Cantos 2026_Final

Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal

EDITOR

John

J. Han

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Susannah Cerutti

EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS

Ben Gaa Michael Shoemaker C. Clark Triplett

COVER ART COVER DESIGN WEBMASTER

Christina Chin

Joel Lindsey

Joel Lindsey

Cantos, an annual journal published by Missouri Baptist University, welcomes submissions from poets, writers, and visual artists. We accept previously unpublished poems, short fiction, novel excerpts, short plays, and nonfiction. Please submit your work as a Microsoft Word attachment via email to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu. For previously unpublished artwork, including haiga (illustrated haiku), send your submission as an email attachment to the editor. Use the subject line format: “Cantos [Year]: Your Name” (e.g., Cantos 2026: Ben Smith). We do not accept Google Drive files or hard-copy submissions; any hard copies received will be recycled.

Along with your submission, include a 100-word author bio written in the third person, using complete sentences and beginning with your name. For more detailed submission guidelines, see the final two pages of this issue. Below are the reading period and target publication date:

Reading Period

January 1-February 15

Target Publication Date

March 15

Cantos does not accept simultaneous submissions or reprints. Our review process takes approximately two weeks, with earlier submissions receiving priority consideration. Multiple submissions within a single reading period are now allowed. The editorial team evaluates all submissions for suitability, content, organization, structure, clarity, style, mechanics, and grammar. We do not consider works that include profanity or foul language. There is no monetary compensation for contributors, but those residing in the continental United States receive one complimentary copy of the issue in which their work appears. Copyright reverts to authors and artists upon publication. The views expressed in Cantos are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of Missouri Baptist University.

BOOKS FOR REVIEW: Books for review should be mailed to John J. Han, Editor of Cantos, Missouri Baptist University, One College Park Drive, St. Louis, MO 63141.

ISSN 2327-3526 (print)

ISSN 2327-3534 (online) Volume 32 2026

https://www.mobap.edu/about-mbu/publications/cantos/

Retail Price: $10.00, including shipping and handling (U.S.)

Available for purchase and shipment within the continental United States only.

Terrie Jacks

Botanical Fanatical” and other poems Marc Darnell

Phoenix Lullabies” and other poems

MarthaMaggie Miller

Faringdon Market Square” and other poems David Pickering

“3 Aunties” and other poems

poems

LaDeana Mullinix

Willett 71

Seeds Sambhu Ramachandran 72 “A Poetic Prelude to Form FS-240” and other poems Wes Carrington 75 weak & gentle

Elizabeth Jeane 76 “At the Food Pantry” and other poems

79 My Husband Undergoes Cancer Treatment

Gloria Williams Tran

83 PowerPointless Doug Stoiber

85 Tanka and Haibun C.X. Turner

87 Haiga Lavana Kray

Visual Art

Terrie Jacks

90 Staying Alive, Man

90 Going to the Party

Michael Shoemaker

91 Secret Fairie Garden

92 Signs of Spring

93 St. Andrews, Curry Rivel, Somerset, UK

94 United We Worship, Redlands, California

95 Through a Veil of Strings

Carston Anderson

96 Color

Michael C. Roberts

97 Description of Photographic Series on Cemeteries

98 Cemetery of the Cite, Carcassonne, France

99 Cimetière Saint-Laurent-des-Combes, Saint-Émilion, France

100 Cimitero urbano di Arezzo, Italy

101 Elgin Cathedral cemetery Elgin, Scotland

102 Cemetery of the Cite, Carcassonne, France

Prose

104 Behind 100 Broken Hearts: Susannah Cerutti An Interview with A.J. Mason

110 No Smile Ingrid Bruck

111 Two stories Huina Zheng

113 Beloved Incurables Suzanne Underwood Rhodes

118 A Day in the Summer Matthew Wherttam

120 The Master Clock James Fowler

125 Two stories Kevin Brown

126 One Fine Day (a play) Robert Boucheron

134 Between Text and Place: Two Literary Museums John J. Han in Gunma Prefecture, Japan (a photo essay)

150 Notes on Contributors

161 Submission Guidelines

“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

JANE BEAL

The Way of the Garden

The way of the hummingbird is through the air quick, tiny, bejeweled at the neck, now chased by a bee who has decided to drink at the red flowers of the sugar-water feeder today: I love the sound of his wings, blurry and buzzing, that tells me he’s close when I look up, there’s a patch of air that’s sparkling!

The way of the waterfall is to flow downward into the rocky pool splashing and singing a water-song, splashing and singing ceaselessly while I listen and wonder how I have inherited this happiness in the afternoon.

The way of the Japanese maple is to reach her red leaves toward the sunlight, and grow, and shine over the waterfall, watching over the birds that play there in the morning, taking their tiny baths like an angel who paused on the way from heaven to earth, and in answer to a transforming prayer, rooted down and stayed to stand guard: a sign of beauty, a sign of change.

The way of the jasmine is to creep across the garden path

and climb up the side of the fence and open up tiny white blooms like stars in a dark-green jade sky in the springtime how they fill the air with fragrance! How sweet is the perfume of tiny flowers that look like a bride’s bejeweled crown nothing compares to their possibility.

The way of the flowering pear tree is to tower overhead! How tall is the tree that spreads his branches over the pergola and shades me from the summer heat, showering down tiny pear nutlets for the squirrels, and my little dog, who eats them and chases the squirrels barking like an utterly mad little thing!

The way of my brother’s blue-gray couch is to invite me, and my lover, and my daughter, and my dog, and anyone who comes over to sit down and rest a while, looking around at the garden that continually renews itself with life even when the sun is going down, even when, at summer's end, the coolness of autumn creeps into the neighborhood, and the spirit of my brother comes back from the other world and reminds me of how thin is the veil that separates heaven and earth.

The way of the gardenia is to grow when the hot sun touches the green leaves in the morning, so that the warmth and the brightness calls forth blossoms perfectly shaped like white marzipan on a wedding cake, like a dream that doesn’t stop when we wake up but like a promise of good to come lingers, tenderly, and tells us that the love-story of Sleeping Beauty is a vision of Eternity in a single flower.

MICHAEL SHOEMAKER

“found” and Other Poems

found alone praying sweet presence beg forgive release tears Your touch makes whole. no more bag reclaim for me

In The Curvature of Quietness

No more dialogue, conversations, chit-chats, dilly-dally discussions, tempestuous tweets, exclamations or even egalitarian whispers in my ear.

sh. Shush. SH!

I think I will go wash the car and wax it twice with the congenial company of the healing hiss from one garden hose. Ecstasy.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki - 80 Years

They gather at Pearl Harbor in the folds of starched paper cranes bend and flatten, bend and flatten bend and flatten, each year learning to submit to peace.

A survivor was 5 and retells. Listeners linger on a brain’s bluff wondering what is possible, to recall or reexperience from an eight-layered black chasm.

It is more than the “Lost Decades.”

Awakened by the vanilla of orchids, hands open- lips purse- tongues cease. Blessings from leis descend from halos, heads, hands, and heels with commitment in the walk.

A reporter asks a young American who says, “Never should have happened,” too early to have lifted jaws to the “Guad” in green hell “Guadalcanal,” or strain cheeks to “wa” in “Okinawa.”

Will something like this occur again? You don’t know. I don’t know. Nobody knows. Cranes may fly.

PAUL HOSTOVSKY

Two Poems

Listen

I don’t know how to say this, but maybe that’s a good thing, because too much intention kills the poem, they say. Let it go where it wants to go. I’m listening for its voice, which isn’t my voice exactly, though it kind of resembles me. Like that little kid I was when I was a little kid who wanted to go where he wanted to go. I’m not that kid anymore but I’d like to tell him something: Don’t be afraid. Because it’s okay. I’m not afraid, I can hear him say, all bluster and pump fake and jumpshot. I know you’re not but I am. I’m so afraid. He looks away, dribbles the ball between our legs, shoots, scores! I miss him more than I know how to say. I do not know what I am. I do not know what I am. And I don’t know how to say this exactly, but maybe what I am is trying to tell me not to be afraid, the way I would say it to the child I was, though he can’t hear me because he’s so busy being what he is. Which isn’t what I am. Not exactly. Though it resembles me.

Mr. Westrich

They’re talking about tying teacher pay to teacher performance, and tying teacher performance to student outcomes. They like to use words like outcomes. They probably don’t read much poetry, whoever they are, and wouldn’t know a good line if they wrote one. I remember Mr. Westrich though, my 7th grade English teacher, who died in a boating accident the summer I was 12. I remember his performance his performances the way he’d make us all laugh, the way he’d interrupt us whenever we said um or er. “Don’t burp,” he’d say (he called um and er “burps”). We had to put a penny in the jar every time we “burped.” When the jar filled up, he said, he would buy us a cake. And we’d all eat it together. He was as good as his word. I hated school but I loved Mr. Westrich. Whenever we said y’know he’d interrupt us and say, “No, I don’t know, tell me!” Our outcomes, if anyone cared to measure them, spanned a lifetime of not burping, of saying what we meant instead of saying y’know. But his greatest performance was dying like that, in high summer, on a sailboat, or under a sailboat I don’t remember how it happened, only that it did, only that he died his final act. His perfect disappearance. No one I knew and loved had ever died. He was the first one. It taught me what can’t be put into words. It taught me the ineffable. It was around that time I first started making poems.

DENISE ENGLAND

“Canada Geese” and Other Poems

Canada Geese

glide across winter’s wide topaz in Vs as black beaks

slice shivering sky backlit jet

silhouettes

chiaroscuro in flight.

Below, my earthbound arms jerk (acute, now obtuse) angles shoveling snow,

as the geese honk greetings to this flightless imposter in polyester wings.

Crown of Thorns (Villanelle) after a folio in “Ecce Homo,” 16th-century illuminated manuscript

Wretched wreath born of bloodlust ruby death impales its nails, pours from His head into dry dirt, blooms in Heaven: Christ’s ever-emerald crown.

This cohort of spite, whose whips contort, whose spit spews from mocking mouths, thrusts its cross, its wretched wreath born of bloodlust. Ruby death,

come relieve this incessant scythe of violence! Splintered curses twist, shatter into scattered blooms in Heaven Christ’s ever-emerald crown

where angels tend its nascent flower. They breathe His suffering, suffuse the sapphire spheres with cries: wretched wreath born of bloodlust, ruby death!

Yet in the depths, His tender temple, crushed, reknits, uproots as decay gives way to luminous blooms in Heaven. Christ’s ever-emerald crown

glows, exposes my bloodstained hands; He lifts them now wrecked, now bleached, to touch, to bless His wretched wreath born of bloodlust. Ruby death blooms in Heaven: Christ’s ever-emerald crown!

Hot Tub Mythology after “Andromeda Galaxy” by

Starburst bubbles crash into my skin a backyard Andromeda lashed in a cubic meter sea.

Spent, spirals of air effervesce like champagne, kiss my limbs as they swirl, form planets in my orbit a galaxy of Saturns.

David Dayag

JOHN REPP

The Monsignor Advised

The Monsignor advised Mary to say “Heaven’s all around” when her third-graders’ inevitable questions piped from their tender throats. The friend across the table sipped coffee, numberless thought-blips writhing like spirochetes. Mary spent a month in Haiti & saw how small our typical worries are. The friend dragged the dray load the dream of Kay Street had dropped. A crone had held a broken wine bottle to his carotid as a gaggle of kids paraded a bedsheet reading FEED HUNGRY CHILDREN, the black paint glinting wet. Mary savored a mouthful of muffin as a faint rattling somewhere in the cafe brought Achille working her rosary back to him, but why say anything when the Haitians he no longer taught were the daughters of the ruling class & Achille the only name he recalled & the friendship new so best to avoid the merest hint he thought his pedagogical labors equivalent to the mission Mary undertook because he didn’t think it, being acutely attuned to the workings of his heart.

RANDY BROOKS

pickup load of hay the Herefords round themselves up

school bus stop knocking mittens together to warm up

the silence of dawn snowdrifts embargo our farmhouse

phone booth to the wind how long it’s been since we talked

Haiku

MATTHEW BRENNAN

“Listening to Beethoven” and Other Poems

Listening to Beethoven (Rhymed ballad quatrains)

His last two months in uniform My father lived in Prague Where he was sent on V-E Day, Survivor of war’s fog.

His billet was a bombed-out building, The plaster cracked like glass Of windows facing the city square. He’d watch the evenings pass.

His bedroom had a record player And every night he played A scratched up copy of Für Elise And felt he had it made.

He told me this when he was dying. But only now I wonder If he regretted a girl in France Whom war had put asunder.

Baxter’s Fine Foods

July 1964 (Four-beat accentual quintets)

We were on vacation, a road trip to Capital City, Bagnell Dam, and Rolla, Missouri, our last stay on a three-day tour my virgin taste of high life and adventure.

Our final dinner loomed like a feast, my second time eating out not counting Sandy’s Drive-In, where thirty-five cents could buy a burger, fries, and a tiny Coke

you balanced on the Plymouth’s dash. You’d save the Sandy’s bag for garbage. But at Baxter’s, starched white cloth cushioned ceramic plates and napkins folded into puffy squares.

The gleaming tableware was heavy, but I ignored the neat array and used my little fingers, fumbling barbecued drumsticks slippery as slivered bars of motel soap.

I caught a groove and with gusto moved the slathered chicken to lips and mouth and cheeks. The Kansas City sauce blended with my ruddy blush: Diners gawked and laughed while waiters brought me napkins, more and more, for me to stain. I’d wanted poultry, which Dad hated and we never had, but not this, not when I noticed my brother’s pristine fingers pinched

a leg of plain roasted chicken, food fine enough but soon forgotten.

Mapping the Family Tree in St. Louis (Shakespearean sonnet)

With November here, we bros came home Where we began to search for graves and stones Of those long gone. First, Mike. His catacomb Of sorts we’d find where Stan the Man’s in bronze,

A magnet for mad fans when the Cardinals play, And here our brother Mike’s cremains are planted. The Jewish Cemetery drew us way West next. Our grandpa’s upright marker slanted

Slightly, but thick in depth it gripped our rocks. At Calvary, we walked and walked but could Not find Mom’s plot. We thought we knew her box Had rooted under crabgrass where we stood.

It is as if her life has lost its worth. Like bones, her stone has been reclaimed by earth.

JOEL LINDSEY

Two Poems

The Chicken or the Egg?

Not the old riddle, not the tired debate over firsts, as if the barnyard were some endless cycle of cause and effect, feather and shell.

No, the real question the one that waits behind the coop, leaning against the grain silo, bits of cracked corn tossed as passing theories is which will be last?

Because perhaps the egg is no mere beginning but the master plan itself, the architect of its own replication, whispering delicate instructions from within its brittle walls.

And the chicken, all bustle and fuss, all pecking and scratching, is just the necessary middleman, the unwitting messenger of some deep yolk agenda.

So, maybe the last to remain will not be the hen, worn thin by time and predation, nor the rooster, strutting toward some final dawn, but the egg silent, perfect, complete.

Waiting, as it always has, to crack open the next great advance.

Optimization

The SEO consultant says we need more backlinks, more keywords, more engagement signals that whisper to the ever-changing algorithm, like a secret handshake.

So we tweak, we refine, we adjust for the latest breakthrough, rolling relevance up the hill, even as it tumbles back down each time Google wakes up and decides that some new word is king.

No, wait experience, No, wait authority, No, wait momentum.

I ask her, “When will we be optimized?” She laughs and sends me an invoice.

Meanwhile, I an ever-changing algorithm myself sit in therapy, metrics under review.

More self-compassion, fewer negative thought loops, stronger internal links between childhood and today.

I tweak, I refine, I adjust for the latest breakthrough.

My therapist says, “You’re doing good work.” I nod, but I wonder When am I done? When am I better? When do I stop paying someone to help me rank higher in my own mind?

I ask him, “When will I be optimized?” He laughs and schedules our next session.

JC Alfier

Windowlight

Awake at 3:00 a.m. That's nothing new under the vacant moon. The bedroom far too warm. Made a call to a wrong number. Realized it as soon as the person answered. A sultry languor as unhurried as a chant. I said at once, I’m sorry. I called the wrong number. She returned, perhaps you were supposed to. I hung up. Outside, dark weather struck by blistering wind. Now I ask myself what her voice could've held. But this small hour marches on in its anthem of silence.

TOBI ALFIER

“Listening to Mama” and Other Poems

Listening to Mama

She’s of a mind to smack that boy silly…

A brittle truce between them now and she wishes the room were quiet enough to say she was sorry but it isn’t and she isn’t though she knows how heavy silence can swell dark as the night air, and as her mama once told her: don’t ever go to bed angry even if you go to bed alone don’t alert the ghosts.

She’s got about an hour or two to set things right and she will. She pours two shots of Jack in her least dirty glasses, calls a cease-fire. Till next time.

At Daybreak

The moon hangs bright in a black velvet sky. Rain hits the windshield like mullions in antique glass. Lightning strikes in the distance a true summer storm. Just yesterday she was rocking on the porch feeding a tiny baby lamb whose mama felt nothing but indifference. Today she was in a new city like the baby lamb’s mama, indifferent to all and accountable to none.

She stops at an all-night diner, the parking lot full of watery gravel. A walking stick in one hand, umbrella in the other she treads carefully, drops the drenched umbrella in the metal can by the door. A farming community announced by the metal milk jug/umbrella stand. She drops heavily into a booth, beat half-dead from her long drive, but still interested in watching the line cooks as they run back and forth in a dance only they can do.

She warms her hands on a perfectly thick porcelain mug and listens to the couple behind her discuss their imperfect relationship. She recognizes instantly that their words are all wrong. She’d lost her soul once in a compromise; she’ll never do that again. But for now, a waitress nice as pie, cream skimmed off the tops of bottles for her coffee, and the broken sun starting to wake through windows still running like tears from the couple behind her. Somebody’d best feed that baby lamb today ’cause she won’t be coming back not just yet.

Every Town Has a Story

just like every person you meet on the road has a story

ice cracking on the river raggedy weeds growing in sidewalk cracks, ushering in spring, ushering in summer, it all has a story.

In this world you gotta have a breakaway heart, that’s what church is for, and faith, lovers who love, all the beauty you see the color of bourbon, warmth of a fire, scent of your lover’s neck.

Tell me a story, stranger.

VERN FEIN Soul

We must have one, everyone says so. To be souless one of the worst condemnations.

A soul cannot be seen, inside a body that is seen, body feels pleasure and pain, the soul just absorbs.

Where does the soul go?

I think it waits for renewal occupies non-space because there are too many and waits, waits until the artistry of God paints a new body on it, the colors of incorruptible flesh.

EMILY ROBYN CLARK

“Celestial

Bodies” and Other Poems

Celestial Bodies

It’s good to be outside to look at the stars and wonder at your place among them. It's good to do things to get up early, to be out in the world, braving the sun.

These celestial bodies make you feel: Think back to how it all started, dig down deep to where your story began, when you first felt a tug and your heart move like an eclipse across the sun.

Do you know that stars have names and feelings, too? They speak in rhythms like we do.

The Big Dipper is ladling up the deep The Seven Sisters form a circle and hold onto each other, a bright string of pearls. Listen: you can hear them singing.

Frames of an Elk in Winter

For Abbas Kiarostami

Am I a sleeping Elk a wounded Elk, an Elk by the water?

I remember I give, I carry, I pour out, I let flow in.

Elk by the river, snow at my tail snow in my antlers.

I am becoming white like the land in an ever-flowing rush.

Water never ceases here the river flows and I carry everything.

Wide Cowboy Sky

I was cold waking up and you weren’t here.

You pulled me up into a warm place of ready sun and permanent blue stone above and I thought I’d like to stay here forever, but gravity brought me back down.

When we’re together again in another state, under the white sun, maple leaf and the marsh blue violet,

I’ll let go so you can swing me wide up into stars and carry me back home to you.

BEN GAA

strung up between string lights spider web sitting still. . . the slow return of frog songs park field the breaking free of the puppy out of the stream the orange of duck feet what’s left of the web of sunset deep freeze the creak of neighborhood trees warm winter day a little bug window walking

Haiku

BRYAN RICKERT

box turtle the child’s excitement and mine leaf pile the sudden burst of a squirrel we pretend not to see each other backyard deer frost warning I give a heads up to the butterflies first buds the Fujisan of parking lot snow winter landscape poems read aloud the only sound as if happy to see me the buck’s leap

Haiku

JOHN GREY

Two Poems

A Teenage Love Poem

Old lines on yellow-tinged paper at the bottom of a drawer such passion but was it really mine?

And did she respond on seeing this, as if fancy adjectives reflect a fancy adjectival heart?

To be honest, if it weren't for the woman's name in the title of the piece, my past wouldn’t know her.

I've partnered her with roses, a lake at sunset and the rays of the sun. And she rhymes, or nearly so.

But there is no face in these lines, unless it's Helen of Troy's.

Was it love? Or temporary madness?

I have the evidence. But the crime itself eludes me.

The One Who Moved East

Up and down California, so many friends go quietly, amid ever decreasing numbers of Emails.

I don’t get wide-eyed thinking people will remember me, not now when I call the east coast home, but distance turns friendship into a kind of slow death.

I’m preoccupied with normal stuff. Work a job, pay the bills, grocery shop, take out the trash…all needs to be done. None of it is worth sharing.

And new people have been moving into my spare time, Presence crowds out memory. That’s the nature of intimacy. It must be here for it to happen. And California is no longer around.

MARIA CRISTINA PULVIRENTI

Haiku

wild geese flap between jonquils soft sunset

CHRISTINA CHIN

Two Poems

pitch dark the glow of luminescent cat’s eyes

JOSHUA ST. CLAIRE

blue spruce candles my once-a-while with the day moon the yellow leaves under the yellow moon what I cannot say stealing the greenness of the grass harvest moon

indigo deepening the other half moon

solidago moon the pain jolts me awake long night moon through maple limbs the universe the boiler clinks on the third quarter moon

Moon Haiku

DONALD W. HORSTMAN

Limericks with Illustrations

lilly

the leetle leetle beetle knew she had best skeedle a hungry owl was on the prowl her hunger to beleetle

mo there once a toad called mo plopping along very slow when he encountered a wall rising up very tall that was as far as mo could go

elsie while the missus was affixion to cook herself a chicken a wary chicken called elsie walked by observing the missus she did fly wanting no part of that kitchen

TODD SUKANY

“Our

Testimony” and Other Poems

Our Testimony

The electric chair, bolted to drab concrete, is centered, framed behind observation windows. On this special day, it is draped with colorful flowers, both fresh and plastic. On this special day, families will pose, dressed in Sunday

best, for a photo op soon shared across the interweb. All will smile. All will fill a basket of Easter eggs.

Awaiting Fruit

“until I dig around it and fertilize it.” Luke 13:8

I read somewhere that “Love is love.” So I tried it. All in. Dug a hole and planted a fruit tree. I ran in circles.

Sang praises. Draped limbs in rainbow colors. Dunged it. Spoke sweet nothings.

Wrapped myself in trunk affection. Even hugs. Now four years have passed and the plastic is fading.

Black-and-White

Strolling the aisles of a local flea market, I see your snapshot, your smile on a glass display rack.

You only flashed three or four in your lifetime and this was the one of you leaning between burl stumps, pipe decorating your face, club-handled walking stick holding ground against the two o’clock shadow leaving your feet. Your hunting jacket, Uncle Ray, has much straighter edges than the ragged photograph divorced from its shelf.

Psalm Sunday

“And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way….” Matt. 21:8

Joe’s head is on a slow swivel, looking left and then left again. His wagon creaks at a pace

in keeping with his bones. He’s trailing just out of hearing of those following the donkey . . .

those shouting Hosanna. Without a mumble, Trader Joe folds coats, seasoned by hooves, sandals, and other droppings.

JIANQING ZHENG

“Confession” and Other Poems

Confession

My wife’s birthday is the first day of fall and I write her a poem which she thinks is too shallow without showing love I once offered. What is love if love has turned into gray hair with no possibility to turn black?

We are not young anymore, we are no longer two balloons floating in the sky with an imagination that each day is a day for honeymoon, we are crumpled paper that has browned and can’t be smoothed into old days, though my heart wants to cheer up like a mockingbird singing on a bough in sunshine, my wings have no strong muscles to flap like an angel, though my love is stone-hard for you, it hides among winking stars too hard for you to touch.

Pilgrimage

Blue cordilleras: ancestors’ gravestones fade out in red sunset which fades out into the dark clouds.

Winter Evening

The moon climbs up the tower of the city hall when the clock strikes into cold light crunching for a peaceful chitchat under our slow steps

DIANE WEBSTER

Two Poems

Shadow Manner

During night’s time light through the archway lies on the alley’s pavement until a human shadow bobs headfirst into view.

Walking, walking, walking taller, taller, taller until the man appears like a key inserted into a lock to open darkness behind which envelops the shadow head to toe then man in the same manner.

Waterfall End

Where a waterfall ends in a momentary pond leaves swirl in the current still seeking downstream.

The path of least resistance descends in a ladder step of ponds until the last pond spreads out into the lie of the land like sheep all headed in the same direction as they graze across the pasture.

RICK K. REUT

To the Past

…to the past, turning cold like a too seldom told story out of a sweet dream. It is incomplete and almost as insane. Dark wind drives a big rain cloud that looks like a car speeding towards a star sign. It is your star sign. You stare at the skyline and start to feel dizzy like someone who fell off a bike, leaving a long, bloody track. It leads all the way back…

…to the past, turning cold like a too seldom told story out of a sweet dream. It is incomplete and almost as insane. Dark wind drives a big rain cloud that looks like a car speeding towards a star sign. It is your star sign. You stare at the skyline and start to feel dizzy like someone who fell off a bike, leaving a long, bloody track. It leads all the way back…

Note: This poem is an excerpt from the author’s manuscript Around a Word, a collection of cyclic verse that explores poetry without a definitive beginning or end, blending elements of rhyme and prose. To see the entire collection, follow this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xQEeVO7WKSqhlWneciTAkhAIlPaDfwt1/view.

KEVIN BROWNE

a nightly performance of twinkling fireflies in the inky woods for an audience of two it closes in a week dragon boats ply the river a busker feeds her dog

Tanka and Haiku

INGRID BRUCK

Two Poems

Dear Issa,

I take a ginkgo walk in the garden of 10,000 bedbugs, moons, and deaths.

I follow your footsteps. Some days, I can’t find haiku.

I climb to the top of Cold Mountain. Did you paint haiku on the cave wall with ink only visible in full-moon glow?

I journey to Kyoto where you slept. Baby Buddhas light the path at the turn but you are not present in the temple.

Did you stroll through moss and fern in the garden? Carry a bucket of water, stroke calligraphy on rocks? Was the first line dry before you finished?

Dear Issa, I walk in the grove where a student hanged himself but do not unearth a Yellow River poem.

Thank you, Issa, for taking a ginkgo tour, the bedbug in your robe, the frog at the pond, its moment of splash, time of inch, act of sting.

Your English Friend Across Time

Tree Dweller Fisherfolk

who are these tree dwellers fishing from branches? on your morning walk, you break their trigger lines across the driveway overnight hunters high in tree branches weave the long dangling strands some of the tree tunnel hosts wait on the end of a rope others leave behind a thread bridge discard from a youngling that kited on a silk string or hitched a balloon ride to a new hunting ground be a wary door bell ringer if you don't want to get snared guests presenting themselves for dinner make a spider happy

DOUGLAS J. LANZO

“A

Tale of Courage Wrought by War” and Other Poems

A Tale of Courage Wrought by War

Dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien and his Oxford Schoolmate, Geoffrey Bach Smith, who succumbed to bursting shells at the Battle of the Somme

With pipe in hand and elven words, he wove us golden strands, of hobbits from the Middle-earth adventuring in lands… with bands of dwarves and Ranger men, evoking love of Shire of village life on rolling hills with sounds of flute and lyre, where puffs of smoke, from hearths of joy, brought warm tales by the fire.

His words wrought tales of simple life, transformed when duty called, to battle evils little known with forces thin and sprawled.

This man did heed the final words of dear friend lost in War who with his pen, foreseeing death, in letter, did implore… Tolkien to voice the dreams that they had shared at School of ancient texts, and language lost, of tales where wonder rules.

Quenching More than Passing Thirst

Written in Memory of Mother Theresa

Jesus’ words, spoken from the cross, “I am thirsty” experiencing loss, but in His suffering, thirsting for men’s souls, saving them from sin, His body paying their tolls;

The same words spoken, from heaven to a nun, who devoted her life, to serving God’s Son;

Words that she heard, with visions of the poor crying and begging, that their lives be restored not only with drink and bread from the earth but with love divine, redeeming self-worth, as children of God, with mercy and grace, from streets of Calcutta to a life-changing place…

Where all people are loved by nuns sensing God’s face in poor eyes that long for caring embrace… Pleading for a savior to free them from pain, they feel love on earth and thirst slaked, by His reign.

Grace that Struck Me

In loving memory of the pastor and Church members slain in the Charleston mass shooting

It struck me like a bolt of lightning how deep and powerful the grace of God could be… first hearing at the funeral, of Clementa C. Pinckney, a moving eulogy

Words that told a Church filled with mourners that even the killer though full of hate he be could be used by the Lord to build community: recalling fellowship shown that day, inviting a stranger into a Church to pray to join a Bible group whose love he would betray; stunned by words of loved ones of those slain, forgiving Dylann Roof for heinous, racist pain…

Fighting tears singing Amazing Grace, President Obama brought healing to that place with heartfelt words of love no darkness could erase.

PHILLIP HOWERTON

“Weather House” and Other Poems

Weather House

Grandma’s was the size of a bread box, made in Germany of wood, and housed a witch and two children. The witch reveled in the hurly-burly she conjured, the children ventured far in fair weather.

Mine is the size of an alarm clock, made of pressed cardboard. A maiden and her beau, unable to step beyond their threshold, peer out opposite doors trying to imagine a change in weather.

Garden

Tomatoes volunteer to be where I have planted bean and pea. Even our gardens are haunted by wanting to be but not wanted.

Ancient Cedar

ancient cedar tree, broken, bare, useless until this moon rose through it

Mother Thinned Marigolds in July and Gave Me Some to Transplant

They moved in from two counties over during the height of drought. They didn’t know anyone around here, and being uprooted and sun scorched, they grew weak and withdrawn until late summer showers stirred their spirits. Although they now work to keep pests from tomatoes and beans, they dress flashy, causing the sober potatoes, who will soon face the shovel themselves, to complain in flat and starchy tones about what is happening to the neighborhood.

TERRIE JACKS

“

Disco Frolic” and Other Poems

surprise, surprise fire lights the sky

MARC DARNELL “Botanical Fanatical” and Other Poems

Botanical Fanatical

I conquer the white fungus upon my houseplants, conjure a hurricane of baking soda mist and Palmolive soap bubbles.

The currents whip the powder from the leaves and sullen stems that now waxenly glow under yellow, purple and red light.

My sentinel oscillating fans prevent its plaguey return. I'm sorry, my children, I let stillness infect you.

I now fly through my rooms a helicopter daddy scanning, a drone of bone and blood, caretaker, hero of green mansions.

Motifs in an Unpainted Scene

The farmer eats a sprig of broccoli beneath the olive tree.

He breathes with branched bronchioles and coughs a cloud in the cold morning.

His chimney bellows white his wife is up, as mist recedes from grapevine rows.

She combs the strands of her dirty hair, then sweeps the raw floorboard lines

black ants have breached to build soft hills once again.

The wife now stirs a dizzying batter as the farmer rolls a cracked tractor tire

his wife will fill with cockscomb celosia beside their son’s crossless mound.

And the world doesn't know it is spinning.

convalescence in blue it was their neptune hue that made the gardener buy two dozen sprouts and plant them too near the gutter where rain drowned them 10 a.m. May 31st they swooned and bent as palm trees in monsoon that are never the same again yet partly recover but not these blooms the deep blue dead

MARTHAMAGGIE MILLER

“

Phoenix Lullabies” and Other Poems

Phoenix Lullabies

The phoenix has arrived. She follows my every move. She cries her healing tears knowing they cannot save me. Still, she tries, honoring me with her continued presence. She lifts me to incredible heights so that I might see the stars that guided me and those I have created that will remain to help others long after my fire has consumed me and my star has fallen. A last bleeding celestial flight as it streaks across the night precursor to my final immolation. The flames tickle. They warm as they consume, slowly emerging from my soul. I submit with grace accepting my fate and step into the darkness without fear or regrets, wrapped in her flaming wings, listening to phoenix lullabies as she sings for me of rebirth and immortality.

Beautifully Broken

We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in. Ernest Hemingway

A tea cup that has seen sixty years is far from like new. It carries imperfections as it decorates a wall, resting on a shelf with its saucer. Chipped. Cracked. Fractured. It seeps drips when included in a tea party. But its pink and yellow roses, gold rim and handle are still beautiful. It can continue to set where it is on the wall, or it can be glued to its saucer filled with a wick and wax colored pink to match a rose in its China pattern. Even broken it's able to adjust, to spread light canceling the dark when lights go out, or creating a romantic glow for a dinner for two.

Crying Wolf

Under the plenilune as it glares through trees, bare, skeletal and black, gilding a path silver between shadowed tombstones a lone wolf paces, his crying howls shattering cemetery serenity. His chthonic shape insidiously entrancing, grief transmitted in every movement, every muscle twitch, every whisker whip, as his head flips up to scream his epithets at the fickle moon. Blaming his goddess for not saving his mate. Vengeance fills his soul as his heart hemorrhages and a new grave pillows his collapse, oblivious to the freezing chill as he falls through the ghost of a stunning auburn wolf standing shoulder to shoulder head hanging low whimpering silently into the wind.

GEORGIE HERZ

Is that it?

I thought there’d Be more.

Two Poems

Don’t I Know You?

Hi! I know you from somewhere a class, a job, the county fair.

I know it was fun, our time together; I wish I could remember it better.

Each day, every moment fills my head, I can’t recall all I’ve seen or said.

I try making connections, or a list Why won’t it work to remember this?

Sometimes a photo will help, but mostly I just forgive myself.

SARAH WATKINS

Two Poems

Mal

I rang up the pepperoni package seventeen times before it occurred that you wouldn’t notice me no matter how loudly I tap-tap-tapped to delete, how many times I coughed into my elbow, but I knew you the way your nostrils burned from your first peroxide bleach the crooked grin you slipped me like a five-dollar bill.

I knocked over a tabloid, the kind we used to clip the models from, watch it flop face-heavy like buttered toast the way we did on my carpet why you didn’t come to braid our dark hair together?

I’m not sure why you’d start then random convenience store, Sunday afternoon, dressed down or why I thought you might: the real ring-fingered you who had thrown away your collage-making safety scissors ten years ago but I waited for as long as I could, ruminating on you like sour cud, rushing my hands over our memory’s stipple edges until I got finger cuts.

I guess now I gotta pick up the magazine. I gotta leave the store. I gotta swallow what I’ve been chewing.

To the girl who stole my online work when I was seventeen

You, a full garden, pruned my vine. The juice is still sticky on your fingers

the work that grew along my front yard fence watered by the warm southern rainwater crushed against your cool skin.

As it filled the valleys of your fingerprint whorls, did it breathe, expand, absorb, call you in a murmur by your secret name?

It was dead, sticky, disposable, a slapped mosquito, an uneaten cat-sliced yard bird, that work of my hands, my germination, rooting, crawling, flowering, harvesting, my little sun-heated fruit so polished you could see your own reflection in the blood-red skin.

I’m sorry you did not learn the point of fruit growing ain’t just so you can eat.

DAVID PICKERING

“Faringdon Market Square” and Other Poems

Faringdon Market Square

For Peter Starr

God’s once and future angels watch this town. Time-lit shadows twist, show paths beyond defeat; The heart’s deep past sees ends to eyes unknown.

The market square of time is veiled in brown. Vanished brothers, vanished waters, long retreat, Yet once and future angels watch this town.

The bells, the Bell, recall love’s seeds long sown, As souls still face their narrows, Christ to meet. The heart’s deep past speaks ends to eyes unknown.

Faith’s untold soldiers walked and walk these stones, And sin still battles grace; hope is not asleep, For once and future angels watch this town.

Forgotten paths, unseen under the sun, Form shapes divine, and hidden pilgrims seek. The heart’s deep past knows ends to eyes unknown.

Time knows its fate and bows before the throne. We can’t escape from grace, not here, nor London Street.

God’s once and future angels watch this town; The heart’s deep past sees ends to eyes unknown.

House of bread

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Tertullian

Athens came calling. Just south of Jerusalem Their compasses met: Both found true north. The world’s best dreams Led shepherds to rejoicing angels, Persia’s finest to sheep and straw. Camels ceased complaining Outside a cave, under a star.

Despite the donkey, Plato’s spirit came, Fixated by the Form of Forms Incarnate. Between two cows, Aristotle’s ghost found greater wonder, Recalculated virtue, in light of Charity made child, wisdom’s new birth, Reason divine in infant eyes.

This night reframes all narrative, retrains History’s gravity for a world upturned, Where stories untold find endings unknown; All maps are changed, all paths curve On recreated calculus.

Athens and Jerusalem find their true end, Their searches fulfilled in a baby’s breathing. House of bread holds bread of heaven; By mother’s milk the bread of life is fed. The unsleeping Word is wrapped in sleep: In Mary’s arms, poetry made flesh, The morning star hidden from the sky.

After

Heart feels the final fall. In death’s victory Is death’s defeat; A cross-shaped door Turns ending to beginning. After their last darkness, after The silver sky, the sceptre, And the throne, they move In more than mortal music, Where light is glory.

Time’s long prisoners find Their final liberation At dawn of day undying, As eyes made new Behold the threefold crown.

A Darker Glass

Reading

Revelation

Four horsemen always riding; Secrets seven thunders spoke. Star’s key, trumpets sounding; Four horsemen always riding. City falls before the final king; Abaddon, the abyss, the smoke. Four horsemen always riding; Secrets seven thunders spoke.

A King’s Regret

Before his execution, King Charles I said that it was God’s punishment for his betrayal of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford.

I had the field Till Marston Moor. The Scots made promises, So did I. I was once A prince to trust, Yet all my birds Have truly flown. All I have Is empty hands, A neck made ready For the axe.

Strafford I betrayed. ‘Put not Your trust in princes,’ said he Who trusted me. That debt Long waited to be paid. In dark times, on dark scales, Injustice doubled Makes stern justice.

Time to end this tragedy And join the endless dance. I lay down a broken For a better crown.

Political Echoes

Money’s webs ensnare the law; This game, these rules, we need to burn. We work and work, and what’s it for?

Money’s webs ensnare the law. So rise the rich, we end up poor; Their perks are more than we can earn. Money’s webs ensnare the law; This game, these rules, we have to burn.

RICHARD ERIC JOHNSON

“On Water with Noah” and Other Poems

On Water with Noah

The sailor watches intimidating somber gray green waves white capping immensity

sudden sea birds floating leaves volcanic peak in sight nostrils sense organic earth fresh water fruits grains of sand scattered stars horizon prayer

the sailor waits

Authenticity of Angels

wings folded or spread sculpted stone marble bronze crystal eyes closed gazing up or down hands in prayer playing a lyre standing kneeling churches graveyards idolized in murals

angels live and walk in our midst plainly dressed maybe fancied up speaking many tongues called to deliver messages once twice maybe never

Decision in Eden

rich soil embraced seeds planted

roots to poke sun blue skies young and yearning full of confidence out of the gate find new harvests

snakes be damned atonement down the road next kingdom come

LADEANA MULLINIX

“3 Aunties” and Other Poems

3 Aunties

No, said the first, I don’t need to go. I’m good too, said the second. I’d better go, said the third, it’s quite a little drive home.

So they all went arm and arm, steadily cruising past the cashier to the ladies’ room,

as they had since girlhood when they dodged dishwashing after dinner with an exaggerated urgency, escaping to the outhouse where one went onto the smooth wooden seat while two stood watch for the 10 foot imaginary rattler, which had replaced the tiny green striped garter snake one might have seen one April afternoon.

Folks smiled as they sauntered past, touching each green vinyl booth back with one or two fingers for balance, waving to the cook - kitchen door open, nodding to friends.

Someday, someone thought, there will be two, then one. How will they find their way unmoored, blown into aloneness. How will they find their way? What will they do?

Their path ahead may be cobbled and foggy, but they will cope

People do.

Each has already placed a fine tip on the table, and we drive them home.

Apricot

The apricot is not what God thought a fruit should be.

Before the apricot God made a lot then thought why not make a fruit that is a hoot and tastes a little bit like fur with a color like no other its name the same as the fruit.

With its slight taste of fur You can be sure the apricot is not what God thought a fruit should be but it’s certainly, undoubtedly Indubitably

the fruit for me.

January 8

Outside, cold, wet, and windy.

Inside, two calico cats curl on a cushion like warm cinnamon rolls baked together in one sweet spiral.

KIT WILLETT

Two Poems

Memento mori

I’ve begun using an hourglass to measure the steeping of the tea. It sits on the sill, backset against the gloom of a grey day.

As the seconds pass, the birdsong swells and fades; I am sure the clouds still move behind the rain, though who could say for sure.

The honey drips off the spoon. Slowly, the shadows dissolve.

The granules fall into perfect chaos, the most stable shape, and when the final grain joins its brothers, the tea leaves are ejected from the pot and thrown into the garbage disposal.

Where you go

When you rest on my study desk, I admire your cover; a designer spent weeks working ardently on it, only for the publishers to confirm by email that the first draft was closest after all.

When you join your unread siblings on my bedside table, I admire your paper stock; it is stronger than my other books: recycled and woven into the binding, speckled with the memory of paper past.

In the morning, when I move you to my satchel, delicately, I see for the first time your blurb; I cannot stop to read it.

When I take you out and hold you on the bus, I have the chance to brush through your pages, and I catch a glimpse at your typesetting. It is well-chosen, well-spaced, well-leaded. You are a beautiful book.

When I place you down at work, face up, I wonder what you have to tell me, and when it is I will have time to hear.

When I finally crack your spine, after dinner (and many years of having you), I savour in your well-selected secrets, and I smile at how they finally found their new home in me.

SAMBHU RAMACHANDRAN

Apple Seeds

I cut an apple in two & a severed landscape of snow, quick-sloped & tooth-deep, opens to view on my palms.

The brown-black seeds lodged in the core give off an unctuous gleam in amber lamplight.

The dark pawprints of some animal delicate & shy neatly laid upon a stretch of granular snow one, two vanishing without a trace.

WES CARRINGTON

“A Poetic Prelude to Form FS-240” and Other Poems

A Poetic Prelude to Form FS-240 (Consular Report of Birth Abroad) to the Foreign Service family

In the middle of the last decade of the last century, Y2K a few years away, we packed our bags and bassinet and arrived in Austria in November, welcomed by gray buildings and grayer skies, snow in the forecast, a baby on the way.

Our high-ceilinged flat was drafty, cold; the building had housed Freud’s first office, we were told. We cranked the radiators up, humidified by ceramic cylinders filled with water. Around Vienna, skating rinks appeared, couples circling the ice like birds.

On the square, the Christkindl market opened, aroma of glühwein filling the air, and we celebrated Thanksgiving by snacking on grilled pork, roasted chestnuts, and all those lovely ways of eating potatoes: spiraled and fried, pancaked and fried, or just fried.

December came, bringing Baby Jesus and then baby Matthew, each wrapped in swaddling clothes. Friends sent flowers and Glücksschweine, good luck pigs. My brother flew in to watch our eldest son, almost three. Holding hands, they took the tram to visit us.

Outside the hospital that night, fireworks boomed and bloomed, bouquets of sparkling lights everywhere, celebrating the new year, and our newborn. Dark beer will help the milk let down, a nurse said, and we drank to that, watching Maazel conduct joyful Strauss on TV

and adding our own notes of happiness in the City of Music, City of Dreams.

The Cats at Christmas in memory of Neo (2013-2024)

“Modern man can’t see god because he doesn’t look low enough.” Carl Jung

Cats know nothing of Christmas, yet here they are, furry faces looking up expectantly as if to witness Jesus come into the world, or Santa down the chimney.

We’ve known of the Christ Child since long ago, when a Bethlehem tabby jumped into the manger to help keep the baby warm that night. But Santa, though, that one’s on you.

The cats climb in, climb up, climb on the branches, the ornaments swaying precariously from their hooks. What do they think of this magical tree that appears each year in the corner?

We think: The tree is out! The tree is up! And watch humans bustle busily while we wait, nestled in the evergreen time between then and now, together in our solitude.

Cats are cats, they do their thing, but we wonder what gifts these whiskered Kings would choose: catnip perhaps, or something shiny, or a dead mouse to lay at the feet?

We’d bring warmth, and we’d bring love: the feel of fur against bare skin and swaddling clothes, with our whiskers measuring the distance between heaven and earth.

Her Eyes in Late Autumn (Villanelle)

So, ere you find where light in darkness lies, Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes. William Shakespeare

My mother is slowly losing her sight. Doc says there’s nothing we can do but pray as her light grows darker; on comes the night.

She lives on the river, where I flew kites. A few years ago, my dad passed in May. My mother is slowly losing her sight.

Autumn is here now, unseen leaves take flight. The sun sets a bit earlier each day and the light grows darker; soon it is night.

Her view of the world used to be so bright, now all the colors are fading away. My mother is slowly losing her sight.

Her health is good and her hearing loss slight. She had steak for her ninetieth birthday, but her light grows darker; on comes the night.

A sudden frost strikes: winter’s early bite. Turn up the furnace, the cold’s here to stay. My mother is slowly losing her sight as her light grows darker on comes the night.

An Amen for Uncle Phil

Heading back to his Memphis home, my dying uncle took two things in his suitcase on that airplane the Bible, and a cast-iron skillet.

He believed in God, but trusted no one in the kitchen.

ELIZABETH JEANE

weak & gentle

maybe one day

i’ll look back on the fawn I was bowing my head stretching my neck and I won’t shout

“he’s right behind you” and I won’t cry because we all know how the story ends doe dies you hang my head above the spot between your eyebrows and I shout in my sleep

GLORIA WILLIAMS TRAN

“At the Food Pantry” and Other Poems

At the Food Pantry

In the church hall on metal folding chairs, under the glare of fluorescent lights, they sit: the young man with greasy hair bent over his phone, an African woman in an orange head wrap, smiling and chatting, away from the crowd, a long, lean white man dressed in slacks and polo shirt, a grizzled man in soiled jeans carrying a well-used backpack, and a heavy-set woman scolding her young daughter

all waiting until their turn to sort through the bruised bananas, toilet paper (one roll per family), wilted lettuce, frozen rotisserie chickens, expired bakery goods, assorted cans of vegetables (some without factory labels), helped by volunteers with smiles worn thin.

Survivors, they take the day’s meager haul and fade into the night until another food pantry day.

Dance of the Starlings

Starlings swirl in the sunset, back and forth, now together, then apart, the birds a pulsating whole in the darkening sky fringed with gold.

Round and round they go, as they do-si-do in their country dance, whirling, twirling over the fingertips of bare winter trees.

Dark birds bank in the sun, fade to white in the light, emerging black again. Flying lower and lower, they flirt with tree limbs.

Weaving in and out, ascending, descending, the feathered dancers glissade in the gloom into the grove’s embrace.

Departures

The duty to leave falls on the young, cars packed to the brim. Her full-length mirror, almost forgotten, balances atop the pile of clothes and boxes of books stacked upon the back seat of her compact car.

My role requires dispensing hugs and advice in equal measure. I stand on the porch as she backs up and heads out. One more wave and I retreat to my dark interior and half-empty mug of coffee gone cold.

On Empty

Like a shroud fatigue settles on my shoulders. Each step forward my foot drags as if in protest of this constant effort to improve to become better to hurry the healing.

Therapy session stops, I collapse in the car, my energy drained like a car battery in winter. My engine, barely turning over, sputters, the tank empty of self-compassion.

Patience. It takes time. One step forward. Words rain on clay-like spirit, bouncing off, as I try and try and try again. The effort wears me out and drives me into the arms of Jesus.

Why?

I beat my fist against his chest, but all I hear is silence and all I feel are his arms around me.

The Least of These

A lover of humanity are you protecting the poor shielding the alien uplifting the downtrodden.

On the picket lines at the meetings on the phones in the midst you are too busy by far to share a meal take a walk spend some time with the mere lonely ones like me.

DEBORAH BAXTER

My Husband Undergoes Cancer Treatment

I used to lie next to you, just touching your side, my left hand tucked under your hip. Now we sleep in separate rooms, like guests in our own home, distance a part of our nightly routine.

I am still near enough to hear when you’re restless. Most nights, even the sheet is too much, its weight suffocates as your temperature rises, then falls, a side effect of the hormone therapy.

Now you are the one to have hot flashes instead of me. Together, we ride the waves of your discomfort; fans blow when it’s cold outside, air conditioning in December.

On the worst days, I wrap myself in a blanket while you wear shorts and sweat. But it’s better than daily infusions of chemo to target the cancer; you say the x-rays don’t hurt.

At bedtime, I wish I could sleep beside you, my hand tucked under your hip, secure as two sea otters holding hands as they sleep, making certain they don’t drift far away from each other.

MARK GILBERT

MRI

contrast agent my face / my expression / my grimace the chill

dikka dikka dikka pause rattle pause bleeping bleep lines of force penetrating the perfusion

my magnetism protons attracted or repelled

dreaming of latte and a chocolate-filled croissant drifting away

imagist poetry in ones and zeroes dots and dashes

Fourier transform dumbing me down to a pretty picture

DEBBIE STRANGE

Haiga

DOUG STOIBER

PowerPointless

She read every word in every box On every slide in her PowerPoint deck. Including slide titles. Verbatim.

And we, writers all, primed to hear the secrets of her success Sat dumbfounded, blinking, Unsure at only the second slide if her secrets would be written AND read throughout her seminar To the very last slide Where she will announce, “The End” So we know and she knows that she is finished with us.

On each big bright slide She showed us the words she would read To us, Writers all, And then she read them. Verbatim.

Our hostess, our presenter, who writes for fame and profit Was never warned (apparently) against putting blocks of text on her slides.

● Bullet points ● Brief, big, memorable

Our presenter did not trust herself To impart meaning from within herself She wanted cue cards

We, writers all, acolytes pledged to enrich our own lives with this valuable presentation, We, people who live to write words for people to read We were having words read to us that we had already read ourselves, Right in front of our noses

And after every several slides: “Any questions?”

Our embarrassing silence begged the next slide to appear without delay Such was her heated shame at holding us hostage

We eyed our attendees’ avatars warily

To see if anyone dared to click the ‘LEAVE MEETING’ button and disappear themselves

With a cheery two-tone signoff

Before the next tomato-red slide with the neat boxes of serifed text could appear, Leaving those who remained, writers all, to bear the weight of this passive insult coming from our midst

And what, dear God, would happen if the first defection then became the deluge?

And only one of us, in the spirit of comity, hung on to the last?

This could be a trap.

More slides to be read

To us; at us

Our speaker, late in this onslaught of numbing screeds in bright colors

Decided a little interaction might rescue her recitation of printed words.

Her half-hearted, skittish attempts to induce a feast of reason and a flow of soul

Went unrewarded, met with roaring silences

And at last, a slide transitioned into place with a hilarious swipe-in, She announced, “The End”. Smiley Face.

Oh no!

Yet another slide that says: “Q&A”!

Comity, schmomity.

We are, writers all and all at once out of here.

C.X. TURNER

Tanka and Haibun

cobwebs glint where the rafters sag how long the light has been waiting here an owl’s call splits the frozen dark your breath as ice flowers bloom on the windowpanes under the harvest moon the night breathes through pine between us a constellation not mine to name

Imprint

The leather pouch turns up at the bottom of a box marked kitchen. Dust along the seam. The press stud still closes with a small, certain sound. Inside, a red magnet.

One edge rubbed thin to bare steel. Paint blistered in tiny bubbles across the arch. A thin metal rectangle fastened tight to one side. It fits the hollow of my palm as if it has been waiting there all along.

Years ago, on the carpet, I lined up paperclips. Watched them leap, hesitate, turn away. Attraction. Refusal. The invisible made visible in the space between my hands.

Now, in a different house, it draws a loose key across the table. A small insistence. A held breath released.

empty room the faint dent in the carpet where a table stood

Between Rooms

Afternoon settles in. I watch a dark ring widen on the desk and do nothing to stop it.

In my mind: a pressed shirt, cuffs aligned. A hotel lamp pooling light over marked pages. Two glasses set down on a low table. The soft close of a door.

Outside, pampas grass bends and lifts again. A single snowdrop lowers its white head towards the soil.

neap tide I duck under and lose the shore

LAVANA KRAY

Haiga

“I would like to paint the way a bird sings.”

Claude Monet

Visual Art

TERRIE JACKS

MICHAEL SHOEMAKER

Secret Fairie Garden

Signs of Spring

St. Andrews, Curry Rivel, Somerset, UK

United We Worship, Redlands, California

Through a Veil of Strings

CARSTON ANDERSON

Color

MICHAEL C. ROBERTS

Description of Photographic Series on Cemeteries

As my wife and I travel domestically and internationally, we frequently end up visiting cemeteries. In these we often learn how different cultures celebrate lives and honor their ancestors, come to terms with death and afterlife, and otherwise park their dead.

Some cemeteries are tourist destinations such as the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, St. Louis Cemetery No.1 in New Orleans, and La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires. Maps and guides direct tourists to unique tombs, celebrities, and point out spots for best pictures.

On these visits, I have wondered about the stories of those whose lives and remains are memorialized in these plots. We often have only succinct information on the tombstone or plaque, but who were they and what were their lives like? Writers such as William Least Heat Moon, Susan Sontag, and John Steinbeck have noted that every place and everybody has a story.

While cemeteries mark the ending of a life, they do not convey the time passing and life-markers for those entombed. Imaginatively, poets over history speak for the dead. An American poet, Edgar Lee Masters, projected stories voiced by those entombed in the “Oak Hill Cemetery” in his Spoon River Anthology. (Years ago, I trekked to Lewistown Illinois with a high school friend visiting cemeteries in the area and dipping our fingers into the Spoon River that inspired the poet as he was also influenced by epigrams in the Greek Anthology.)

We find that some cemeteries are plain with minimal markers such as memorial parks with lawn-level plaques to facilitate grass mowing, while others are above ground tombs with ornate vaults (often because of high water tables or as demonstrations of prominence and wealth).

Many are sad memorials to lives taken “too soon,” some are honorific for imminence and reputation, and other sculptures and inscriptions may be ironic or even jocular. Michael J. Crosbie, an architect, commented on “In Praise of Cemeteries” during the pandemic:

“Time spent in the presence of those who’ve gone before is a reminder of our shared ultimate reality, beyond the grand designs we fix upon the otherwise random pattern of our lives. As we survey the inscriptions, we find those who succumbed to wars, epidemics, childhood sickness. The history recorded in a cemetery reveals that these people were as vital and alive as we are now, with dreams and plans that seemed within their grasp. Those imagined futures might not have come to pass, the stones tell us.” (https://commonedge.org/in-praiseof-cemeteries/)

Rather than morbid obsessions with death, I too find that cemeteries are valuable chronicles of culture, art, and the arc of life and death.

Cemetery of the Cite, Carcassonne, France (1)

Cimetière Saint-Laurent-des-Combes, Saint-Émilion, France

Cimitero urbano di Arezzo, Italy

Elgin Cathedral cemetery Elgin, Scotland

Cemetery of the Cite, Carcassonne, France (2)

Prose

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

Thomas Mann

SUSANNAH CERUTTI

Behind 100 Broken Hearts: An Interview with A.J. Mason

Recently, I had the amazing opportunity to interview A.J. Mason, author of the romantic comedy (rom-com) 100 Broken Hearts (2025). During our conversation, I asked him about the book, such as why he wrote it and what the writing process was like. The book is available to purchase on Amazon; a paperback copy is $17.99, a hardback copy is $27.99, and the Kindle edition is $8.99.

Susannah Cerutti: What led you to write 100 Broken Hearts?

A.J. Mason: There are some truly incredible romance tales out there, but at the time, many of the stories I was consuming felt very similar and very predictable to me, and I wasn’t enjoying them. Much like Theo, the main character, I admittedly carried a little judgment toward the romance genre. So, it was a little bit of “let me take a stab at it and

see if I can write something I’d enjoy.” At the same time, my family, half-seriously and half-jokingly, was telling me I should write a romance, and combined with the fact it’s the biggest market for a reason, I figured why not.

Once I decided to write a rom-com, it all started with the question: “What if there was someone who broke 100 hearts?” A bit preposterous, I know. It is fiction, after all. That question was in the back of my mind, and I ran with it. It was really the starting point, and it’s central to the book in many ways. From there, it was figuring out what that would look like, what type of person would do such a thing, and how it would all resolve. I definitely enjoyed the process.

Also, sidetracking a bit, but I’d just read a couple of books where it felt like the main character betrayed himself and his beliefs pretty easily, and I remember rolling my eyes and thinking to myself, “He wouldn’t have done that in real life.” The male lead also tended to feel a little static or contrived in those books, so 100 Broken Hearts probably focuses on the male lead a little more, for better or worse. That’s also why you probably see Theo struggle with things a little more than other characters traditionally might because I wanted to really highlight that internal battle. Now, fiction isn’t real life, obviously, so he has to move on.

SC: What was the writing process like for you?

AJM: Admittedly, I feel like my writing process changes a little with each manuscript, especially on the specifics, and if I could go back, I feel like I would’ve even done things a little differently with 100 Broken Hearts. In the big picture, my writing process looks something like this: write the first draft, set it aside for a little while, come back to it, and then revise as much as needed until it feels ready. At that point, I have a completed draft. And then we’re onto developmental editing, copyediting, and proofing. Although, honestly, it sometimes all blends together.

Nowadays, I’m trying to outline more because I see the benefit to it, but for 100 Broken Hearts, I was a pantser, as they call it. No outline. Flying by the seat of my pants. Now, I knew where I was going. I always knew the ending. And as I came up with ideas, I’d make note of them to include in the story, so I did a bit of outlining as I went. I also wrote out of order a lot, which is something I still do. If the idea is hot, why not write it? Now, it gets a bit problematic when you realize your character hasn’t changed two hundred pages in because you wrote that chapter at the same time you wrote chapter two, and then you have to revise.

Arguably the most important thing I try to focus on when writing a novel is consistency. When working on a project, I try to work on it every day. Take even three days off, and suddenly I forget where I’m at. I lose momentum. So, consistency is the biggest thing for me. It’s better to write 500 words a day instead of 3,500 words every Saturday.

Outside of that, I really just write when I can. I’m not super rigid. I’ve written at 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. And I’ve dozed off while writing at both of those hours. Ha. There are certainly times when my creativity is higher, so I try to take advantage of that. For better or worse, I tend to listen to a lot of music when I write, too, though I wonder if it’s distracting sometimes.

SC: What was the biggest challenge you faced while writing 100 Broken Hearts?

AJM: I always tell people the biggest challenge was seeing it through to the end. A romance novel is pretty formulaic plot-wise, so it’s not like there are many hurdles to overcome there, but on the internal side of things, willing a book across the finish line is a battle in itself. You’d think writing 80,000 words is the tough part, but that’s just the beginning. After I finished the first draft of 100 Broken Hearts, it sat around for a year or so. It needed work. I had to ask myself, “Am I going to see this through to the end?” That required revisions, edits, and a lot of stuff on the publishing side. Talk to any author, and you’ll probably hear rumors of the half-finished manuscripts sitting on some lost hard drive. There’s a reason. Finishing a draft is one thing. Seeing it through to the end is another. So yeah, for me, seeing the novel through to publication was overall the toughest but also the most rewarding part. It takes a lot of delusional selfbelief to keep going in the world of writing, so it felt like a good accomplishment. Technically speaking, on the writing side, the novel underwent a sizeable revision from the original drafts, and it was really the first major revision I’d worked through. It was a challenge. It took a lot of time, but it also taught me a lot about revisions. “Kill your darlings,” as many writers say. I did enjoy detaching from the project as the author and viewing it as the editor, so that was fun, in the end. And then the publishing world is a challenge in itself. No matter which path you take, it’s overwhelming at first. I learned a lot in the process, and I hope it makes things easier for the next novel.

SC: What question do you wish someone would ask you about your book but never does?

AJM: Oh, this is a great question. One thing I never get to talk about much is the “why” behind it, what I hope the reader takes away from it, which is that by reading 100 Broken Hearts, people come away with a little more hope and positivity and a little bit fuller hearts. Love is hard. It can be so fulfilling, but it can also hurt, and I know a lot of people who’ve been hurt by it. My hope is that 100 Broken Hearts shows that, whether you’re a love cynic, a believer, a victim, or a critic, the novel will inspire you to believe that maybe, just maybe, it’s possible for you. I suppose that’s the inspiration behind the dedication, too:

To all of those who have found love, and to all of those waiting to, to all of those who don’t believe in love, and to all of those who do.

This one is for you.

And, if nothing else, I hope people enjoy reading it and that it provides some quality entertainment. It draws a little inspiration from some of those early 2000s romcoms, so I hope some of that comes through. I’ve also become intrigued by Korean culture over the last couple of years, and it weaves its way into the novel, so I hope Theo represents it well.

One thing I also love that I’ll never get to talk about is all the little hidden references and foreshadowing throughout the book. I’d have to go find them all and list them, but they’re there, and I enjoy seeing them, even if I’m the only one who knows.

SC: Were there any alternate endings you considered for the book?

AJM: No, not particularly. Unless you’re La La Land, romance stories are pigeonholed into the happily ever after ending. It’s what the market and audience expect, so you know the couple will end up together in the end. It’s the romance novel’s version of the hero winning and beating the bad guy. There’s some freedom in how it all comes about, but once I had an idea of how I wanted 100 Broken Hearts to end, I never wavered. The finale is a good callback to some earlier events in the novel, and I find it sweet and wholesome while providing good closure for the book. I don’t recall really considering any other options for the ending. It’s never changed since the first draft.

SC: Did you get writer’s block while writing this book? If so, what did you do to cope with it?

AJM: Oh, that feeling of staring at a screen watching the cursor blink endlessly while you try to create something, anything, but your brain is blank? All the time. Writer’s block and I are close friends. And I’m a perfectionist, so that doesn’t help. I don’t mind writer’s block, though. I try not to view it as a bad thing. Usually, in fiction at least, it just means I haven’t given enough thought to where I’m going next or how to get there. It’s like a puzzle in need of solving. And other times, I’m just tired. I can come back to writing later. Hemingway said to stop writing when you still have something to write about so that you have a place to start tomorrow, which might help, but I don’t really adhere to that strategy. Sometimes that’s the case for me, but generally, I prefer to exhaust all my words when they’re in my head. It just depends. Some days you’ll start where you left off, and others you’ll start fresh.

The best advice I’ve heard regarding writer’s block is that it’s just the fear of bad writing. I believe Seth Godin said that. It’s so true. Nowadays, whenever I find myself staring at the cursor, I just tell myself to write badly. It’s a miracle, really, how effective it is. Imagine a sprinter saying, “I don’t know how to run the 100m.” If they go ahead and run it, it might not be their fastest time, but it’ll be close enough. They’ll run it, and they’ll start to remember as they do. It’s the same with writing. And the beautiful thing about writing is you can revise and edit it later, so nothing is set in stone. Usually, when I write badly, it’s not that bad, but if it is, I can fix it. One year, I committed to writing 100 words every day, no matter how bad, and I think that challenge overlapped some with writing 100 Broken Hearts, so the story might’ve benefited from that.

I’d say the greatest difficulty with writer’s block is in the idea development stage. If you don’t know where the story is headed, it’s hard to build a road there. Writing badly helps because you just lay tracks down and see where they go and course correct along the way. But this year, I’m also trying to be better at outlining in hopes that it helps in the big picture and limits some of those initial blocks.

SC: Which genre (mystery, fiction, romance, etc.) do you like writing the most?

AJM: I suppose whatever I’m in the mood for. Really, whatever I’m working on at the time is usually my favorite to write. Each genre has its own charms and challenges, too.

Romance explores love and relationships, which is fun, but the plot can also be formulaic and a bit limiting. Suspense has this unique thrill to it, but tying together the crime and clues and avoiding plot holes is tough. Personally, I’ve always loved reading literary novels, and I think what we read is usually an indicator of what we’d like to write the most, so I feel drawn to writing those as well, but they’re tricky. Exploring more freedom in prose and trying to capture the essence of life is such a rush, but it’s also hard to produce that certain feeling or theme.

I will say, right now, I’m most interested in writing a series that I guess we’ll tentatively say falls more into the urban fantasy genre. I’ve enjoyed dabbling in that world and am excited to see where it goes.

SC: What advice would you give to an aspiring author?

AJM: A majority of the advice I found and received when starting my writing journey could be boiled down to two things: write and read. A lot. By definition, if you’re reading, you’re a reader. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. So do it.

People also tell you that you have to believe in yourself. That’s a non-negotiable for almost any dream you’re chasing. It’s true here, too. You’ll suffer as a writer. If you want to get published, the odds aren’t great (the general statistic is 1-2% of manuscripts a publisher receives are actually published, but self-publishing is changing the game a bit), so you’ll have to build your resolve. Don’t let the numbers discourage or stop you. No matter what, you should write that book if for nothing else than for yourself.

I’d also add be sure to finish that first manuscript, but don’t expect it to be the next Harry Potter. I’d even go as far as to say expect it to be bad. That way, there’s little pressure. Don’t expect to be Shakespeare on your first go. See the first manuscript as a learning experience. If it’s good and publishable, then great. Maybe you are Shakespeare. But either way, you’ve learned, and you now know how to write a novel. You’ve also done it, so you have credibility with yourself. And now you can revise the first one. Or you can write a second with more confidence and knowing what you’re up against.

And study, study, study. Practice, practice, practice. Read books. Analyze books in your genre. Read books on writing. Then put it into action. I have an athletic background, so I always compare things to that, but an athlete who doesn’t train at all isn’t going to be very effective. The same is true of writing. Master the craft.

From personal experience, I’ll also say that you have to develop the skill to distance yourself from that first draft. I know. It’s your baby. But to be honest, none of my first drafts have been that good, at least not as good as they were after revision. I’m currently editing one of my earliest manuscripts, and after so much time away, I realize how convoluted it was. At the time, I thought it was amazing. How wrong I was. Developing the ability to distance my emotions from the project and look at it more objectively, like an outside editor, has been so humbling but also one of the most important skills I’ve gained in the process. Of course, this is also why it’s helpful to have an editor and other outside eyes look at your work.

Lastly, I’d advise any aspiring author to start growing a social media following immediately. Unless you’re posting controversial stuff, you’re certainly not going to hurt yourself. I’ve seen people get book deals solely because of their social media following instead of the quality of the work. Agents ask for your handles nowadays. They want to

see you’re active on social media, and even if you haven’t written your first word, you can start now.

SC: What are your plans for future projects?

AJM: I think I can say this now, but the plan is for my second novel to be published this year. I have some additional manuscripts in the drawer that I need to edit. In regard to writing, as I mentioned earlier, I want to try my hand at a series that’s more in the fantasy genre. I’ve always had it in my heart to write something of the sort but have been hesitant to do so. I think this is the year I finally do it. It’s going to be a crazy year. I expect that much and know I have my work cut out for me, but I’m excited and curious to see what happens. I feel like God made me a writer, so I can’t wait to see how He uses everything and what becomes of it.

The author at a book-signing event in Kirkwood, Missouri, on November 13, 2025.

INGRID BRUCK

No Smile

You don’t appreciate a smile until you get Bell’s Palsy and can’t. People you know startle on meeting. Hummingbird-quick as a whirr, facial nerves don't work. The left brow can’t lift. Your left eye doesn’t wink. You use a finger to open or shut that eye. Wear a black patch. Can’t drink from a glass. Pinch your lips to hold a straw. Your mouth sags, food dribbles out on the left. Did this happen to the Phantom of the Opera? Can you join him in the cellar? You want to spit at the thief who stole your whistle but can’t.

HUINA ZHENG

Two Stories

The Naturalness of Care

“Dad thinks all these years of what you’ve given are simply what’s expected of you, that’s why you feel wronged,” she says, this girl of thirteen, each time her mother comes to her with complaints, whether it is the mother-in-law who once scolded her before relatives, calling her a hen that cannot lay eggs though the truth is only that she bore no son, or Lan’s father who has grown cold and distant, running a toy factory in a town four hours away and keeping a girlfriend not yet twenty, and Lan answers with the same practiced gentleness, naming the hurt exactly where it lives so her mother can hear it spoken aloud. Her mother pulls another tissue from the box, eyes swollen like peach pits, hair loose, rambling about how she was once the most beautiful girl in the village and how she chose, of all men, one with nothing to his name, while Lan bites the soft flesh inside her cheek and listens for the sentence she knows is coming, “if it weren’t for you…” Her mother refuses divorce for Lan, always for Lan, so that she may have a “complete” family, and so Lan thanks her for the sacrifice and endurance. (Even as she finds herself thinking, more often now, that her mother finished only elementary school, has never worked, and if she were to leave her father what would remain for her, while that girlfriend will soon give him a son and take everything else.) And still it is never enough, the attention, the love, the care, her mother lying in bed all day, sleepless at night, aching by day, so when Lan comes home from school she cooks, washes dishes, mops the floor, does the laundry, sits and listens, and when the house finally quiets and she bends over her homework beneath the desk lamp, her shadow pressed flat against the wall, the low sobbing rises again from her mother’s room, and Lan bites down on her lower lip, whispering to herself that “Mom only has me,” then toward the closed door repeating, almost without sound, “I’ll stay with you.”

To Know Her

You know this.

None of it was her fault.

She didn’t choose to be born in that closed-off village. To become the neglected daughter in her family. She didn’t choose to raise three younger siblings, or to wash everyone’s clothes by the river at seven years old, even in freezing winter. She learned to live with being overlooked, ordered around, punished for her brothers’ mistakes. She never had the word for misogyny, but it seeped into her like cold water, into her bones, into her breathing.

She didn’t choose to marry a man who drank and hit. To become a wife covered in bruises. Her brother spoke for him, said he was a good man; she believed him. Her parents approved, calling it a fine match. No one mentioned that his father beat his wife too. In that world, a husband’s violence was taken as natural. When the blows became routine, the only response she heard was: What woman doesn’t suffer? Why are you the one who complains?

She didn’t choose to leave you. To become the mother who left. Those were the shadows of the one-child policy. She had no say. Her mother-in-law forced her to give you up, and you must remember this: she resisted. However small that resistance, it was the first time she ever fought back. Leaving you at ten days old with a relative who lived alone was not abandonment, but survival. Bringing you home six years later was everything she could bargain for, the price of bearing a son so she could reclaim her daughter. She must have loved you with a heart already fractured.

She didn’t choose to value sons over daughters. To become an instrument of patriarchy. She simply repeated what she had swallowed all her life: daughters do the housework, sons don’t; girls don’t need much schooling, marriage is their future; only sons can support aging parents. She internalized all of it, and tried to shape you with the same mold that once shaped her.

So, no. It was never only her fault.

Back then, the younger you could not read the tears she hid, could not hear the tremor in her voice when she denied favoritism, could not recognize her clumsy attempts to reach you.

But now you can. Now that you’ve walked the thorned path she once walked, and looked back through her eyes, you understand: She was fighting the world. Not you.

And now, at last, the two of you can sit together like strangers meeting for the first time, peeling back the weight of the past, gently, carefully, trying to know each other again.

SUZANNE UNDERWOOD RHODES

Beloved Incurables

I catch a glimpse of the incurables down by the water when Tom and I drive into Springlake Park. It’s a shocking word, “incurables,” but that’s what it says on both vans in the parking lot. “Home for the Incurables, Sweetgum, South Carolina.”

We sit at our picnic table under the trees and a big blue sky eating ham sandwiches. “I can’t believe they’d have a name like incurables in this day and age,” I say to Tom. We watch them playing in the lake below. They wade and screech gleefully as they smack the water to splash each other. Their shoes and socks lie scattered on the ground as if tossed by a storm. Some are in wheelchairs on the grassy shore. They wear checks or flowers and one man is wearing a tee shirt with an enormous number 3 and the words “Dale Earnhardt Forever.”

“It's an anachronism,” Tom says. “For example, we don't say ‘retarded’ any more. I remember when people with Down’s syndrome were called mongoloids. Guys with PTSD were called shell-shocked. We think we define the words, but they define us and who we are. Ignorant, that’s what we are no matter how many robots we create. Morally ignorant. If you think about it, what we don't know is what causes wars.”

“That’s profound,” I say, admiring how his eyebrows knit together when he’s formulating a thought. It’s good to see him this way again, reflective and deep, like he was before he got deployed. Therapy is helping, I can tell.

A woman in a red striped shirt that reminds me of those popcorn sacks you get at the zoo is standing several yards back from the lake under the incurables’ picnic shelter watching the group, obviously in charge. “Roy,” she yells to a man with a long black braid. He’s standing at the water’s edge, smoking a cigarette. “Roy, tell Billy to come on up here.” Roy calls and signals with his arms. Billy comes up from the lake, a bulky man with a small, grinning head, shirt and pants soaked like a second skin. He’s rolled up his trousers, exposing blazing white legs. He lumbers up the bank to the shelter and shakes himself off, laughing as water goes everywhere. He picks up a blue beachball and throws it helter-skelter. It bounces off the cement straight in our direction.

“I've got it!” Tom announces, holding the ball high. Billy hurries down the slope from the shelter then stops a few feet from our table, squinting at us with uncertainty.

“Hi. Is your name Billy?” I ask.

He nods vigorously. “Billy.” I figure he’s in his twenties, maybe thirties. Hard to tell, his face is so smooth.

Tom offers the ball. “Hey, dude. This is a cool ball you’ve got.”

“Dude,” Billy repeats, taking the ball. “I know you. I seen you befowa.”

Tom laughs. “Where did you see me?"

“I seen you at my house. I like you. You nice.”

“Hey, Billy! Come back!" the woman shouts. “Leave those folks alone.”

“Oh, he's fine. He's just getting his ball,” I tell her.

“Dat’s my mom,” he says, pointing at her proudly.

She walks down to our spot and takes his hand. “He’s a good boy. He’s one of the kids. I call them all my kids.” She turns to Billy. “You get to be my special helper.” To us she says, “Have a good day,” and leads him back to the shelter. She hands him a stack of paper plates and demonstrates putting them on the table one by one.

“Why do you think he said he knew you?”

“There’s no telling. Some good-looking guy like me was probably at his home for the incurables, maybe to fix the plumbing, who knows.” Grinning, he grabs a Coke from the cooler and taps the lid. “I don’t have the patience it takes to work with people like him. Not anymore. Their innocence rubs my cynicism the wrong way.”

“Stop it. You mess with Carter and get him to laugh when he’s feeling sorry for himself.”

“He has a good reason to feel sorry for himself. If I were really honest I’d say, ‘I don't see the point either, having two stumps instead of legs.” He takes a long sip.

“Lord, you are so jaded. What about all the people who overcome their disabilities and live full and productive lives? Look at the veterans with missing limbs who compete in cycling events and even marathons. We see them all the time in the admissions office enrolling on the GI bill. The technology for prosthetics now is amazing.”

He knows this of course. But I have to try to put a good spin on things, keep it positive. Mother calls it the spirit of encouragement and says it’s the only way to defeat the dark powers that are always lurking under the surface. Sort of naive, I guess, but something got her through Hayley's death. I give her a lot of credit for that, even if she was just putting up a good front for my sake.

“I'm not just talking about veterans. Look at Billy, for example. I bet he’s happier than you and I could ever be so child-like and trusting. Really, everyone is disabled in one way or another, only now it’s called being ‘differently abled,’ though that sounds a bit weird. My brain gets me lost in parking garages and even our own neighborhood. According to your logic, we should all just go ahead and kill ourselves.”

Tom rolls his eyes.

“Look, doofus, I happen to know you care about Carter. You’re always trying to help him find a lifeline. It makes me think of that Tom Waites' song 'Hold on, hold on, baby got to hold on. Take my hand . . .’”

“Tom Waites.” He laughs as I sing and fingers my hair. “Girl, I know you lie like a rug to me.”

“What are you talking about?” Deep down, I do know. It’s why we don't try to have a baby. Not yet. But I’m saying I’m believing we will. Choosing to believe is what Mother says we have to do.

We finish our sandwiches and watch Roy help the waders dry off and find their shoes. He pushes the ones in wheelchairs up to the shelter where the woman called Mom has set food on their plates. When everyone is settled, she says loudly and with feeling, “God is great, God is good.” The residents of the home join in, their discordant utterances like music from another planet.

“Let's go swimming.” Tom pulls off his shirt and chucks his empty can into the trash.

“Not yet. We still have cake. Besides, I wanted to hear about that new oxygen treatment you said is being used to help soldiers with PTSD. Diving chambers or something."

“That’s like the last thing I want to talk about. Come on, songbird, let’s go while we have the lake to ourselves.”

He grabs my arm.

“Wait, don’t you want dessert? It’s that chocolate velvet cake you like.

“You can wait. I’m going in.”

I know better than to protest. Back when we were dating I tried to dissuade him from joining the army, but he felt he owed it to his younger brother. Drew was killed in a mortar blast in Iraq. They'd been close and leaned on each other because they had to. Their parents drank.

“Besides, I’ll go in as an officer and for every year I serve, they pay for a year of medical school.” That was always Tom’s dream, to be a pediatrician. Was.

He sprints to the lake, his beautiful, muscular back breaking my heart as I think about the nightmare trying to kill him, kill me. He doesn’t talk about it but sometimes it fumes out like black smoke, and I don’t recognize the man shouting at me. I watch him plunge into the water and swim with powerful strokes that propel him farther and farther out, cutting a line through the mirror of Spring Lake until he disappears altogether and I feel the old fist of fear as I felt it the night the news reported a firefight in Ramadi with seven Americans dead and another night after he’s home for good and we’re in the living room watching a movie and the scene comes on when Julius fires his pistol and suddenly Tom starts sobbing and saying over and over, “Get up, you freaking dirtball,” and he stands up and careens around the room, not seeing me he knocks over the lamp, swearing and screaming, “Mullins, get up, don't do this,” and I’m scared out of my mind, wondering should I call 9-1-1, drive to my mother's, file for divorce? Lord, what to do?, but then it stops and goes quiet. He slides to the floor and sleeps there all night, out cold.

Why does he have to swim so far?

I pull my book out of my backpack and try to read. Not for long. Loud burbling and laughter the incurables are parading back to the lake, exuberant as kids at a circus. I count twelve, including four in wheelchairs. They obviously have palsies and Down’s and other disorders causing spastic and shaky motions. Billy leads the pack, hugging his beachball.

Roy entices him to a game of catch in the shallow water near shore, but Billy’s arms go akimbo each time the beachball comes his way. He hoots and splashes and reaches after the bobbing ball.

“Back this way, Billy!” says Roy, but Billy has lost his footing and I see him as he goes under. “Billy!” Roy trudges after him in water waist deep that loses its floor, and now he is thrashing violently to reach the kid, and I am racing to the lake, joined by Mom. We see Billy’s head crown the surface then descend again.

“Oh God,” she sobs, and the whole group cries and clamors, watching Billy drown. Suddenly I catch sight of Tom, a speck that grows larger and larger as he swims toward shore. Billy is underwater and Roy dives and surfaces, unable to grasp his slippery body. But Tom has come. One downward plunge and he emerges with Billy and turns him on his back, arms under his arms as he sidestrokes the twenty or so yards to bring him in. He lays him out on the grass and starts CPR. Mom has called rescue. She and Roy work to corral the incurables, hollering in obvious panic, to get them back up to the shelter. Tom is on his knees over the blue body, pumping rapidly on Billy’s chest,

breathing into Billy’s mouth, never wavering in the rhythms of his primitive ritual. It’s strange I should become detached at a time like this, as if I’m in the eye of the storm. Everything seems surreal, like the lake itself, calm in its gray indifference.

It was like that when Hayley died, though in an inverse kind of way. I was there when it happened one minute looking out the window at the parking lot, the next hearing three sucking breaths followed by dead nothing. I froze. I was only sixteen. Nothing in the room moved at all: not the vase of pink rosebuds from Uncle Gabe, not Lucy Bear at the foot of her bed, not the curtains with smiley faces nor my mother’s Bible, open and left on the chair she had just gotten up from so she could grab coffee not the bag on the IV stand dripping its vital, futile meds as it had dripped all morning, and above all, not her small white face and half-shut eyes, and the hideous map on her bald head, the friendly, everyday marker for her lethal “treatment,” the next round of radiation.

“Liars!” I screamed at every one of those things. “You are all a bunch of liars!” Nurses and hospital people came and forcibly led me out of the room while others attended to Hayley why didn’t they help her up so she could nuzzle next to me as she always did when her strength ebbed and I would read Frog and Toad and we would laugh and she would stroke the silk edge of her blanket.

Tom has turned Billy on his side so water and vomit can pour out of his mouth, then on his back again, quick, hard compressions, two breaths, and on it goes. There are sirens, bleeding lights, paramedics rushing over.

Tom gets up as they take over. “Robyn.” I hurry toward him. He loosens in my arms, his chest heaving against me. “He’s alive. He's going to make it.”

“You saved him. Thank God, you saved him.”

“I did my job.”

“Don’t give me that. You’re not in the army anymore.”

Shouts rise from the shelter as Billy is carried on a stretcher to the ambulance and lifted in. Tom gets the cooler. We walk in silence to the parking lot. The ambulance takes off and I look back and catch a glimpse of Mom’s red stripes. The incurables are gathered close, murmuring. What must they think of this death that came so near, this burial that would have taken Billy away from them forever?

I rest my hand on Tom’s thigh, feeling suddenly drained. He starts the car and we pull out of the parking lot and head north onto Joe Pye highway. The afternoon sun gilds the pines.

“You know who Joe Pye was?”

“No idea.”

“He was an Indian medicine man in Massachusetts back in the 1880s who used a weed to cure typhus fever. It’s that purple plant you see in the fall by the highway. He healed a lot of people, so they named it Joe Pye weed. And you’re right. It wasn’t just a job. I’d swum out nearly a mile and was planning to go all the way to that island where we camped last summer, and how it rained and we clung hard to each other and you said it sounded like someone from heaven was tossing coins at our tent.”

I smile, swatting tears.

“But something told me to go back, that you were worried, so I swam back as fast as I could and there was all this commotion and I realized what was happening, you know, the drowning. God, I was so scared I couldn’t save him.”

“But you did. It’s a miracle. For you as much as for Billy. Let’s go visit him when gets out of the hospital. His home is only forty-five minutes from our house.”

"Yeah, definitely. Little brother. That’s what I’m gonna call him. My little brother.”

MATTHEW WHERTTAM

A Day in the Summer

I had French toast for breakfast with my campers. The piece I got was burnt. After the van ride to town with Bertrand, who also had the day off, we walked toward the gazebo on the town green. New Milford’s town green. Bertrand didn’t talk much, and when he did, he stuttered.

My lunch was a quart of cold milk and an ice cream sandwich. His was a box of Cracker Jacks. Some of the Cracker Jacks got stuck in his teeth. Cracker Jacks, stuck in the teeth of a stutterer! As I said, a quart of cold milk and an ice cream sandwich was my lunch, and since it was my day off, it would be my dinner, too.

The breeze was soft and the sky was filled with patches of puffy, white clouds. The sun would come out, go in, and then come out again. But it was never in or out for too many minutes in a row.

On the way to the gazebo, a thin and tall gazebo, I bought the Sunday New York Times. Back then, it did not cost a fortune. And there were so many sections. More than enough for two people. When we got near the gazebo, I gave Bertrand the sports section and he sat down on the grass and buried his face in a story about an auto race. (He had never driven a race car and never would.)

I sat down and spread the other sections of The Times around me. The paper was filled with big words and yet even with those big words it was somehow easy to read. And for that reason, having that big-worded paper in my hands made me feel virtuous, smart, even intellectual.

When Bertrand was done reading about the auto race, he opened the comic book he’d brought along. Its inside back cover had an advertisement for a racecar drivers' school. A school with its own racetrack and its own race cars, so you didn’t have to bring your race car to class with you.

A small town is fun when it is busy, but not when it is too busy. Sundays in the summer and in the late morning in New Milford are not too busy. People are either leaving church or starting out on picnics, but there are not nearly as many of them as are out and about on weekdays.

The gazebo was filling up, but the folks in its seats weren’t talking much. The gazebo was white and awkward-looking. Awkward-looking like a giraffe or one of those birds that have bunched-up bodies and stand forever on one long leg. A sign near this gazebo said its seats were for sitting, but that you could not eat there. And that sitting and eating anywhere on the grass was not permitted. Bertrand and I were sitting and eating on the grass.

It was good to be away from my campers. I had told them this was my day off. My free time. I am not sure seven-year-olds have a clear understanding of what free time is. They think summer is good because they don’t have to go to school, but I’ve never heard any of them actually use the words “free time.”

What’s also nice about a small town like New Milford is that you don't have to walk far to get out of it. Bertrand and I were going to be walking out of it that afternoon. Walking to a small lake of some sort. A man-made lake. I was to ditch my Sunday Times

except for the magazine section, and he and I were going to walk along Route 7 toward that lake. He would have his comic book and I would have my magazine section and we would walk along a narrow path with the road and automobiles and trucks on one side, and farmhouses on the other. I didn’t know then that a big brown-and-white dog would be bounding out of one of those farmhouses and racing toward us. Barking and racing toward us with bared teeth. Or that Bertrand would then grab me, hold me between himself and the dog, and shout out in a clear, loud. stutter-free voice, “Look out! He might bite!” And while he would be holding me, he would be standing in one of the lanes of Route 7 and smelling like Cracker Jacks.

That dog would stop short, Bertrand would let go of me, get out of the road, and things would slow down. My mind would still be jittery and I would not know anything about what was going on in Bertrand’s mind. Whether it would be filling back up with images of race cars or maybe of the lake we were heading toward.

When we got back to town that evening, we discovered that the camp’s van driver had forgotten about us; that is, he had forgotten about picking us up and driving us back to camp. Our calls to camp to remind him to get us went to a phone in a dark, locked room in an empty building the camp director used during the day to run things. There were no cell phones back then.

We spent that entire night in New Milford’s police station with a sheriff and a deputy who were too busy to take us anywhere. We would have liked to sleep in the station’s jail cell which had a couple of cots, except they were already occupied.

JAMES FOWLER

The Master Clock

Once upon a time there lived a watchmaker whose business it was to repair clocks and watches of all types. His wife had died giving birth to their only child, a daughter whom the watchmaker cherished as the source of beauty and delight in his life. This girl was a daily reminder of her mother’s charms, but also a growing joy in her own right. To have her about was to find pleasure in all the occupations of living.

The watchmaker kept shop along a sloping street of a town. He and his daughter lived in rooms above the shop. An attic served as a workroom and storage area for the watchmaker’s own clock collection. He loved to work to the combined ticking of all the mechanisms.

On a day like many others he sat at his worktable high above the rattle and bustle of the street. His daughter, who helped him run the shop, had gone to the main square for some candles, so the business was closed until her return. That way the watchmaker did not have to interrupt a delicate piece of work to wait on customers below.

As he was adjusting a faulty mainspring, he became aware of a pounding and shouting from the street. Someone was at his shop door, calling for him. These people always had to be served right away. He kept to his work, expecting the impatient one to tire soon and leave. But the pounding only grew more insistent, the shouting more urgent. Sighing in surrender, the watchmaker went to the window and leaned out.

“What do you want?” he called down.

The man raised his face. “Are you the watchmaker? Come down, come down right now! Make haste!”

It was clear the man did not intend to discuss the matter, so the watchmaker resigned himself to descending. Perhaps the fellow had a special job for him, one that took priority. In any case, he could occupy himself in the shop until his daughter returned.

Upon opening the shop door, he noted that the man had no clock about him, nor did he seem anxious to state his business. But after some moments of awkward hesitation, he blurted out, “You must prepare yourself! You must summon strength!” From up the street a crowd was approaching. The man said lowly, “Here they come.”

The watchmaker felt a tide of concern rising upon him, and as the crowd parted he saw it was bearing a still form. His daughter. A woman stepped forward and started to say something about a runaway horse. Just what he did then the watchmaker could not remember afterward.

There was a burial, but it might as well have been a dream. The watchmaker withdrew to his workroom, unable to face the lodgings above the shop where he and his daughter had spent so many happy years. He did no work, but simply sat staring out the window, thinking that the roofs across the way and the sky beyond looked the same as ever, yet no longer had anything to say to him. And while he could hardly lose track of time surrounded by so many clocks, they seemed to measure something in which he had no interest.

A woman from down the street brought him meals, which he tried to eat so as not to hurt her feelings. On the morning of his third day of seclusion she brought a package along with his meal. She had found it on his stoop. She urged him to open it, thinking it might distract him a little from his sorrow. But when he peered in the box, he saw it contained a clock. Someone apparently had left it for him to fix. He set it aside.

As the day moved emptily onward, the watchmaker felt ever more oppressed by the chorus of ticking he had always enjoyed. It was as if he had to endure every second ticked off by each clock in the room. This situation could not go on; he would have to make himself work. He drew toward him the box he had placed aside that morning and lifted out the clock.

It was a handsome if standard piece, one that would sit well on a mantel. Its winding key hung on the back. There was an inscription on the handle. It read A GIFT NOT GRASPED.

The clock had stopped, so he inserted the key and gave it a few trial turns. The mechanism responded immediately with a steady ticking. As the time needed to be set, he looked up at the clock faces to his left.

What was this? They all showed the same time as the clock he had only just wound. He turned. The clocks to his right agreed. He blinked a few times, then fished out his pocket watch. It too kept time with the rest. But he could have sworn that the afternoon was several hours further along than the clocks showed.

He went to the window. The sun was about where it should be for the time attested by all his clocks. This was very strange. Perhaps his grief had affected his memory. Still, on impulse he moved the minute hand of the newly wound clock up to the hour.

The room filled with the sound of gongs and bells striking that same hour. The watchmaker turned this way and that, amazed. And now on top of all the chiming came the heavy toll of the town clock, like a final authority.

Such jumping of time could not be possible, yet he had just experienced it. His swirling thoughts could only form one conclusion: he was in possession of a Master Clock. Even so, he had always assumed that such a device was a storyteller’s invention designed to entertain children. And to his thinking, the fabulous object would naturally be an old, heavily carved grandfather clock.

So this modest timepiece was actually a controller of time. But why had it been left on his stoop? As he went about finding an answer, the watchmaker divided his gaze between the Master Clock and the view outside his window. And as his thoughts took direction, he barely admitted their drift.

Trembling, he reached forth and touched the clock’s minute hand. Pushing gently, he started moving it round and round counterclockwise. Suddenly he stopped. Instantly the room and street outside were cast in a softer, early morning light. All the clocks agreed that the day was beginning afresh. With the Master Clock and its mover still together, still in control.

Again he reached forth and turned the hours back, this time keeping count as he pushed the hand round and round. As he approached the noon of a certain day, the enormity of what he was doing made him pause. He sat lost in thought, half wanting to believe he was caught in a strong dream.

Then he became aware of a pounding and shouting from the street. That sound, that voice calling. He could not live through it again. Quickly he moved the time back from one to twelve.

The disturbance vanished. Again he was alone with the steady company of his clocks. He remained still for some minutes, waiting, listening. He dared not rise from his chair, nor so much as turn to face the door. His eyes he kept on the view across the street and beyond, while his ears were attentive to the slightest sound that might come from behind and below.

Several times he thought he heard something before the sound of steps on the staircase grew definite. They approached with clocklike persistence. Soon they would pause before the door, then a light knock, then he would turn to face what was once ordinary.

“Come in,” he said hoarsely in response to the familiar three taps.

The girl entered her father’s workroom. This high place where a mysterious craft was practiced always intrigued her. But there was no time for lingering just now.

“Father, I thought I would go for the candles while business is slow. Do you want to come down, or shall I close the shop when I leave?” The speechless stare she received gave her concern. “Father, is something wrong?”

“No, no,” he almost whispered. Standing, he beckoned her to approach and drew her close. “Nothing in the world is wrong, my child, my life. Only promise that you will never leave me again, never leave the shop without me. Only promise me this.”

The girl was confused by the intensity of her father’s plea, but glad for the deep expression of love and the chance to satisfy his wish. Yes, they would go together for the candles later that evening, and in the future she would not stir beyond the front stoop without him.

When father and daughter returned from the main square that night, the watchmaker found that the Master Clock had disappeared. The key was still on his worktable, and as he considered its inscription, he thought he understood the nature of the gift. As a reminder of his great blessing he slipped the key into the pocket where he kept his watch.

Over the next few days his daughter noticed that he was spending more time down in the shop with her than usual. Even when he retired to his workroom, he would not stay there very long but would come creeping downstairs to make sure everything was alright. At night the girl would awaken and see her father in the doorway looking in upon her.

Day followed day, with the watchmaker growing less rather than more at ease over his daughter’s return. It seemed she might so easily slip away from him again. He had difficulty sleeping, and when he did fall off, he dreamed that her stone in the graveyard still stood.

It happened that one morning after a sleepless night the watchmaker dozed at his worktable. Down below his daughter was standing on the stoop, watching the activity in the street. It was a gusty day, and as the girl raised a hand to wave at someone she knew, a strong wind came along and grabbed a locket she had been fingering. Down the street it rolled, driven like a pinwheel.

The girl gave chase, not wanting to lose the locket, as it contained a miniature portrait of her mother. But as fast as she ran, she could not overtake the swerving,

skittering object. She came close to it several times, but the wind whisked it away again. The teasing game led her ever farther from home, until finally the locket dropped from sight through a grate in the street. Below the grate the girl heard the rush of waters.

“Ah well,” she sighed, “life is like that.” And turning, she started back.

Meanwhile her father had jerked awake, troubled by another of his dreams. In agitation he left his workroom and clumped downstairs to his shop. Seeing it empty, he rushed to the door and looked out, then hastened back upstairs to their lodgings. But his daughter was nowhere to be found.

The watchmaker swept down into the street and peered anxiously in both directions. Passersby tried to be helpful but could tell him nothing definite. Unwilling to lose time waiting, he headed up the street. His fear pointed the way.

As he roamed from block to block he called her name, put his face to shop windows, and inquired of strangers. Nobody had seen a girl such as he described. The town began to seem quite large to him, and somewhat foreign. Fighting down a sense of helpless loss, he continued his search.

It led him down side streets he had never entered, along narrow, crooked ways enclosed by high, crumbling walls. He was no longer searching only the likely places. In fact, his course grew ever more wandering and incoherent. He could not tell where he had already been, and it seemed the paths he took were narrowing to nothing, like the thin end of a wedge.

The town clock broke upon him then like a summons. Of course, the main square. Why had he not already gone there? Perhaps a part of him had dreaded it. Even as he started for the square at a run, he felt a weight dragging at his legs. And to his ears the toll of the clock sounded mournful.

While father searched for daughter, she in turn sought him. She had heard upon regaining the shop that he was anxiously looking for her. It vexed her that she had momentarily forgotten his wishes and caused him such worry. So she set off, hoping to find him and dispel his fears. At first his trail was easy to follow, for several shopkeepers and street vendors had noted his passing. But as the girl proceeded, reports of his whereabouts conflicted. At a loss, she decided to seek him in the most prominent part of town, the main square.

By the time she reached the square she was moving briskly, half walking, half running. Up ahead there seemed to be some kind of commotion. Someone was shouting and casting about heedlessly. As she drew closer, she recognized her father seeking her in a panic. She started to call to him, but her cry turned to alarm as she noticed a horse-drawn carriage bearing down on him. Her response was quicker than thought.

Certain that he heard his daughter calling to him, the watchmaker turned about in confused excitement. The moment he saw the violently reined horses, he heard a gasp rise from the crowd. Down on the pavement lay a still form.

A voice nearby said, “She saved your life, sir.”

The watchmaker moved toward his daughter’s body with a low moan. As he cradled her head and rocked back and forth, the words on the winding key came back to him. She had understood their meaning better than he, without ever seeing them. He took the key out of his pocket and closed her hand about it.

After some minutes those gathered round urged the watchmaker to rise. They would bear his daughter home. He allowed himself to be helped to his feet and led forward by the kind strangers.

Sorrow would not consume him this time.

KEVIN BROWN

Two Stories

Still Trying to Live Up to Expectations

My father was somewhere in the funeral home. His body, at least. My mother, sister, wife, and I were sitting in a pseudo-conference room planning a service, like we were in a marketing meeting rolling out a new PR campaign, choosing covers for small slips of paper advertising my father’s life and death people would keep for a few months, maybe a year or two, to remember him by, as we say. Near the end, almost as an afterthought, the director asked if we wanted to see him. It, at this point, I suppose. My mother’s no was sharp and quick, as if the director had asked if she wanted a section of the service devoted to their secrets. My sister’s was softer, but definitely decisive. For one of the few times in my life, I agreed with both of them.

I’ve spent more than a decade regretting that agreement. I don’t know if they have. We don’t discuss past decisions. Maybe they saw him enough when he was alive, as if there’s a limit to such sightings. Maybe I believe I could have said something to him it he still could have heard, even two days after his death. Maybe I could have made up for a relationship that was cordial, but not warm, certainly not close. Maybe I just believe I neglected some filial duty, just as I had my entire life. Maybe it would have just been good PR.

Turn to Page 146 for the Solution

In fourth grade, I found Encyclopedia Brown, my namesake and the boy I wanted to be, the one whose mind made the sound of pages turning when he did cartwheels. I followed him in fifth grade with a book about a boy who learned to crack codes, a boy who met a man who taught him how to see the language life had hidden all around him. They had friends and family who not only indulged their obsessions, but cared for them because of who they were.

I wanted to understand the world in the ways they did, be able to talk to peers and parents and teachers, know what to say when my father’s friends asked me How’s it going? or What’s up? I didn’t know what it was, so I could only surmise at how or where it was going, and I had no idea what could be up besides the ceiling or the sky. I thought there must be some clue I was missing, some key to be able to transpose the words and letters others used to make meaning out of a code I couldn’t crack.

It took me too long, too many years, to understand that I was looking in the wrong direction, reading the wrong hidden messages. I watched others, as if I were a detective or a spy, instead of looking inside. The real mystery was who I was and who I wanted to be; the important code was the message I had written in my soul. I had misread the books in the same way I misread the world in the same way I misread myself.

ROBERT BOUCHERON

One Fine Day (a ten-minute play)

Cast of Characters:

JONCEY HUCKLE: Young twenties, strives to create a nice home under adverse circumstances, talks a mile a minute. Wears fashion from a thrift shop.

TRIP HUCKLE: Young twenties, husband of JONCEY, lean and restless, has a dazzling smile. Wears jeans, untucked shirt, work boots.

MAMA: About fifty, mother of JONCEY, a widow with financial assets, patient up to a point. Wears a flowered dress.

SUELLEN CARTER: Thirties, operates an online custom knitting business for which JONCEY is a piecework supplier. Wears a business attire, sensible shoes.

Place:

A cabin in the woods. High chair, crib, knitting basket, wedding photo, armchair, scatter of toys.

Time:

The present, June 21, morning.

Summary:

A talkative young mother in a cabin in the woods waits for her wandering husband. To pass the time, she tends the baby, phones Mama, does piecework knitting, and voices her opinions.

(At curtain rise, JONCEY HUCKLE feeds breakfast to her baby son in a high chair. TRIP HUCKLE enters in a hurry and grabs keys.)

TRIP

No time for breakfast, honeybuns. Wait, a box of donuts? (He stuffs one in his mouth.)

JONCEY

It would be nice if once in a while you asked before you went off all day in the car and left me here with the baby and no way to get to the store.

TRIP

(Mouth full) Gotta make hay while the sun shines. Provide for Mrs. Huckle and all the little huckleberries.

JONCEY

I suppose it’s another deal that involves a personal delivery, a wire transfer from a bank, and a timely follow-up.

TRIP

The business model is service-oriented to a select clientele who value their privacy, so I can’t go into a whole lot of detail. Basically friends and their friends.

JONCEY

You can make friends with anyone, as I have witnessed on numerous occasions, with that grin that shows every perfect tooth clear back to the wisdoms.

TRIP

(He grins at the baby.)

It’s a gift, which helps in the department of customer satisfaction.

JONCEY

While you’re out there satisfying, I’m in here waiting.

TRIP

And knitting.

JONCEY

For an online business, which is one-of-a-kind knitted garments using hypoallergenic yarn in a rainbow of colors. It supplements our meager income.

TRIP

Speaking of which, time’s a wasting.

(TRIP plants a big wet kiss on JONCEY’s mouth, and he exits. Surprised, she licks the donut sugar from her lips, then resumes feeding the baby.)

JONCEY

Alexa, call Mama. She isn’t always the most sympathetic listener, but at least she takes my calls.

(MAMA enters and faces the audience.)

Hello, daughter.

MAMA

JONCEY

Oh, Mama, I just put some mashed banana on that darling silver spoon they gave me at the baby shower, and I steered it to toward Trip Junior in the high chair I found at the Lockhorns’ yard sale, which was a steal even if it has a few dark stains like bruises, but Edwina Lockhorn said her youngest outgrew it and they wouldn’t be having any more, not if she could help it, she was just glad it was going to a good home, and he wolfed it down and opened wide for more like a baby bird in a nest. If Trip stayed a minute longer, he would have seen.

MAMA

Look on the bright side, Joncey.

JONCEY

Though I have pointed out that this is his home too.

MAMA

And don’t nag, because it goes in one ear and out the other.

JONCEY

Which is clearly the case with Trip. I suggested that he clean the dead leaves out of the gutters and repair the leaky toilet, which would be a snap seeing as how he’s a plumber.

MAMA

Plumber’s helper.

JONCEY

Now, Mama, the state is so balled up in red tape that they haven’t issued the certificate, but he completed the vocational training, and he worked a few months for Superior Drain, your full-service bath outfitter. Trip has a working knowledge of plumbing.

MAMA

You know what they say, Joncey, the cobbler’s children have no shoes.

JONCEY

(Puzzled) What does that . . .

MAMA

I need to get going, daughter. Have a blessed day!

(MAMA exits. JONCEY talks to the baby.)

JONCEY

Trip probably picked up Spotswood Mayes again, though what he sees in that overage juvenile delinquent is beyond me, because if Spotswood ever put in a decent day’s work in his life, I’d be floored. They’re probably waltzing all over the county in our car, while I’m stuck here with you, the spitting image of Trip, as anyone with eyes in her head can see, such as Suellen Carter.

(SUELLEN CARTER enters.)

SUELLEN

Here I am, right on schedule, to pick up a batch of knitting orders.

JONCEY

Here they are, knitted to the customer’s exact specifications.

(SUELLEN greets the baby, looks at the wedding photo on the wall, and back to the baby.)

So, Joncey, did you adopt?

SUELLEN

JONCEY

Certainly not. I can show you the stretch marks.

SUELLEN

That wasn’t what I meant.

JONCEY

Then what did you . . . Oh, Suellen, that is so mean! Not to mention highly unlikely. Like I told Trip while we were dating, he was my one and only, though it took a little nudge to get him to the point. True, the baby was born less than nine months after the wedding, but I absolutely did not trick anyone into marriage because I was pregnant. The doctor said he might be a month or two premature, seeing he had a low birth weight.

SUELLEN

If you say so, Joncey. This order came in last week. Since your internet access is limited out here in the sticks, I printed the online form where the customer fills in her measurements.

(SUELLEN hands JONCEY a sheet of paper, which she studies.)

JONCEY

What kind of woman is shaped like that?

SUELLEN

I know, but custom fit is what we’re all about. Here’s your check for the orders I’m picking up.

JONCEY

Thank you, Suellen.

SUELLEN

Are we all squared away on the business side of things?

JONCEY

Fair and square.

So, did Trip ever find a job?

SUELLEN

JONCEY

Actually, Trip is an independent contractor, and his hours vary.

SUELLEN

My Hodge comes home for dinner every night at five o’clock on the dot. I have to run. Call me if you have questions.

(SUELLEN takes the pile of garments and exits.)

JONCEY

Alexa, call Mama.

(MAMA enters. She and JONCEY speak as before.)

Hello, daughter.

MAMA

JONCEY

Suellen just left, and it’s a good thing, because she couldn’t resist a parting shot about Trip.

MAMA

It was a tease. Let it go, Joncey. Let it roll off your back like water off a duck.

JONCEY

I appreciate the knitting referrals, but she’s forever adding her two cents where it isn’t needed.

MAMA

Suellen knows how to push your buttons.

JONCEY

I must admit it sounds attractive to have a man you can set the clock by. In that case, I would get the baby ready, and power through my housework and some knitting, and dash to the store for something tasty for dinner and set the table as pretty as a picture, with a vase of fresh flowers, cloth napkins, and polished silverware . . . but the car is always gone.

MAMA

Would you trade husbands with Suellen?

JONCEY

Hodge Carter is a dull thud compared to Trip.

MAMA

There you go, then.

JONCEY

But it would be nice to have some punctuality.

MAMA

We’re at the longest day of summer, when the sun stays up so late it’s easy to lose track of time.

JONCEY

Especially here in the woods, where Trip wanted to get away from it all. He’s into selfreliance and sustainability, a lifestyle that’s off the grid. A person might have preferred something closer to town, but the house was vacant and in good shape, since the previous owner had to sell before they ever moved in due to financial considerations.

MAMA

Meaning they had to unload it.

JONCEY

Mama, you looked at the property and gave us a check for the down payment as a wedding present, so what could I say?

MAMA

You were in such a hurry to get married, Joncey. And to that Trip Huckle! It’s a good thing your father had already passed.

JONCEY

Mama, I don’t see why you say that. Papa would have liked Trip. Everybody does.

MAMA

Fortunately, the life insurance policy paid out. I had enough to live on, so I could part with the money, seeing as how you had to tie the knot with someone.

JONCEY

Then what is the problem?

MAMA

The problem is how do you know what he’s up to? Gone all day, day after day, no regular job, no way to track him.

JONCEY

I am not a person who constantly calls her husband to check up on his whereabouts. He brings home the bacon.

MAMA

So you say, but whose hog is it from? Trip is into some shady business.

JONCEY

Oh, Mama, that is uncalled for! Trip is a free spirit, a natural wanderer who needs the great outdoors. He can’t be cooped up in an office or tied down to some routine job.

MAMA

Such as plumbing?

JONCEY

Which pays well, I have to admit, and it would be nice if Trip still worked for Superior Drain, because it’s a dependable outfit, and he’s handy with a wrench.

MAMA

Before you were complaining, and now you’re defending him.

JONCEY

I was not complaining! I was merely pointing out a few details that could be improved, such as use of the family automobile and regular hours. If Trip’s field of operations takes him out of calling range much of the time . . .

(MAMA quietly exits.)

Mama? We must have got cut off. Reception is spotty out here in the woods.

(JONCEY lifts the baby from the highchair and lays him in the crib.)

While you’re napping, I’ll get in some knitting, a full-size top with a bunchy neck that will not look flattering. Suellen is a talented designer, but not every design is meant for every body type.

(JONCEY picks up a piece of knitting, sits in the armchair, and knits while she talks to the baby.)

You ate a big dinner last night and breakfast today, which cleaned out the pantry, so a jaunt to the grocery store to stock up is definitely in the cards. It’s one fine day, and later we’ll get some fresh air on the patch of grass in front of the house, a bright spot here in the wilderness. And who knows, maybe your father will make it home for dinner, though it’s anybody’s guess. I’ll put you to bed before the sun goes down, and I may go to bed myself soon after, because who wants to wait alone in the dark in a remote cabin?

As soon as I drift off, Trip will undoubtedly roar up to the house in our car without his buddy Spotswood. Brakes will squeal, gravel will spit against the wall right under the window, and he will bellow along with the radio, which will blare at full volume tuned to his favorite station, your notch on the dial for Easy Country.

Trip will slam through the door with his pants pockets stuffed with money, a bag of groceries in his arms topped by a bouquet, and the car keys dangling from his lips. The keys will drop to the floor with a crash as he shouts, regardless of whether anyone is asleep, including his own precious child. It could happen any minute . . .

CURTAIN

JOHN J. HAN

Between Text and Place: Two Literary Museums in Gunma Prefecture, Japan

(A Photo Essay)

In May 2023, I visited the cities of Takasaki (高崎市) and nearby Maebashi (前橋 市), the capital of Gunma Prefecture, located just north of Takasaki. Takasaki is a city of more than 370,000 people, and Maebashi has about 330,000. Both are situated on the western edge of the Kantō Plain, framed by mountains to the north, west, and south.

In the literary realm, Gunma Prefecture is associated with two distinguished poets, Sakutarō Hagiwara (萩原朔太郎, 1886-1942) and Bunmei Tsuchiya (土屋文明, 1890-1990). The Sakutarō Hagiwara Memorial House and the Maebashi City Museum in Commemoration of Sakutarō Hagiwara are in Maebashi, while the Gunma Prefectural Museum of Literature in Commemoration of Bunmei Tsuchiya is in Takasaki.

A free-verse poet and critic, Sakutarō Hagiwara was born in Kitakuruwamachi, Higashi-Gunma District, Gunma Prefecture (later Kitakuruwamachi, Maebashi City), as the eldest child of Mitsuzō Hagiwara, a physician, and his wife Kei. He is widely regarded as the “father of modern Japanese poetry” (日本近代詩の父) for opening new horizons in poetic expression. Although his formal education was marked by repeated failures and withdrawals from elite schools, he developed independently through wide reading, music, and intense self-directed study, eventually committing himself to poetry. His debut collection Howling at the Moon (1917) revolutionized Japanese verse through its use of colloquial language, symbolism, and psychological introspection, securing his place at the forefront of modern poetry. Over the course of his career, he published influential poetry collections and critical works, taught at Meiji University, mentored younger writers, and founded the “Gondola Western Music Society” (ゴンドラ洋楽会) a mandolin and guitar ensemble in Maebashi City, showcasing his lifelong devotion to both literature and music.

Bunmei Tsuchiya was born into a poor farming family in Kamigō Village, Gunma District, Gunma Prefecture (now Takasaki City), and graduated from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tokyo. A leading modern tanka poet and a distinguished scholar of Japanese literature, he played a central role in shaping twentieth-century poetry through his long association with the journal Araragi. As a poet, he established an unsentimental style that explored the inner lives of ordinary people, most notably in the collections Ōkan-shū (1930) and Sanya-shū (1935). As a scholar, he made major contributions to the study of the Man’yōshū, especially through Private Annotations on the Man’yōshū (1949-56). In recognition of his achievements, he was awarded the Order of Culture and named a Person of Cultural Merit, and he remained active in the literary world until his death at the age of 100; earlier in his career, he taught in the Faculty of Letters at Meiji University.

Takasaki is about 100-110 kilometers (62-68 miles) from Tokyo. By Shinkansen, the trip takes roughly 50-60 minutes, while conventional JR trains take around 1 hour 50 minutes to 2 hours. From Takasaki, it takes just 10-15 minutes to reach Maebashi

City by car or train. On this trip, I was accompanied by two Japanese professors of English, Aya Kubota and Yuko Kanaya, both fellow members of the John Steinbeck Society of Japan. This photo essay presents scenes and artifacts from our visit a pleasant journey through the peaceful cities of the Kantō Plain.

Top: This ¥1,980 ticket (about $12.70-$12.80 USD in early 2026) was my fare from the Tokyo area to Takasaki. The train ran directly to my destination, and the ticket shows I traveled entirely on conventional JR lines. My memory is hazy, but I may have switched along the way to a Shinkansen limited express, which would have cost about ¥2,520 and brought the total fare to roughly ¥4,500 with a reserved seat.

Bottom: Takasaki and Maebashi are located northwest of Tokyo. Credit: Google Maps.

Top:

Bottom: An interpretive

An aerial view of the Sakutarō Hagiwara Memorial House in Maebashi.

sign at the entrance of the Sakutarō Hagiwara Memorial House.

Top: A close-up of the interpretive sign.

Bottom: Two cats watch over Hagiwara’s birthplace from the roof, bringing to life the poet’s evocative imagery. Their silent, perched presence echoes the mystery and melancholy of his celebrated poems.

Top: A dog statue stands on the grounds of Hagiwara’s birthplace, echoing the poet’s vivid imagery from Howling at the Moon. Its form and inscriptions invite visitors to step into the imaginative world of his verse.

Bottom: Across the Tone River stands the Sakutarō Hagiwara Memorial Maebashi City Museum of Literature (萩原朔太郎記念 前橋文学館).

Top Left: The Sakutarō Hagiwara Memorial House and the Sakutarō Hagiwara Memorial Maebashi City Museum of Literature sit on the banks of the Hirose River, a serene waterway that winds through the heart of Maebashi.

Top Right: The Hagiwara Memorial House and the Maebashi City Museum of Literature are separated by the Hirose River; the memorial house is the one on the right.

Credit: Google Maps.

Bottom Left: A statue of Sakutarō Hagiwara stands in front of the Maebashi City Museum of Literature, welcoming visitors into the world of his poetry and music.

Bottom Right: A plaque at the entrance of the museum depicts a cat, a figure that recurs throughout his work.

Manuscripts: Some of Sakutarō Hagiwara’s original manuscripts on display at the memorial museum.

Books: A selection of Hagiwara’s poetry books exhibited for visitors.

Bible: A reproduced copy of the Japanese-language Old and New Testament Bible owned by Hagiwara. Although not a formal Christian, he often drew on Christian ideas of sin and redemption in his work. His poems explore the human struggle with faith, mortality, and existential despair, reflecting his deep engagement with spiritual and moral questions.

Bottom:

These photos illustrate the Japanese fascination with Western culture a century ago, a period when baseball also became a popular sport in the country.

Top: A photo of Hagiwara as a mandolin player.

His guitar, displayed at the the Maebashi City Museum of Literature.

Top: Hagiwara as conductor.

Bottom: A concert of the Jōmō Mandolin Club (上毛マンドリン倶楽部), a musical ensemble from the Jōmō region (an old name for part of Gunma Prefecture). In the photo, Hagiwara sits in the center of the front row.

Top: After visiting the Hagiwara House and Museum, we headed to Takasaki City to explore the Gunma Prefectural Museum of Literature, which commemorates Bunmei Tsuchiya.

Bottom Left: A photo of Tsuchiya. Credit: https://www.tateshinashinyu.com/en/literati/.

Bottom Right: A sign directs visitors to the museum.

Top: The sign at the entrance of the museum reads, “Bunmei Tsuchiya’s Tanka Monument.”

Bottom: The poem inscribed on the rock can be translated as:

Above the blue, Mount Haruna appears a phantom fleeting. Its vision does not linger for my eyes alone.

Top: An exterior view of the Gunma Prefectural Museum of Literature. The museum showcases Bunmei Tsuchiya’s legacy as well as broader literary traditions of the region through manuscripts, interpretive displays, and thematic exhibitions.

Bottom: We strolled around the grounds before heading for an ice cream break. On a windowpane of the parlor, “Haruna Foothills” was written, pointing toward the mountain mentioned in Tsuchiya’s tanka.

Other windowpanes indicate the directions of various mountains across the plain.

After driving along a steep, mountainous road, we arrived at Haruna Prefectural Nature Park, where the lake was shrouded in evening mist. Mount Haruna appears in a variety of Japanese poetry and prose, especially in regional literature, modern tanka, and cultural works connected to Gunma’s poetic tradition. Its presence is more notable in localized, travel-related, or modern literary contexts than in the well-known classical national anthologies.

Below are my translations of six tanka by Bunmei Tsuchiya. The poems astutely capture ordinary life, the human condition, lighthearted moments, and poetic reflection.

ただひとり吾より貧しき友なりき金のことにて交絶てり the only friend poorer than I… our friendship ends, we part ways over money

父死ぬる家にはらから集りておそ午時に塩鮭を焼く home, after our father’s death… my siblings and I gather at noon to grill salted salmon

己が生をなげきて言ひし涙には亡き父のただひたすらかなし the tears I shed in lament for my life entirely for my departed father

老眼鏡買ひ来て何をするとなく掛け外しして二日三日すぎぬ new reading glasses for aging eyes on and off for two or three days without purpose

青山に三十五年住みつきて面知るは今十人足らず thirty-five years living in Aoyama now remain only ten faces I know

行きつまる歌かとまどひまどひつつ心うつろなりき並槻の蔭 poems at an impasse… my heart drifts resting in the shade of Namitsuki trees

Notes on Contributors

“I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.”

Peter DeVries

JC Alfier’s poetic sensibilities run astride backroads and marginal regions, toward the déclassé those haggards of rural and urban loneliness. His most recent book, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press. Other books include The Wolf Yearling, Anthem for Pacific Avenue, a collection of California poems, and The Red Stag at Carrbridge: Scotland Poems. Journal credits include Faultline, Fugue, New Delta Review, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, River Styx, and Vassar Review. He's also a collage artist whose work is informed by photoartists Toshiko Okanoue, Francesca Woodman, Deborah Turbeville, and especially Katrien De Blauwer.

Tobi Alfier’s credits include Arkansas Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Cholla Needles, Gargoyle, James Dickey Review, Jerry Jazz Musician, Louisiana Literature, Permafrost, Ragaire, and Washington Square Review. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (https://www.bluehorsepress.com/).

Carston Anderson is an AmeriCorps alumnus currently living in Boston. He is a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he is pursuing a master’s degree in English Education and teaches Composition and Creative Writing. His recent fiction has been published online in Half and One, and his nonfiction work on small-press publications is held in the UMass Boston Special Collections. His interest in photography began recently after he discovered a free, dust-covered camera on campus nearly forty years old. To his immense his surprise, it worked beautifully after light cleaning.

Deborah Baxter has lived in the Tidewater area of Virginia all her life. She grew up in Norfolk and now resides in Chesapeake. She and her husband, Butch, will be celebrating fifty-three years of marriage this September. She earned a B.A. in Creative Writing and a B.S. in English Education from Old Dominion University and is currently a student at The Muse. Her writing reflects the irresistible forces of nature alongside those of the human heart. Her work has appeared in Medicine and Meaning, As You Were: The Military Experience and the Arts, The Poetry Society of Virginia, and The Dominion Review.

Jane Beal is Professor of English Literature at the University of La Verne in Southern California. She holds a BA, MA, and PhD in English from the University of California, Davis, and an MFA in Creative Writing. Beal regularly publishes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her poetry collections include Sanctuary, Rising, and Song of the Selkie, along with eight haiku micro-chaps. She has also produced three audio projects combining poetry and music: Songs from the Secret Life, Love Song, and The Jazz Bird (co-created with her brother, saxophonist and composer Andrew Beal).

Robert Boucheron is a retired architect in Charlottesville, Virginia. His stories, essays, book reviews, poems, and translations have appeared in Alabama Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Fiction International, Literary Heist, Saturday Evening Post, and Zodiac Review. His plays have been staged in Concord, North Carolina and Detroit, Michigan.

Matthew Brennan has published seven books of poetry, most recently The End of the Road (2023). Snow in New York: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2021. He has contributed individual poems and criticism to Sewanee Review, Poetry Ireland Review, New York Times Book Review, Southern Quarterly, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His prose includes four books: Wordsworth, Turner, and Romantic Landscape (1987), The Gothic Psyche (1997), The Poet’s Holy Craft (2010), and The Colosseum Critical Introduction to Dana Gioia (2020). He taught at Indiana State University and is now retired in Columbus, Ohio.

Dr. Randy Brooks is Professor of English Emeritus at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, where he teaches courses on haiku, tanka, and Japanese poetics. He and his wife, Shirley Brooks, are publishers of Brooks Books and co-editors of Mayfly haiku magazine. His most recent books include Walking the Fence: Selected Tanka and The Art of Reading and Writing Haiku: A Reader Response Approach.

Kevin Brown (he/him) teaches high school English in Nashville. He's fourth collection of poetry Jack Imagines a Different Map is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in May 2026. He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on social media sites at @kevinbrownwrites or at https://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Kevin Browne’s poetry and prose have appeared in diverse literary journals, including Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Closed-Eye Open, and Pangyrus. When not writing, he can often be found walking in the woods or attending live music concerts near his home in southern Wisconsin.

Ingrid Bruck lives and writes in the Amish country that inhabits her poetry. A retired public library director, she writes short poems and flash fiction, grows wildflowers and makes jam. She is the author of one chapbook, Finding Stella Maris (Flutter Press), and her work has received four Pushcart Prize nominations and two Best of the Net nominations. Recent work appears in Failed Haiku, Spillwords, and Five Fleas Itchy Poetry. Her website is www.ingridbruck.com.

Wes Carrington is a former diplomat who spent most of his professional life traveling and working in Latin America and Europe. A native Virginian, Wes turned to poetry at some point in junior high school as a shorter alternative to meet his English teacher’s weekly writing requirement, and grew to love it. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Aethlon, Grand Little Things, Passager, Shot Glass Journal, and various anthologies from the Moonstone Press and the Poetry Society of Virginia. Wes has a loving spouse, three great kids, and a cat who is always hungry.

Susannah Cerutti, a junior at Missouri Baptist University, serves as president of the campus Creative Writing Club. She is from Washington, Missouri, a small town west of St. Louis. She is majoring in Human Services and minoring in Psychology, with hopes to be a developmental disabilities social worker so she can help children like her. Susannah has always had a gift for spelling; she would get a 100% on every spelling test. However,

she did not discover she had a thing for creative writing until seventh grade when she took speech class. Even though she is good at writing, Susannah plans to stick to being a social worker.

Christina Chin is a painter and haiku poet from Malaysia. She is a four-time recipient of the top 100 in the mDAC Summit Contests, exhibited at the Palo Alto Art Center, California. She has won 1st prize in the 34th Annual Cherry Blossom Sakura Festival 2020 Haiku Contest and 1st prize in the 8th Setouchi Matsuyama 2019 Photohaiku Contest. She has been published in numerous journals, multilingual journals, and anthologies, including Japan’s prestigious monthly Haikukai Magazine.

Emily Robyn Clark is an award-winning poet and filmmaker, and the author of Morning Comes Roaring Down the Mountain (2025) and Art Triumphant (2017). Her poetry has appeared in Lullwater Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and LA’s Cultural Daily, among others, and she has performed her work at venues across the United States, including SoHo in Santa Barbara, The Victory Theatre Center in Burbank, and The Aspen Poets’ Society. She studied poetry, fiction, and creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University and trained in screenwriting and producing in the MFA Film Production program at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts. She is the founder and president of The Screenwriter’s Guild, a chapter of the League of Utah Writers, and a former Artist-in-Residence with California Poets in the Schools.

Marc Darnell is an online tutor and lead custodian in Omaha, Nebraska. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa and has published poems in The Lyric, Rue Scribe, Verse, Skidrow Penthouse, Shot Glass Journal, The Road Not Taken, and elsewhere. His latest books are Forecast: Increasing Visibility (Kelsay Books 2024) and The Mining Muse (Impspired Books 2024). He has been awarded an Academy of American Poets prize three times. His forthcoming book of poetry, Remnants of Reason, will be published by Kelsay Books.

Denise England’s passion for languages, art, cultures and connections inspires her poetry. She studied in Bordeaux, France, and holds an M.A. in French literature. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in the U.S., U.K., and Canada in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Inkwell), The French Literary Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, SLANT, The Ekphrastic Review, Cave Region Review, and Neologism Poetry Journal. She enjoys sharing her poetry within communities of other writers and artists, including Ozark Mountain Poets and Spectra Arts in Northwest Arkansas, where she lives with her husband. deniseengland.substack.com.

Vern Fein, a recent octogenarian, has published more than 300 poems and short prose pieces in over 100 venues, including Heart of Flesh, Agape Review, Calla Press, Feed the Holy, Gyroscope Review, Young Raven’s Review, Bindweed, Grey Sparrow Journal, and One Art. His second poetry collection, Reflection on Dots, was released late last year.

James Fowler has published two poetry volumes The Pain Trader (Golden Antelope Press, 2020); Postcards from Home (Kelsay Books, 2024) and a collection of short stories, Field Trip (Cornerpost Press, 2022). His short fiction has appeared in such journals as Caesura, DASH, Cave Region Review, Aji Magazine, Gambling the Aisle, and Bright Flash Literary Review.

Ben Gaa is your friendly neighborhood haiku poet and host of Haiku Talk on YouTube. He’s the author of two full-length collections of haiku & senryu, One Breath (Spartan Press 2020) and the Touchstone Award-winning Wishbones (Folded Word 2018), as well as three chapbooks, the Pushcart nominated Wasp Shadows (Folded Word 2014), Blowing on a Hot Soup Spoon (Poor Metaphor Design 2014), and Fiddle in the Floorboards (Yavanika Press 2018). With over 1,000 haiku and senryu published in journals and anthologies around the globe, he enjoys both giving and attending poetry readings, conducting haiku workshops, and being a part of the literary conversation. Learn more about Ben at www.Ben-Gaa.com.

Mark Gilbert lives in the UK and enjoys writing short and mid-length poetry as well as prose of any length. His poems have appeared in Spillwords, Dirigible Balloon, Sonic Boom, Shot Glass Journal, Ranger, and Five Fleas. He occasionally participates in spoken word events.

John Grey is an Australian poet living in the United States. His work has recently appeared in Shift, River and South, and Flights. His latest books Bittersweet, Subject Matters, and Between Two Fires are available through Amazon. Upcoming work will appear in Levitate, Writer’s Block, and Trampoline.

John J. Han, PhD, is Professor of English and Creative Writing and Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Theology at Missouri Baptist University. He is the author, editor, co-editor, or translator of 35 books, including Certainty and Ambiguity in Global Mystery Fiction: Essays on the Moral Imagination (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Han has also published nearly 3,000 poems in periodicals and anthologies, including Cave Region Review (featured poet of the year 2012), Failed Haiku, Frogpond, The Laurel Review, Modern Haiku, Simply Haiku (chosen as the world’ s sixth-finest English-language haiku poet for 2011), Valley Voices (Pushcart-nominated), Wales Haiku Journal (nominated for the Touchstone Award), and World Haiku Review.

Georgie Herz, a retired P.E. teacher, is the author of Outcome Unknown: Poetry & Art (2025). She refuses to let arthritis keep her from her daily walks. Rhyming poetry is her favorite form, and she enjoys sharing her work at open mic events. An accomplished watercolor artist, she has illustrated three books. Children, nature, and the challenges of aging inspire her writing and art. She lives in Ballwin, Missouri, where she feeds the birds and loves watching the sunrise.

Donald W. Horstman has been an artist for seventy years and an art educator for forty-nine years. He holds a bachelor’s degree in art education from Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s degree in media technology from Webster

University in St. Louis. In addition to printmaking and poetry, Donald specializes in sculpture, film, photography, painting, ceramics, and drawing. He shares a studio with his wife Carol in their home on beautiful Lake Fond Du Lac located in Fenton, Missouri. Visit www.art4you.phanfare.com.

Paul Hostovsky’s poems and essays appear widely online and in print. He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Only Poems, The Writer’s Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. His newest book of poems is Paul Hostovsky: More Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2026). For more information, visit https://paulhostovsky.com/.

Phillip Howerton has taught English at colleges and universities in the Ozarks for more than twenty-five years. He is a co-founder and co-editor of Cave Region Review, and his poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and journals. Golden Antelope Press published his poetry collection, The History of Tree Roots in 2015 and his Gods of Four Mile Creek in 2023. The University of Arkansas Press released his anthology, The Literature of the Ozarks, in 2019, a project for which he received the 2019 Missouri Literary Award from the Missouri Library Association.

Terrie Jacks is a former president of the Missouri State Poetry Society. She began creating poems and stories for her grandchildren, and now writes and submits her work to contests and various publications. Her poems and stories have been featured in Cantos, Fireflies’ Light, Oasis Journal, Grist, cattails, Failed Haiku, Asahi Haikuist Network, The Best Black and White Haiga Blog, and Galaxy of Verse. Several of her stories have also appeared in The Right Word and Flash. Additionally, she illustrated folktales by John Han, which were published in the Korean-American Journal. This experience inspired her to enter her poems and artwork into art exhibits, and she also shares her work at open mic events.

Richard Eric Johnson lives and writes poetry in Arlington, Virginia. He is the author of five full-length poetry collections, and his work has appeared in numerous online and print journals. He is also a Pushcart Prize nominee. Most recently, he was honored to have his work archived at the La Salle University Connelly Library. He is a graduate of Indiana University, where he earned a B.A. in Germanic Languages and an M.S. in Education. After a tour in Vietnam and West Berlin, he embarked on a career as a public servant and is now very happily retired.

Lavana Kray lives in Romania. Her work has appeared in many print and online publications, as well as in haiga exhibitions organized by the World Haiku Association in Japan and Italy. In 2015 this Association awarded her the title of Master Haiga Artist. Many of her photo-haiku have been featured in NHK Haiku Masters on Japanese TV. The Laval Literary Society from Canada awarded her the André-Jacob-Entrevous Prize 2023, for a literary text (haiku) combined with an artistic visual. She currently serves as haiga editor for Cattails, an online journal of Japanese short forms.

Douglas J. Lanzo is an award-winning author who has published 554 poems in 78 literary journals and 9 anthologies across the U.S., Canada, Caribbean, England, Wales,

Austria, Mauritius, India, Japan and Australia. Doug’s debut novel, The Year of the Bear, was named Ames 2023 Best YA Book of the Year while his second book, I Have Lived, garnered Best Novella of 2024 at the American Book Fest Awards. He and his wife, twin sons, cat and hermit crab reside in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and all but the pets enjoy nature, basketball, fishing and snorkeling. His Author’s website is www.douglaslanzo.com.

Elizabeth Jeane is an MFA candidate at Butler University. Her work has appeared in MSU Roadrunner Review and Right Hand Pointing and is forthcoming in The Polk Street Review. She lives in Indianapolis, where she tutors students and is at work on her first poetry chapbook.

Joel Lindsey is director of University Communications and an instructor of English and Communications at Missouri Baptist University. He lives in St. Louis, MO.

MarthaMaggie Miller is a retired Army veteran and current Army environmental professional who holds a Bachelor of Arts degree. She is the author of Heartfelt Snippets with Moments of Magic (2022). Her work has also appeared in Shadow of the Soul; The Endeavor: Maiden Voyage, Smooth Sailing, Stormy Weather, Making Waves, Helms Alee, Any Old Port Will Do, Anchors Aweigh, Hoist the Colors, and Rough Waters (Volumes I–IX); A Poetic Field Filled with Wildwood Flowers; Inscribed Reveries; Carnival of Sins; Shattered Reflections; Wheelsong Anthology 5 and 6; Invisible Poets Anthology 2 and 3; Cantos 30/31; and Fireflies’ Light 29/30/31/32.

LaDeana Mullinix is a retired occupational therapist and a native Kansan who now lives in northwest Arkansas. Her poems and essays have appeared in Friends Journal, a Quaker publication, as well as in Midwest Quarterly, Midwest Review, Slant, and Medicine and Meaning, the literary journal of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. She is also the author of the chapbook Small Comforts.

David Pickering lives near Oxford, England, and works in a part-academic, parttraining role. In his youth, he wrote a great deal of poetry, then stopped for many years before returning to it three years ago. Since then, his poetry has appeared in The Dawntreader, Ekstasis, and The Clayjar Review. His theological writing has been published in The Harvard Theological Review, Theology, The Journal of Inklings Studies, The Journal of Newman Studies, The Political Quarterly, and The Chesterton Review, among other journals.

Maria Cristina Pulvirenti is an Italian poet who lives in Catania, Sicily, Italy, where she works as an English teacher in a secondary school. She has published a collection of Japanese poetic forms haiku, senryu, tanka, haibun, sedōka, haisan, and bussosuseika entitled E così l’Ikebana, as well as Sembianze in fuga, a book reflecting her life experiences and emotions. Some of her haiku have appeared in international journals, while other poems have been published in Italian anthologies; additional works remain unpublished. Pulvirenti has received several honorable mentions for her poetry, contributes to literary websites, and is currently preparing an unpublished manuscript.

Sambhu Ramachandran is a bilingual poet, translator, short story writer, and academic from Kerala, India. He is currently working as Assistant Professor of English at N.S.S. College, Pandalam. His poems and translations of poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Neon & Smoke, The Tiger Moth Review, Prosetrics, Plants and Poetry Journal, Qafiyah Review, The Alexander Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Wild Court, Madras Courier, The Alipore Post, Muse India, Setu, The Chakkar, Every Body Magazine, and Sextet, among others. You can reach out to him on Instagram: @sambhuramachandran.

John Repp is a writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. His most recent collection of poetry is Never Far from the Egg Harbor Ice House, published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Rick K. Reut was born in 1984. He studied philosophy at EHU in Minsk, Belarus, and Vilnius, Lithuania, and literature at SPSU in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Since graduating, he’s been employed primarily as a translator and as a tutor of English as a foreign language.

Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, of Fayetteville, is the Arkansas Poet Laureate. She’s a teaching poet and the author of five poetry collections, including the award-winning Flying Yellow. Her chapbook The Perfume of Pain was published in July 2024 by Kelsey Books. Other books are Hungry Foxes, What a Light Thing, This Stone, and Weather of the House, and two collections of lyrical essays, Sketches of Home and A Welcome Shore. She’s an Artists 360 Fellow and grant recipient (2023-24), sponsored by the MidAmerica Arts Alliance and the Walton Foundation. Suzanne was a college instructor for over 30 years and taught writing and literature. She currently teaches remote poetry workshops through the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia. She recently brought poetry to the women residents of Magdalene Serenity House, a program to support women released from incarceration and addiction.

Bryan Rickert, President of the Haiku Society of America (2023-2024), has been published in many fine journals. He was the editor of Failed Haiku: A Journal of English Senryu (2022-2024) and editor of The Living Senryu Anthology (2019-2025). Bryan has two books: Fish Kite (Cyberwit Publishing) and Just Dust and Stone, cowritten with Peter Jastermsky (Velvet Dusk Publishing). His work was selected for inclusion in A New Resonance, Volume 12. He was also the recipient of the Touchstone award for individual poems in 2023.

Michael C. Roberts is a mostly retired pediatric psychologist seeking creativity through photography. His film and digital photographs have appeared in The Canary, Burningword, The Alchemy Spoon, FERAL, Camas, Word’s Faire, and elsewhere. His book of photographs, Imaging the World with Plastic Cameras: Diana and Holga, is available on Amazon.com.

Joshua St. Claire is an accountant from a small town in Pennsylvania who works as a financial director for a non-profit. His haiku and related poetry have been published

broadly including in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Mayfly, Fireflies’ Light, and Cantos and had received recognition in several contests and awards.

Michael Shoemaker, an author from Magna, Utah, has published four poetry/photography books, including Sacred Strains of Praise, a 2025 ChristLit Award winner and a finalist for the 2026 Christian Indie Awards. His poems have appeared in Boundless 2025 and 2024: The Journal of International Poetry Festival of the Rio Grande Valley, Tranquility: An Anthology of Haiku, Blue Lake Review, The High Window, and Poetry Pacific. He is a multiple Pushcart/Best of Net Award nominee. As an awardee of a Zion Canyon Mesa Fellowship, Michael will serve as the artist-inresidence in May 2026. He enjoys hiking and hidden picture books.

Doug Stoiber is a poet and short story writer and a member of Mossy Creek Writers in East Tennessee. Eighteen of his short stories and thirty-three of his poems have been published in magazines, journals, and anthologies. His poem “Nine Months Collage” was shortlisted for The Poetry Lighthouse Prize (2026), and “Whither Tinsel” was awarded second runner-up in Blue Crystal’s Winter Poetry, Short Story & Photography Challenge.

Debbie Strange (Canada) is a chronically ill short-form poet, haiga artist, and photographer whose creative passions connect her more closely to the world, to others, and to herself. Thousands of Strange’s poems and artworks have been published in leading journals worldwide. Her haiku collection, Random Blue Sparks (Snapshot Press, 2024), received 3rd Place in the 2025 Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Haiku Foundation Touchstone Awards. Debbie maintains a publications and awards archive at: https://debbiemstrange.blogspot.com/ and you are welcome to follow her on Twitter/X @Debbie_Strange and on Instagram @debbiemstrange.

Todd Sukany, a two-time Pushcart nominee, lives in Pleasant Hope, Missouri, with his wife of over forty years. His work has appeared in Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal, Cave Region Review, The Christian Century, Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal, eMerge Magazine, and The Ekphrastic Review. Sukany authored Frisco Trail and Tales as well as co-authored four books of poetry under the title, Book of Mirrors, with Raymond Kirk. A native of Michigan, Sukany stays busy running, playing music, loving three children, their spouses, seven grandchildren, caring for a rescued dog, and four rescued cats.

Gloria Williams Tran, who lives in the Arkansas Ozarks, has been writing poetry since seventh grade when she discovered a poetry anthology in her school library. Her experiences include working for newspapers, serving as a radio deejay, and teaching immigrant students. In her spare time, Gloria enjoys birding, reading mysteries, and sampling international foods. Her poetry has been published in Slant, Mid/South Anthology, Gathering Storm, Do South, @Urban, and an anthology by Poets’ Choice. She has received poetry awards from the Poetry Society of Virginia, Poets’ Roundtable of Arkansas, and Ozark Creative Writers.

C.X. Turner is a UK poet and the author of evergreen: a haiku, senryu and tanka poetry collection (Alba Publishing, 2024). Her poems and artwork have been widely published in international journals and anthologies, earning her Pushcart and Touchstone nominations, as well as The Tejasvat Award (haikuKATHA, 2024). Turner is co-editor of Wales Haiku Journal and enjoys experimenting with short-form poetry and collaborating with other poets, when not working as a registered social work manager.

Sarah Watkins is an educator by trade and a writer by necessity. She currently resides in northeast Arkansas with her husband. Her work has recently been featured in many publications, including Menagerie, Pine Hills Review, and The Clayjar Review. Instagram: @sarahwatkinspoetry.

Diane Webster lives in western Colorado. Her poetry has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, New English Review, Studio One and other literary magazines. Her haiku/senryu have appeared in failed haiku, Kokako, Enchanted Garden Haiku. Microchaps were published by Origami Poetry Press in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Diane has been nominated for Best of the Net and three times for a Pushcart. Diane retired in 2022 after 40 years in the newspaper industry. She was a featured writer in Macrame Literary Journal and WestWard Quarterly. Her website is www.dianewebster.com.

Matthew Wherttam has worked as a patent attorney, a chemist, and a summer camp counselor. His short stories have been published in Voices de la Luna, Nude Bruce Review, and Umbrella Factory. He shows his stories to his family, and so far they have not disowned him.

Kit Willett is a poet, doctoral student, and executive editor of the Aotearoa poetry journal Tarot. His debut poetry collection, Dying of the Light, was published by Wipf and Stock imprint Resource Publications in 2022.

Huina Zheng holds an M.A. with Distinction in English Studies and works as a college essay coach. Her creative work has been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and other literary journals. She has received multiple honors, including nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.

Jianqing Zheng’s recent poetry collections include Dreaminations (Madville, 2026), Visual Chords (Broken Tribe, 2025), and Soulful Dancer (Blue Horse P, 2025, co-authored with William Ferris). He has lived in Mississippi since 1991.

Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal Submission Guidelines

Cantos, an annual journal published by Missouri Baptist University, welcomes submissions from poets, writers, and visual artists. We accept previously unpublished poems, short fiction, novel excerpts, short plays, and nonfiction. Please send your work as a Microsoft Word attachment via email to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu. For previously unpublished artwork, including haiga (illustrated haiku), send your submission as an email attachment to the editor. Use the subject line format: “Cantos [Year]: Your Name” (e.g., Cantos 2027: Ben Smith).

We do not accept Google Drive files or hard-copy submissions; any hard copies received will be recycled. Along with your submission, please include a 100-word author bio written in the third person and complete sentences, beginning with your name.

Cantos does not accept simultaneous submissions or reprints. Our review process takes approximately two weeks, with earlier submissions receiving priority consideration. Multiple submissions within a single reading period are not allowed. The editorial team evaluates all submissions for suitability, content, organization, structure, clarity, style, mechanics, and grammar. We do not consider works that include profanity or foul language. There is no monetary compensation for contributors, but those residing in the continental United States receive one complimentary copy of the issue in which their work appears. Copyright reverts to authors and artists upon publication. The views expressed in Cantos are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of Missouri Baptist University.

Below are the reading period and target publication date:

Reading Period

Target Publication Date January 1-February 15 March 15

Poetry:

We welcome poems that balance form and content, appeal to a broad range of educated readers, and avoid extremes of obscurity or simplicity. Poems should be single-spaced and no more than 35 lines in length, with a maximum of seven poems per submission. If your poem follows a specific form, please indicate it parenthetically after the title.

Prose:

We value submissions that are lucid, precise, and concise in style. Prose works with multiple grammatical or mechanical errors will not be considered.

For formatting:

• Use the serial comma in lists (e.g., “poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction”).

• Use curved (curly) quotation marks and apostrophes. Opening quotation marks should resemble 66, and closing quotation marks should resemble 99. Opening apostrophes should resemble 9, and possessive apostrophes should also resemble 9.

• Place periods and commas inside quotation marks. (e.g., “It is very simple,” the goblin replied. “I can easily shrink my body and get inside the jar.”)

• Indent the first line of each new paragraph by pressing the tab key once.

• Use one space between sentences.

• We prefer MLA (Modern Language Association) style for citation.

Fiction and nonfiction pieces should be fewer than 2,000 words each. We consider up to three submissions per author.

Essays for the “On Writing Creatively” section (2,500-5,000 words) are typically by invitation. However, established writers and poets interested in sharing creative writing insights are welcome to contact the editor before submitting.

Visual Art:

We consider single images, picture essays, and haiga. Single images should be titled, and images in photo essays must be explained within the narrative. We prefer DOCX for drawings and JPEG for photos. At this time, we are not seeking cover images.