Readers’

Editor’s 6 Readers’ 7 Prize Pages 12 Contributors’ 84 Last 88

Latchkey, 58

Mary Kate Baker Of the Eating Variety, 72

Allison Field Bell

Mysteries and Symbols of My Past, 14 Mildred K. Barya Derecho, 32 Alex Pickens

The art of Andrew Hayes 41 The art of Stacey Lee Webber 42 The art of Jill Baker Gower 44 The art of Sarah Perkins 46 The art of Noam Elyashiv 48 The art of Myra Mimlitsch-Gray 50 The art of Ben Dory 52 The art of John Rais 54 The art of Sophie Glenn 55 The art of Nils Hint 56

26 My Mother’s Feet, Mary Jo Firth Gillett 27 As the Nurse Fills Out the Intake Form, the Ocean Speaks Your Name, Jamaica Baldwin

28 Funeral Anagrams, Aliki Barnstone 29 Weaving, Judith Sornberger 30 Shattered, Saddiq Dzukogi 31 I too take shelter in the body,

John Sibley Williams 39 April 23, 2020 and Today is Shakespeare’s Birthday, Sunni Brown Wilkinson

57 In the Hopes I can Spell out my Name,

E. Kristin Anderson

68 The Weight of Dreams,

Sharamang Silas 69 The Weight of Trains,

Sharamang Silas 71 Karolyne Makes Kliesel,

Melissa Spohr Weiss 81 Communion, Michael Garrigan 82 Fred Wants to Know if I Believe in God, Margot Wizansky 83 When it Comes, Sunni Brown Wilkinson

Amidst the monotony of pandemic life this past year, there is one day that I’ll remember vividly. In late October, a wildfi re sparked and burned furiously down the slopes of the foothills just nine miles west of my house. The same time that fi re was burning, winds kicked up another one on the west side of the Rockies and in one night it burned up and over the continental divide, though the heart of Rocky Mountain National Park. Simultaneously, a third fi re burned farther north, along the valleys and ridges that are home for many of Ruminate’s sta .

Smoke choked the air for weeks, compounding the sense of unease we already felt during a year stripped of normalcy. Some days, I found myself muttering the phrase, we are hard pressed on every side. . . but not crushed. Struck down, but not destroyed.

Fire can be destructive, but it can also be a tool for revelation. I love the cover image of Nils Hint’s Cutlery Pieces and how the charred hand tools are transformed into burnished gold utensils. In the midst of the pressures of this past year, many of us have experienced what it is to be stripped down to essentials. Something which is forged is something which has been made stronger by fi re.

Our issue includes many examples of lives forged by experience. The characters in these poems and stories are shaped and revealed by what they endure. There is heat and pressure in Alex Pickens’ piece, Derecho, in which he immerses us in a sweltering Appalachian summer in the aftermath of a storm. Sharamang Silas’s poem “The Weight of Trains” inquires, “What is worship if not the desire to o er yourself to the fi re / & everything you have ever loved?” There is the more common forging of sustenance in the form of kliesel, the pastry Melissa Spohr Weiss’s poem describes, baking alongside her never-known great-grandmother. It is nourishment made by careful hands against the backdrop of unrest, and yet, “[s]he unspeaks / futures, wipes the war o her lips.” Additionally, the featured artists this issue all create through the medium of metalwork, shaping the hard surfaces of minerals, steel, and stone into objects that reveal new beauties through the processes they undergo.

Ruminate has been undergoing a forging process as well, saying goodbye to sta members and welcoming new voices, as well as restructuring our organization to revive old practices and reach new spaces. We are certain that the struggles and challenges we’re undergoing will shape our community in beautiful ways. We hope the words and images we share with you in this issue, “Forged,” will help you refl ect on what has shaped you, and encourage you to recognize how strength has grown when you’ve passed through the fi re.

Warmly,

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My ninth-grade English class was in an old room with scratched hardwood fl oors, giant windows, and dark green blackboards. I felt extreme discomfort and embarrassment as I walked down the aisle to my seat in the back each day. All the cool girls wore tight designer jeans and lots of mascara, but not loosepleated-jeans-wearing, scu ed-saddleshoed me.

Mr. Northern, the only Black teacher I ever had, was of medium build and dressed neatly in dress slacks, shirt, and tie. I don’t remember much about his lessons, but do recall his energy and excitement about teaching. And I remember that one writing assignment that found me at home, leaning into the circular table in our den, scribbling away on loose-leaf, describing my favorite boxed chocolate chip cookies—a rare moment of joy in that new-kid, outsider year.

A few days after handing in the cookie essay, I entered Mr. Northern’s room and began my usual awkward journey to my desk. Snapping out of my haze of selfconsciousness, I immediately recognized my essay hanging on the bulletin board. A big red letter “A” followed by multiple pluses was scrawled across the top of my paper with a word, one I would always remember, “Superlative,” written in Mr. Northern’s robust hand across the top.

Such a small thing, but this would be one of the greatest days of my life, the day where my sense of self was restored and my future life would start to take shape.

He’s a blacksmith, I’m a poet. Ten years since we exchanged vows and the steel bands he made. Encircled by friends and family, in the meadow below his family’s cabin, built by hand over several summers. At a distance, my ring looks gray. Closer, you see its wood-grain pattern, a feathered arc and swoop: the result of his hands wielding elemental tools—hammer, tongs, anvil, fi re—to bend and fold the metal over and over again. Have you ever noticed how much wood grain resembles a fi ngerprint? Count the rings, trace the life line in each palm: together we’ve been bent and folded on the hard edges of what is (in sickness and in health), building a life by hand with what we’ve been given. With three little lives, now, looking to us with their lake-clear eyes. What can we give them, what can we salvage from a burning world? Knowing their maker, and how to make things. Knowing the worth of hands calloused by love, careful with others. Knowing each of us only happens just this way, just this once.

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Almost every day, like clockwork, Tía (aunt) Bell shuts her door at 4 p.m. She closes the shutters, pulls down the curtains, locks away any view from the outside, securing herself inside the house where she’s lived most of her life, a woman going on nearly seventy. Tia Bell closes up the house well, and no movement is seen in or around the house after this hour. She is careful—like clockwork.

Sometimes when Tía Bell comes to my house next door, I can smell the cigarette smoke still on her breath. The truth is, I’ve never actually seen Tía Bell smoke. Ever. This she keeps hidden, like so much of her life, and I wonder at her deepest fear, or even joy, rather than her deepest sadness, which shows on her like a bad hair-do.

My son, Santiago, and Tía Bell share a birth month, both under the horoscope sign Virgo which implies traits of elegance and poise, but nothing about cigarettes or suffering or hidden loss.

Her husband, my Tío Eppy, died nearly twenty-fi ve years ago; this means Tia Bell’s now been a widow almost longer than she was married. Refusing to let him su er in a cold, colorless hospital, Tía Bell cared for Tío Eppy until his last breath, and he died on the couch of their home’s living room, surrounded by familia and ru ed home-décor. Tía Bell has every right to be bitter about life, and most of the time she is, but I imagine there must be a spark of joy somewhere. Tucked away.

Tía Bell closes up her house early every day, a stack of fresh tortillas on the kitchen counter, shrouded with a soft-linen towel, and a pack of cigarettes waiting, perhaps in the bedroom drawer or on the bedroom nightstand, but always in that place we cannot see.

I sat on my friend’s bed anxiously fi ddling with my hands. “I have something I need to tell you.”

“What’s up?”

“I would prefer if you called me Jaxson.”

She said she wouldn’t until I had medically transitioned. She was the fi rst person I’d ever told.

A year later, I sat across from the principle of my new school. I had told my friends to call me Jaxson and he’d found out.

“I heard that you were going by a di erent name with your friends,” he said.

I looked up from my lap, waiting for him to laugh.

“Would you like us to call you that?”

“Please.”

My principal’s acceptance gave me courage to tell my parents. They were not

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so accepting. My dad believed it was an agenda being forced onto me, shaping me into someone I’m not. My mom stayed silent.

My transcripts say my dead name, but when I go to college my name will legally be Jaxson. I’ve learned in life that you have to forge your own path.

On any other day, “forged” would have brought to mind a smithy—a workshop where metal is first heated, then bent by a hammer into useful, beautiful tools.

But today I have watched the George Floyd murder trial, specifically the testimony of Christopher Martin. He is the nineteen-year-old employee of Cup Foods in Minneapolis who accepted Floyd’s $20 bill on May 25, 2020. Martin testified that he believed the money was counterfeit, fake. Forged.

Yet he took the $20 bill because Floyd appeared “a little high.” Whether Martin acted from compassion or pity, he may never know—the true di erence can be hard to discern even in one’s own heart. What Martin knows is burning guilt: “If I had not taken the bill, this could’ve been avoided,” he testified.

Guilt lies with the police o cers, not Christopher Martin. George Floyd was not killed in white-hot rage, but ice-cold indi erence. The maliciousness that, as one’s knee forces life from a fellow human being, keeps sunglasses in place and a hand in the pocket. As Robert Frost claimed, “for destruction ice / Is also great / And would su ce.”

I write in the middle of Holy Week. Long ago, a brown-skinned man cried, “I have come to bring fire on the earth (Luke 12:49)!” My heartfelt prayer is that, from the fiery intensity of last summer’s protests and the searing truth of this murder trial, a new nation shall be forged—not from counterfeit lip service to equality, but by the hammer of justice, which in the end makes beauty from the heat.

I grew up in a central Indiana trailer park that smelled of antifreeze and cheap beer and the continuous waft of a neighbor’s cigarette. A halfcharred trailer leaned at the park’s entrance, a monument to the shortlived relationship between fire and manufactured homes. All our coming and going—to church, the library, the grocery store, and the firehouse on government cheese day—was marked by the collapsing shell of someone’s former living room, the couch blackened and completely exposed. I wanted to look away, but at five I was compelled to stare at the remains every time we passed.

Mom and Dad, both teachers, made a lesson of the landmark, reminding my younger sister and me to leave dangerous things alone. Being timid girls, we did just that, but Annie a few streets over played with matches in her bedroom closet, or so she told me. The firetrucks squealed through the park a few months later and

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