2025 WITA: KNOT

Writers in the Attic Knot 2025

KNOT

Writers in the Attic

Kerri Webster Works selected by

This program is generously supported by:

The City of Boise

National Endowment for the Arts

Idaho Humanities Council

Idaho Community Foundation

Arts Idaho

This is a Log Cabin Book, an imprint of THE CABIN

801 S. Capitol Boulevard, Boise, Idaho 83702 (208) 331-8000

TheCabinIdaho.org

(c) 2025 The Cabin All rights reserved.

Book design by Adie Bartron Cover image by Unsplash Images Printed and bound in the USA

PAST ISSUES

MOON

CMarie Fuhrman

RUPTURE

Harrison Berry

FUEL

J. Reuben Appelman

GAME

Diane Raptosh

ANIMAL

Rick Ardinger

DETOUR

Bruce Ballenger

APPLE

Malia Collins

SONG

Samantha Silva

WATER

Susan Rowe

NERVE

Kerri Webster

ROOMS

Cort Conley

THREE

Daniel Stewart

TART

Meg Freitag

Contents

Kerri Webster Introduction • 13

Keeley Burmeister

Last Call in Valley County • 17

Kimme Rovin Elf-Knots • 21

Mindy OldenKamp Undone • 26

Maya Grubaugh Sandbox Love • 31

Bonita Vestal Flight • 36

Hope Gordon Tangle • 42

Janet Schlicht Embroidery • 46 The Purple Scarf • 50

Julia McCoy What We Need • 55

Hannah Roberts Knot For Me • 60

Cameron Morfit Naughty, Knotty Pegasus • 65

Brian Thrasher

Lost • 71

Recollection • 72

Stephanie E. Glass

Shuffling the deck • 74

Grace Schwenk

The Bitterroot Wildflower • 76

Sheila Robertson

Knotted and Tangled • 81

Hold to the Now • 82

Jonah Svihus

Bound for Glory • 84

Logan Randall Blood Dinner • 90

Syd Thompson Tree • 95

B.A. Van Sise

Float Test • 96

Krys Warstillo

Do Not Lift More Than 10 lbs • 97

Ellie Snyder

Valse des Cygnes • 99

Mary Ellen McMurtrie

Long Distance • 100

Noah’s Wife • 101

Cold Morning at the Inn • 102

Nate Jacob

Knots for Holding On to a Fish Out of Water (A Golden Sestina) • 103

1LT Adam Ryan

Knots • 105

Mara Bateman

King of Knots • 108

Alan Minskoff

Windsor • 110

Knots Landing • 111

Naomi Trueman

Obsequies • 112

Allie Hampton

K6, SKP, K. K2TOG, K6 • 113

Lanise Prater

Love Lockdown • 119

Faye Srala

Love in Feral Lands • 120

Heidi Naylor

I’ll Call Him Morgan Lassiter • 125

Emergency Position Indicating Radio • 127

Stacey Leybas

SUNDAY • 129

Âmî Jey

Inheritance of Knots • 130

Liam Chimba Hara. Sun. • 132

Breland Draper

Converse All Stars Baby Blue Size 9 • 136

Eric Wallace

Knots My Father Taught Me • 142

Bonita Warren The Other Side • 147

Anita Tanner Losing Words • 152 Bone Poem • 154

Tina Johnson Wintertide, Starrigavan Estuary • 156

Tomás Baiza I Swear to God This Is A Poem Because—See?—I Hit <RETURN> A Lot and at Random and Daring Intervals, And It’s About Aging • 157

Eileen Oldag

In the Loop of a Mother’s Knot • 163

Emma Wells Cornfield • 164

Angela Townsend

Butterflies in Church • 166

About • 171

Meet the Writers • 173

Introduction

Kerri Webster

Anchor, figure eight, clove hitch, cinch, Windsor, arbor: this year’s Writers in the Attic theme, Knot, resonated across genres and inspired an abundance of stellar writing. In one piece, soldiers practice their bowline knots; in another, the knowledge is passed down to a child.

Beyond literal knot-making–whether with embroidery thread, shoelaces, or rope; whether in war zones, living rooms, or hospital beds–the theme proved lush terrain for the metaphoric, particularly in explorations of the ways we are bound together, and the way our bonds can unravel. Knots we inherit, for better or for worse; knots we’re bound by; knots time and memory may unslip; knots we must work to free ourselves from–the stories, poems, and creative nonfiction pieces you’re about to read again and again explore connection, reminding us that, at this time when what binds us may indeed feel frayed, we are creatures who live by relation, which is to say, by the bonds of love.

Indeed, the marvelous work included here–and it was so hard to choose from among all of this year’s anonymous submissions–often enacts relation, rather than merely talks about it, reminding us that knot is a verb as well as a noun, and that our connections are dynamic. Think of this anthology then, as a net by which you’re about to be ensnared, or a knitted shawl to wrap yourself in. Enjoy.

Writers in the Attic

Last

Call in Valley County

Keeley Burmeister

The knot in my stomach grows. I flip the left turn signal on, pull into the station lot. I’d rather be anywhere but here. Anywhere. But it’s 7am on a Wednesday morning, still dark out, snow drifts piling in the corner of the lot, and I’m shifting into park, not locking my doors behind me, at Valley County’s only jail.

The waiting room smells like stale coffee and dry sweat. The woman behind the desk looks like she’s picking breakfast out of her teeth, dagger-like red nails squished between matching painted lips. My shoes squeak against the linoleum floor.

“Here for Jack.”

“Last name?” She doesn’t even look up when she asks.

“Adams.”

“Please hold,” she says, punching numbers on her ancient desk phone. She lifts the receiver away from her cheek. “It’ll be a minute.” She points to a row of puke green plastic chairs. Feet bolted to the ground. Anything’ll run here.

My back aches as I sink low. I’m the only one in the room. Me and the receptionist of the year, behind an inch of plexiglass. She’s pounding away at the keyboard now. Somewhere, a clock is ticking. Every second on the second. The windows look like they haven’t been washed since the building’s completion. I pull out my phone, check the log. Just to make sure I’m not making up the conversation. 4am. 208 area code. 1 minute and 32 seconds. I’m starting to collect calls from the number. Three times the past two years. This time, driving on a revoked license.

Under the influence, always. Bail high enough that I had to drain the savings account I’d been working on for a trip to

New Zealand. Fishing in the spring. It’d been on my bucket list for decades. Slowly building up over the last two years. All in one slip of paper in my pocket now, folded and handed through the slot dug into the laminate counter.

The door buzzes. A red light flickers just above it. An officer comes out first, palm pressed against the door. Then it’s him. A crooked smile breaking across his face. He pulls me into a hug, one I don’t return, instead keeping my arms pressed against my side. He breaks it off, not without a slap on the back first. “Good to see you, brother.”

I wipe my nose with my thumb. “Ready to go?”

He nods, leads the way like I’m the one getting picked up. When we get to the car, he slaps the trunk, right on a dent where a branch dropped during the last winter storm. “Can’t believe this car still drives.”

I don’t respond, just slide into the driver’s seat. He takes his time, touching every surface he can before settling in.

I stare him down until he clicks his seatbelt. The ignition catches once, twice before finally turning over.

“Seriously, Nate. You need a new car.”

“Kind of hard for me to pay for something like that having to keep bailing you out,” I say, arm slung over his head rest, reversing out of the lot.

He flips the visor down, checks his teeth. “You get that money back.”

“And this time?” I say, stopping in the middle of the entrance. He freezes. Stares at me through the corner of his eye in the mirror. “No different than the last two.”

“What were you thinking?” I ask. The anger’s there in my voice. No point in trying to mask it.

“You know,” he rests his head against the window. “One thing just leads to another.”

“Where were you?” I say, rolling to a stop at downtown’s main drag. If you can even call it downtown.

John doesn’t even look at me. Keeps his head on the glass. “Hmm?”

“This time. Where were you?”

“Same as always,” he says, drawing a smiley face in the dust on the dash. “Valley Club.”

I stare straight ahead. No one passes through the cross traffic. I flick the signal left as the tires start rolling.

“You know, they do doubles for the price of one on Tuesdays?”

“No, John.” I’m white knuckling the steering wheel. “Why would I know that?”

He shrugs, drops his dust-coated finger. Still staring out the window as the bar rolls by. “You should get out more.”

“And what? You’re going to pick me up from jail?”

“Doesn’t have to be like that,” John says.

I take the right turn too fast. “Then tell me why it always ends with you that way.”

John looks over, with the stupidest smirk on his face. The same one he’s worn since childhood, on the verge of another grounding. I stare a second longer, pull a hand over my face. Slow down as we hit the first bump into the neighborhood.

“This is the last time,” I say. “I’ll drive you to court. No more. I’m tired of being twisted into whatever this is you have going on.”

“I never asked you to get involved,” he says.

“You do. Every single time you call. You do.”

“It’s your choice, Nate. To answer. To pick me up. It’s all a choice. It’s not like I’m forcing you into anything.”

“And what. If I don’t show, who are you calling?”

“I’ve never gotten that far,” he says.

I pull into his driveway. Throw the car in park. “I’m keeping the car.’

“It’s fine,” he says, swinging the door open. “Just bring it–”

“No,” I say. “I’ll pick it up at the tow yard. But I’m keeping it.”

“Nate.” He looks away, shakes his head. “You can’t do that.”

“I have a choice, don’t I?”

“It’s my car.”

“And let you, what, drive it on a suspended license? How long this time, John?”

“Fine,” he says, hitting the door frame with an open palm. “Keep it, for all I care. It’s a piece of shit anyways.” There’s a split second where I see the hurt boy from childhood. After Dad came home from the bar, fists swinging. It’s the same look in his eyes now. Just a split second before he slams the door, stalks up the walkway.

I throw myself across the passenger seat, getting caught on my seatbelt, crank the roller arm down. “Next time you call, don’t expect an answer.”

I don’t wait to see him inside. Burn rubber backing out of the drive. Hit the edge of an overgrown gardening plot, full of dried weeds. Tell myself don’t look back, don’t look back. Whatever you do, don’t look back.

I make it to the stop sign before my eyes do their natural adjustment, right to the glass.

The front door is swinging, wide open. A dark gash across the butter yellow house. No lights on. No crashing noise. The silence of a residential street, no doubt some neighbors snapping curtains shut after trying to peek at the disturbance.

One punch and the rearview mirror cracks, right down the middle. My knuckles come back red. The mirror pitches a distorted reflection. A thousand different ways to see behind me, all tangled together.

Elf-Knots

Kimme Rovin

Thomas James was a cheater. He cheated at basketball, he cheated on tests, but most importantly, he cheated at four-square. The fourth graders agreed that overhand throws were illegal. But Thomas James loved to do cherry bombs, slamming the ball down from above his head so hard it was impossible to hit back. Thomas James was also a liar. He lied to the fourth-grade homeroom teacher Mrs. Walsh, he lied about pushing kids in line, and he always lied about overhead throws. “You can’t do cherry bombs!” “You’re out!” all ignored by Thomas James who smirked and lied. Thomas James was also a bully and Elias Drake was his constant target.

On Friday, Thomas James tripped Elias in the cafeteria. Elias fell forward, scraping his knee and spilling his lunch all over the floor. “Womp, womp,” Thomas James taunted softly; a beatific smile transforming his face as he made eye-contact with the lunch monitor. “Elias tripped!” Thomas James exclaimed with mock concern, even as he covertly stepped on Elias’ peanut butter sandwich. The peanut butter oozed out like Thomas James’ lies. Thomas James smiled innocently down at Elias, who was still on the floor. “Whoops,” he said, “So sorryyyy.” He drew out the last word, a slithering snake, hissing and venomous through his sweet smile. Even Thomas James’ face lied. Elias hated him.

On Saturday, Elias’ mom brought in the mail, producing a kid’s National Geographic magazine. Elias’ grandma bought a subscription for him every year for his birthday. Elias took the magazine outside to a battered camping chair underneath the huge oak in their front yard. He opened the magazine. After the descriptions of woodland animals and some vivid images

of them pouncing and prancing, Elias found a small section on fairies, elves, and goblins. These were magical woodland residents, the magazine said. The brief description of elves caught Elias’ eye. “Elves are typically good-natured, but when provoked will shoot an elf-knot, sending bad luck to their target.” The picture showed a slender elf shooting a knotted grass ball with a tiny bow and arrow. “The elf-knot is almost never found, leaving its victim with eternal bad luck.” “I wish Thomas James would get hit by an elf-knot,” angry heat suffused Elias’ face. “Do you believe in elves?” he asked his mom as she made dinner. “Mmmm, I guess they might have existed once,” she said, preoccupied by the tomato sauce sizzling and popping in the pan before her.

The next day Elias made a tiny chair from extra wood scraps in the garage and placed the chair next to his own fold-out. He imagined he was sitting next to the slender elf from the magazine, except the elf was a boy closer to his own age, with an acorn cap hanging out the side of his head like the boys at school did with their baseball hats. His bow and arrow hung loosely at his side. “If you’re real, it would be awesome if you could shoot an elf-knot at Thomas James.” He paused, “It’s OK if you can’t, though.” Elias realized he was talking to himself and went inside to play video games.

On Monday at recess, Thomas James fell trying to cherry bomb Sarah Atcheson. The other kids playing said it looked like he had tripped on something. Thomas James sat out for the remainder of the game, a dark scowl on his face as he cradled his bruised knee.

The next day at lunch, Thomas James tripped again, but this time in the cafeteria. His sandwich fell to the floor, immediately trampled by students pushing through the room, frantic to sit at a table with their friends. Elias watched from

his seat in the corner.

On Wednesday at four-square, a snake-eyes move tricked Thomas James and he got hit in the head. Then he missed a side-hand ball. He tried do an overhand slam but his arm twisted and he threw the ball out of bounds. He lied, yelling that the ball was still in play, using his angry tone to bully his way back into the game. But this time no one gave in. They insisted he was out and there was nothing Thomas James could do about it. He called for the recess monitor, claiming the other kids were cheating, but she waved him away, too busy watching the younger kids chase ants. Thomas James stormed oU, muttering to himself about how unfair it was, all of them lying about what really happened.

Elias watched this too.

For the rest of the week strange things continued happening to Thomas James. In Spanish he tried to provoke Elias into a fight, but instead knocked over a chair, agitating Señora Flores so much that she sent him to the principal’s office. He got out in four-square three times. He tried to stomp on Elias’ backpack but ended up squishing his own pack, inexplicably strewn on the floor in front of Elias’ cubby. Thomas James opened his bag to find all his homework crumpled. Mrs. Walsh gave him a talk about taking care of his belongings. Elias watched Thomas James’ face redden.

That weekend Elias sat in the camping chair next to his elf friend. “Have you been doing things to Thomas James?” he asked, cocking his head towards the little chair. He paused, trying to hear an answer. “OK I know I can’t hear you,” he said after a few seconds, “but it sure seems like Thomas James got hit by an elf-knot.” He imagined his friend smiling, a glint of mischief twinkling in his eyes. “If you did do it, thank you.” “But,” he stopped for a another second, “I don’t want Thomas

James to get hurt, even though he really is terrible.”

Thomas James’ luck didn’t improve the following week. He lost every day in four- square and no one believed his accusations against the other players. He took to sitting alone at lunch after being pushed and tripped. He got caught antagonizing Elias. He cheated on Matt Richards’ test only to find that Matt Richards hadn’t studied at all. They both failed, and Mrs. Walsh noted that Thomas James had the exact same answers as Matt. Thomas James spent another afternoon with the principal.

Elias started to feel bad for Thomas James. He came to school each day with a dejected look on his face. He kept to himself. Although Thomas James sometimes glared at Elias from across the room, he stopped talking to him. He also stopped playing four-square. The other fourth graders delighted in this turn of events. At recess, Thomas James tried to kick the anthills the younger kids were so intent on watching. He was harshly reprimanded by the recess monitor. He sat by himself on the edge of the field eating a snack but he accidentally dropped it. Ants crawled over the remains.

On Thursday evening Elias sat with the elf again. “This is getting to be a bit much,” he said. “Thomas James seems really sad.” Elias looked over to where he imagined the elf was sitting. “Maybe it’s time to end his bad luck.”

But Thomas James kept tripping, and losing, and getting in trouble. Elias started to worry.

On Friday, Elias approached Thomas James, he took a deep breath willing himself to be brave. “I’m sorry you seem to be having such a rough time,” Elias squeaked out the words. He looked up at Thomas James apprehensively, waiting to get pushed or kicked. Thomas James glared at Elias, then turned away, fists clenched. Elias thought he

looked like he was about to cry.

Elias sat with the elf later. “What can I do to help Thomas James?” he asked his friend. Again, no response. They sat in silence. Then Elias remembered the magazine, “the elf-knot is almost never found.” Elias started to think about where an elf-knot might have attached to Thomas James.

The next week, Elias faked sick so he could stay inside and read while the other kids went outside for recess. He looked around warily to make sure he was truly alone before approaching Thomas James’ cubby. He rifled through the mess of papers, crumbs, and unfinished projects until he got to Thomas James’ overstuffed backpack. He ran his hands over the nylon material, “Where could you possibly be” he asked the elf-knot. Elias saw a line of kids returning to the classroom and brushed his fingers over Thomas James’ backpack one more time. His index finger caught on something small and round, stuck to one of the straps. Elias pinched the tiny ball, removing it from the backpack. He ran back to his desk and picked up a book.

That night Elias gave the tiny woven ball back to his elf friend, placing the sticky knot carefully on the small chair.

Undone

Mindy OldenKamp

Thrifted shoes meant thrifted laces. Great soles, strong arch support, a smart purchase, yes, but you forget how much everyday use really stresses the little things. Like the stupid laces. And these, despite being woven through a spiffy pair of leathery looking Madden sneakers, were unraveling and barely holding the tongue in place.

This morning, an unwillingness to obey the call of the alarm combined with the inevitable late-start to the work day was not braiding well with the hearty dash of spousal frustration I’d created. Definitely not a shoe-related issue, we’d been opposing forces straining away from each other, turning small tangles into impenetrable indignation. And, this morning in particular, my overflowing, stubborn righteousness led to a tightening pull made with the strength only irritation can muster and severed the tired strands in two. Life and laces mirroring each other in one moment.

I felt the irrational prickling of tears, staring at the frayed ends of shoelace and feeling an overwhelming sense of connection to the now uncoupled strand. Everything felt tight and worn and broken and beyond repair in the most urgent way.

Tying my shoes should be easy, should just happen, an effortless chore to start the day.

I couldn’t help but let the chips I’d been carrying carefully on my shoulders increase their own weight. It just shouldn’t be this hard. All I wanted was an easy morning, tied shoes, and that quintessential happily ever after. We were, afterall, more than ten years in, enmeshed with each other and so far from strangers that we could communicate with looks and

half words.

Until we didn’t.

Until we were sharp barbs and angrily jerked emotions and frustrated rushing to point out the slights committed against each other. Each tired struggle pulling the anger knotted tighter, turning emotional fabric to irritated cement. Fighting the flood of exhausted emotion threatening to breach, I let my eyes roll through the bedroom. The morning sunlight prying its way in through the poorly closed curtains caught the edge of my wife’s necklaces, hanging from the corner of a framed piece of art, and a memory tugged me deep into the past.

In the warmth of the sun-filled dining room, it was his smell that first distracted me from my meticulous coloring. I had been focused, intensely filling the paper sky with a light blue so closely matching the cloud-kissed sky outside, and as I filled the open area to near completion, his familiar earthy scent nestled into my nostrils. He was sea-salt air and rain dappled dirt, coffee sipped before sunrise, and the sweat of an honest day’s work all woven together in a master tangle.

My grandfather, Joe, joined me at the table, his silence warm like a blanket from the dryer. He was no-nonsense and mischief, his eyes piercing and full of a playfulness directly in opposition to the small spiral notebook and pen he carried in his shirt pocket - a symbol of obedience and order held over from his army days. He was ordered life and playful love permanently intertwined.

“Your Gramma says you been coloring for days now. Lost in your own world. Time for you to do a job for me.” His voice was an instant draw away from my colored pencils. “Sort these out for me. Just go easy and slow.” He set a strange mess on top of my artwork.

My eyes took in the walnut-sized orb of tangled gold chains and pendants now taking up the last remaining corner of white sky.

“I can’t do that.” I whispered back.

Grandpa Joe stood to leave the room, a smile playing at the edges of his sun-weathered face, and rested a rough hand on my shoulder. “If I can use these tired old farm hands to make the jewelry, you can use your smart little fingers to free them. Be gentle and take your time.

You’ll figure it out.”

I stared at the mess of chain link and gemstones, curiosity and dread dancing together in my gut. I had to give it a try, disappointing my grandpa wasn’t an option.

I counted five different pendants, each a beautifully mounted cut of picture rock my grandpa had found in one dusty corner or another. He’d spot a rough looking stone caked with dry earth and nourish it into a gorgeous bit of rock, polished and mounted and drastically different than how he’d found it. I’d been in the desert with him and only ever seen pebbles and clumps of desolation. He saw beauty.

“You might need tools,” I heard him holler from the kitchen. “Think about what those might be.”

I could find no origin, no end to any of the individual lengths; where do you start if you can’t find the beginning? My fingers probed and prodded, frustration building its own knot in the pit of my stomach. The more I pulled, the tighter the clump became, and I could feel the urgent desire to be done growing. “This is stupid,” I whispered under my breath.

“If you’re getting frustrated, go find tools. Jewelry is fragile and you have to handle it with care.” Grandpa called to me from the doorway. “But I’m not telling you exactly what to use.”

I wanted to complain, to tell him this was pointless, to give up

and go back to my solitary world of colored pencils and control, but he gave me a look. Why didn’t he just give me the answers? My fingers, small as they were, still couldn’t grasp everything and I couldn’t see where the mess of links would work free.

I wandered from the dining room where I’d been camped for the three days since my parents had left me for my grandparent visit, exploring the house for the first time. In Grandpa’s office I found a magnifying glass. In the basement closet I unearthed an old set of jewelers tools, tweezers, and pliers. From the kitchen, Gramma offered up toast with homemade raspberry jam and a handful of very pointy toothpicks.

Back at my dining table workstation, I found my grandfather settled in. He looked up as I climbed back into my chair, offering me up a smile that snuck into my soul and warmed me from the inside. He radiated a calmness that fostered my determination, and I lined out my newly acquired tools, my fingers gently nudging tangled link from tangled link. Before I fully understood, I had a completely free necklace. And then I had two. The more I worked the problem with patient intention, the more links came free, and the walnut ball of gold fell into a pretty collection of picture rock pendants.

I felt Grandpa’s hand pat my back. “See? Told you you could.”

I heard my wife call from the kitchen, letting me know my coffee was ready. No matter how frustrated, how burdened by the ways in which life was “life-ing” us, she always made sure the coffee was ready. No matter how messy we might be, we still held beauty.

I tied the two strands of lace back together, knowing they still had the strength to get through another tomorrow, and planted my feet firmly on the ground. I took a deep breath. If I could remember to just quit pulling, to be care-full, I knew I

could gently undo the issue.

I found my wife standing in the kitchen, quiet and hurt, yet familiar and comforting as she held out the steaming cup of coffee for me.

“I’m sorry. We’ll figure it out” My hands moved with the gentleness my heart felt to wipe her tears, the escape of emotion boiling over from parenting and jobs and fighting with me, and I felt the knotted anger in my own chest loosen.

Sandbox Love

Maya Grubaugh

Tell you what—you were thirteen years old when Marnie’s mother asked you to speak at her service, and you were not the right person for the job, and you said yes. This was before your uncle Scotty died, before that big family blowout in your grandmother’s kitchen, but you still knew enough to know you can’t just look someone in the face and tell them no. Not when it’s about a funeral. Not when it’s about your friend who’s dead. So you said yes, and you didn’t say what you were thinking, which was that you were pretty sure you knew what she wanted from you—some version of Marnie she didn’t get to see, some kind of proof that Marnie went on beyond what she could personally vouch for. It wasn’t the last thing you wouldn’t tell her.

You’d outgrown pinky promises a long time ago, but you couldn’t bring yourself to break one now. It seemed almost sacrilegious. You think back to recesses on the school playground, to huddling in the shade underneath the perforated black platform that connected the monkey bars to the slide—the clubhouse, you and Marnie called it, just to make it yours—and all you remember somehow are the pinholes in the plastic overhead, letting light down. Pinpricks of sun. In your memory it’s not a clubhouse anymore but a confession booth, or your own personal slice of reeling, starstaggered sky. Marnie somewhere overhead. Hiding.

You never liked Marnie sacred. You liked Marnie how she was, with scraped elbows from soccer and recycling jokes and constantly straining her eyes because she was too proud to wear her glasses. Just as well, though, really, because you’d been there with her when she cracked the lenses—one of

those things you’d promised not to tell her mom. Stupid. She’d shoved them in her back pocket on the way home after school, which wasn’t usually a problem, but today was the day Holly Atkinson had loaned Marnie her skateboard overnight. She’d glanced at you sideways as she handed it over. “Just no sharing,” she told Marnie.

You’d given her a tight-lipped smile.

“Yeah, no problem,” Marnie said brightly, and waited till Holly’s back was turned to slant you a grin. “So did Wes say we could borrow his bike?”

It went like this: a yellow bungee cord from your dad’s garage tied in a clumsy knot to the seatpost of your brother’s bike, Marnie balancing on the skateboard behind you, keeping the rope pulled taut; you on the bike in front, straining to sink the pedals all the way down, trying to work up the momentum to coast. It was mostly Marnie’s idea, but you’d picked the spot, a rambling stretch of asphalt a few blocks down from Maple. It only met its connecting roads at either end, which meant you could flood all the way down it without having to worry about cars rolling out from behind corners, but it also meant you had no excuse for riding the brakes. Not that you thought you’d have the chance to, at first.

You had your teeth gritted from the outset, trying to concentrate on Marnie instead of the seething ache in your legs as you dragged the bike into a wobble. “It’s cheaper on Tuesdays, if you wanna go,” Marnie was saying. “Like, actually just a dollar, which is nice. The movie’s definitely rated R, though—I heard one lady fainted ’cause it was so fucking gross or scary or whatever—so, um, we might have to sneak in. Oh, and we’re definitely sneaking in snacks, ’cause those assholes mark up the prices so much it’s insane—”

“Jeez, dude, your mom know you talk like that?” you finally

clipped out, trying and failing to keep the strain out of your voice. The bike wavered again and you white-knuckled the handlebars trying to stay balanced.

She didn’t miss a beat. “Nope, and we’re not gonna tell her till I’m, like, thirty.”

You had just enough breath to huff out a laugh.

“Hey,” she said, and then faltered—only for a second, but Marnie tended to think with her mouth, so any hesitation drew your full attention. She only ever tempered her phrasing when she was worried about hurting your feelings. “You know…I could be on the bike first. If you want.”

You turned your head just enough to shoot her a smile. “No sharing, remember? What Holly said?”

“Well, Holly’s just—”

“Holly just doesn’t like me.”

“No— Come on, Lucy. I don’t think she thinks you like her. You never— Oh, shit.” A smile cracked into Marnie’s voice as you finally wrestled the bike into a glide, and you laughed— kind of elated, mostly relieved. You hadn’t wanted to let her down. (You still think about that sometimes, trying to breathe through slow washes of terror: you don’t want to let her down.) She lobbed some comment back up at you, her voice tipped high and uneven with enthusiasm, but it blended with the chatter of the skateboard’s wheels on the asphalt and you couldn’t make out what it was.

It went like that: verging on perfect.

For about fifteen minutes.

You felt the jerk first, you think, nearly yanking you off balance, and then heard Marnie gasp, but either way you were suddenly weightless. You’d spilled forward an extra fifteen feet before you processed it enough to stop.

Marnie was on the ground when you twisted to look.

She was on her back, propped up on her elbows, staring disconcertedly as the skateboard rolled forward without her and thudded dully against your back wheel.

You gaped at her, bewildered. “Are you okay?”

Marnie’s face flushed pink—and then crumpled.

Shit. You fumbled your kickstand down. Marnie’d dropped her head back down to the asphalt, her hands cradled against her face, and despite all your clumsy attempts at composure your mouth was suddenly dry. You’d only seen Marnie cry once, and that had been over a knocked-out baby tooth and a bloody mouth. You paused, though, when you got closer, because you could see the whites of Marnie’s teeth and the curl of her lip, and it took you a second to realize that— however it had begun—the asshole was laughing.

She turned a big, sloppy smile on you. “Dude, my parents are gonna kill me.”

“What?” You took another step forward, and then stopped, wavering. “Why?”

She fished her glasses out of her back pocket, smiling through her groan. The light instantly caught the cracks in the lenses—they were completely beyond saving—and you hissed a breath in through your teeth. But Marnie just smirked at you, and there was only a beat of silence before you were both dissolving into giggles.

See, that was the version of Marnie you loved. Tough as nails and totally stupid.

She hadn’t looked anything like that in the viewing room. Hadn’t looked anything like herself, even dressed in the itchy green dress she’d let her mom talk her into wearing the last few Easter Sundays. It was too neat, for one; your Marnie had never been able to stop tugging at the collar, always navigating out of the pew with worried creases in the fabric.

She wasn’t wearing her glasses, though—hadn’t lived long enough for her dad’s insurance to cover another pair—and at least that looked right. She probably would’ve been relieved. You opened your mouth to say so, but your breath caught instead, and then your mom was pulling you away, through static, your stupid, Times New Roman funeral speech crinkling in your grasp, and you cried so hard you puked.

And when the time for eulogies came, you sat shaky in a sun-bleached pew, and you didn’t say anything at all.

No one else said anything to you, either: not about the eulogy or about Marnie, and not for a long time afterwards, like they were afraid you might shudder apart if they did. Well, except for Holly—but she’d sat brittle and dazed at that funeral service just like you, and it wasn’t even till summer that she could stomach acknowledging Marnie as anything other than alive, either.

You’d been shuffling your feet on the sidewalk outside the cemetery when she broke that silence, you with your head down, facing the street, Holly with her fingers tangled in the chain-link.

“Do you think—” she started, and then faltered, blinking rapidly. “Do you think it still looks…like her?”

You hadn’t understood what she meant, at first. Couldn’t even begin to connect the question to Marnie, because the image of her you held onto in your mind never deteriorated past a few blocks down from Maple Street.

Looking back, maybe that was the one thing you should’ve told her mother. The one thing you could’ve offered her. When you think of Marnie dead, that’s how you picture her: thirteen years old, winded, cradling her sides and covered in dirt. Laughing.

Bonita Vestal

By spring quarter of my first year in college, I had completed the standard freshman requirements and was eligible to register for my first freely chosen class, Biology 101. It marked the beginning of a commitment: the long series of science classes required for pre-med students. Because the professor was both famous and popular, the class was held in one of the largest auditoriums on campus. My lifelong seating preference in a setting like that is well toward the back, at the end of a row. I like a clear path to the exit.

On the first day of class, I arrived early enough to claim my place, get out my new spiral notebook, used textbook, and pen, and stow my book bag under the seat. As I straightened up to settle in for the lecture, a tall boy with a buzz cut and horn-rimmed glasses strode purposefully down the aisle to the second row, sidled across to the center seat directly in front of the lectern and sat down. Somewhere in my head, I heard, or knew, “He’s going to be your husband.”

A husband was part of the long-range plan because I already knew I would be the mother of two children, first a boy, then a girl. At the time, I didn’t realize it was unusual to receive clarifying pronouncements like this. I simply trusted the information and returned my focus to whatever was right in front of me—in this case, Biology 101, and in the bigger picture, survival.

I was the first in my family to go to college, and then only due to a full tuition scholarship. Here I was, at a prestigious West Coast university, with homemade clothes,

a Catholic girls’s school education, and something known then as a “work-study” arrangement. Room and board were compensated by service work on campus. In my case that was mostly food-service, sometimes housekeeping.

Between work assignments and the pressure to maintain a GPA worthy of the scholarship, I had no time for social life, which was actually a relief, since I had no social skills. But thanks to my immigrant grandparents, I had language skills sufficient to get accepted as one of only a few soon-to-be sophomores chosen to study abroad. Six months in Europe opened me up and showed me the folly of limiting myself to a curriculum full of science requirements, so I gave up pre-med and threw myself full-bore into psychology—until it became clear to me, about a year before graduation, that there was no work awaiting recent grads in social science. That left me just enough time to cram in all of the basic pre-med requirements if I carried an oversized class load, and a reasonable assurance of eventually having the work I wanted.

As graduation drew near, the women I lived with planned their annual senior event: dinner and a play in San Francisco. It required inviting a date. My course load was now heavy with science, and I thought of the boy in the second row of Biology 101. The campus newspaper had recently featured an article naming him as president of Overseas Campus Board so he was easy enough to contact, and even though we had never met, I asked, and he accepted. Dinner in North Beach and a live performance of The Fantastics made for a memorable first date, and we found an easy harmony after that. A year and a half later, we agreed to tie the knot, even though we had years of professional training ahead of us. We

were both high performers and landed same-city positions all over the country, bringing our son, and then our daughter into being during that time.

I loved being a family and overlooked some of the realities. He couldn’t imagine professional success without freedom from other mundane responsibilities, and I couldn’t imagine a family without a dedicated domestic at its heart, but I had a full-time professional position just as he did. Impossible was something we both understood: impossible hours, impossibly low pay, educational loans impossible to live on, let alone pay back. We lived with impossible every day. During those years, my life was eerily empty of any clarifying pronouncements—or was I too exhausted and distracted to notice?

A growing awareness began to bother me though, as another emptiness became more evident. Our nest was empty. Our offspring had fledged and were soaring, happy, healthy, and successful. I often came home to an empty house. He was working late, writing grants, at the gym, out of town, ever chasing the impossible.

My work in the healthcare system had become a highly competitive business, more profit-driven than patient-centric, empty of human relationship, let alone compassion.

And my life was empty of crucial elements: time for friends and time outside, enough sleep, reading, travel, sports, and self-care.

And then it happened. That clarifying knowing, as sure as it had been all the other times, landed unbidden, front and center in my consciousness: I could take the best part of my professional practice, the part closest to my heart and truest to my personal sense of mission, and offer that as my work in

the world. I knew I had to do it.

Shortly after I gave notice, openings appeared, invitations arrived, and almost seamlessly I moved into that magical space where service meets need and something new emerges. Just as with the prior proclamations, I knew this venture would thrive. Better yet, I would, too!

I tried acupuncture, yoga, and massage. I studied meditation, intuition, hypnotherapy and breath work, all of it alien to my partner and unwelcome in our conversation. I was running in my own lane, gaining ground but losing that familiar feeling of being tied into something safe.

The next transmission was startling, and a little ominous: “You’re gonna know when you know”. When that moment arrived, I knew what it was, but couldn’t find the courage I needed.. It was like a window sash lifting and I could feel the fresh air, but didn’t have the nerve to jump.

The next time, it came with a surge so strong that before I knew it I was in free-fall, no going back, and no idea where to land. I was terrified. He was devastated.

He left it to me to undo the knot. He stepped aside, required me to step up or stand down, and we moved on, both of us at loose ends.

He met a new love who opened up his life to theater, opera, ballet and symphony. They took up photography and traveled the world in search of images, lifelong aspirations of his that would never match mine.

I had regular encounters with fear, doubt, and uncertainty—but never regret, not even once.

On holidays, birthdays, our kids’ weddings, our parents’ funerals, we all show up: he and his wife, I and our grown children now with their spouses. We share food, gifts, and conversation like people who matter to each other. Here at the top of our lives, we are the best we’ve ever been, still connected, just better unbound.

The knot, though, was critical. Living into the outside limits of what being bound together meant—because that’s what we promised—provided a measure of comfort, until it began to chafe. This happens everywhere in Nature: the Monarch butterfly wriggling free of the chrysalis, the moist and sticky chick pecking relentlessly at the eggshell. When the time is right, some inner knowing drives the process. It’s the effort of escaping confinement that brings the strength to fly.

I spent half my life trying to make everything work well enough that peace prevailed most of the time, never brave enough to make a choice on my own behalf. I won’t speak for him, but it looks like he finally sees the cost of personal success above all else. People who know us say I am stronger and he’s grown softer. I say we are both better people, two souls flying free and shining bright.

Although this outcome was surely no surprise to our children, they had concerns and scouted regularly for the first few months to assess our well-being—-his, and mine—-or equally likely, theirs— maybe to learn how things might play out. We were all exploring unknown territory.

Our son was twenty-four the year I moved out on my own, a man of few words who has always preferred the outdoors. One warm morning that first summer, while I was unpacking

boxes in my new place with door and windows open to collect cool morning air, he rolled up on his bike and came in to give me a hug.

“Mom”, he said, “You look like a bird that’s been let out of a cage. Don’t even think about going back!”

Hope Gordon

Baby blue twine held my father’s gift together, thick and sturdy, just as he was in life. I ran a finger to the center of the white marble box, where the knot was tied. A sailor and a craftsman, my dad was the kind of guy who wouldn’t get on a boat unless he knew how it was built. This eccentricity did not die with him; it was contained in front of me. The inscription read:

Whoever can get through this knot will be the Captain of the Marigold.

Six months ago, we lost him. He was deep in his seventies, with the strength of a man in his forties. The exception was his heart. The doctor told him to take it easy, but he never did. On the day he finished polishing the final panel of the Marigold, the boat he had worked on for twenty years, he called me in jubilee. “I did it, little bee!” he’d said. “I can’t wait for you to see her!”

The next day, he was gone.

His heart had been kind enough to hold out until the masterpiece was complete. He must have felt it coming, or else he wouldn’t have given us the box, leaving a cryptic message in his will. For my children and my children’s children. Follow the inscription.

Every month since then, my siblings and I traded the box and worked to untangle the knot. It had since become a wild mess of peculiar strings.

“Having trouble?”

My son Will, seven years old and deeply precocious,

leaned over my shoulder and touched the loose string. He looked exactly like me, if I was a boy, which meant he was also the spitting image of my father. Reddish hair sticking in all different directions and freckles just on the tip of the nose.

“What do you think?” I sighed.

“Just cut it.”

“That’s not really in the spirit of the whole thing, little man. I’m sure Grandpa wanted us to untie it.”

He tilted the box forward, small hand dirty with green and blue markers. Having only recently learned to read, he took a few minutes to decode the inscription. “Mom, it doesn’t say ‘untie’. It says ‘get through.’ He just wanted you to get through it, not unravel it.”

I stared at the box for a moment, heavy on my fingertips. Could I really…?

“No.” I shook my head. “I’m sure that isn’t what he meant.” He crawled over the couch leg and plopped into my lap.

“That’s just what it says. I think Grampy wanted you to cut it.”

I had a sudden vision of Will as a baby, laughing like a maniac as my dad did a ridiculous and not-at-all accurate impression of Richard Nixon. Maybe my son knew my dad better than I did. Not crowded with thirty years of extra memory, he saw simplicity hidden in the complex.

I read the words again. And again. For the first time, I heard them in my father’s voice: raspy, never serious, like he was always on the cusp of a joke.

I knew my son was right, and I realized something else. “He left this to his children and his children’s children. The inscription says ‘whoever.’ It doesn’t have to be me who opens it, or your auntie and uncle.”

He blinked at me, blue eyes twinkling. Sometimes I wondered if that kid could read minds. “You mean…I can…”

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.” I gave him the box and bolted to the ceramic kiwi on the counter. Deep inside, underneath sewing kits and loose batteries, I found the pocket knife my dad had given me when he first taught me to sail.

Will hopped with glee. This reaction was half the reason I was going to give him this privilege. The other reason was so my siblings would forgive me for taking the easy way. It was hard to be angry with a seven year old, and amongst all our children, Will cared the most about boats.

“Be careful,” I advised. “Point the blade away from you, and don’t rush.”

In revered silence, he sliced the tangle one string at a time. It broke like butter and didn’t make a sound until it was finally cut through, a pathetic ‘thunk’ on the floor.

We looked at each other, thinking the same thing. Once we opened it, just for a moment, my father’s soul would be with us once more.

“Let’s open it with everyone here,” Will whispered, shining with old wisdom. “I think they’d love that.”

So I became the host of an impromptu family dinner. My brother argued with me about cutting the string for half an hour, in between making faces at his one-year-old, so I knew his anger was unserious. My sister was just glad she didn’t have to see that infernal knot ever again.

My mother whispered to me, “Was it Will’s idea?” I told her yes, and she wandered off with a smirk on her face.

As we laughed and ate dinner, the box sat on the table near an empty chair. For the first time in months, I couldn’t feel my father’s absence. I kept expecting to see him, standing too close to the football game on the television, or putting each of my sister’s twin toddlers on his shoulder and spinning them in circles.

When the first bout of silence hit us, my brother displayed his signature gravitas by sliding the marble box across the table. The stone rumbling on wood demanded our gaze.

“Okay William, are you ready?” my brother whispered, but in the quiet, his voice boomed.

My son looked as though a spotlight had fallen on him. In his eyes was a question and a sparkle.

I smiled. “Go ahead little man.”

Soundlessly, the box opened, thanks to my dad’s superior craftsmanship. Many adventure movies have a scene where a treasure chest is open, and the inside glows on the face of the protagonist. I was suddenly living in that movie. We all gasped at the gold light, the polished brass reflecting the light hanging over the table. With great care, my son poured the contents onto the table.

Eight gold keys. Of course, they weren’t real gold, but they may as well have been. There was one for each of us: my siblings, our children, and our mother. Identical to one my father had, we knew instantly they opened the lower deck of the Marigold. In an elegant script, our names were carved at the top of each.

Will stared at his key for a long time, holding it tenderly, like it might break in his hands.

He looked up at me, like he couldn’t believe it.

“You okay buddy?” I asked softly. In response, he handed his key to me, facing it up so I could read the inscription.

I smiled. My grief floated away from me.

Captain William.

Embroidery

Janet Schlicht

My mother moved house many times in her life, packing us all up for a new start in a new town every time my dad got transferred. You could say she was an expert packer.

It is curious, I think, that her last move, to the house she bought in Boise after my dad died, and when she was 70 years old, did not demonstrate any inclination to downsize in response to her changing reality. She brought boxes of things that she never unpacked, and they sat in the middle of various rooms in her house. After her death, I ran across one whole box filled with old magazines. Inside each, tucked between pages to prevent their becoming tangled into irreversible knots, were embroidery threads she had saved over the years. That’s a lot of embroidery thread to move two-thousand miles from Minnesota to Idaho.

Finding these colorful threads reminded me of the day, some weeks before she died, when we attempted to begin getting rid of things in her house she no longer had use for. We both knew that a brain tumor would be bringing an end to her life at some unknown future moment. We had agreed that it might be a good time to begin right-sizing her life. At that time (and I mention this not as a plea for forgiveness, though I guess I do hope for that), the minutes of my life seemed always to be too few, with too many necessary things wanting my attention. So it was that I suggested we begin the task of sorting through things the next Tuesday, my one day off work.

I showed up, as planned, at 8:00, ready to tackle the job at hand, confident that by the end of the day, we’d have everything in her house assigned to piles: keep, toss, and give

away. I sensed less enthusiasm from Mama as she opened the door to let me in. We began, by her choice, at a tall narrow hutch with glass windows, in which she had displayed various keepsakes. In light of all the untouched packing boxes scattered through her house, it might have occurred to me to wonder why these particular things had taken priority over the myriad other things that remained stowed away in dark boxes. The reason for that became apparent very quickly.

She opened the glass doors and carefully pulled out a miniature ceramic milk can. She handled it with reverence, cupping it in her hands, as she told me that it had been a gift to her from her friend Roslyn. I stood with the packing paper in my hands, ready to wrap it and prepare it for its journey to some other home. But mama stayed put, as did the little oldfashioned milk can, and she began to tell me about Roslyn, and their long friendship, and how much that milk can meant to her. It went back on the shelf, my packing paper unused. The next item came out, and then the next. She handled each one as if it were a baby swallow that had fallen from its nest, and just as carefully placed it back in its rightful spot.

I am not sure I remember how the rest of the day unfolded. I know that the hutch remained as it had been at the start of the day. If we sorted through anything else, I can say with confidence that we did not accomplish the task that I had in mind for the day. We may have sat down in the afternoon and had a cup of tea, our cups clicking against their saucers as we each thought our own thoughts.

A week later, the hutch and its contents suddenly ceased to matter at all. Mama’s condition plummeted. Cascading failures of her physical body took control of the narrative. There was an urgent trip to the hospital. Tubes. Oxygen. Hard decisions for me and my sister. The end of her life arrived

only days later, a mercy of sorts given the possibilities.

I think often about the day at the hutch, and the embroidery threads, and the many unopened boxes of things. All these things represented her memories and her aspirations. I was not the daughter I could have been. I could have validated those stories, and in so doing, validated her life, which is really what she wanted that day. Maybe I thought there would be more time, or maybe I did not yet know how to be the sounding board that she sought. If families are knotted together through shared experience, it seems clear that I allowed some serious fraying of our knot at the precious end of her life; that I could have, should have, simply taken her in my arms that day and said,

“mama, mama, you’ve lived such a lovely radiant life and I will carry the radiance of that life forward, and you will not ever be forgotten.”

Should have said, but didn’t. It’s a regret that winds itself up in my own head to this day; a regret that I can’t seem to let go of, though I imagine her spirit now, just smiling, and saying it’s all okay.

The coda to the story, and the other part I keep returning to, is the embroidery threads. When we were girls, my sister and I learned to embroider from Mama. The many colored threads would become intricately joined to become things of beauty, at least to our eyes. Did she save all that thread through many moves, long after she actually picked up a needle to do any work with it, because that thread was part of the memory where she held our childhoods, when we were knotted tightly as a family, before my sister and I went out into the world and became too involved in our own lives

to nourish the memories she held? Maybe. But here’s the thing: my sister and I, separately and without mentioning it to one another, picked up embroidery again a few years ago. It makes me think there is still a knot that holds our family together, some loose threads dangling here and there that need to be tucked in from time to time. We are thoroughly entangled, in the best way we know how. And Mama is part of the knot.

The Purple Scarf

Janet Schlicht

She began to knit a purple scarf for a purple-wearing friend. That was around the same time that the wrongness entered her body, before an unwelcome and uninvited intruder changed everything, before she became intimately familiar with pain.

To understand the story of the purple scarf, it is important to know about her Norwegian- ness. She spent her early years in Norway before finally landing in Boise, after many stops along the way. Through all those transitions, she carried Norway with her, and within her. It wasn’t just that she had little Norwegian tchotchkes sprinkled through her house—little trolls, Norwegian flags, yes, all of that. Beyond that, though, she was in so many ways a Norwegian who happened to live in America. By that, I mean her life centered around beauty in all its shapes: beautiful, simple interiors; seeking out the hidden waterfall in the canyon and spreading out a table cloth for a picnic; walking through the woods and breathing in the piney smells. She made krumkake with cloudberry cream for Christmas, reminiscent of the cloudberries she used to pick along the fjords. She loved, in fact, all the foods of Norway, and she had a singular way of demonstrating her enjoyment of them by humming as she ate. She had a custom made bunad, the intricately designed traditional dress from her home region; she wore it when she joined the other Norwegians in Boise for Norwegian Independence Day. She won medals in cross-country skiing, and scattered carrots on winter trails where the bunnies could find them. She fashioned a homemade troll out of sticks and moss to put at a cattle guard. And perhaps most

impressive of all, she was a master knitter.

Her knitting had always been a marvel to me; the deftness and confidence of her hands moving fluidly to create intricate designs. She learned her skill from her Norwegian mother and grandmother. I was and am a bumbling, clumsy knitter, a late in life learner, strictly a knit and purl plodder. Knitting has always seemed a bit of a magic trick to me, the way the yarn becomes joined in some organized tangle that is not really a knot—you can pull on one end and undo the whole thing—but rather an integrated whole mitten or sweater or sock that holds together, mostly forever, or until the yarn itself disintegrates.

(A knot. Not a knot.)

A knot came into her life in a different way while she was knitting the purple scarf. A malign, serpentine knot that first introduced itself as a backache (do some PT, you’ll be fine) and a loss of appetite (try Pepto-Bismol) and from there, ever so silently, little by little at first and then in great chunks, made its way at liberty though her body. By the time it became evident that the symptoms were caused by a malicious intrusion, there was little that could be done, save trying to make her last weeks comfortable. Those of us around her needed no reminder that these knots winding and tangling themselves so tenaciously all through her insides were not to be unraveled easily. Or at all.

(Knots that cannot be undone.)

She fought the very idea of the disease, tried to renegotiate the status of their acquaintanceship. She railed at the idea of its presence on her body, refused to believe that there wasn’t, surely, some way to cut the monster out. The unfairness of it gnawed at her, at all of us, that just at the moment when she had reached a time of order and harmony in her life, her very

life was being taken. The knot growing inside her robbed her, really, of the beauty that had always defined her life. First to go was the beauty and enjoyment of food; then it was the weakness that prevented her from being outside, enjoying birds and walks along the river.

The purple scarf remained a priority for her, at least off and on. She used the softest wool from Norway, and chose a surprisingly simple pattern, knit across with a purled border.

Something even I could imagine doing. She picked the project up as she felt able. She sat many days on the patio with her knitting, and she looked as lovely as the pot of spring tulips blooming beside her. The purple yarn began its transfiguration from a ball of fluff into tufted billows the color of spring lilacs, and finally began to take shape as a magnificent and warming scarf. In moments like this, we could all be convinced, however fleetingly, that the demon inside her wasn’t real, that it could be vanquished, that she could fight it and win, if only she could eat a little more, if only, if only…We could imagine beseeching the god that none of us believed in for a reprieve. The diminishment of her flesh was an unavoidable reminder to the contrary.

In the end, she was victorious in at least this small way— the knot could not undo her appreciation of the visual feast of this world. One day, she stood at the window. It was spring in all its glory and promise. She was silent for a while, just taking it in, all of it. “I’ll really miss all this beauty,” she said. An admission that she knew the ominous knot inside her was burgeoning, blossoming, growing ever tighter.

She picked up the purple scarf for the last time about two weeks before her death. “I have to get busy and finish this,” she said. “I haven’t got much time.” She tried to knit lying down, not an easy thing to do even without the unfocusing

effects of pain medication. I offered to finish it for her, but “no,” she said, “no, it’s too complicated.” In the end, after her last breath had been drawn, the purple scarf laid unfinished by her deathbed. I picked it up. The last several rows were riddled with errors and holes. Set against the otherwise perfect rows of stitches, there was a jagged section that seemed to mirror the relentless disorganization of her own self. (Not knotted properly.)

It had to be finished, of course, to honor her, and to deliver the scarf to its intended recipient. I could have ripped out the last dozen or so rows to make the final piece perfect. But the errors were a relic of her hands and the last journey they took, pulling the soft purple wool into a wearable shape. They were, in a sense, an expression of the turbulence of her last days, before stillness came for her at last.

The Japanese concept of wabi sabi enjoins us to embrace imperfection in all aspects of life. Spaces are designed to include such imperfections, a reminder of the impermanence of all things. Related to wabi sabi, kintsugi goes a step further, insisting on calling attention to the imperfection by adding gold in some form to highlight the imperfection. It is often referred to as “golden joinery.” In that spirit, I searched through my yarn scraps. I found, alas, no spun gold among my odds and ends, but I found a bright yellow-orange that I thought would suffice. It stood out from and complemented the purple yarn of the scarf. I wound it through the middle parts of the scarf that represented her best efforts at creating beauty before she died.

I finished the pattern, leaving the errors in place. Purl 7, knit across, purl 7 to the end.

Every stitch made me think of the slender threads from which our lives are spun. These slender purple threads with

their own “golden joinery” live on as testimony to the way she embraced life, to the way she hummed while she ate, to the beauty she built into her life. Her “not knots” in the purple scarf are an assertion that her life mattered in a way that no malignancy could diminish.

The beauty of the finished product, knotted but not, is a form of vindication over the thing that tried so hard to rob her of beauty. I hope the Valkyries were there in the end to guide her joyfully into Valhalla, and I hope that is a beautiful place for her to be, with lots of picnics by the burbling creek, and golden sunsets to mark the end of the day, and I hope she is knitting more gorgeous designs from an endless array of yarns, with all of her not-knots in perfect order.

What We Need

Julia McCoy

When I tell my daughter the story, it goes like this. Rapunzel doesn’t let down her hair. She cuts it off. She knots it together in thick strands until she has strong rope, then climbs out of the tower and into the brambles, breaking free and running into the unknown. While I tell her this, I knot a shoelace and act out the escape with my fingers.

At work, I imagine new details for the story. My job, my calling, is to clean the dome. It must be spotless, so that at any time residents of Undersea Palace A145 may gaze upon the glory above us. Three miles of glass, rainbowed, open to the ocean. When I was first assigned to my work, I would gaze upon it, too. The creatures of the ocean, unencumbered by human interference, at last able to breathe. But now that years have passed, the view is so much static in my eyes. It oppresses me.

My mother was so proud when I was chosen for undersea escape. After everything, even a custodial job is prestigious. She hugged me when I gave her the news, neither of us yet imagining that we were counting down with each hug. Fifteen left, then ten, then the last, then fire swept over the earth like the great flood and my mother was wiped out with the rest and now there is no one to be proud of me.

In the story, the tower is made of glass. Rapunzel can see through it to the world beyond, to the burned and blackened ground. There is nothing outside of her tower. But then one day, she sees life next to the river. She wonders, what if?

My daughter’s father, Merv, works on the second floor in maintenance. He’s closer to the men in charge. Merv knows secrets. He showed me pictures of the husks of burned out

buildings and charred corpses. The men in charge don’t tell us these things. But we know and we whisper.

I still sleep with Merv, sometimes. It comes at a high price, because after we’re done he tells me secrets, and I don’t want to hear them anymore. Tonight, as he pulls me into his chest, he tells me that a Sky Castle fell from the atmosphere, leaving a crater in the earth. The effects ricocheted through the world in earthquakes and dust storms and tsunamis.

“The whole earth mourned them,” he says, weeping.

As far as I’m concerned, they were as far from me as anything can be, and I cannot muster the energy to care. I only feel jealous that they died on the soil.

When he is done weeping I say, “I am going mad, Merv.”

He nods and pulls me closer. I think he can tell that my mind is slipping. That sometimes I am gone from my body and walking barefoot on grass in a place that no longer exists.

“We aren’t meant to live here,” I say. “Man is supposed to breathe fresh air and walk on dirt. It would be better to go back. Even if we died.”

Pressing his mouth into my neck he says, “Our daughter.”

He tries to pull me back, but the madness started with her. When she learned to speak, she didn’t need all of my words. Rain, clouds, sun. I couldn’t teach her the distance of thunder by counting the seconds. She never knew the man in the moon. Whole parts of motherhood fell away from me and I crumbled with them.

But I nod, and let Merv believe he has fixed me. I wish he could.

My mother saw me off at the dock. That was the last hug. There was still hope, then, that she’d find a place to escape. Maybe one of the Sky Castles or a shuttle to another planet or an undersea dome like ours. But no one wanted the old,

and the kind of person she was meant she would never take another’s spot. She let herself go hungry so I wouldn’t and worked jobs that afforded no dignity and carried me until she had nothing left for herself. She lived as a martyr and died as one, too.

When my daughter is done with school, she joins me on the scaffold. She can name every fish, every shark, every piece of flotsam that passes us by. She organizes them by color and size and scariness. She is a prodigy, doing all this at only nine. Or maybe, like every mother, I believe she is more special than the rest, absent of proof.

Then one day, after unknowable days, I find a crack in the dome.

It shouldn’t be there. The glass is not just glass, it can’t break. But here it is. I run my finger along it and feel a thrill of hope.

That night, the story changes. Rapunzel finds a crack in the tower. She realizes it will spread, that if she is in the tower when it breaks she will be sliced by shattered glass.

“What do you think she should do?”

“How big is the crack?” my daughter asks. “If it’s not so big, she doesn’t have to go.”

I return to my scaffold with a hatchet. If I leave it be, the crack may spread, but progress will be slow. It could take years. So I chip away at it, tiny diamonds of glass dripping. Nightly, I return to work, each millimeter a victory. I don’t want us to drown. But when the cut is deep enough, we’ll have no choice but to leave.

My daughter receives a reward. Top in her class. She wears a blue ribbon pinned to her shirt. Now in fourth grade, she tells me she is too old for the story, so I wait until she falls asleep and whisper it in her ear.

When the crack reaches five millimeters, I give myself a night off, and find Merv. I feel well, the weight of my body and soul in the same place. When we are done and lying in each other’s arms, Merv regards me, asks how I’m feeling.

“It can’t be so bad up there.” His hand pauses in my hair.

“Wouldn’t it be better to take our chances? Even if we die, at least we’re on the earth.” “Why don’t I take our daughter for a little while?” he asks, stroking my hair again. “Just until you feel better.”

“I feel fine.”

I stop seeing Merv. I redouble my efforts to break the glass. I do not sleep. I do not eat.

When the crack is almost there, almost deep enough that I can imagine the water dripping onto my forehead, I insist on telling my daughter the story again. She needs to understand.

Rapunzel sees the crack is so large that the tower will soon fall. She sees the river, with its trees growing on the bank. She must go, and though she is afraid, she is also overjoyed.

“What happens next?” I ask.

“Rapunzel cuts her hair at the roots,” my daughter says, “to make her rope. She knots it and ties it to the windowsill. She slides down into the brambles, which hold her back with their thorns. Under the weight of her escape, the tower shatters. Still, she breaks free and runs to the river. But when she gets there, it’s nothing. Water flows, but it doesn’t hold life. The plants are sickly, dying. As Rapunzel sinks to her knees, she realizes the tower, the prison she hated so much, kept her alive. Now, she will die.”

I run a hand through her hair. “But she can mourn with her people now. She can honor them on the soil.”

“And who will care about that? Who among the dead will praise Rapunzel for weeping on the soil, mother? Couldn’t

she have wept in safety, and wouldn’t the dead be glad?”

“No, that—”

“And when she dies on the barren earth, when her body joins the rot and decay and none are left, when her knotted hair is the last remnant of her being, what will happen then? What good came of her sacrifice?”

I am crying. “Why are you saying this?”

“Because it is true.”

I wipe my eyes, and my daughter is gone. And I remember, she is not here. When Merv asked to take her, I said yes. I could spend more time cutting the glass without her. I am not in my home, but on my scaffold, staring up at the dome, under the crack. Except, there is no crack. The glass is stronger than all my efforts.

I let the hatchet fall from my hand.

Rapunzel looks out from her tower at the river. There are no trees. The land is dead. She cuts her hair to the root and drops it out the window, watching it drift away in the current.

Knot For Me

Hannah Roberts

It was yet another sleepless night. I had tried all my usual strategies. I’d named flowers for every letter of the alphabet: Agapanthus, Bluebell, Campanula …. nothing for X, Yarrow, Zinnia, Ajuga, Begonia, Clover….still nothing for X, Yucca, Zenobia. I’d redecorated my childhood home in my imagination. This was a long-term and difficult project since the house was incurably ugly, but my parents were beautiful and deserved better even if only in retrospective fantasy. Finally, I had tried my favorite sleep-inducing exercise, working out what I would wish for should I ever be lucky enough to run into a wish-granting entity of some kind. I’d been careful to word my wishes in a way that they could not be misinterpreted - I’d read too many stories of wishes gone awry and thought it best to be prepared. Nothing had worked and I was still awake at two in the morning.

The worst part of sleeplessness, I thought, is that it’s such a waste of time. You’re too tired to accomplish anything: you can’t look at screens, your eyes are too gritty to read, your mind is too foggy to think. It’s boring and useless and ridiculous.

Tired of twitching in bed, I got up and started wandering aimlessly in the dark, drifting eventually into the bedroom used by my two little grandchildren when they visit. It was brighter than daytime in there due to the paranoia of the neighbor over the road and her anti-theft megawatt lights pointed directly at our house. I am not sure whether she is trying to prevent people from sneaking into our house or us from sneaking into hers, but, either way, at night our home is illuminated strongly enough to be visible from space. Unless

we close the blackout blinds and curtains, the front bedrooms are as harshly lit as interrogation cells.

The children’s bedroom is not a bad place to be if you find yourself at a loose end. I am descended from generations of frugal, careful custodians of stuff, and the shelves are crowded with toys from every decade since Queen Victoria died in 1901. There is everything from handmade Edwardian dolls’ clothes and elderly Teddies of every size to Star Wars Lego sets, Beanie Babies and dinosaur Magnatiles.

On this night, as on every other, by courtesy of our nyctophobic neighbor, every item was illuminated like a museum exhibit. My eyes fell on an old game bought many years ago and ignored by every child thereafter, its undisguised nerdiness openly marking it as suspiciously useful and, worse still, educational.

No matter how you package it, competitive knot-tying cannot compete with modern entertainments. My Mum told me that it had been a favorite activity in her 1930’s Girl Guide troop, but by the 1970’s when I, in turn, became a Girl Guide, it had lost its allure. I could barely be persuaded to learn the basic reef knot. “Left over right and under, right over left and under,” repeated the troop leader, trying to keep the exasperation from her voice. It gives you a nice firm, flat knot, but for someone who can’t tell left from right, it is a bit of a nightmare.

I had bought the knot game for my then five-year-old daughter. Her obsession since she could first open a drawer and find a ball of string had been to tie her stuffed animals into excruciatingly contorted shapes and hang them from the bannisters like a bizarre garland. She later told me that she was terrified of confinement and was trying to find ways to cope with her fear by playing games in which her beloved

stuffies were shackled but happy.

I think now that her newborn life in an incubator, tied down with multiple tubes, scared and scarred her, but at the time, I had neither her explanation nor my hypothesis to help me understand her odd behavior. I feared I was raising a future expert in bondage. And so, in the hopes of steering her towards a less eccentric form of string mania, I bought the knot-tying game. I should have known better as this was the child who looked at me like I was mad when I proposed swimming lessons.

“I can already swim,” she said, her definition of swimming being bobbing along under water and occasionally popping up for a breath of air. “Why would I want to learn the same way of doing it as everyone else?” The formal tying of knots in internationally recognized patterns of construction was a lost cause with a child who thought even swimming strokes were a step too far in conformity. Knot So Fast was never opened. But there it was on the shelf at two o’clock in the morning.

There was one knot that I occasionally wished I knew. To make a traditional English Christmas pudding you have to tie a double layer of parchment paper very tightly over the china pudding basin prior to steaming it for eight hours in a pot of boiling water. It is a lesson in extreme frustration unless you can tie a slipknot. If you can’t, you have to persuade a second person to hold a finger in just the right spot and whip it away at the last moment as you pull the two ends together. Even then, it’s not really tied tightly enough to be secure. Moreover, there’s rarely a second person around when you need one. Every year, at Christmas pudding time, I wished for slipknot expertise.

That night, in the light of my neighbor’s paranoia lamps, the obvious occurred to me. Why not learn to tie a slipknot

and make my insomniac tendencies productive for once? There was an spotlit instruction book right in front of me. I fished out the thick orange cord that Knot So Fast provided and opened the book.

“I love knots,” my mother had said, as she did something very complicated with a skipping rope, “This is a Bowline on a Bight. You can sit in it if you like and I’ll hang you from the washing line.” Mum had not just been a Girl Guide, she’d been in the Navy. “Got to know your knots,” she said. Her favorite was the clove hitch, “a simple knot, but so useful for carrying things.”

I did not love knots, but Mum had a point about their usefulness, I thought. I studied the slipknot diagram intently.

“So,” I said to myself, “the string comes in and curls over itself and then comes back through itself and then curls around and comes back through itself again.

“Or to put it another way,” I said as I held the string in both hands, “the string comes in and curls back under itself twice, although it’s not there yet to curl under and how can I curl it under itself when it’s not there?

“Or,” I said, out loud for extra clarity, “the string comes in and curls back on itself to make a loop,” I felt I was getting somewhere at last, “and then the end of the string goes through the loop and back out the loop and disappears because it’s gone in and out the same way and now I have lost my loop and must start again.

“I’m pretty sure,” I said, “that overing and undering in the right places are critical to this endeavor, but I can’t quite seem to over when I need to or under when I need to either. How is that difficult? I don’t understand how it is so difficult.”

An hour later, I had something lumpy with a bit of slippage in it if I pulled hard enough. It was not beautiful and only

barely functional but it would have to do. Worn out from the strain of thinking too hard, I keeled over on the bed in the children’s room. Then I got up again to shut the blinds and curtains. I did not need the Colditz spotlights making my efforts so mercilessly visible.

“What I really like doing,” I thought, “is picking knots apart.” I’d had a lot of practice at that.

At Christmas pudding time, I asked my husband, “Could you just put your finger there while I tie this cover on the basin?”

Naughty, Knotty Pegasus

Cameron Morfit

The news came to Frank Miskell at dawn, the letters swimmy on the screen of his phone. “Love is love,” the text said. Frank’s fishing lure eyebrows twitched as a flash of sweat announced itself under his mustache. “Tollners,” he said, tossing the phone on his bedspread, the side where Arlene once slept. The ceiling fan twirled, mocking him.

The sun was already beating at his window shade, a harbinger of strong sales for Miskell’s Emporium of Inflatables & Etcetera in Vilano Beach, that tiny spit of land north of St. Augustine that jutted out like an upside-down head of broccoli. His father, Arthur, had started the business, going electric with the first all-inflatable pink flamingo. “It’s the game-changer!” he’d said as his three sons snickered, their mother scolding them. The big, pink bird was the size of a Pontiac and ran point in the army of umbrellas, rafts, and beach bric-a-brac Arthur dutifully set up on the curb at dawn as he greeted insomniac customers with a cheerful hello.

This had been in 1956, and the game-changer was not, for Tollner Keepsakes, Curiosities & Crafts across A1A had quickly stocked the same item. Then Everett Tollner had sent out a puke-colored sea monster with industry-changing cup-holders. Although that item had had to be recalled when its shade structure turned out to double as a sail, carrying a few unsuspecting beachgoers halfway to Cuba, the cold war had begun. And now Patty Tollner, daughter of the rat Bart Tollner, granddaughter of the copycat Everett Tollner, had beguiled the innocence and sense out of Jimmy Miskell, son of Frank Miskell and grandson of the legend Arthur Miskell.

“A Tollner,” Frank said, “will NOT tie the knot with a Miskell.”

He smoothed the bedspread, imagining a lipstick outline around the departed Arlene, and massaged his lower lumbar. Dr. Scanlon said his back problems were due to his front problems, but in any case, they’d been a damn flimsy knot, tied by a drunken, three-fingered sailor with appalling followthrough. At least he would save Jimmy from the same fate.

The workday passed as any other, with the exception being that Frank called his brother, the middle one who taught gym and coached JV football at the high school.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” John said. “It’s an old feud.” Frank sighed. “Never mind.”

That night, on the way to a dinner he didn’t want to attend, he wheezed his way through St. Augustine’s holiday crowds, families up from Daytona or down from the Northeast for Night of Lights, cardboard-sign burnouts, a skinny old man in a blue bikini top playing the mandolin.

No surprise, his nemesis, the wannabe Wayne Newton, was already seated, the sleeves of his black, satin shirt rolled up, forearms bulging, chest hair poking out the V of his open buttons.

“Bart,” Frank said, pulling a chair back. “Franklin,” Bart said, which always pissed him off.

The restaurant roiled with commerce. Frank had sweated through his shirt. His brows twitched. His mustache quivered. “Arlene,” he said.

His ex-wife, turned out in a tight, low-cut sweater, gave a tight smile. “Frank.” She looked stunning, but Frank would not mention this.

“Franklin, I’m afraid the kids are late,” Bart said.

Arlene laughed. “Should we be surprised?” Her hair, chestnut, was up in a top knot, that word again, and she looked at least 10 years younger than Frank remembered her.

Dr. Scanlon said he was going to have to start eating sensibly, but dammit, he was going to have the cobbler.

A white apron appeared and explained everything to Frank like he had never been to a restaurant. He ordered a Diet Coke, and they made chitchat, the takeaway being that Patricia and Jimmy were now cohabitating, the way Bart and Arlene were. Frank tried to play it cool, the words on his menu a blur. The families Miskell and Tollner didn’t do anything together, even if they’d been co-plaintiffs in 1963, their petition to protect public beach access winning a ruling by eminent domain. Then they’d resumed antagonizing each other, the natural order of things.

One of Frank’s customers had been prop master of San Francisco’s gay parade; soon after, Frank, in the dead of night after three bourbons, hid a rearing Pegasus amongst the usual Tollner menagerie, its giant erection waving in the breeze between a bunny and an alligator. There it had remained for two days before a concerned churchgoer complained to City Hall.

Although he denied it, Bart had then stolen Frank’s pinwheels. “How much you do in sales this year, Franklin?” Bart said now. “Oh, I don’t think we should bore Arlene,” Frank said. “Ballpark,” Bart said. “Because I had a very good year.”

Frank imagined driving a sledgehammer into his nose, the resultant mess like one of Gallagher’s watermelons. “It’s premature,” Frank said. “It’s only December.”

Bart arched his eyebrows. “Holding out for a big finish?” He turned to his new squeeze. “Are we in the presence of a big finisher, Arlene?”

She smiled. “Let’s not go there, dear.”

The obstacle is the way, Frank reminded himself. Bart made him sharper. Bart also eased his guilt over having paid Leo to steal the Tollner company Jeep and leave it in Yulee.

The kids arrived, Jimmy in a Ramones T-shirt and droopy jeans with holes in the thighs, Patty in cutoff shorts and a turquoise tank top that was losing the battle to contain her breasts.

“Sup, Dad,” Jimmy said as he fell into his chair. Patty did likewise before nuzzling into the space between the boy’s neck and shoulder. Jimmy was a goner; Frank had to save him.

“Nice to see you, Mr. Miskell,” Patty said. Frank met her eyes. “Hello, Patty.”

The waiter reappeared and took drink orders, not carding Jimmy and Patty. They gushed about the impending arrival at The Amp of a band Frank pretended he’d heard of as he ate the bread he wasn’t supposed to eat. It’s an old feud.

“We would like your blessing in this marriage,” Jimmy said. Frank did a double take.

“In this union,” Patty said.

“Say it like we rehearsed it.”

“In this union,” Jimmy said.

Frank stopped chewing. He looked at Arlene for backup, but she offered only a prolonged “Awwwww” as the hairyarmed Bart pawed at the bangles around her right wrist. He oozed self- confidence. Frank oozed Nutter Butters. An awkward silence grew, Frank wanting to say: “Are you doing this because your mother did?” He wanted to say that up was now down, hot was now cold, and Arthur Miskell and Everett Tollner were rolling over in their graves.

There was satisfaction in imagining this later as he walked away with a Styrofoam box full of leftover chicken and a large dollop of mac and cheese, for he had saved room for

the cobbler, which was totally worth it. The sidewalks had cleared out and he replayed the events of the evening on the walk back to the car – a farty, old diesel Mercedes that had been his father’s and that, like the business itself, he couldn’t seem to get rid of.

“You’re an adult,” he’d finally said, surprising himself. “You’re both adults. It’s not for me to tell you what to do. Just tell me where to be, and when.”

“Oh!” Patty giggled. “We already did it!”

“Justice of the peace,” Jimmy added. “We eloped.”

“I’d been meaning to tell you,” Bart said helpfully.

“The knot,” Frank said, his voice trailing off.

His eyes were still adjusting to the fluorescence of the parking garage when something mewed, and he walked toward the source of the noise, an undernourished calico. Either that or an equally skinny, dirty-white cat huddled up against the concrete wall. Then a third one, the color of a sunset with white striping. And a fourth, this one just a kitten with the same markings.

“Heyyyyy,” he said, as if reading bedtime books to Jimmy. He looked over his shoulder, turned back to the strays. “You guys hungry?” He stepped forward; they stiffened and backed up. “No, it’s OK! Look!” He placed the container on the ground, knees creaking, and pried open the top. They eyed him warily. His brother Leo, the youngest, was a stray. Last time he’d come around, sunburned and strung out and drinking a beer on Frank’s front porch, his dirty bare feet were a welter of calluses and scabs and he’d been wearing a medical bracelet.

In the bright garage, Frank backed up, baby steps, until the cats relaxed and gathered around the meal, little mouths smacking, and he smiled for the first time he could

remember. He knew that he would return the next night, and the night after that, and with the wet stuff, the good stuff, not kibble. No one needs reminding they’re a stray. Their hunger would not fail him, their devotion would not fray; these ties, this knot, would bind.

Lost Brian Thrasher

I like to tie a string around my finger when I need to turn the stove to low —else my bone broth overboils— or I need to add skim milk to my list, despite the list sitting idly just beyond the kitchenette. But now, when I need it most, I can’t recall where that old spool lies.

If I ever find it in this quagmire, I’ll tie a string around my finger and never forget again.

Recollection

Brian Thrasher

Here hangs my Sword of Damocles! Please, don’t touch—it’s there for a reason. I collect knickknacks and bric-a-brac like this. But if you keep your distance, your cheeseparing fingers in your pockets, I’ll let you gaze upon all the treasures my backroom keeps.

Watch your head and don’t fear the bouillabaisse before you: The colors run, but a keen eye can spy where true gold gleams. This is my Ship of Theseus—like new condition!— beached in this bottle.

Splendid, yes?

I was just remarking to the auctioneer: Friends walk into your life and run out of it. Lipstick-stained ties wash out in a week. But relics are history distilled, preserved, incapable of change. Smell it if you’re a doubting Thomas; In this sanctum, even the dust has dust.

I can hold the past in my palm and display it on my highest shelf!

And speaking of, have you looked upon my prized possession? This—this!—is my Gordian Knot. I spend each night with white gloves and gentle tugs, trying to untie it.

All these years and still unsolved, but that’s high-quality workmanship for you! I know there’s an easier way, that with a single stroke I could sever it. But it’s mint, immaculate!

Besides, I’ve only one heirloom sharp enough, and it already hangs where it does for a reason.

shuffling the deck

Stephanie E. Glass

as i shuffle tarot cards / shadows of a black cat / run over my shoes. / sitting on your rusty tailgate / i pull the world1 from the deck / and set the world aside to / watch water droplets / glimmering / like sequins on your denim jeans

some nights, watching the sequins / shine is all i have / others I don’t have even that

i start to talk about god / in your mother’s house / and watch your face shut / watch your eyes lock / feel my throat close around / what i do not say. / i want to hold up a mirror / and show you your father’s face / but i do not want to add to your pain / so i let you add to mine

sitting at your mother’s table / i do not know what you need / and you will not tell me. / I read / your face: if you were what i wanted, / you would know / without a word. i almost want / to say / that’s not how this works / love is understanding and / understanding is work / but i’ve said it before and / i’m tired / of pretending / that this is love.

but when we talk about god, / or rather the absence of god, / alone in your inherited truck, / me pulling the hanged man2 and shuffling the deck / in your barely-used passenger seat, / you in the broken-down drivers seat, / a pillow shoved under one asscheek / to save your broken back / there / there / we’re on point.

there / railroad earth / sings about being in tune.

through a spiderwebbed wind / shield I see sleeping nests / of yesterday’s birds awaken / and / flame across the sky / i burn the living / and burn your memory / but we flare up like a tickle / in the back of my throat / god we’re all on fire with something / aren’t we?

like a show on my iris / your games of hide and seek play out / i watch you move / northbound / then west / but you always stop at the wall / of your fear.

the postcard on your mother’s fridge contains / a poem and your name you love / her and so you / write to her / i love you and so i write to you / you write back once / but not more / i always / want more / you do not have that to give / at least not to me

watch me stand witness like a widow: / i am holding out my empty hands. / understand this / they deserve to be filled

i slip off the tailgate and shuffle / the deck / i pull the world / and press it to my chest / with both hands

1 end of a life cycle / beginning a new one

2 sacrifice / surrender / suspension in time

The Bitterroot Wildflower

Grace Schwenk

“Have you ever seen a bitterroot wildflower?” I ask my mom, as we drive down West Broadway on our way to the airport.

“I saw one once when I was a little girl,” she said with her eyes still on the road, “in sagebrush near Darby when we were camping.” Her lips fall back to silent as she says this. I can tell she is nervous. I’m nervous. We are on our way to pick up my older sister, Rowan, from the airport. Her plane gets in at eleven.

In hopes to escape the silent car, I pick up where I left off in my book about Montana wildflowers.

The Latin name for the bitterroot wildflower is Lewisia rediviva. The first half of the name comes from Merriweather Lewis, who takes credit for discovering the flower. However, the Flathead Indian tribe used the root of the flower for food and trade centuries before Lewis and Clark took their expedition.

I roll my eyes at Merriweather Lewis. I’m related to a fraud. It was a sunny afternoon when my grandmother sat Rowan and I down at her kitchen table and told us we were related to the great Merriweather Lewis. He was our great, great, great, great grandfather. Or was it uncle? I can’t remember. What I do remember is feeling a sense of pride surge through me as my grandmother told me this. Six-year-old me believed she was somehow greater than she was five minutes before because she was related to Merriweather Lewis.

“I’m related to Merriweather Lewis,” I would say, every time we talked about Lewis and Clark in school, “he’s my great, great, great, great grandfather.” The last word was often interchanged with uncle. I felt so much pride in my great grandfather, or uncle, when I was younger. Now I just feel

shame as I read about how he took credit for what he didn’t really do.

“Do you think Rowan got the cards I sent her?” I ask my mom, slicing the heavy silence once again. I sent Rowan a card every day while she was at rehab in Oregon. Each card had a quote from one of my favorite writers and a picture of her dog Goose.

“I’m sure she did,” my mom says, “I sent her a few packages that she thanked me for on the phone when she got the chance to call home.” My mom still didn’t take her eyes off the road. I wonder what she is thinking. I want to tell her that it’s not her fault. She is a good mom. There were places where she could have been better, of course, but she’s human. No parent is perfect.

Montanans voted to have the bitterroot wildflower represent them as the Montana state flower in 1895. They chose the bitterroot wildflower over thirty different types of flowers they were given to vote on.

The sound of the blinker signaling my mom waiting to turn the car into the airport brings me back. I shrug my shoulders, feeling the sweat pooling beneath my armpits. It’s a good thing I remembered to put on deodorant today. I always sweat when I get nervous.

We pull in front of the airport and my mom parks the car in the pick-up waiting zone. Looking out my window, I see people emerging from the revolving doors, eyes searching for a familiar car. There are lots of hugs, laughs, and smiles. What will Rowan be like when she emerges from those doors?

“Rowan just texted me,” my mom says, staring down at her phone, “her plane landed late so she will be out in thirty minutes.”

The flower blooms from May to June. It grows low to the

ground in high valleys and low-lying mountainsides.

Rowan had her highs and lows before she had her lowest low. Growing up, we had our highs and lows as sisters as well. She was the sister who wanted to climb trees, wrestle, and play the Nintendo. I was the sister who wanted to play horses, barbies and dress up. We often compromised with each other. We would play horses for twenty minutes and then play Nintendo for twenty minutes.

We grew apart as we reached high school. Fighting more than we got along. She was two grades ahead of me at Big Sky High School in Missoula. I went to school just outside of Missoula in the small town of Florence. She was funny, extroverted, and athletic. I was shy, quiet, and studious. Our differences melted away when she moved out for college. She got a college scholarship to play soccer at a community college in Sheridan, Wyoming. I was excited for her. It seemed like her life was putting her on a great path. I was even more excited to take over her room.

Growing best in soil that is dry, the flower can often be found near shale or gravel that is loose.

“There she is!” my mom said, sounding excited for the first time all day. I look up to see Rowan walking out of the revolving doors. Her curly hair is tied up in a bun, her favorite tree chacos on her feet, and a big smile is plastered on her face. She waves excitedly at our car. I jump out of the car and run over to her.

“Thank you for all the letters,” she says, as I wrap her up in a hug, “they were just what I needed.” I grab her bags and place it in the trunk of the car while my mom steps in line for her hug. I let Rowan have the front seat, secretly feeling pleased with myself for giving it up without a fight.

“It’s so good to see you guys,” Rowan says, as she buckles

up and shuts the passenger side door. My mom wipes a few escaped tears from her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Rowan, I told myself not to do this. I don’t want to stress you out,” our mom says.

Rowan takes her hand and places it on my mom’s shoulder. I can’t believe how good she looks. My mom accompanied Rowan on her way to rehab. When I dropped them off, Rowan looked unrecognizable to the sister I grew up with. She was thin and pale. She had dark bags under her eyes from the sleepless nights spent drinking alone. Her curly hair was frizzy with flyaways. Her eyes were sad, lost, and searching. This Rowan looked healthy. The bags were gone. Her curls were perfect ringlets. Her eyes looked happy and clear.

The flower is clear-cut, rugged, and distinct. It survives any and all conditions. Even in times of drought, when it appears perished and parched, it can suddenly burst back to begin a second life. That is where the second half of the Latin name Lewisia rediviva comes from. It means renewed.

“I appreciate that,” Rowan said, tears welling up in her eyes now, “but I’m okay now. You guys don’t have to be careful around me. I want to be open with you guys about my journey. I’m so excited to share what I learned with you guys.”

The bitterroot wildflower is rare. To catch a glimpse of its darling pink petals, is a sacred occasion.

Rowan reached around and grabbed the book out of my hands. She wasn’t one to remain in the sappy waters for long. She began to read the page about the bitterroot wildflower out loud in a British accent despite my protests to give it back. She stopped when she got to the part about where the second half of the Latin name came from.

“Lewisia rediviva, have you ever seen one?” she asks me.

I stare at this new version of my sister. Sitting there in the passenger seat, ready to begin her second life.

“I believe I have seen a bitterroot wildflower,” I say.

Knotted and Tangled

Sheila Robertson

A christening gown

A pink prom formal

My wedding dress

Stories in fabric

Riffling out over lifetimes

I still hear the rattle

Of her Singer

Stitching back-to-school clothes

Mending basting patching

Sewing my yellow bedspread

The snick of scissors

The whirr of bobbins

The hiss of her iron

Until years betrayed

Dim eyes and arthritic hands

Today a threadbare baby blanket

Comforts her

She doesn’t remember

Quilting it

To welcome me

Knotted fingers and tangled memories

Pluck and fret at the fray

Of the binding

As I watch life’s stitches

Coming undone

Hold to the Now

Sheila Robertson

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Carl Pandolfi, from James Joyce’s Ulysses

Hold until your fingers cramp your eyes feel like sandpaper and the moon becomes a place to hitch your dreams. The present is a looking glass where silver tarnishes. It is a camera where pictures of children making faces in mirrors are captured then disappear into tattered albums. Photographs of birthday parties that count down years, increasing in numbers of candles and silly hats. Images of childhood friends who no longer exist.

When the future becomes the now will it still find you searching for news? The news already old and you wondering what life would have been if you had chosen to commute to work through jazz dives or aboard cruise ships? When you pull on the same distressed jeans you wore in high school, do you remember the road trip you took in a hot-waxed Chevy convertible? The smell of warm asphalt, mustardy hot dogs,

the wind in your face and the impossibility of the milky way spanning horizons.

The possible the possibilities Of flying into the twilight. Getting lost in the pitch and timbre of a language you have never heard. Wandering streets named Djidelli and Safi and Xuan. The smell of garam masala and nigella. Taste of mangosteen. Feel of humid air, heavy with magnolia blossoms. And when these electrifying moments are woven and knotted into the magic carpet of memory let go and seize another present. Hold to the now gently, then set it free. Turn and embrace a future scaling the curve of the moon.

Bound for Glory

Jonah Svihus

Bobby’s in the mirror. Cheeks fold beyond the lines where a smile should be. He pokes at them like a baker checking dough, looking for something resembling his father and only seeing himself. The examination continues down his body. His button-up shirt clings to his chest, and the sleeves end above his wrists. His upper arms, polyester sausages. His breasts pull the fabric around the middle buttons. He sees his skin like two slitted eyes set sideways. His orange nipples show through thin polyester. He has no blazer for the day’s occasion.

Bobby’s grandmother, Nan, opens the door to the guest room. Bobby sucks in his stomach. Her dress moves like a shadow across the room. Her hair’s fixed in a bun. She studies the child like a specimen.

You need a tie, she says and sweeps past Bobby into the closet, heels clicking hard on the worn wooden floor. He looks at the button that’s supposed to fasten across his throat. He grabs both sides of the collar and squeezes them together. His neck spills over like a seine net filled with smooth, unwanted bounty. Eels, carp, a frog-skinned leviathan. His face turns red. Nan returns holding a black tie like a dead rat—by the tail, far from her body.

Let me do it, she says. She gets herself behind Bobby. He looks to the ceiling to see the underside of her sagging chin, textured like goose flesh. The collar closes tight. Look ahead, she says, sending the tie under and around and through a loop until there’s something resembling a knot. It’s an ugly, lumpy thing.

Close enough, she says.

From the passenger seat, Bobby watches the town roll by. Red, white, and blue bunting hangs off of awnings. Flags poorly glued to wooden skewers poke out of clay pots. A mother pushes an empty stroller across a lawn towards a parade scheduled to roll down Main in a stupor.

Further on Bobby sees the marquee at the front of the church. He reads his father’s name but looks away before he can decipher the rest. Nan pulls into the parking lot and cuts the engine in a handicap spot. She leans over the center console, brushes Bobby’s leg aside, and grabs her purse. Her hand plunges, past the wallet filled with receipts, the thin unbalanced checkbook, the pairs of heavily magnified readers, to grab a clasped box of rouge like a claw dredging the shallows of a poor sea. Looking in the sun visor mirror, she dabs a sponge onto her cheeks.

Everything’s going to be okay, she says. You know that, right? Bobby nods. Looks out the window at rusty sedans. There are pickup trucks with mud caked onto wheel wells, creeping up the side panels like a disease eating the faded paint. You’re the man of the house now, she says. The car smells like dead roses.

In the pews, Bobby looks at the crucifix. Red plaster smoothed onto the slit where the spear slid between Jesus’s ribs. He eyes it, telling himself that life is nothing compared to the suffering of Christ. The Priest calls all to rise.

Bobby stands and feels the blood drain from his head. He grabs at the tie and focuses on the metal nails in the plaster palms. The Priest’s voice drones at a constant level, a frictionless stream of nasal baritone washing over. A firework in the distance goes off. Still the Priest drones. His flock does the call and response. There are dirges sung with

the accompaniment of a woman on piano, her limp hands tapping the keys daintily. Amens fall between stretches of ancient mutterings, the sullen conclusion to anything said. Plaster Jesus forever suffers on the hot cross.

Whispers, a giggle, a cough, all of it echoes in the high ceilings that reach to stained glass, practically sweating. Bobby looks behind him and sees his cousins, the brood of his father’s brother. He turns back to face the Priest and Jesus. Comes a tap on his shoulder.

How’d he do it?

Didja see him?

When’s mommy’s service?

Nan strikes. Open palm on back of head. Beaver tail on warm water. The crucifix watches. The Priest pauses. Bobby avoids looking anywhere else but at Jesus. The outline of the figure, pained, wobbles. Nan’s hand caresses Bobby’s back in circles. There are more songs. Bobby rises when told. He makes the sign of the cross. He sits when told. For the eucharist, he crosses his arms and enters the aisle. He can feel the sweat in the crook of his elbow, the lubricating effect on his armpits. His black pants chafe with every step. Down the aisle, before the Priest, he receives the blessing.

May the Lord watch you.

Smoked tri-tip soaking in its juices under tin foil. A sheet cake with a layer of icing uncracked, untouched. Roasted potatoes with parsley flakes sprinkled over the top on baking trays. Coffee and meat perfume the room.

Bobby, Nan, and the Priest sit at a folding table in the corner of the parish hall. The boy tugs at the tie on his neck, trying to get a finger between the knot.

Quit that, Nan says. It’ll be off soon enough. Bobby resorts

to picking at the thin plastic covering on the table, like a vulture’s beak gnawing on some supple skin.

One by one hushed condolences are given to Nan. When the aunts, the family friends, the distant kin look at Bobby, they can’t bear to say anything. The women grab his restless hands, lips holding back guttural hurt. The men nod at Bobby, and he nods back. Then, like a changing tide, the mourners flow out the door into the hot sun.

See, Nan says. They didn’t eat the food. Such a waste.

The priest takes a sip of coffee, sets the paper cup in his lap, and looks into his murky, jet reflection.

It’s the thought that counts, he says. Will the men take it?

The men?

The homeless—you still let them sleep here?

You mean to donate what was donated to you?

Yes, she says, looking through the walls to another place far away.

You’re too kind.

Nan inspects the last few in the parish hall. Hanger-ons. Faces she only sees on Sundays. The kin that would come have come and gone.

They didn’t eat because they’re ashamed, Nan says.

They came, didn’t they, the Priest says.

They might as well not have.

The Priest drains the coffee into his mouth, swallows, and sighs.

The bereavement council will clean this up, he says. He turns to Bobby, takes the boy’s hand in his. God is with you, he says. He leaves. A firecracker splits the warm air outside. Bobby winces.

In bed that night Bobby watches the ceiling fan spin. He wears a XXL t-shirt from a charity 5K run he walked entirely. He relaxes, feeling the cool air tickle the peach fuzz on his arms and shins. He reaches idly for his neck to loosen the knot of a tie that’s been long cast off. A few locks of hair from his bangs bob up and down in the breeze like dark willows on the banks of a troubled stream. A blue light flashes, casting the ceiling in indigo. A burst of red comes through followed by great booms. The thunder of fireworks bounces in Bobby’s stomach. He sits up and parts the curtains hanging in the window. Among the smoke blowing away into space, light blossoms and splits the darkness into hundreds of shooting stars that die as they fall. The sonic response to the light’s call shakes the glass before Bobby’s face.

A crack, a shattering of something inside the house. Bobby looks to the door. He rises, opens it, and walks down the hall, reds and blues from the night painted onto the wood-paneled wall.

In the living room, red brick on Persian rug. Window shattered. Beyond the broken pane, outside, a lawn, a street, an American flag snapping and snarling in the wind like a dog on a chain.

Bobby walks towards the brick. Shards of glass shimmer in red, then blue, before fading into invisible, sharp nothings.

Murderer. The note is affixed to the brick by a loosely tied string.

Get back, Nan says, appearing from the hall behind Bobby. She reaches for the phone hanging on the wall, hands shaking, missing the keys to dial 9-1-1.

Bobby stares past the hole in the window, looking for something in the shadows, only to see nothing in a rocket’s red glare. Nan looks at the child, the son of her son cast in red all over. He is a knot forever severed from the things he once

held together. He reaches for his neck but only finds sweating flesh.

Blood Dinner

Logan Randall

At inconsistent intervals, we meet for dinner and drinks, just the four of us.

A sibling is a strange thing, like a funhouse mirror where you can see yourself but not quite as you are. I overhear a video of my older sister talking and mistake her voice for mine. It’s not that we look the same, we don’t, but our jaws mimic one anothers and written inside the movement of our speech is the other. Facial recognition can’t tell the difference between my bearded, minimally groomed brother and myself and sorts our photos wrong, the structure of our faces similar enough to stump a computer. My youngest brother sometimes becomes so intense when he talks about something he read that I get a shock and marvel at what it is like to have a conversation with my own private passion, the weaving of meaning into words.

We call these dinners “Blood Dinner”. My sister organizes them, makes all the requisite reservations, because she is the oldest and some stereotypes are right. The conversation is strange because after 30 some odd years, no one ever has to wonder if they have been misunderstood.

We all speak the same shared language. No one over explains themself, they don’t need to. No one ever asks, do you get what I’m trying to say?

I am intelligent, I think, but all my siblings are far more intelligent than I am, to varying degrees.

“Everything is salad,” says the youngest. He is our baby brother, twenty four and married and people’s boss, sipping mezcal on a rock. Still a baby, though. “Have I told you this? My theory?” We spend an hour discussing this, the metaphor

only breaking down in reference to the Holy Trinity. If the Father is the salad maker, the Son is the bowl, and the Spirit are the tongs, it all works. But they must be also woven together physically, he says, three persons one essence, and here we find ourselves stumped. We talk about hadrons, baryons, atoms, all salad, struggle with quarks and then decide, yes, also salad.

What is salad? It’s an amalgamation of things. “Hair and thoughts,” says my sister. “I’m just hair and thoughts. I’m salad, he’s right.” This makes me laugh, that she would think of hair first. Hers is dark and chestnut and she cares more about lots of other things, most other things. I think this would be a fittingly strange epitaph for her, Hair and Thoughts. Our favorite Salad. She reaches across me to spear a Castelvetrano olive from the dish and I can smell her hairspray, the same Paul Mitchell she’s been using since childhood.

Salad also breaks “The Cubic Rule of Food Identification”, notes the other brother, in which a food is identified by the location of the starch based on the planes of a cube. According to this rule, nigiri is an example of toast, hot dogs are a type of taco, and pigs in a blanket fall into the sushi category and it makes perfect sense to all of us, nodding along to the mathematical sense of it. “Geez,” I say. “Anything can be math, can’t it?”

“Everything is math,” older/younger brother responds, traces of beer foam in his mustache. All four of us can be summarized by what we believe everything to be. She never declares hers but I think that to our oldest sister, it’s all relationship. For me, everything is poetry. I told you about the math. And for the baby, it’s all theology, every last drop (though maybe that and salad). I feel as if we are four pillars,

holding up a ceiling, but as if my pillar is slightly shorter and I can’t ever quite reach and so they carry the weight without me. This creates a grade in my direction and all the goodness they uphold rolls toward me. It is quite lucky, I think.

At some point in the night, it dawns on me that this is my daughter’s extended family. How can that be so? All my life, there they have been. Not an extension of a thing, but the thing itself. I’ve never felt more separate from my child, thinking that her life could be something other than mine. That separateness is terrifying and electrifying. She might someday choose a family and I will be but an extension of it. How horrible. How glorious. How strange.

At the table, we talk about figs. The older/younger brother says that a fig is really just a dead wasp, which I can tell is an oversimplification of a thing. I am right, it is not the whole truth. Which does not mean, though, that it is not the truth. “The wasp dies pollinating the fig blossom and the structure of the fig forms around its body, where it eventually liquifies.”

“So wait,” I ask. “Am I eating a wasp when I eat a fig? Is the wasp inside the fig?”

“No. But the essence of the wasp exists in the fig.”

He has said this to me before. We have talked about this before. That is true for a lot of our conversations, thirty some odd years of us repeating ourselves and repeating ourselves and repeating ourselves and, every now and again, really hearing each other.

My sister teaches the boys the nonsense language she and I grew up speaking in front of them, keeping nothing of substance from them but hoping it seemed as if our secrets were worth finding out. She sounds ridiculous and fluent, ridiculously fluent, and asks me to translate. I translate. The passage of this information is funny, really, and we are laughing.

“Ubit subeems cubomplubex bubut wubone dubay, ubit jubust clubicks uband thuben yubou gubet ubit,” she says. It seems complex but one day, it just clicks and then you get it. I don’t remember learning this language with my sister, I only remember speaking it with her. Maybe this is the mystery of older siblings: the relationship, for the younger party, has no genesis. It just is. And somehow, one day, you just click, and then you get it.

Two days later, they will attend my first reading. They will come up in the writing, they have to. If I talk about my life, they have to come up. They will all cry, all their spouses rubbing all their crybaby backs. That is a quality we all share. The brother with the figs will hug me, will tell me I’m talented, will tell me he didn’t realize how talented I was. I don’t share my work often, they have never heard it read aloud from my mouth. He will cry again telling me all this, I will cry a little too. I will think, how can you love someone so much, hold them so close, and do this so rarely, this sharing of pride and tears?

In the fall of 2024, all four of us are in school, accruing debt and information. We can’t seem to get enough, gluttons for the classroom, we consume and consume and consume and I’m not sure even one of us has a plan outside a PhD, learning in no particular direction but parallel, certainly. None of us have overlap in our education, all branching from the trunk in completely different directions. My parents told us all that education was important and we listened, apparently. Each of us is married to someone older, someone who works hard at a job that earns a living, with concrete titles like “nurse” or “business owner”, “research scientist” or “software engineer”. And the four of us: student, student, student, student.

We are so different and exactly the same, really. I tell them at dinner as we debate the saladidic nature of humans and the universe and subatomic particles that I struggle to make friends because I cannot discuss this with just anyone. Someone mentions their spouse, says they would discuss it. And I laugh—did we all go out and pair off with more palatable versions of ourselves?

People constantly ask my mom what she did to raise kids who still like their parents and each other. I don’t know if there is a secret. My mom and dad loved us so much it was embarrassing, loved us so much they stained us with it, and they thought the best of all of us. How could we not, in turn, think the best of each other? Always I am angry that I can’t move away to somewhere nearer the sea. My family has entrapped me here; who would move away from this?

It’s strange, four individuals with this small tether of lineage, like blood red thread at the seams of something bright white. We are different, each of us, yes, but somehow the same.

The essence of the wasp exists in the fig.

Tree

Syd Thompson

my family tree runs down from gener ations down to me. I exist to carry on my father’s legacy. my br others do not feel th e same as my sister a nd me. w e were m ade for mothering as HCG machines. we were raised to give and give and never to receive. and if our husbands knock us down to lie back down and bleed.

I exist to plea sure every m an that come s to me. so i f I serve him well I’ll carr y on his fa mily tree. g od looks do wn with pit y to his dea rest daught er Daphne. p regnant belly t ied in kNOts wi th labrous melanch oly. my family tree ru ns down from generations down to me. when peneus wi ll not save me, cast your wreaths unto my feet.

B.A. Van Sise

STATION MIAMI BEACH

An hour before pulling into port they call sweepers, sweepers, man your brooms and grooming the deck, boys with pimples rub vomit off the boat, until they’re to dump all garbage clear of the fantail, which everyone calls a float test as broken pans and hooks and knobs are lobbed like a sacrifice to Poseidon— to pass the test, it need only float.

Nothing floats. The bottom is bedded with unfloating flotsam, thrown in by mild men who never complained and never explained. Then, a call comes over: a man has jumped from the bridge. He meant the rent to clear and his wife to stay.

The boys put away their brooms in a tiny room with no room to spare, climb over each other, to see, at last, and find that yes, he floats. He’s passed.

Do Not Lift More Than 10 lbs

Krys Warstillo

They find it nestled in the folds of my brain. A knot of cells, quiet and persistent as family secrets. The surgeon maps coordinates around the mass, charting a path through delicate tissue that holds both danger and truth.

Recovery: four weeks of forced stillness, no screens, no books, no escape into the usual distractions. I fight, claw at the quiet, my body thrashing against the absence of motion until it betrays me, landing me in the ER before I surrender.

Just me and my mother, watching over my sleep for the first time since childhood. Before midnight taxis, before she learned to speak in silences. Twenty years of distance dissolve in the space between my bed and her chair.

“I was sixteen,” she says finally, her words unwinding like a rope too long coiled tight. The story: a taxi driver paid to keep vigil, a coyote’s borrowed papers, an uncle who fled first and sent for the others, one by one, each crossing a knot tied in their shared history.

I watch her in the low light, she slowly massages rheumatic hands, her frame smaller than memory allows. I used to fear her. Her sharp voice,

the weight of her expectations. Now I see only the gravity of her presence, steady and certain, holding me here.

Strange how this mass, pressing against my memory, loosens hers.

In recovery’s quiet, I learn to read her pauses, how she weaves between languages, past and present, pride and regret.

“For the life we had...” she starts, then stops. Some stories, I realize, resist unraveling. Like thread snagging on something unseen. The brother saved by a dairy farmer’s kindness, the sister who married her way to Texas, the mother who gathered her children and ran. Not every catch in the line needs to be untangled. Some just need to be survived.

In the stillness of healing, I understand: truth needs a body forced to rest, a mind too tired to run. And in this quiet, with nowhere to look but at each other, we sit together in the knots we cannot untie.

Valse des Cygnes

Ellie Snyder

The swans have picked their places In the dressing rooms. There they will stay Through run of show, any swapping Potential for loss of balance, fallen turns. They pencil on the thick lore of the eye, Blood lips and the circlet of white Feathers cradling each low coiled knot. Bobby pins, lash glue, tiger balm, toe tape

Scatter under the oven of bulbs ringing

Each mirror, pointe shoe ribbon trails Over counter’s edge like pale vine. The swans have been called to the stage For barre then notes. They have until Adagio to find their legs. In the dressing rooms They turn white. They cross their wrists, Leaning away from Odette’s pathetic love.

Long Distance

Mary Ellen McMurtrie

Telephone wires knot like a giant cat’s cradle all over this big old country. One hooks to a box by my back door and loops though the linden tree to the alley, wanders across State Street, down Fairview and up the hill till it can ride the freeway to open desert air. Except for a dip across the Snake River, it doesn’t take much of a bend all the way to Wyoming, And that flat prairie can let a length of wire blow full tilt forever to slice the Continental Divide. It’s a pull up the Rockies, but a smooth glide going down. Ties in somewhere in Oklahoma before it angles south to Texas and finds you there in Dallas sobbing so hard I can barely figure out he is ignoring you and making you ashamed of yourself in a way I never wanted a daughter of mine to know. How long between your sob and what I hear? Maybe generations because I have forgotten what it’s like to hang your star to the heart of a man who ends up having no soul and you forgetting you had one without him. I wonder if that long loopy line bulges just ahead of your words as they race latitudes of states I need a map to name. And does it ripple the perch of a crow watching each eighteen-wheeler crest the horizon?

Noah’s Wife

Mary Ellen McMurtrie

And the constant pounding and sawing— I’m quite sure he’s crazy.

Have you seen the size of the ship? How does he think it will ever be finished? Much less float. But he says God has commanded it. So pound and measure he will. In the meantime, I cook and search. He is thinking about camels and elephants.

Does he consider the mantis? How we will have to keep male and female separateher tendency to chew his head much stronger than his idea of two by two. And the honeybees. Never just two. Does he even think about the wren? The nematode?

Will soggy cells have to knot together and drag themselves out of the mud again? I can’t help but look for two ladybugs. Can ants live underwater intricate in their tunnels until the sun reaches them again? Will the spider build a web city in the top of trees? And the mice. What about the mice? It has been hard to convince the scorpions. And the mud when the flood recedes— Imagine the mess that will be. I know now why the she-mantis preys.

Cold Morning at the Inn

Mary Ellen McMurtrie

I want to offer this stick of stove wood to the fire and a place for you to sit. Just for a moment here by the warmth. Tell me of your journey before and where it aims you next. I want to offer my listening, outside the doing. Lay your bundles and bags about you and sit. This preciousness you drag and carry, I’ll guard it while you sit.

Hands out to flames.

Light flickering your face. I want to offer my protection while you pause here by the stove. Even though you and I both know there is no fortress thick enough for safety. Together we can lean toward this knot of pine and hear in its spit and hiss the ancient moment of peace. A moment when two of us, gathered together, share with the world a small cup of awe.

Knots for Holding On to a Fish Out of Water

(A Golden Sestina)

Nate Jacob

“Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.”

- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, TS Eliot

Everything ocean flowed through her hair, flip-flops slapping the legs of her trousers, slapping the boardwalk. She’d fallen behind, saying that she heard the mermaids calling her—willing— down the beach. Stay with me I’d sing. I, too, can sing.

If she’d only stay with me, I’d sing until her teary eyes held me, her hair dripping sand down her nose, the beach going with her—on toes, in cuffed trousers— and the plan was to leave the mermaids, leave the crowd, leave them all behind.

Leave them deep in silent wake, far behind under cover of marine fog. Let them sing to wayward sea-lovers—these mermaids— let the cool mists freeze in their billowy hair. Gather shells if you must, in pocketed trousers, but don’t hold them to your ear. Not at this beach.

Fish scales drift and blow across this beach, eddy around the mesmerized—the left-behind— as deep as the sanded knees of their trousers. No beauty here to lure her in, but still they sing. Can they be so certain she will listen? Pull your hair tight across your ears! They lie, these mermaids!

But she grew up with dolls in the tub—her mermaids— whom she called up from the deep to her hopeful beach. She dressed like the ocean, knotted driftwood in her hair, swore to the tides she would leave us all behind for life underwater, for the chance—like them—to sing. What use then, legless in her dreams, of trousers?

Yet there she is, far behind in her wide-legged trousers, facing the surf, straining to hear the mermaids. When she was young, we would hold hands and sing. Now, she asks for rides daily to each different beach hoping for proof—a song—that she has not been left behind. It always ends in tears, in sand dripping from her hair.

She’ll never not sing nor fight wearing two-legged trousers. She never cleans seaweed from hair. And though the mermaids leave her back at every beach, she’s closer to leaving us behind.

Knots

1LT Adam Ryan

Together we sat, my Platoon and I, we 39. Passing the time, on our forward base

..If you could even call it that.

Desolate, unrelenting sun, shade unseen nor felt. A meager outpost in the middle of nothingness; little more than our dusty cots in the open air

And the encircling fortress of the twenty-five destroyed armored vehicles – evidence of the cause of our summons, and our purpose -

To advance ahead of all else and create safe-passageAnd a constant reminder of the consequences of failure.

And sand, so much sand – hot sand

Sand so fine that it lingered in the air, penetrating your senses

You can taste it.

We pass the time tying the knots we all learned, essential to the tasks of the combat engineer Square, Bowline, Figure-Eights; Gregories, Overhands and Ulis; Each with their own unique purpose, yet this time the same: To help pass the time.

We exist in a near-constant state of “River City”

The dreaded code for a Loss, and all communication with the outside world is immediately cut.

So the System can inform the next of kin.

Our books have been read, letters written, subjects discussed

At length.

And so, we sit Baking Tying knots.

“Lieutenant, Wake up!”

First, the stagnant filth I am coated in Coming to..

The position of the stars in the sky tells me we are in the in-between time, three or four

Then, senses sharpening, our eyes lock.

The runner from the command tent registers that I am awake, a mission:

“A bird went down by Kajaki, ready your men, we need you to lead the recovery.”

The Prusik tightens across my chest,

“…Kajaki is thirty miles away”

“Get moving then.”

Our well-practiced series of controlled chaos of preparation ensues

And without delay, the 39 are mounted for the journey

Knowing intimately what lies ahead

And we await final clearance for departure

Only to be stood down. This time…

So now, again, we sit.

Being cooked alive in the day’s heat, another day of River City. Tying knots.

And thinking of our 1, Called Home too soon.

-

Many years have passed. Constellations still tell me the time of night

And I have tied joyous knots since With my wife, on our wedding day, deeply in love. With my children, fishing in the streams nearby.

And the enduring Prusik on my chest has finally softened its hold

And my heart is full again, But I can still taste the sand.

King of Knots

Mara Bateman

My dad named for a tree & temperament likewise has tried a thousand times to teach me to tie a bowline knot.

In the slippery shade of willows Chacos sunk like shovels in the sand he twists the yellow tail: over under rabbit burrow & I imagine all the dads of history ancient dads with freckled hands tugging taut this trusty knot a legacy which ends with me in a hundred half-hitches.

And I remember lots of things: the smell of Coppertone creak of oars a mean upriver wind night swims. I remember the dangerous difference in the shape of snakes green heart leaves in sets of three feet downstream.

I remember the dazzle the nearness of fish rising roots & small white rocks & how to cut the wind but not this trusty knot.

I don’t want the mantle of dad-kings named for trees I want you here tying it.

Windsor Alan Minskoff

My father, long a bespoke dresser, asked me, his baby boy, an adventurer, not my far more accomplished older brother—Yale, Cal, Chicago, Columbia— to show him how. The family wit, I put on my best Brit, slowly guided him step by step: left side shorter, up, over, under, around and through, pull snugly to the collar, the tight triangle. He watched closely, in his navy wool window pane suit, his soft silver hair, eyes dusty blue smiled when he twice completed the task, looked at his handy work in the mirror, silk, muted gray black polka-dots perfectly tied.

Knots Landing

Alan Minskoff

The Western White Pine our state tree grew to 75 feet at the north edge of our yard, half a football field from the kitchen door. Twenty-seventeen, the storms pelted, punished, pounded ripped it from the sandy loam. It leaned sharply, pulled to the earth, home. Experts deemed it doomed. One tree preservationist asked, could you anchor it to your neighbor’s wall? Might shift slightly, stave off the chain saws? We felled it with spring’s awakening. The green needles, brown twigs and gray branches, ashen bark and brazen leaves spread, spilled sorrow over the gashed lawn. The wild uprooted stump remained, umbilical growth rings, memories membranes.

Obsequies

Naomi Trueman

when our time runs out, i’ll be belly up in dirt satiated on salt and stale bagel sandwiches tried to give away the words, pretend they weren’t mine

the mirror had tired of me, sun-lined skin and rather small teeth. i floss goodwill out in painstaking tangles and really, if i’d known how quick the cracks appear in bone

and how muscle wears itself away, i’d have pushed the limit twice as hard.

burnt up in soda ash and overwrought daydream tendencies, i’d rip out the roots and fill the holes

with missing sleep

Allie Hampton

“The Beautiful Math of Knitting” is what Sarah Wells, science and technology journalist for Popular Mechanics called the work of physicist, knot theorist, geometrist and avid knitter, Dr. Sabetta Matsumoto. Dr. Matsumoto currently investigates knot theory to determine how different types of stitches alter a knit fabric’s elasticity. Since basic knit stitches can be translated into 1’s and 0’s, they can be programmed. Dr. Matsumoto’s research could one day lead us to programmable knitting, which could create wearable electronics that mimic the natural environment. Imagine how water runs off of a leaf… with programmable knitting, it becomes possible to create fabric that reacts the same way. In theory, using fabric to mimic nature could inspire our relationship to fabric to become more natural. The frog that sits under a leaf to keep dry doesn’t take it for himself. He doesn’t own it.

I suppose my mother is in her most natural state when she is knitting. Home sounds like her two knitting needles tapping against each other. After my Great Aunt Nellie had a stroke and lost mobility in her hands, my mom said, “if I can’t knit, take me off of life support.” She said, “I don’t want to live like that.”

My mom taught me to knit at my Aunt Barb’s house in Arizona. I don’t remember if we had a reason for visiting. I just got on the train with my mom and my sister. When we got there, I said, “it’s hot in Arizona.” I don’t know what it was about Aunt Barb’s house that compelled my mom to teach

me to knit.

Aunt Barb gave me two blue metal knitting needles and one of those big oblong yarn balls. The yarn was soft, synthetic, acrylic purple. It was a shade of purple that looks like it’s made for children – it’s bright and plastic.

My mom cast on1 the stitches for me, so I could focus on knitting onwards. This is how it was for the first five years I knit, asking my mom to start and finish projects for me. My mom taught me to knit while we were both sitting on the guest bed, while my sister Abbey was knitting a blanket to donate to the cat shelter.

My mom held the knitting needles close to my face, slowly wrapping the yarn around the back needle. As she lifted the stitch onto the next needle, she said “out through the window… and off jumps Jack!” Lots of people learn to knit with stories like this. They never made sense to me.

My mom’s rough hands guiding mine, showing me the movement of the yarn. That made sense to me.

I said, “I feel like you’re just passing slip knots back and forth.”

“Yes, but you’re making new ones,” my mom said. “It’ll get longer, slowly.”

In a way, Dr. Matsumoto’s work appears revolutionary, but it shouldn’t. Knitting’s relationship to coding has existed for centuries: it is a simple binary of knits and purls. A knit stitch occurs when a loop faces away from the front of the work, while a purl stitch is the opposite: the loop appears in the front. At its most basic level, this is what Dr. Matsumoto is translating into 1’s and 0’s.

When my Oma or my mom or I read a knitting pattern, we are also coding: translating a language of code to an action.

All knitting patterns are code – and some go far beyond the 1’s and 0’s of knits and purls.

Throughout the two World Wars, some knitters took this coding even further, using knit projects to embed code about train movements in Belgium, or to send morse code messages in Germany. Women knit code into sweaters and scarves by adding intentional holes, strategically placing purl stitches, or changing colors. But even without wartime coding, programming, and machines, knitting has always been revolutionary. Our ability to change materials into string and use that string to create fabric kept us alive in early human history. We need fabric to be warm and to live. We need string to create advanced traps for animals. We’ve always been making it beautiful.

In a world where our relationship to fabric and its beauty is accelerated; where we buy, throw away, and buy more fabric and clothing, hand-making is revolutionary.

“I’m not buying that, I can make that at home,” is my mom’s response to a lot of daily life. Foaming hand soap, laundry detergent, Dawn Power Wash dish spray, and when I was growing up, American Girl Doll clothes.

While the dolls themselves are already over a hundred dollars, American Girl clothing and accessories make them even more expensive, especially if your daughters circle everything in the catalog every season, for every holiday, for every birthday. My mom kept every American Girl Doll box we ever got, the ones with the big white star on the maroon background, and reused them to wrap the doll clothes she made at home.

I always cherished this, I thought it was what made my mom really cool. That my sister and I got to match our dolls because my mom made us the same dresses. That our dolls got to look different from everyone else’s.

I don’t think my mom made us American Girl doll clothes in a direct act of protest against capitalism. My mom did it because she liked it. My mom sewed us clothes and fixed the holes in our jeans because she wanted to. My mom knits because she likes it.

It’s nice to think that utilizing Dr. Matsumoto’s research to make natural fabric could trickle down, and make our consumption more natural.

I doubt it’s possible. While mathematical knitting is knitting, it’s also math. Science. Tech. It’s being reported on in Popular Mechanics, with the sub-title that it could create the “Toughest Gear Ever.” Sarah Wells discusses that Dr. Matsumoto’s knitting equation could be used to create space suits that protect against any form of radiation. The roots of revolution, femininity, or joy in knitting cannot save it from someday being used to colonize Mars.

Even after I learned how to cast on and cast off, I still had to hand my projects to my mom every time I made a mistake. Her hand outstretched, saying “give it to me,” is a sight I’ve seen so many times, I can’t write it into one memory. She’s on my couch this Christmas, untangling knots in my yarn so I can make a sweater for my girlfriend. I’m sitting next to her in her bed, and she’s undoing my project to fix a mistake I made

6 rows ago. We’re in the living room at my Great Uncle’s and she’s picking up my dropped stitches.

As knitting and crocheting have been spiking in popularity, I have a really rotten feeling. A sense that this is mine. A sense of ownership. I want to say, “I learned this from my mom and it belongs to us.”

It’s a feeling that says, I love this so much. I don’t want to give this to you if you’re not going to understand that it is sacred. That it is also math and it is also science.

I experience a feeling like this often: a blip of a moment where a part of me believes that I love something more than anyone has or ever will. It is almost always toxic, and it is almost always untrue. There are hundreds of people who know more than I ever will. There are people who love to knit more than me, and who will continue to.

I have no right to take ownership and I don’t want to. But in my gut reaction, I want it to be mine. When people learn to knit who don’t respect its history, who don’t know that it is revolution… to me that is a personal betrayal.

I want to undo this feeling, rip out the stitches of any project that belongs only to me. Knitting is a gift, one that ties knots of us together, and one that I want to share.

I want to say, cherish this with me, and extend my hand the same way my mom does, silently, when I’ve told her I dropped a stitch.

1 Creating the first row of stitches on the knitting needles. There are many techniques, but my mom does the long-tail cast-on, which works on one needle with two hands. Casting on creates the foundational row to knit from.

Crane, Nicky. “Sustainable Stitching: How Ethical Yarn Choices Impact Our Planet.” Thread Collective, 26 February 2025, threadcollective.com.au/blogs/yarn

Gutierrez, Sandra G. “Spies once used knitting to send coded messages – and so can you.” Popular Science, 13 November 2020, www.popsci.com/story/diy/secret-code-messages-knitting

“Knitting, Codes, and Espionage Through the Ages.” Tim O’Neill Studios, 29 January 2024, timoneillstudios.com/knitting-codes-andespionage-through-the-ages

Wells, Sarah. “The Beautiful Math of Knitting—Yes, Knitting— Could Create the Toughest Gear Ever.” Popular Mechanics, 28 April 2021, www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/a36276147/ hidden-binary-of-knitting

“What is biomimicry?” Biomimicry Institute. biomimicry.org/ inspiration/what-is-biomimicry

Lanise Prater

To loc your hair is to give yourself the Room to fuse and let loose ends entangle. It is to bind and fortify. When loc’d, You commit yourself to security. To care and to twist. To be locked is to Come undone. To allow yourself to trust The process and embrace the many Phases it may come with. To find ease in Permanence because the upkeep will Always be worth it. A sustained romance Coddled by coils and moisturized ends, Bundled by large silk headscarves and leave-in Conditioner.

Love in Feral Lands

Faye Srala

Many hikers and rangers have scurried up trees with a moose behind them for encouragement, so when I approached the shore of Big Sand Lake, I scanned the water carefully. They usually stood belly deep in the shallows munching reeds from the lake bottom. During one backpack trip into this lake many years ago, four splashing moose woke us up in the morning. On that trip, wolf tracks overlaid my own on the hike out. My ex-husband and I loved it here, because of the wolf tracks. Our eighteen-year relationship thrived on hiking through summers and skiing through winters in the backcountry. Any imagined insult at our jobs earned a salute to our coworkers on our way out the company door. A month or two immersed in wild lands set us right, and restored our humility when the money ran low. We craved remote areas where we could have a lake to ourselves for a few days. Big Sand, nestled eight miles into the largest wilderness area in the lower forty-eight, and spanning a large swath of both Idaho and Montana, never disappointed. We didn’t see the wolves, nor hear them at night, but their canine imprint on top of my Vibram treads revealed their presence.

Lapping water against the shore echoed with the ghosts of my lost spontaneity from those long-ago idyllic days. Before mortgages, before maturity, before the tender whispers in bed grew too faint to hear, we trekked into Big Sand many times. I hadn’t been back for over a decade. Not since the divorce. A jay squawked above. The soil, eroded in spots, exposed evergreens’ intertwined roots. They overlapped and circled around each other, making it impossible to sort out the lineage of their limbs. Mike and I slept like those tree roots.

We bought matching sleeping bags with zippers on opposite sides to zip together for one large bag. During the night, our arms circled each other, and our legs locked in a coil, never wanting even a layer of fiberfill in between us.

I had hiked in from the Idaho side, and surveyed the feral land from the western shore where the trail first nuzzles the lake. My eyes followed the water’s edge to the north, knowing the trail continued to the far end of the lake and led to the ideal tent site on the sandy beach responsible for the lake’s name. Sand in the backcountry was a rare treat. Sleeping on sand was better than sleeping on grass, which was better than sleeping on hard packed earth. The sand gives way during the night and feels like being swaddled in a cradle. A perfect site to pitch a tent lies on the edge of the sand, nestled in the trees for shelter from the wind, but close enough to the shore for a view upon waking.

One night, after laying on the beach until drowsy from watching shooting stars unzip the dark, and after curled into each other in our sleeping bag, odd noises unlaced us. We looked out the tent door and saw a cow elk nudging our packs. We didn’t think she’d eat our freeze-dried pasta so we once again corkscrewed our arms and legs into the sleeping position. In the morning, I found a blue plastic Tupperware lid chewed flat. A salty snack had probably lured her to it. The lid traveled back to the car in a backpack pocket, and eventually found a home at the bottom of successive junk drawers in all the houses I’ve lived since. Every once in a while, the lid surfaces. Sometimes I push it out of the way to keep searching for whatever the current quest of the moment is. Other times I pick it up and examine the round plastic, small enough to fit within the palm of my hand. Indelibly imprinted bite marks invariably take me back to the night an

elk chomped contentedly on it under a Milky Way night light.

I knew continuing on behind the sandy tent site the trail rose quickly, and in a few more miles, there would be a weathered knotty pine sign nailed to a tree on top of Blodgett Pass. An arrow would point to the east with Montana stenciled under it. Likewise, an arrow pointing to the west would have Idaho stenciled under it. We huddled under a tarp there one summer. Thunder roiled around us as we reached the top of the pass. We built a cocoon for two the under trees, broke out the cookies, and watched the storm roll up the valley floor. The smell of ozone wafted around us from prancing lightning strikes.

Five miles beyond the sign, if I remembered the mileage correctly, the trail descended into a meadow and another good camp site sat close to Blodgett Creek. The year we camped there was my twenty-sixth birthday and the first time I spotted a bear in the woods. Mike and I left camp early. We barely got going when we heard something behind us and simultaneously turned in time to see a cinnamon bear rump run through the trees. Seven miles beyond the bear meadow is the trailhead in Hamilton, on the Montana side.

I started mentally retracing the trail: following the creek back through the bear meadow, up the pass to the lightning storm refuge, past the wood sign nailed to the tree, down the pass to the elk’s sandy beach, along the lake shore watching the apparitions of moose from years ago, and back to the spot where I stood and reminisced about a past life.

Mike and I quit the north Idaho jobs and moved again. This time to southeast Idaho because I had accepted a position with a government contractor. A bigger city welcomed us. This job paid well and an early retirement was a possibility, if I put my time in. The next time I quit, it could

be permanent. No more pleading for time off, no more job interviews, no more inventing excuses for why I had a few months off work here and there. It’s easier for a woman in this regard, one of the very few things that is easier for a woman. I could explain my absence from the workforce in many acceptable ways: we moved for my husband’s job and it took a while for me to land a new position, [my, his, our] [mother, father, cousin] was [sick, died] and I was the primary [caregiver, executor]. Poor Mike though, his potential employers looked at him askew like he wasn’t a real man because he took a month off to explore an alternative to the fiercely competitive struggle for mediocrity in a corporate swamp.

Our relationship survived lightning storms, wolves, and bears, but it couldn’t survive a plunge into the establishment. I had left my “roaming the country” phase behind and had started my “I want to make a lot of money” phase. Mike remained a teenager with graying hair. We fought. Mike’s new constriction left him grumpy. His grump made me miserable. We divorced when I was forty.

I started my hike out. My ageing skeleton argues with me every step now, and prevents me from carrying a full pack very far these days. I mostly only go on day hikes now. I passed the muddy part of the trail where the wolf tracks were those many years ago, and silently offered an appeal to whatever deity was listening to allow the wild creatures to continue to live out their lives as nature intended.

A couple months later, Mike gazed at me from the internet. The crinkles around his blue eyes were deeper now, and his smile held a sagacity missing in his younger days. His obituary said he hiked up until nearly his last day. I thought about how we once slept wiggled into pretzel positions, arms

and legs knotted together, and all the untamed forests we slept in. I always hoped he was happy, and secretly wished a chance encounter might give us a bit of time to catch up. He had died at the end of July, perhaps the same day I reflected on our time together while listening the water purr along the shore of Big Sand Lake. I don’t know the exact day I stood on the water’s edge and roamed through the thick underbrush of my memories. I could check my exercise app, but I prefer to believe the days match and don’t want the magic ruined.

I never stopped loving him, but sometimes love breathes and heaves into something unrecognizable, something overbearing—into a job you want to run away from, into a constricting cluster of forest mat decaying in an air starved environment.

I once thought I’d be married to him forever, never thinking the inevitable change that comes with life wouldn’t complement each other. When we divorced, I never thought his grasp would continue to tether my heart.

I’ll Call Him Morgan Lassiter

Heidi Naylor

which is close, but not his real name which there’s little reason to protect, since he died at age 14 at a railroad crossing in faraway rural Idaho where they let you drive so young while I was home in Pittsburgh, also 14 and missing every day the way he’d tossed a football to me an hour or more In the dusty white hallway of the church we the members were building which is where trembly Brother Flaherty did the electrical, which to all of us felt heroic since he was known for being occasionally on the sauce and not always capable; still, he showed up every evening with knee pads and hard hat and serious work boots, and tight clove-hitch knots, despite all that shaking— one-handed, in the dark of the stage—how we loved him for this, love that might not last, be recognized or continual which is like the love I had for Morgan which made my palms crackle my shoulders crumble—heavy, slow voltage— my sorrow found no outlet: no one to tell, when Morgan and his family moved to where he died from the train, a widower, the boy

with the wide grin, the lightning arm and those magic words I like your jacket, your hair is pretty, oh where did you go Morgan? I questioned the parking-lot, streetlamp-lit sky like an unbroken circuit I asked and also I asked and I asked.

Emergency Position Indicating Radio

Heidi Naylor

Tonight you phoned in a clotted voice to tell us about the plotted search grids and the voices of his family: two sons, one in Israel an ex-wife and the other in Austin an elderly father.

About the e-pirb, the beacon that called you out of sleep and home to drive to work, to dispatch the boats, the choppers over house-sized swells outside of Thorne Bay in gleaming dark water the temperature we accept for refrigerant storage.

What you want—it seems—is to talk about him: a veteran Ketchikan fishing guide out alone in the night (how do you know? we ask) a silence; then—it ends up detective work six persons might have been with him but we located each of them, safe in their homes.

Oh, son. And his name? Yes, you breathed it—again a man in his fities, a geoduck clam fisher you’ve—too—found his sons, their mother, his father; these mysteries unknotted, cleared through the hours like debris in the water, just not the central mystery of where he is now.

The boat also gone, the search now suspended; I taste this failure, blot your tears with my fingers and wish to drop into those thick folds of silk swim deep through the cold blue enigma of loss to tender—convey—dark, sweet, tangled regard for the way you have honored this man.

SUNDAY

Stacey Leybas

It’s a familiar dance, this Sisyphean pendulum. Best intentions counterweigh the physics of human nature.

The week’s route is marked by deep-tread footprints, the tangles embraced: vice, loop, and fault. Here I am more resident than guest.

At close, I limp to bare-edged pews a sturdy knot cocooned in cross sections of the likewise condemned. We are, each of us, anxious to wrest relief from scraps and sips and nail-pierced hands.

The apical moment: I am reclaimed.

LOOSENING—a surface gasp from icy waters. I bask, and gather sieve-held light, and vow to destroy old maps

until the blind compass—gravity’s swing— guides back to footprints, some old, a few fresh.

I am dizzy and frayed.

Yet I wonder: might an over-shoulder glance across effort-strung years betray the pattern of those quiet-winged moments has nudged me to fractionally higher ground?

Inheritance of Knots

Jey

I was born into a web of fingers, tightened around throats before my first breath— a lineage of clenched fists, silence pulled taut, words unraveling before they could form.

My great-grandmother’s spine curled like rope, knotted from years of bowing to men who mistook obedience for love. She carried her pain in the curve of her back, passed it down in the way we flinched at raised voices, at hands moving too fast.

But my grandmother never bowed. She bit through the ropes, let them coil at her feet, her spine straight as a blade. When they told her to soften, she sharpened instead, wore defiance like a second skin.

My mother was caught in the tangle— torn between the call to resist and the instinct to survive. She learned to swallow knots, hold them behind her teeth, each unspoken plea cinched tight in her jaw.

She tried to teach me the same art— to tie myself smaller, to carry weight without complaint.

But my body remembered. The knots took root in my shoulders, wrapped themselves around my ribs— a strangling, an inheritance.

Some nights, I pressed my fingers into the aching, trying to loosen the past, to smooth what had been coiled for too long.

One day, I found the knot’s throat. Pressed my thumb to its pulse, felt it fight, felt it hold. And with the force of every silenced woman before me,

I cut it open. Let it unravel. Let it fall to the ground like frayed rope, a thread pulled from the hem of a dress that no longer fits.

The weight of it lingers, its ghost woven into the air, still unraveling in the spaces it left behind. Each thread pulls at my bones, echoes of what once held me, the shape of defiance, carved like a scar, etched in the curve of my spine.

Liam Chimba

I tread carefully down the old industrial estate, careful not to fall into one of the potholes and ruin my new shoes. They were my first pair of steel toe caps, brought for a tenner down at one of those farmlands that was repurposed into a bootsale each summer. I must’ve realised I was poor. That the opportunity to buy work boots only came so often. And each paycheck offered a slim margin (one to two weeks) where I’d be able to buy something without that awkward, austere exchange between my parents and me. Do I want it? Do I really want it? Do I need it? No to any one of those questions and the same wrought out silence save for the birds cawing overhead, the sense of being watched by them, and the final withdrawal where I admit that I could go without. Technically, I could survive without ‘the latest’ deodorant, ‘the trendy’ bedsheets were on some level a luxury. That was all true. And it was also true that other teachers and practitioners could sit across from me with a pen in their hand and write it down as a ‘decline in personal hygiene’, suggestive of this or that, fixed only with these prescribed deliriants. It did dull the shame. And take the edge off of each footstep. So, yeah, both ways were true.

I tried not to think so I could step forward, live in the present, avoid the holes in the earth. I tried not to think and the pavement flashbanged me with the image of Eumenides open mouths’. I tripped, one of my shoes scuffed, and I held onto a nearby lamppost. My fingernails dug into the metal, the cuticles against little pockets of flesh. I hated what walking represented: idleness, passivity, an ultimately unproductive act. Something that would force me back to the

boot sale. My teeth turned against one another as I carried on. The new marks on my shoe would be motivating, at the very least.

At the end of the industrial estate I turned into a small cul-de-sac, weaving between a shipping container and a small building occasionally used for drum practice. A dull shriek rung out to give melody to a tom fill, then died out, then repeated itself. Down a darkening alleyway, I found my destination and knocked at the door, a rotten blue thing with a picture above it titled: Sun Gym. My coach opened the door and flashed a smile, it fell quickly. It was an effect I had on people, I had reasoned, that after a long enough silence they’d drop their smiles, step backwards a bit and into Muay Thai stance. He tucked his chin further into his chest. A small, bare man with an egg for a head; only good for learning mothers milk underneath his skeletal frame. He wore a black rash guard and brought me up along a narrow set of stairs. The handrailing was falling off. And he spoke about a pigeon he had adopted recently, the trips to B&Q he had made to build a little outhouse for the animal. He had lost his wife recently. The things people do when they’re grieving, his love for that reincarnated bird, my teeth gritting so hard they might split. The gym had no lights apart from the wavering, hypnotic wisps of human sweat that hung above us.

I took my shoes off and stared at them for a moment. I sat kneeled at the edge of the white tatami mat. The enamel of my teeth might crack like some internal earthquake. Beside me, my coach began another monologue, this time about the spiritualism of jiu-jitsu. Where westerners imagine the centre of consciousness to be in the head, he told me, the samurai instead saw the consciousness of each person to exist just beneath their belly button, just above their bladder. The

hara, he called it, with the kind of careful pronunciation that forced me to accept his idea. But this hara was my centre of gravity, the point from which my balance orientated around. He laughed and wiped sweat from the top of his head, saying I was easy to take down for the same reason I didn’t talk much. I asked why and he shrugged. When the next round started, I knew I would pick him to fight, that no amount of whitewashed Buddhism or whatever made a difference to me. The bell rang. I put my gumshield in. We stood up and he shook my hand. I used the opportunity to imagine the hara at my feet, my knees buckling and body lurching forward, my right hand reaching out to pick his ankle. And in that time, I was already folded into the floor, trying to scramble some kind of half-guard back until he mounted my chest. My old coach had called it missionary. Though that was before he became a firefighter and burned his hands off, the thing he had done to open doors hey?

My coach transitioned from mount and into the setup for an Americana, a funeral teasing its victim, a casket being lowered ever so slowly, the air pushed out of my lungs with a desperate crackle. He pinned my arm to the mat, weaved his own through it, and ‘accidently’ fell into guard. The kind of mistake he could only have made intentionally. I was no longer there. My body, which I figured must precede me somehow, be the centre of whatever I was, fell away. I might’ve been staring into his eyes. I might not have. In the depths of waning consciousness, steam fizzled from his head, he became a loose collection of images: a pair of eyes, a sleazy gumshield, an old man, the old man, a father, a funeral. I wanted to kill what was already dead to me. And only in the black hole, I realised the futility of my tawdry thoughts, cheap things like the gauche jewelry we’d see placed on old

banana boxes, we’d pass them sometimes and laugh to one another. He’d get an americano from the white van at the side of the dual carriageway. And I’d watch the plebs, which was his word for anyone that wasn’t us, traipse the uneven ground of the boot sale.

Baby Blue

Size 9

Breland Draper

My middle school shop teacher, Mr. Cramer, had a hard, pale scar that wrapped around the entirety of his left wrist. It was an ancient scar, visible, light colored like the ghost of a wristwatch on an arm that was tanned from a lifetime outside. An interested student would likely assume that the scar was from a woodworking accident. They might picture the flesh of the wrist mangled in a machine. A teacher who works with his hands risks disfigurement. Another teacher may assume that it was an incident where a student, whose mind was elsewhere at ten in the morning on a weekday with tests and lunch and middle school social hierarchies, might have slipped and Mr. Cramer jumped in to save the student’s eye, finger, or body. The shop was packed with table saws, belt saws, drills, sawdust covered floors, and a high wall scarred with nails that students populated with nail guns when Mr. Cramer was in his office. It would be easy to imagine in this teenage playhouse for mayhem that it was one of his pupils to blame.

The scar was from Mr. Cramer’s own youth. An accident he described to the class, the pointer finger and thumb of his right hand unconsciously wrapped around the wrist while remembering. He had been riding a horse when a dark storm led him seeking shelter. Just barely beating the storm home, the young Mr. Cramer dismounted quickly and moved to tie the horse to a post. Forming a V over the post with the horse reins he reached through to pull the reins tight. A lightning burst startled the horse, which tripped backwards on a stack

of metal irrigation pipes, its head jerking and pulling the V loop firm around Mr. Cramer’s wrist, gripping tighter and cutting into the flesh, blood starting and running down his hand and fingers, as the horse reared back and pulled harder.

A fly rod is held together with several knots. Starting at the reel, an arbor knot is used to tie the backing to the spool. The backing is a fly fisherman’s last warning. A built in “Oh shit” alarm that you don’t have much line left for the fish to run. An acknowledgement that you only have one knot holding your line, an expensive set-up, to your reel. A thought flashes, “How well did I tie that knot?”

Attached to the backing is the fly line. This line will determine what type of fishing you perform. Floating line will lead to throwing dry flies on the water’s surface or nymphs just below. Sinking line, with different weights, lengths, and depths, will get your wet flies down to fish feeding in deep pools. These lines have differing thickness and colors. Typically, light colored for floating and dark for sinking.

See-through, fluorocarbon leader is connected to the fly line. These days, most leaders come with an already-tied loop that is easy to attach to the fly line. The leader is transparent to avoid alerting discerning trout.

From here the line tapers in size, depending on where you are fishing, what type and size of flies you are using, and the weight and awareness of the fish.

I prefer a surgeon’s knot to attach the leader to the last line segment, the tippet. The surgeon’s knot becomes a quick motion as this will be the knot a fisherman ties the most besides the final knot of the tippet to fly.

Growing up I learned the easiest knot to tie on a fly, the clinch knot. Some simple loops and pull the loose end through and the fly is set to cast.

. . . . .

“Jolene.

. . Jolene. . . JOlene. . . JOLENE.”

Dean’s head bops to the song as his little fingers try to figure out the knot. Full concentration. He has all the instructions and tools and practice. Form the bunny ears. The bunny tucks into the burrow. Pull both ends and tighten. The music is just background. A mantra for him to concentrate. Mission accomplished. We high five and head outside with our skateboards.

. . . . .

We sat Dean down to wreck his life. Was he old enough to understand? The sun shone through the front room, dust particles floating, the light falling on the blue couch.

“Sometimes people fall out of love.”

“We both still, and will always, love you.”

“We’ll just have different lives.”

Sometimes knots come apart. . . . . .

Dean’s first fly rod arrived on the day my grandfather died. February 20th, 2019. Eighty- seven years old. Sudden and massive heart attack. His face pale from blood loss. The fly rod was a light four-weight Ecko Gecko. It was dark yellow with a green camouflage grip. A two-handed rod, built to

make casting easy for a four-year-old kid. We sat together at the table under the dining room light and tied his line segments to the reel.

. . . . .

It was a large, healthy fish. Its silver color from the ocean washed away to a bright red stripe along its side as it traveled 800 miles back into freshwater.

My father waved to me from 200 yards downstream. I had been delayed to the river, and I took it as a gesture to get in the water and fish my way to him. I stepped into the water knee deep and began casting. I held a long 11-foot switch rod which I cast with two hands, pulling the line tight across the water and flipping slightly downstream with a motion similar to a roll cast. The heavy line and fly swung across the current and directly below me.

I looked and my father continued to wave at me, this time more exaggerated and frantic. He had moved a good thirty yards downstream.

I finally realized that his rod was bent. He was fighting a fish and instead of telling me to work the water between us, he was calling for help. He didn’t have a net.

The fish held steady in the current. “I’ve been battling this thing for thirty minutes before you got here.” Each time my father would make progress, the fish would effortlessly turn its head into the current and swing three feet into the center of the river. “I can’t move the damn thing.”

I inched into the water. Without a net I would have to grab the steelhead by the tail. I could see the hook rested in the corner of the fish’s mouth. A good set. It would be difficult for the fish to shake it loose. I wondered if my dad felt confident in his knots. With one motion, I reached down and grabbed

the fish, lifting its tail out of the water.

“It’s a hell of a good fish.” My father motioned the steelhead back and forth in the water, reviving its energy. With a flip of its tail, the fish slid into the current and swam upstream.

. . . . .

I crested the rolling hill at sunset. Rays of light racing across the valley, outlining the Sawtooth Mountain Range beyond the Salmon River. A grove of aspens covered the top of the hill. I sat in the dirt and grass, resting amongst the trees, and studied the carvings left by Basque sheepherders, long dead. One tree held the darkened, overgrown initials of C.D.D. with an arrow pointing West. The grove’s roots were entangled as one living creature tied together. Planted in the same soil. Breathing the same air. Overlooking the same valley.

Good knots, tied tight and true, attach a trout to the tippet, leader, fly line, backing, reel, rod, hand, wrist, heart, and soul of the fisherman. An electric current from one end tied to the other. A loose line and slack rod is turned alive in seconds by the strike of a fish. A bad knot can break it all, leaving the fisherman holding an almost weightless rod and coiled line.

There are poorly tied knots. Tied quickly without care. Knots that are incorrect for the job. Then there are the unintentional and unwanted knots. The big bird’s nest type of knots. I learned early from my father, when I would spend more time on the bank untangling knots than fishing, that sometimes it’s best to “cut your losses” and start with new line.

Then there are wind knots. The tiny knots that are a

point of weakness. They’re created unwittingly by your own movement, bringing the line overhead and flipping it into the water. You may not notice they are there. When your tippet snaps between the leader and fly unexpectedly while you are fighting a trout, you are left standing alone knee-deep in a river, water drops running down your hand and fingers, wondering if you should have checked your line for wind knots. Was there something you could have done differently?

Knots My Father Taught Me

Eric Wallace

Whenever I come into my father’s room in the nursing home, his gray face slowly awakens. It’s as if a moving cloud has freed sunlight to slide across the dark wall of a cliff. My father sits a bit straighter in his chair and reaches his shaking hands toward me.

But not to welcome his middle-aged daughter. He’s reaching for what he knows I’m hiding behind my back, teasing him as much as you can tease an old, worn-out bastard whose mind is already slipping toward the abyss.

What I’m hiding is a big ball of sturdy string. I’m about to guide him again into something that surely must be part memory, part re-stimulation of the neurons responsible for pleasure and fun. And maybe part puzzlement. If he recognizes me at all, he might be wondering why would I be here? He can’t ask that question aloud, but it might be trying to burst out from deep within.

For the first six years of my life, this man, Roy Bates, was a passable-enough father, or seemed to be. Then suddenly he wasn’t there at all. He vanished as quickly as a drop of blood swirling down a drain. He deserted my mother and me, and we never heard from him again.

I was numb and confused. My mother, Vivian, soon was saying that she hated him, and she tried to teach me, if not hatred, then extreme distaste infused with a healthy dose of growing forgetfulness. Roy Bates vanished into the uncertain wake of family history.

But now that I’m much older, I find that wisdom and forgiveness are two peas in a pod. Or maybe it’s not exactly forgiveness, but empathy. Empathy born of who I naturally am and of my many years working as a healer. So, having found my father again, more or less by accident, every week

here I am back to doing what he and I did when I was a girl of five or six—working with knots.

The only change is our role reversal.

“Annie,” he’d say back then, bringing out his big ball of twine and adding a smile to his sun-crinkled face. “If you can tie and untie knots, you can solve all the problems of the world.”

“Why’s that, Cap’n?”

“Just is. OK, today, let’s try the figure eight.”

I often called him Cap’n since he liked it and because he was always talking about his days in the navy. He wasn’t at sea any more, just selling tools and hardware at Sears. But, awash in nostalgia, he loved to talk about is time on the docks and on “them lovely big ships.”

“Some gets seasick out there, but I didn’t, you know. I loved the cold salt air and the wide-open ocean. OK, Annie, can you show me that clove-hitch again? Practice makes a good sailor.”

Almost every week, he’d take me through the knots he liked: bowline, reef, sheet knot, anchor bend, and many more. He taught me about loops, hitches, stopper knots, even about decorative knots. A hoped-for little brother had never been born, so Roy turned me into a make-believe boy a father could ‘show the ropes to.’

But I found that my temporary boyhood had gender limits.

“When I grow up, I want to be an admiral,” I blurted out as I was shaping a buntline loop. “Whoa, Annie! Girls can’t do that, just can’t. Admiral?” A laugh, a throat clearing. A not very discrete spit into the grass. “No way. Not be captain neither. You’ll have to settle for shore duty.” Another laugh. “Or be a teacher. Or a nurse. You’d be a good nurse. “

Who was I to argue with my Dad back then? He’d lean in close, smelling of a comfortable old pipe tobacco, wet socks, cheap nutmeg cologne.

“She loves me…she loves me knot,” he’d joke, pronouncing the last word like kuh-not so I’d get it.

He never quite finished shaving, and he always had a chin a bit rough like our bathtub pumice stone. I loved touching his craggy face.

Sixty years later, in the nursing home, he’s still not shaving. He can’t any more. And now he smells of urine and stale talcum powder.

“You my nurse, Missy?” he asks almost every time, his rheumy eyes showing only confused half-recognition. I tell him again I’m Annie, his daughter, but it doesn’t really register.

What awakens him is that ball of twine I’ve brought. I unwind a length of string from the ball. “OK, Roy, can I show you the square knot?”

His gnarled hands are still remarkably strong. He grabs the string and starts turning and twisting with the clumsy dexterity of an eager midshipman.

“He was never in the navy,” my mother Viv told me long years after my father had deserted us. “Just one of his fantasies.”

For Viv, even years after Roy had left us, there was still some rankling. Or at least some need for what might pass for retribution. When I was home for a visit, and the subject of knots happened to come up—by then, I was tying sutures with the best of the other surgeons at Johns Hopkins—my mother quietly and almost idly remarked that Roy was a cheat, a ne’er-do-well and a liar.

“He never set foot on a ship, barely stepped into a bathtub, that man. Only water he knew about was being wet behind the ears. He made up all that navy and sailing stuff to enlarge himself in your eyes, Annie, to dream, to whatever else…”

“But, Mom, the knots…”

“Roy learned them knots from a picture book and from

one of his deadbeat friends, I reckon. A phony, he was. A phony through and through. Did you ever see pictures of him in a uniform, Annie, any kind of navy outfit? Huh?”

“No, but wasn’t there a bad fire before I was born? Burned all the old photos? His things?”

“He told you that? Figures. No, there was no fire. And no pictures. No uniforms. No sailor. No ships. Just a lotta knots, a lotta hooey.”

Time had taken the edge from Viv’s bitterness, but it had left a veneer of scorn.

Scorn rubs off. So, I spent the middle years of my life caught between happy girlhood memories of my father teaching me about knots and this new information my mother had shared.

But I chose not to worry about it too much. I loved the idea that my surgical career had a connection to the strings and cords Dad and I worked with. That I’d become a doctor and not an admiral seemed just fine to me. Even one of my main hobbies has connected to back then: I’m a pretty fine weaver, and plenty of the weaving knots I tie today have their roots in Dad’s lessons.

Mom died last year, and in the later sifting and sorting, I uncovered and contacted a previously-unknown second cousin, who startled the hell out of me by saying that Roy Bates was still alive and only two towns over in a memory care place. After a small debate with myself (and with my inner Viv), I went over there and made the reconnection.

On my very first visit—on a whim, a hunch, a bit of nostalgic mischievousness—I’d taken a big ball of string. And it paid off. When I walked in to my father’s room, he had looked at me like I’d at best come to change his diaper. But when I brought out the string, his vacuous expression changed, and knots were back in play. There was life in the

Now I come to the nursing home at least once a week, always bringing plenty of twines and strings, sometimes a bit of rope.

My father and I go over almost every knot—fisherman’s knot, weaver’s knot, reef, anchor-bend and all the rest—and Roy makes a really good student, as some deep muscle memory recalls each of them, and I have very little teaching to do. His hands move with the facile energy of a much younger man. Of a sailor.

And as I’m watching my father now, I’m suddenly wondering something. Where’s the truth? Was he really in the navy after all? Was there a fire? Was my mother lying, lying out of years-old pain and the need to pay him back, to tarnish his status?

And which story matters? Isn’t there something to be said for family ties, no matter how strained the particular knots?

My father holds up a sheet bend knot. He’s used it to tie two separate cords together, two realities joined. His expression holds a bit of puzzlement, a little hope, a touch of pride.

I gently touch his gaunt, rough face. “Good work, Cap’n,” I tell him, meaning it.

The word Cap’n resonates. There’s a hint of an old, old smile. Deep inside, he knows who he is.

The Other Side

Bonita Warren

When I said, “I do,” and my husband and I ceremonially tied the knot in front of seven family members as well as several dozen Holstein cows curiously watching the celebration from the other side of a farmyard fence, I didn’t realize how much I would value the other side. “Tying the knot” derives from an ancient Celtic tradition of physically tying together a couple’s hands with a ribbon or cord for a year and a day to ensure their compatibility and symbolize their lasting bond.

Thinking back, I suppose that we spiritually tied our knot a year and a day prior to the official ceremony when we met in Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store, which is not a cigar store, but a landmark institution of caffeination in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, an old and venerated Italian pocket nestled between the waterfront and several of the city’s seven originally named hills. From our first encounter, we bonded daily over quiet early morning espressos and late-night cappuccinos with hours-long chats as well as our disquieting outbursts as we yelled at each other across Columbus Avenue in the early morning hours.

After the official “I do”, our lives wove a tapestry of new shared experiences and common passions as well as solo journeys, each interwoven with the other while following our separate threads. As our lives became busier and more complicated juggling jobs, child and other activities, occasionally our threads became tangled, and life became messy. Through it all, however, our knot held tightly. We planned our lives as best we could, always looking to the future when we would have more time together. We

continued to strengthen our knot every morning over coffee and chat at the dining room table for the next 36 years—until he died.

Now, our knot untied, each morning after coffee is made, instead of the dining room table, I sit by my front window and spread before me is a legacy for my family. It all started one day quite abruptly when sitting on the sofa idly gazing out across the treasured valley from my promontory perch that my reverie was shattered by, of all things, an Idea—a big Idea with a capital “I”, which was immediately followed by those cursed words, “Why not?” Or in this case “Why not knot?” I’ve always been afflicted by the “why not?” syndrome, for which there is no medically prescribed cure. The only treatment to rid myself of self-imposed challenges is to boldly rise up and to accept the duel face-to-face—Idea vs Me. Inevitably, I lose and reluctantly add the idea to my list of projects, which currently will take ten lifetimes to complete.

But this “why not” challenge was different than other ideas on my list—those with a lower case “i”. I had only reflected for a few seconds before my Idea—an artful manifestation symbolically representing events, objects, places and people important to me in a simple art form from times past— transcended to ... Aha! a tapestry of our family’s coat of arms using the traditional heraldic elements and symbols yet designed meaningfully for our family. This tapestry would visually be our life’s colorful threads. I was invested in this Idea; after all, it was our history, and unbeknownst at the time, soon to be my future for the next decade.

Delving headlong into heraldic symbolism, the meaning of colors, forms and shapes beguiled me; my former design life resurfaced and reignited a passion and joy set aside years ago. I randomly retrieved the infrequently accessed elements

and principles of design from my mind’s deep recesses and eagerly applied them to my Idea.

As my heraldic knowledge grew and my previous design life blossomed anew, the composition for my coat of arms tapestry began to expand exponentially—both conceptually and dimensionally. The tapestry is no longer a simple shield with a few symbols and traditional colors and patterns as the Idea had originally been envisioned and now rivals the size of those hanging on the walls of medieval castles and Renaissance palaces; it is huge—a composition of hundreds of images and more than one million cross stitches in 500 colors ... and nearly 100,000 knots on the back side holding everything together.

From Idea to executable design is a planned process, albeit not always straightforward. The endless array of cutout images scattered across my living room floor, under the sofa and chairs, taped together with seemingly miles of transparent tape gradually transformed into a haphazard collage—the visual representation of our lives, designed to the perfection of phi—the Golden Ratio, to entice an observer’s eye and excite curiosity. Each eyeful reveals another of our life’s dimensions.

Overall, my coat of arms forms a Palladian window viewed safely from within while peering outward through frames spiraling inward toward infinity. For our family, who embraces the challenge of a puzzle, a binary message is encoded in the window border surrounding the framed view. Aligned with a compass’s directional points as well as our spiritual and political leanings, the western left side of the tripartite fenestration is for me to reflect on the world’s vastness stretching across a broad wildflower meadow toward the ocean of my dreams and the imagined unknown

beyond the horizon at the day’s end. The eastern right side is for my husband to face the sunrise slowly emerging at the day’s beginning between the distant soaring mountains, headwaters to the flowing streams he would traverse that day in search of elusive fish. The center window is for our family with a symbolic protective shield for our shared lives and our shared loves. Here, we remained individuals, each holding onto the knot for the other, bound together by an invisible thread that held us together as we unexpectedly changed course, explored uncharted paths or anchored each other during stormy seas.

The shape of the family shield itself, like our family, defies convention and is a compilation of traditional shield shapes. Its center, the intersecting hearts and minds of father, mother and son, embraces a compass rose without which we may not have found each other and our ways together. The shield is anchored by an open book—for our love of the pursuit of knowledge as well as our approach with each other, resting on a compartment of solid ground and flowing waters among a forest of evergreen—the alternating stability and fluid uncertainty experienced throughout our lives. Supporter Max, always there with his unconditional love and wagging tail, holds our shield steady. The shield’s helmet is a red-tailed hawk about to soar into the unknown, which captures the nature of our lives, and whose feathered head is wreathed with a floral halo of unity, perfection and eternity. Tethered to its sharp beak, a weathered banner proudly proclaims our family motto, “in aeternum incipiam iterum”, Latin for “forever begin again”, words that have guided me through endless detours, shake-ups and failures. Sheathed with an embracing mantle of garden flowers, vibrant emergent buds through decaying withered petals reflect our graceful

transition into older age.

After a year of collecting images, snipping out unwanted tidbits, perfecting the design, translating the collage into a stitching pattern, purchasing the threads and canvas, my tapestry is ready for its first stitch. Unwind the thread, measure, snip, slip the end through the needle’s eye and finally, tie the knot to connect the thread ends together. Slipping the needle from the back to the front through the first hole in the canvas, I feel the knot catch and know the thread will hold, with the same confidence in the knot that tied my husband to me years ago and held for his lifetime.

Every morning for the past two years, I’ve repeated the steps of unwinding, measuring, snipping, threading and knotting multiple times. The precise design on the front of the tapestry is slowly coming alive. As each thread courses its length, the time eventually comes to knot its end on the reverse to ensure that my life, ooops … my tapestry doesn’t unravel. After reaching to the back side to secure numerous threads with a sturdy knot, I now realize that my tapestry was designed as one-sided—the front. On the back, I see randomness and chaos—the messiness of tangled thread ends, threads that are too loose or taut and the muddle of knots. Undesigned as it is, I appreciate the back side of my tapestry for representing my life as much as the front side does.

Recognizing that my tapestry has two equally important representations of our life together—the one that was planned along the way and the other that just happened, I am faced with a conundrum of displaying my tapestry to fully represent our life. One side, beautiful for thoughtful symbolism and design, is incomplete without the other side—its knottiness, the messy happenstance and strength that ties us together “till death do us part”.

Losing Words

Anita Tanner

Words like knots in your backbone wear and begin to disappear, a reversal of Ezekiel’s prophecy in the valley of dry bones— you cannot hear the word of the Lord.

Whole concepts filed in drawers, ideas you think never to lose, poems you love, questions you choose to ask are falling away.

Famous art you believe indelibly marked, sculptures you need to kneel before now lost down a long, long corridor, symbols that once thrust meaning, now inert.

More than once from library shelves you check out books only to find you’ve read them before— the mind’s osteoporosis.

It’s the bare-bones of trying in vain to love someone who is now without a body, as if attempting again to force a lock, untie a knot.

desperately jiggling the key, commanding strands to wiggle free with the boney fingers of your hand.

Bone Poem

Anita Tanner

Adam named knots of bones before Ezekiel praised and prophesied, his awe at piles of dryness becoming liquid enough to lay sinews upon them in the valley of dry bones.

Adam searched for names for bones, spinal bumps in a column all down his backbone that helped him move, discs and notches, knots of bones he named vertebrae. And after long dry lists from cranium on down the ribs to ulna, radius, femur, fibula, he kept himself laughing at humerus near the funny bone, then on down to unusual bones like phalanges at the tip of extremities which gave him pause to go back and rename the tailbone, the end bone, prominent when the patella goes to the floor at the bed at night— sacrum, the sacred bone where the soul resides, humble bone.

Some bones are honeycombed— John the Baptist must have known them in his jawbone, midnight aching, not only when he prophesied but when his mouth was stilled from chanting things so breakable he learned diminishment and shrinkage of hard-core solidity. He must have tired of all things skeletal in the valleys of wind, open-mouthed rantings that fell on deaf ears.

Ezekiel must have lived long years in his dry bones enabling him to hear the noise of shaking he could hardly write about, so near the grave, the valley where we all go to overhear the breath of four winds bringing us up again.

Tina Johnson

The knots of autumn come untied in certain ways. Arctic air snows cedars on the ridge, then mows down grass like rustling paper. Up valley, black-tailed deer tug breakfast leaves, sniff the air, and listen. Red squirrels cache spruce cones and wait.

Trumpeter swans fly in from tundra lakes up north, the lights of their bodies stitched against stark canopies of sky. Every other bird has flown, or so it seems, but the swans descend like fluttering ships, emigrants from polar night who trust the certitudes of winter, the axis of the Earth that leans from light to dark, and back again.

I Swear to God This Is A Poem Because—See?—I Hit <RETURN> A Lot and at Random and Daring Intervals, And It’s

About Aging

Tomás Baiza

This piece is called “I swear to god this is a poem because, see?, I hit <RETURN> a lot and at random and daring intervals, And it’s about aging.”

And now the young folk are saying “Aw hell, not another old dude fucking whining about getting old.”

To which I say, “¡Watchense, jovencitos! With a little luck, and only if you play your cards right, you might get old enough to one day wake up and wonder which part of your precious body is going to hurt first the moment you try to roll out of bed.”

I swear to god this is a poem.

I lie in this humming, throbbing MRI machine, told to hold still while I listen to classic jazz.

Seconds tick, joints click, and someday a doctor will tell you that you’re not just sick.

I HATE poems that rhyme—especially the ones about time and what it does to us.

I’m at that stage where every hint of praise is followed by the qualifier for his age.

Repeat: I HATE poems that rhyme.

I, an elder statesman of Gen X, realized recently that young people really don’t want to talk with you. They look through you, as if you’ve faded to the point of becoming a spectre, a ghost, a frail, sinister phantom whose decrepitude is more virulent than the first wave of COVID, and whose unattractiveness is irrelevant because, as I’ve just established, you’re invisible.

But of course they see you. They just don’t acknowledge you.

I swear to god this is a poem.

The MRI tech scolds me for moving and I have to apologize for the sudden coughing fit that blurred her image. Fuck me, I think, I’m old enough to just break into coughing fits for no reason.

When a young person—say between the ages of 18 and 30— notices you notice them, I’m convinced that they invariably tell themselves the same thing: “Gross. He thinks I’m hot.”

Even if they are, I don’t, and if it’s obvious that they think they are, then I really don’t. I once wrote into the dialogue spoken by an elderly Mexican woman that youth and beauty are not virtues, but rather temporary conditions, and that virtue comes in what you choose to do with them while you’re in possession of them.

Every generation thinks they invented sex, music, and slang.

I swear to god this is a poem.

Duke Ellington’s rendition of “Caravan” bleeds from the headphones. I shiver beneath the heated blanket and the MRI tech assures me that I’m doing great, only twenty more minutes…

And I reflect on how I utterly wasted my youth and whatever claim to beauty I might have had.

I once pretended to be so pretty that my girlfriend cocked her head at me one night before going out and said,

“Let me put makeup on you. Let me do your eyes at least.”

A half-hour later I gazed into the mirror and, reluctantly and flush with modesty, proclaimed “Holy fuck, I look amazing!”

Forgive me. It was the Eighties.

And, almost four decades later, I have to admit that I probably did look amazing, but not in a way that would have been sustainable, like, in ways that would get you a job, or allow you to make friends, or let people see you as a real person and not a monster.

I swear to god this is a poem.

Just ten more minutes, Thomas, the MRI tech says over the headphones. I don’t correct her mispronunciation of my name. She sees me as she’s been trained to see me—an old jock who has destroyed his body from soccer, football, fencing, taekwondo, Muay Thai, boxing, half-marathons, marathon, Iron Man, street

beatings, car accidents, nose broken six times, seven broken fingers, five knee surgeries, three concussions, 10-inch titanium rod in my left shoulder...

All manner of vain and unnecessary pendejadas.

Maybe the only thing that can keep us feeling young is to watch—and shamefully gloat over—our parents growing frail. Not that we want that for them, but isn’t it inevitable?

It is.

We just don’t want it to be inevitable for us.

I sat next to my mother’s bed at the assisted living facility, the same bed in which she would die twelve months later, at the height of the pandemic. I tried not to notice how her brown skin had become sallow and spotted, and how the chin she had once so diligently waxed now bristled with gray beard hairs.

My mother gazed at the photo of my daughter that I had brought. “She’s so pretty, mijo.”

“She is,” I said.

“Good thing,” my mother growled with a tinge of bitterness. “Life’s so much easier when you’re pretty.”

“She’s smart, too, mom.”

“Aún mejor,” she said, rolling her eyes. “That’ll help, too.” My mother rubbed her chin stubble with the back of her hand

and sighed. “¿Sabes qué, mijo? The boys in school, they never liked me because I wasn’t pretty like the white girls, and I was smart. It took me way too long to stop feeling guilty that I was both of those things. Ugly and smart.”

Hang in there, the tech says. Just five more minutes.

I thought about a photo that my sister treasured, an old image of my mother in her senior year of high school. She wore a sweater, tight over her ample bosom, blue-black hair pulled into a tight knot at the nape of her neck, and her red lips contrasted with the makeup that made her much more pale than she really was. It’s true: my mother wasn’t gabachapretty. More like handsome and formidable. It embarrassed me to think that she was trying to pass as a white girl in that photo, but who was I to judge a young Chicana who would go on to raise two problematic children from two problematic white men who would abandon her to single motherhood.

“At least I was smart,” my mother went on. “Not like your tía, Rosita. She was always the prettiest of us, the one the boys wanted to take out and kiss and put their hands all over.”

My mother shook her head, “Okay, Rosita was beautiful, but mijo she was so dumb! Like, durrrrrrrrrrrr!” She twisted her face into a spastic mockery of someone struggling to achieve coherent thought.

“You’re not ugly, mom,” I said, shocked at her cruelty towards her youngest sister. “You never were.”

My mother sighed again and studied the photo of my daughter. “She’s so pretty, mijo. Is she smart, too?”

I swear to god this is a poem.

Okay, you’re done, the tech says, interrupting Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island.” You did great!

At the end of it all, will some higher power announce with cheery finality that I’m done and that I did great?

Will this place be better for my having used up so much food, water, and oxygen in the time that I occupied it?

Will my daughter resist what I fear is the inevitable human temptation to resent our parents for growing ancient and losing their minds and making us orphans?

I climb out of the borrowed medical scrubs that have old stains in places I’d rather not think about and wonder how many of the people who wore these baggy blue pajamas before me were scared, or angry, or resigned to what time had done to them.

I think about Thelonious Monk and orthopedic surgeons and short-term memory.

I think about how my insurance isn’t going to cover near enough of what this shit’s gonna cost.

I think I remember swearing to someone, at some point, that this was supposed to be a poem.

In the Loop of a Mother’s Knot

Eileen Oldag

With neither shame nor aggravation, I brought my shoe and lace, lamed to uselessness by ganglia of knots. To my mother, I offered the task and my confidence. As she sat, I eased to her side. She hummed. She chose one of her formidable tools. Her fingers, slender, trim-nailed, muscled if compared to my pink chubs, to massage the knots persuasively to surrender. Or her no-nonsense safety pin for direct attack of clenched loops, loosening their grip, exacting release. Or the aluminum crochet needle, its small gaping mouth pushed to chew open the closed bights, to free the turns and elbows. I rested my hand on her knee as she worked until the last knot bloomed into a small flower and disappeared into her hum with the lightness of a blown dandelion. She slipped the shoe onto my foot, guided the lace into a billow of bow. She stood and kissed me on the forehead.

Kissed on the forehead I never disentangled but grew to love knots

Cornfield Emma Wells

Scurrying for undergrowth away from the all-seeing world

I look to burrow, digging deeply into timeless holes that swallow me whole as vintage wine.

I long to eclipse my being, forgetting my name, leaving my name tag on the brink of a field where I forfeit humanity for sumptuous, feral fields.

Here, animal licks and lioness quirks are normal, wanted, absorbed like osmosis.

Flung far, to deepest reaches, I womb myself in taller wheat, erasing my humanness, shadowed and immoral, in the belly of a field where innermost reaches are internal organs. Here. I’m a shrew or rat. A bestial child

of God where I blaspheme, writhe, blame, maim in sharp, tall rushes that act as blades, cutting myself loose of society’s control bearing a crow’s wing as a halo.

Here: lost, deprived, hollowed out of fleshy pulp that lines someone else’s heart, I suffocate free, stripping myself of bandages, unwinding anxiety, boasting noxious, tormenting threads, until I’m reborn with pink-kissed skin, innocent as a fledgling, aiming to take flight upon wings of gold, listening for a siren call to a wheat-weighted heaven.

Butterflies in Church

Angela Townsend

Everyone wondered why Daisy Barlow was scared of throwing up at church.

It made sense when Daisy worried about getting baptized. Daisy was prepared to repudiate the devil and his works. She did not like him at all. And Reverend Kucsma was gentle and good, with long silly fingers that played hymns and the Looney Tunes theme on the organ. He let Daisy talk until she had nothing left to say during Children’s Time, even if the topic turned to unicorns and the deacons started clearing their throats. But Daisy was not so sure about the whole armor of God. Daisy was only six years old, and she had seen the knights at the Renaissance Faire. Daisy wore the dress with the kittens to her baptism, and nobody made her wear a helmet.

But Daisy still cried every Sunday morning, because it was possible she would throw up in church.

It could happen in the narthex, where Mr. Mueller and Mrs. Mueller, unrelated, handed out bulletins. It could happen just as Goody Wood materialized, her pearly curls and turquoise housecoat taking shape before Daisy’s eyes. Daisy knew that Goody’s real name was Gloria, but she did not know how Goody could be somewhere else, and then be right there, without time to get from place to place. Daisy asked her daddy about this, and he said that some people long ago could “bilocate,” but he just thought Goody walked very fast.

It could happen during Children’s Time. Daisy asked Reverend Kucsma if he had ever seen anyone bilocate. He said that he had not, but nothing is impossible with God.

Daisy asked if Jesus liked jokes, and Reverend Kucsma said “definitely.” Reverend Kucsma asked the children what you should do if you have a problem, and Daisy said you should figure it out. All the deacons laughed, even the one who said that children should be seen but seldom heard.

It could happen during the Doxology, right when everyone was singing “world without end.” Daisy asked Tiny Tina, whose real name was Mrs. van der Noot, what she thought was the best part of church, and Tiny Tina said, “world without end.” Tiny Tina said Mr. van der Noot was dancing on streets of gold in the world without end, and sometimes she could hear him tap-tap- tapping like Fred Astaire in the doxology. After that, Tiny Tina always turned around to wink at Daisy at “world without end.”

It could happen during the anthem, when fourteen women and Elmer stood up in maroon robes. Daisy’s favorite anthem was “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” because it was Elmer’s favorite, and he cried and smiled at the same time. Elmer brought Daisy porcelain animals that came in the box with his teabags. Elmer came to Daisy’s house for dinner for eggplant parmigiana, and he brought a stuffed armadillo. Daisy’s mommy said that was the one animal on earth born already wearing the full armor of God, and Elmer laughed so hard he cried.

It could happen during the gift of music. Daisy asked God to forgive her for not liking this part of church. The gift of music took the place of the anthem. The people with gifts of music were never part of the choir, which Daisy thought was strange, since people who sing should be friends with other people who sing. When Karolee Boetsma gave the gift of music, Daisy tried very hard to understand what she was saying, but all the small babies were crying too loud.

It could happen in Sunday School, the furthest location from Daisy’s parents. Mr. Mueller, no relation to Mr. Mueller and Mrs. Mueller, was a wonderful teacher. He said that Jesus does not care if you are rad, or even if you miss church. Jesus is with you at breakfast. Jesus likes peculiar people, like that little man who scampered up a tree to see the top of his head. Jesus has been scared, but he is not scared anymore, and someday nobody will be scared. Daisy pictured Jesus at the dinette table. Daisy’s daddy put a blueberry in each compartment of her toaster waffles, and she pictured him doing the same for Jesus.

It could happen during coffee hour, which smelled of streusel and sulfur because something was wrong with the basement pipes. Daisy held her nose when she washed her hands. Daisy’s daddy was an elder, so sometimes she got to help him wash the juice glasses. Daisy felt sad for all the bread cubes that did not get to be part of Communion. Daisy’s mommy spent coffee hour holding people’s hands while they cried. Some Sundays, more people lined up to see Daisy’s mommy than Rev. Kucsma.

It could happen in the parking lot, where the eighth-grade boys taught Daisy how to catch yellow butterflies. The eighthgrade boys said it was rad that Daisy’s hair was long enough to sit on.

Chuckles, whose real name was Charles Mueller, said that he was going to try to grow his hair long enough to sit on, too. Matthew Mueller, no relation to Chuckles, carried Daisy on his shoulders, and she pretended she was Zacchaeus, the little man in the tree. Daisy’s mommy made them let the butterflies go, and they all sang “Born Free.” Elmer stopped his car to watch, and for some reason he cried.

It could happen on Easter, while everyone was drawing.

Daisy heard Rev. Kucsma say to her daddy that while the other children drew rabbits, Daisy Barlow was drawing the substitutionary atonement. Daisy heard Rev. Kucsma ask her mommy if Daisy might have “the call,” and Daisy’s mommy said, “with all respect, I hope not.” Daisy asked Mr. Mueller if Jesus was going to make sure everyone was okay in the world without end, and Mr. Mueller said he could not say “no” to that question.

Everyone wondered why Daisy Barlow was scared of throwing up in church, but Daisy could not answer.

ABOUT

THE CABIN is a Boise, Idaho literary arts organization. We forge community through the voices of all readers, writers, and learners.

The WRITERS IN THE ATTIC (WITA) program is a submission opportunity for writers, both emerging and established, to publish work related to a one-word theme. With submissions blind-judged by a local writer of acclaim, selected poems and fiction are published in a yearly anthology. This publication is meant to be a platform for building an inclusive community and provoking creativity and experimentation through a love of writing.

2025 Theme: KNOT. Knots mark a coming together or a pulling apart. Sailors, like storytellers, use knots to navigate, set pace, and keep lines—whether of rope or relationships— from slipping away. Knots bind and create something new, serving as both tools and decorations. They can be a tangled mess or a source of great strength. Knots in our muscles tighten, capturing our attention and crying for a friend’s touch, while knots in our stomachs constrict, holding our emotions and demanding courage. This contest invites you to explore the knots in your own story. Write about the knots that keep your world together, or those that tether you to the past. Discover the beauty in tension, the significance in binding, and let your words weave something strong enough to hold.

Judge Kerri Webster is the author of four books of poetry: Lapis (Wesleyan University Press, 2022), The Trailhead (Wesleyan, 2018), Grand & Arsenal (University of Iowa, 2012), and We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone (University of Georgia, 2005). She has taught at Washington University in St. Louis

and Boise State, and as a Writer in the Schools for The Cabin. The recipient of honors including a Whiting Award, the Iowa Prize, the Lucille Medwick Award and a Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America, the Lynda Hull Memorial Prize, an Alexa Rose Foundation Grant, and three Literature Fellowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, Webster’s poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, the Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, Guernica, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Poetry Northwest.

MEET THE WRITERS

First Lieutenant Adam Ryan is a writer who explores the intersection of memory, hardship, nature, and healing. A former Army officer, he draws from his experience of leading over 200 combat missions in austere environments as a source for reflection and gratitude for the present.

Alan Minskoff teaches journalism at the College of Idaho, has been a magazine editor—Idaho Heritage, Boise Magazine, Boise Journal, the New Boise Rag, and Art Idaho—writer of two chapbooks of poetry, Blue Ink Runs Out on a Partly Cloudy Day and Point Blank (Limberlost Press) and is the author of Idaho Wine Country with photography by Paul Hosefros and The Idaho Traveler (Caxton). He reviews audiobooks for AudioFile Magazine and is on the Behind the Mic podcast. He and wife Royanne have been married for four decades. He is the father of three and grandfather of five.

Allie Hampton is a senior at Boise State studying Communication, Creative Writing, English Literature, and Environmental Studies through the Interdisciplinary program. She loves to write nonfiction, both personal and not, and loves to read magical realism. When she’s not reading and writing, she’s competing on the Talkin’ Broncos Speech and Debate team, crafting, knitting, searching through yard sales, and spending time with the people she loves!

Âmî Jey is a poet and healthcare worker exploring the emotional textures of neurodivergence, trauma, and belonging. Their work has appeared in Whiptail Journal, The Broadkill Review, and other literary journals. They write toward the moments that don’t make it into reports—the ones that still shape everything.

Angela Townsend works for a cat sanctuary. She is a fivetime Pushcart Prize nominee and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Trampset, among others. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College. Her poet mother is her best friend.

Anita Tanner was raised on a small dairy farm in Wyoming where she learned hard work, a love of animals, and the power of metaphor. Reading, writing, and the quest for new ideas is an insatiable thirst for her. She is widely published in various periodicals and magazines. Her collection of poems, Where Fields Have Been Planted was published in 1999.

B.A. Van Sise is an author and photographic artist with three monographs: the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass with Mary-Louise Parker, Invited to Life with Mayim Bialik, and On the National Language with DeLanna Studi. He is a twotime winner of the Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medal, a two-time Prix de la Photographie Paris winner, an Anthem Award winner, a finalist for the Rattle and Kenyon Poetry Prizes, and a winner of the the INDIES Book of the Year and Lascaux Prize for Nonfiction.

Bonnie Vestal has been a longtime practitioner in both traditional healthcare and complementary healing arts. She is interested in what keeps people whole and growing and what makes life worth living. Her stories, based on personal experience, are evidence of the huge untapped potential inside of ordinary people who are willing to explore new ways of seeing things. We all have room to accommodate broader perspectives, differing viewpoints, and mysteries that defy explanation. Sharing stories helps make that happen.

Bonita Warren was inspired to write as a way to process her grief after the sudden and unexpected death of her husband in 2024. While this is her first submission for publication, she has participated in several generative poetry workshops and open mic readings offered at Chautauqua Institution’s Literary Arts program and author readings at The Cabin. Her writing stylistically tends to be memoir and ekphrastic. She finds writing, particularly the initial stream-of-consciousness flow of words from mind to paper, to be such a mind-freeing way to explore both her inside and outside worlds.

Breland Draper lives in Boise with his son Charlie and their yellow Labrador Luna. Breland works in the nonprofit world and in his off-time, he can be found with Charlie and Luna exploring Idaho’s rivers, wildlife, and beauty.

Brian Thrasher was born and raised in Boise and even attended youth writing camp at The Cabin. Now, as a nonyouth, he works as a data scientist, so it’s pretty weird that he’s being published as a poet, right? He guesses it’s one of those right-brain/left-brain balance situations. Brian also likes writing comedy music and speaking in the third person.

Cameron Morfit was a sportswriter for the Idaho Falls Post Register before moving to New York to begin a 20-year career in magazines. He later moved back to Idaho with his wife and daughter, settling in Boise and covering the PGA Tour while racking up frequent-flier miles. He now lives in Northeast Florida. His non-fiction work has appeared in The New York Times and elsewhere, and his story in this year’s Writers in the Attic was inspired by two real-life families in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Eileen Earhart Oldag (she/her) writes from Boise where she lives with her muse, Tom. Like her knot-defying mother, she is a native of Texas. She was co-founder of Upper Gladstone Writers’ Workspace in Shreveport, LA, and she continues to benefit from writing circles like Poetry in the City of Trees. Most recently, her poetry appeared in Harpy Hybrid Review, BoomerLit Mag, and the ekphrastic anthology the art of Chestnut Review – volume 1. This is her fourth selection for Writers in the Attic.

Montanan poet Ellie Snyder writes and manages social media for a global nonprofit and is passionate about literature, fashion, and music. Find her work in Pangyrus, The Dewdrop, Magpie Zine, Pinky and elsewhere, and find her fitchecks on Instagram @elliegsnyder.

Emma Wells is a mother and English teacher. She has poetry published with various literary journals and magazines. She writes flash fiction, short stories, and novels. She is currently writing her sixth novel.

Eric E. Wallace lives in Eagle, Idaho. Eric is the author of three short story collections (Undertow, Hoar Frost, and Stonerise) and five literary novels (Emperor’s Reach, The Improviser, Mind After Mind, Hover Point, and Depth Perception, all published by BookLocker). Eric’s work has appeared in many literary journals and many times online at Idaho Magazine and at WritersWeekly. This is the 12th Writers in the Attic anthology to include one or more of Eric’s stories. Visit www.ericewallace.wordpress.com.

Faye Srala is a chemist, author, and defender of public lands. She earned a BA in English with a history minor from Idaho State University, a BS in Chemistry from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and an MBA from the University of Utah. Faye’s work has been published in The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought, As You Were: The Military Review, Twin Bird Review, and nominated for The Best of the Net anthology. When not busy reading and writing, she bakes decadent desserts, drinks wine, and hikes off those calories in the extensive Idaho wilderness.

Grace Schwenk is a writer from the Bitterroot Valley of Montana. Most of her writing is done at a fire tower on the Payette National Forest. When not writing or looking for smokes, she can be found getting lost with her dog, Selway. Her work can be found in Tiny Seed Literary Journal, WinC Magazine, Chaotic Merge, and others. She is a second-year non-fiction MFA candidate at the University of Montana in Creative Writing.

Hannah Roberts grew up in England in a cold house with no television, but with lots of books and warm cuddly parents. She has always written short pieces, their brevity ensured by her inability to finish them. She is lucky enough to belong to a small group of writers committed to encouraging and supporting each other. Without them, her essays would have little punctuation and no final paragraphs. She is very grateful to Writers in the Attic for providing a wonderful incentive to finish and polish at least one piece a year.

Heidi Naylor is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and made her way to Idaho in 1990. Her story collection, Revolver, appeared in 2018, and her poetry collection, February Light, will be published soon; both books from BCC Press. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and received a fellowship in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. She loves Idaho trails and her family, including two little granddaughters. Find her at heidinaylor.net.

After working as an English teacher for six years, Hope Gordon began pursuing a lifelong love of writing. She has recently published a young adult fantasy book called Savage Wild, which can be purchased on Amazon.

Janet Schlicht is a long time Boise resident, now retired, who enjoys storytelling in all its forms. She is grateful to the people at The Cabin for all they do to keep storytelling part of our lives.

Jonah Svihus’s storytelling explores quietude, chaos, and boyhood. A graduate of Lewis & Clark College, his prose lingers between lyrical observation, sharp realism,

and hallucination. His work has appeared in Paper Plane Press, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, and the Lewis & Clark Literary Review. Until his OnlyFans feet pic account supports his family, Jonah spends his time working in advertising, preserving American roots music in multiple projects, and cooking for his wife. He has M12 (W14, D) flat feet, and included two typos here to prove his hunanity at the cost of his diginity.

Julia McCoy is a middle school English teacher. She enjoys biking, traveling, and discussing why public education matters. She has pieces published in CommuterLit, Crow and Cross Keys, and an upcoming piece in ThimbleLit Magazine.

Keeley Burmeister’s fiction has been published in 50 Give or Take, After Dinner Conversation, and Moss Puppy Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University, and serves on the fiction reading team for Chestnut Review. She is currently working on a second novel, while working to find a place in the world for her debut novel. When she isn’t writing, she’s hiking in the mountains or swimming in a river with her partner and rescue dog.

Kimme Rovin likes to write about everyday magic and is on an endless hunt to find evidence of fairies. She would definitely go through a magical portal if she found one. In the meantime, she finds inspiration running in the foothills, reading lots of fantasy, and wondering what might be hiding just out of sight. Her stories explore the places where imagination and reality quietly meet.

Krys Warstillo is a writer and artist by passion and an educator and marketer by training. A serial mover now hoping to grow roots in the Treasure Valley, she lives with her husband and two sons in a home full of almost-finished murals and never-finished projects. Armed with an MEd and an MBA, she’s an education enthusiast who writes to unpack the contents of all the little boxes she tucks into the corners of her mind. When she’s not chasing down words or small humans, she’s probably lost in one of her (too) many hobbies.

Lanise “Lenny” Prater (they/them) was born and raised in Philly, but now they call Brooklyn, NY, and Minneapolis their home. They are a femme non-binary poet who previously performed in the spoken-word space. Now they are working in Human Resources while using their free time to nourish their passions (writing, ceramics, reading). Lenny enjoys making art and writing about the black experience, gender, and womanhood. Their poetry tends to be narrative as they love stepping into the worlds of others.

Liam Chimba (He/Him) is a graduate of Creative Writing and Philosophy from the University of Chichester. He lives on the East coast of England. Published in Fugitives & Futurists, Peatsmoke Journal, Maudlin House. Instagram @liam.44.4

Logan Randall is a creative writing student at Boise State University, and her work has appeared in Mother Tongue magazine. She is a Boise-based writer and mother of two who loves to travel and eat, read and drink, and compulsively design and redesign her home. She has been writing since she was five years old and has improved a lot since then, she hopes.

Mara Bateman lives in Boise, Idaho where she works as an acupuncturist at a local nonprofit clinic. Her writing has appeared in the 2021, 2023 and 2024 editions of the Writers in the Attic, and Paper Plane Press Volume II among others. She is the creator of This Poem Is For You: Horoscopic Poetry by an Unlicensed Bystander. When she isn’t writing or poking people with tiny needles for their own good, you might find Mara snuggling a cat, running around the foothills, or hightailing it for the coast. To read more of Mara’s work, visit thispoemisforyou.substack.com.

Mary Ellen McMurtrie lives and writes in the mountains outside Idaho City. Her poetry has appeared in several presses around the country; one rode around town on a placard in a Boise City Bus. Now, in life’s later chapters, she thinks about mortality and the small mysteries that keep us wondering.

Maya Grubaugh is an emerging writer from Boise, Idaho whose debut work of short fiction, “Incarnations,” was previously published in Stonecrop Magazine. She’s a big fan of all things art and storytelling, her two very energetic Schnauzers (hi, Stevie and Willa!), and probably you.

Mindy OldenKamp is a wrangler of words, a minder of memories, and a proud parent to a motley crew of three cats, one dog, and a mostly grown girl human. She lives in Nampa with her wife, where together they spend their days plotting the revolution via subversive acts of community and kindness. She believes laughter is life-saving, cheese goes with every meal, and it’s never too late to love.

Naomi Trueman is a poet, essayist, and an assistant librarian at the best library branch in Boise. She loves hot coffee, Merganser ducks, and spending time laughing with her dear ones. She can often be found biking the Greenbelt or sitting in the Boise River on a hot afternoon.

Nate Jacob is a husband, a father, a poet, and a beard enthusiast, and a resident of Star, Idaho. His strongest conviction is that a taco is a sandwich, although he is willing to be convinced otherwise. Once, in the wilds of Alberta, Canada, he met his doppelgänger (not a bear) and since then he has felt not-at-all-alone in the world. This is his second poem to appear in Writers in the Attic, something he counts among his greatest accomplishments in life, a bit behind the wife and children mentioned a few sentences ago, though well ahead of the beard also mentioned.

Sheila Robertson finds joy and inspiration in the natural world. Her writing grows out of the landscapes in Idaho and Oregon, where she has lived. She has published articles, stories and poetry in Writers in the Attic (9 times), Crab Creek Review, North Coast Squid, Camas Literary Journal, Trouvaille Review, New Feathers Review, Milagros, Poems From The Rebel Outpost, “little white dress” and The Stafford Challenge 2024 Anthology. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Idaho Statesman, Travel & Leisure Magazine, Idaho Magazine, Boise Magazine, and others. Presently she participates on a team encouraging Yamhill County, Oregon writers to publish in Paper Gardens.

Stacey Arrington Leybas writes stories for children ranging from picture books to middle grade fiction. She owns and operates a private music teaching studio and organizes events and experiences, including writing conferences. An avid fan of checklists, traveling, and memory-keeping, she lives in Kuna, Idaho, with her husband and five kids, where their family also runs a synchronized holiday light show.

Stephanie E. Glass lives in rural Nebraska with her son, Milo. Together with a constellation of loved ones— including a lively clowder of cats—they celebrate the joy that infuses the rhythm of their daily lives. Glass frequently disappears into the Nebraska Plains and Badlands for hiking and backpacking trips. In addition to nature, she draws inspiration for her poetry from literature, motherhood, queer identity, political activism, nature, post-traumatic growth following domestic violence, and the healing relationships she has built with those she loves. Her work has appeared in Rattle Poetry Magazine (Dec. 2024), The Quarter(ly) Vol. XIII: This Is Where We Are Now, and the Moonstone Center for the Arts anthology: Go Back to Where You Came From.

Syd Thompson is a genderfluid writer born in Temple, Texas, living on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Kwikwetlem (Coquitlam, British Columbia). Thompson draws inspiration for their work strongly from their upbringing in Southern Evangelism, queer culture, feminism, and current events. You can read their other work New Voices: Spring 2025 from the Moonstone Arts Center, and the Citizen Trans* Project from New Words Press.

Tina Johnson writes poetry, personal essays, and short stories. Her work has been published in Inkwell, Atlanta Review, and Bellingham Review as well as other small literary journals. She lives in Star, Idaho.

Tomás Baiza is the award-winning author of the books Delivery: A Pocho’s Accidental Guide to College, Love, and Pizza Delivery, and A Purpose to Our Savagery. His third book, Mexican Teeth: Stories and Assorted Artifacts of an Errant Chicanidad, will appear in 2026. Tomás’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize, and his novel, Delivery, has been accepted into the holdings of the Library of Congress Center for the Book. Sherman Alexie has called Tomás’s writing “painful, scary, hilarious, incredibly vulnerable, and powerful in equal measure.”

Writers in the Attic Knot 2025

The Cabin is a literary arts organization in Boise, Idaho. We forge community through the voices of all readers, writers, and learners. Writers in the Attic (WITA) is an annual contest for both emerging and established writers to publish work related to a theme chosen by The Cabin. This anthology showcases the talents in our community.