped palms
EMPTY GARBAGE BAGS
by Becky Burns
Of all the things my partner left behind for me as a way in which he might mitigate some of his guilt for abandoning me, the very large roll of kitchen garbage bags took the cake. You know the type. Garbage bags purchased at a certain very large ‘big-box’ store where one can buy several hundred of them so as to never be “inconvenienced” by running out. Ever.
“No, take them,” he implored, “you’ll be glad you did. These things can be expensive!”
He said that last sentence just like I wrote it. With a bit of glee. As if he were doing me a great favor by offering me such a thing.
I took them.
Two years and three months later I am getting close to the end of the roll.
The inconveniences of losing a life partner in my mid-sixties have added up in a myriad of ways. I would count them, but let me just say that this sum exponentially outnumbers the garbage bags. It’s funny, because the first thing which pops into my head as I consider inconveniences is the act of taking out the garbage. I now live nearby bears, so most of the year I have to wait until the morning of garbage pick up to shuttle the full garbage bags out to the bin. I mutter under my breath. And sometimes, because I live nearby homes where nobody is ever home on a Wednesday morning because they all have partners and live in the city and come only to the beautiful countryside on the weekends, I yell out loud about how much I do not appreciate
this chore. I also have been known to do that about anything requiring a hammer or an axe, which I have now learned to pay someone to use. This involves more muttering and sometimes yelling. One time I was loud enough that a neighbor heard me. I didn’t know she was home. She was walking her dog and I saw her too late to control my outburst.
“I’m still adjusting,”
I explained, offering a weak grin, which she accepted with grace.
As the roll of kitchen garbage bags dwindles, I dread unspooling the last bag. I dread it like I dread going to the dentist. I know I will cry and I cannot stand myself for this fact. It will be the end of an era. The last bag, shaken open and stuffed into the kitchen bin, hungry for the detritus of my single life.
A life I did not choose but that chose me. The empty garbage bags a fitting testament to a man who thought nothing of moving on to a new woman, as long as he could leave behind something convenient. A realization that by filling each and every one of these empty garbage bags, I have delayed a necessary step in grieving, in a sense buying myself time I’d rather not have had.
No matter. Just a few more Wednesday morning garbage pick-ups.
Maybe two. Then, one.
by Lilly Griffin
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
by Brian James
In the beginning, dreams came from dreaming, before they became a commodity peddled for pennies in the back alleys where old men flush with nickels and dressed like waiters bartered for good deals on the first erotic dreams of children which were mainlined in excess, causing seizures that left the sick bastards slouched over dumpsters, drooling in their borrowed revery of second-hand perversions.
In the beginning, the end was a thought left to future generations to consider as they swept the streets of pollution and piled trash into duffle bags to lug back to ramshackle dwellings built too near the river so as to be prone to flooding whenever the rains came in the spring, the summer, the fall, or the winter, because rain no longer knows any season except for Mud Season which reigns all year round from June to June.
In the present, criminals enjoy elevated status and strut arm-in-arm down the old parade routes of the past, smirking like saints and worshipped with the same fervent devotion once reserved for virgins who have struggled through childbirth only to see millions slaughtered in the names of their offspring in order for empires to be washed clean with sacrificial blood.
In the end, nothing really matters because the end is a fiction all good citizens look forward to like vultures eyeing the dead strung up on meat hooks and swaying in the breeze of fallout winds that travel the gulf stream, spreading death like fairy dust into the eager, opened mouths of all survivors.
by Lilly Griffin
GLASS HUE
by Jennifer Edwards
I bleed like the rest; but in front of you all I have done much to moderate the color. Adorning the spectacle and adjusting the saturation of hue. I fear I am only ordinary, bleak, blank, not even black, but clear. My character is a cut-out; a copy of another aspiration; a revolving fantasy of feeling special when I see my words light up another’s face. I love and, in the emptiness, respond to the pings that resonate across time as space. My days are a measure of the distance it takes for the reverberation to come back to me. So... Do I speak plain and by doing so make myself understood, truly known? Give those who would listen the answer to the trick of my fool’s dance, so that they may walk away and take for granted that they will always have the chance to see such things another day; not the person of consequence that they, you, had come to see. So, the words are the flight of my feet through your mind. Dancing and dashing just out of sight to keep you blind to the fact that I am nothing. No, more than you. Not even as much. I sit here as a marker of the void; the absence of color, light, sound; the absence of a “you;” a clear hue.
STORIED HOME
by Dana Iova-Koga
I spent the weekend with Frieda in Massachusetts. We wrote and brainstormed and tossed workshop ideas around together in her mother-in-law’s crooked house. Bundled up because one of the heating pipes had frozen and burst. In between working sessions we walked, and Frieda called out the names of the waterways as we passed them: Cranberry Creek, Sawmill River, Connecticut River. She told me stories of the land too.
“One time when we were driving home, a HUGE snapping turtle was in the middle of the road here, and it would’t move. Cars were backed up and we all waited for a long time but the turtle didn’t move. We didn’t know how to get it out of the road and there was no other way around it. Their necks are so long, you know, that if you are standing behind one it can reach its head around to its backside and bite you. I finally called my brother, who is a fisherman, to ask him what I should do. He told me to get a really long, thick stick and get the turtle to bite down on it and then drag it out of the way. The first stick we tried the turtle snapped right in half. So we found a thicker one, which held, and that’s how we finally managed to get it off the road. That mountain range there? It’s the Great Woman, lying down. Can you see? There is her head, there is her shoulder, there is her hip.”
I could see her lying there. Many mountain ranges look like reclining women. I myself have sometimes been a mountain range, lying
on stage with my shadow cast large against the upstage scrim. I think a lot of women suspect they are actually mountain ranges. The giant woman who is lying near Frieda’s home seemed to be enjoying her rest.
In one break between working sessions Freida said “Let’s go walk up the Beaver’s Forehead!” She pointed to a bald promontory of rock ahead of us, illuminated amber in the winter sun.
“It’s called the Beaver’s Forehead because the story goes once there was a massive beaver in the river. She built an enormous dam, she was a bit greedy. Her dam was so big that none of the creatures down river had enough to eat and they started to starve. As a punishment for her greediness the beaver was turned to stone, there on the banks of the river. Her dam was dismantled so that the river flowed again. Now Beaver has the role of protecting the river, watching over it to make sure everyone has enough. That’s her forehead there- see how she’s looking out over the valley?”
Later, when we were perched on that forehead, enjoying the sparkles reflecting off the snaking Connecticut River, Frieda pointed out the Seven Sister mountain peaks in the distance, showed me where the glacier had carved out the valley. Told me how, if the tectonic plates had just shifted and shaken a bit differently in the time of Pangea, we would now be looking out instead at the continent of Africa. She also told me then and there that
crows are the most playful bird, as well as the most intelligent (as far as we know), and showed me how to tell the difference between the tracks of an old, tired dog and a coyote.
“That’s where you live, over there,” she said, pointing far into the south-westerly distance.
I loved listening to Frieda talk about the land, could have listened to her yarn endlessly. I realized if someone came to visit me in my new home I wouldn’t have any such tales yet to tell.
When it came time for me to leave the sunset was stunning. The sky threw a bunch of pinks and purples together in a slow flash. I typed my destination into Google Maps and headed down the bumpy driveway. Not a quarter mile into the journey the navigation system stopped functioning.
I had a brief moment of worry, but then I looked out and saw the Great Woman, lying.
I know where I am.
I came to the place in the road where the turtle sat and wouldn’t move.
I know where I am.
I passed the rock shelf that marks the glacier’s tracks.
I know where I am.
I saw the Beaver’s Forehead and the Seven Sisters beyond that.
I know where I am.
I remembered Frieda’s finger- pointing me toward home.
I know where I am.
Frieda’s stories oriented me. I didn’t even realize that was happening while I listened, I was simply enjoying the tales. But with each story she strung a strand that connected me to a particular feature of the place. It was only later, when I could have been lost, that I realized the web she had constructed to help me locate myself.
In one way, there is nothing unusual about this act—humans have been telling each other tales to impart information and wisdom since our existence began. But these days it is remarkable for the fact that we don’t navigate much this way anymore. The art of storytelling and the art of navigation go hand in hand. And we are rapidly losing our fluency in both. Driving home in the dark I promised myself I would gather stories that would help orient myself and others in the Hudson Valley- a place that is a new home to me.
On one of our walks Frieda and I discussed what to do with feelings of hopelessness, despair and grief that can arise in the face of current world events. We talked about the unproductive stupor such heaviness can impart. It occurred to me on the journey home that maybe collecting and sharing stories to navigate by is also one way we can collectively practice respect for the past and simultaneously offer a gesture of hope for the future.
MAPPING MY DESIRES
by David T Budd
He rolled out the rice paper and she dove onto the smooth white surface splashing dark as blood then bright chlorophyll, primrose, bee balm, azure sky and dusky iris.
Swimming in all directions at once, her strokes leave traces, a new delicate garden.
I feel you mapping my desires, he said, as she teased him awake from his quiet dream, She flaunting the magic of fibers and pigments combined to dazzle and seduce.
The colors he felt even in the absence of light asking him to rise and take in the fragrant intoxicating hues she so artfully lay before him.
They embrace, … release, and embrace again in the turning.
Together they are rolling out more fresh white surface and they swim, swim in the spreading pool of colors.
by Danica Louie
Shown left: FADING AND CREATING
ZOO CAMP TO XC MEET
by Maeve Erickson
The peacock saunters gracefully down the pavement, against the gray, flaunting his bold hues.
He’s away from home, but so close to you now that you nearly bump into him as he sways.
You’re simply amazed by the colors and tents from all around, meeting up in one venue.
Kids jumping with joy or stomping their feet, waiting for their time to shine today.
So many bright colors and sunlight it nearly blinds you
`cause you can’t stop looking at the nature of it all in amazement today.
by Jerrie Basile
SERENITY IN STORMS
By Estrella Frankenfeld
Sometimes rain means
Collecting
Gutter water
In yogurt containers
And then, when those fill up, Old yellow cat litter boxes
All so we can make mud On dry days
And our parents won’t tell us we’re wasting water
Sometimes rain means Sitting
In the basement
Listening to the portable radio
Smelling the damp mildew smell And liking it
While outside the tree with my favorite swing Is splitting in half
Sometimes rain means Two girls
Laying
In bed thinking Of the infinite ways
We have loved each other In past and future lives
And still it feels as if it’s the first time I’ve ever loved at all
Sometimes rain means Arguing About whether we get More wet
Walking slow or running fast
Because there must be a science to Dodging raindrops
Sometimes rain means Wading Through the creek Arms linked and shirts off Listening for thunder
Because we know that’s when we’re supposed to get out
This project is produced in collaboration with Kingston Library and the Midtown Kingston Arts District’s Youth Workforce, The Department of Regional Art Workers, and printed in Midtown at the Neighborhood Print Studio.
Working on Show & Tell has been a fun and gratifying experience for me as someone exploring my early twenties. Learning and gaining experience in project management and organization through a project I’m passionate about has offered me both useful professional skills and a new perspective on working in the arts. Being able to assist the wonderful creative team behind Show & Tell, and collaborate with The Kingston Library, has been one of the most rewarding opportunities the Youth Workforce program has provided me. I’m a lover of community art projects, physical media, and libraries; Helping run Show & Tell has given me the means to connect with other people who share that love, hopefully including you.
—Lilly Sherman-Godfrey
JOIN THE TRANS COLORING PAGE PROJECT
Artist Nova*Darkstar’s trans coloring pages can be colored in and sent to Show & Tell to be scanned and featured in our second issue.
Pull out center spread (pgs. 13-16) by removing staples or carefully tearing out pages. Color in one or both images!
To submit, drop off your coloring pages:
The D.R.A.W Studio: 22-24 Iwo Jima Ln.
The Kingston Library: 61 Crown Street
You can also mail them to:
—The Kingston Library 61 Crown Street Kingston, NY 12401
Or, if you prefer, color them in to keep for yourself!
