The Big Windows Review Issue 11 ~ Spring 2018
The Big Windows Review is a publication of the Writing Center at Washtenaw
Community College, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. We publish poems and short (500 words or less) prose. Design by Tom Zimmerman. All images by Tom Zimmerman, with the exception of the back-cover art, which is by Jessica Winn. The front- and back-cover art are photographs of the covers of just two of the more than one hundred recycled blank journals that Jessica has assembled and distributed for free in our Writing Center since summer 2017. The works herein have been chosen for their literary and artistic merit and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Washtenaw Community College, its Board of Trustees, its administration, or its faculty, staff, or students. Copyright Š 2018 the individual authors and artists.
The Big Windows Review Website: thebigwindowsreview.wordpress.com Email: thebigwindowsreview@gmail.com Editor: Tom Zimmerman Assistant Editors: English Department faculty member Ben Wielechowski and Writing Center tutors Zach Baker, Zaynab Elkolaly, Jessica Kreutzer, Kourosh Labaf, Sarah Levin, Meera Martin, Simon Mermelstein, Erica Morris, Matt Severson, Elizabeth Shillington, and Tyler Wettig
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The Big Windows Review Issue 11 ~ Spring 2018 ~ Contents ~ Catherine Owen Tim Miller Stephanie V Sears Nanette Rayman Rebecca Rose Robert Beveridge Dean Baltesson Salvatore Difalco Tim Robbins Robert Carr Jake Montgomery Joseph Saling Jonathan Douglas Dowdle Mark J. Mitchell Chase Spruiell Kavona White Maryam Barrie Pamela Hobart Carter Kathleen Coman Paul Piatkowski Marjorie Sadin Bedell Phillips Thomas M. McDade Tony Gorry P.C. Scheponik
Funeral The Woman of Vix Girl of Glass Delicate The night I was appointed Pocket Old Maps Playmate A Shipment of Joists Last Swim Chamber Getting On
4 5 6 7 8 9 11 12 14 16 17 21
The Hardest Light Fire monumental I Ain’t Crazy Settled by German Presbyterian Farmers Unicorn/Gumball Machine The Reasons Fever An Oyster without a Pearl Eclipsing the Grave Molly V. Walters Other Lives Chasing the Sun
23 24 25 27
Contributors
29 31 32 33 34 35 36 38 39 40
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~ Catherine Owen ~ Funeral And so the bees became widows But this was not enough for us. We had to decimate their longing too. In fields of poppies, the hives dried their tears. Autumn arrived with its smoke & sorrows. We remembered childhood but it only angered us With its purity. You know the heart. Its wasps hold endless stingers. Or does it only harbour One simple, irredeemable wound in it. No, you won’t understand until it’s too late. And winter has snowed in All the honey of our lives.
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~ Tim Miller ~ The Woman of Vix Let my crooked look fall on you in life and you’ll be free of infirmity and pain and our people will know the far future. I may wander the earth with a knobbled walk and this hard, twisted face I turn at you, and while no man will spread my waddling legs I already know how you’ll bury me: a thousand liters of wine in one krater of bronze, a frieze of chariots and horses on its rim and a gorgon gazing out from each handle. I will be laid on a wagon and adorned with Greek and Etruscan treasure, with amber and diorite and iron, with brooches and beads and rings and a torque of gold round my neck fashioned at the ends into the paws of a lion, and topped with two tiny winged horses in ascent. Not bad for a woman no one will love and just right for a woman you can’t ignore.
France, 480 BC
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~ Stephanie V Sears ~ Girl of Glass
(to Gaspara Stampa) I was a girl of glass winter’s limbs of mist
a mirror of night effusions, across un-sauntered gardens,
lambent flesh of celebration
under reflecting ceilings,
virginal braids pinned Courtesan in fact
with sea floor wares. to the melodious and the ineffable.
My red lips were thus kissed indirectly. My wit soldiered on this front of beauty. I attracted the solar charm of men standing apart, insular, deserted beaches strewn with dereliction, marked by the footprints of a dangerous calling. For him I embodied all women. We bathed in dusk’s lagoon in loose linens. Seagull cries fell into our laps. Day and night we dressed in art’s finery. I was drunk on a ferment of devotion. Yet one hard day savagery beat on our island shutters ~6~
and condemned us. Our sand-scrubbed door grew black and limp like a clutch of dead crows, and I, later, did you sometimes recall me, was left the dapifer of loss and despair.
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~ Nanette Rayman ~ Delicate It’s so gossamer, our freedom. And it tears more winged each day. The enslavement paves it over. We thought our freedom was as sure and sweet as Madeleines baked into a mold. Just delicate moths, our freedom in a boundless dark. So let’s be porcelain with it. Treasure it. So red white and blue poppies will drench with it. So our alphabet of this world will still be here. I hope we will never be lost.
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~ Rebecca Rose ~ The night I was appointed
I'm done with all these other women he tells me,
as I watch him put a boot in her face. He pushes the last of his women down into the drink and swears allegiance to my skin as she drowns under his bones. He says I am the only one he loves. He embraces me and pulls me down to the sand where the waves crack our feet he tastes the blood on my lips and calls me honey he buries his face into my neck and murmurs for another god. He whimpers and withers inside me. Over his shoulder I watch the bloated corpses of my sisters float in his dark waters, like jellyfish in so much moonlight. I am a lucky woman, they tell me For he has chosen me.
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~ Robert Beveridge ~ Pocket In the darkest hours I wonder if she keeps a picture of me in her breast pocket tilted a bit the pointed pocket corner throwing my shoulder to the bottom of her chest the way I keep hers \
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~ Dean Baltesson ~ Old Maps The old maps will now remain folded frayed and worn at the edges possibly ready to tear at the creases if I dare open them again roads towns railways rivers points of interest our youthful mountains all those trails and contours are turned neatly toward each other as if gone forever but we still see the sky not drawn on any map luminous today and declaring your continued presence.
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~ Salvatore Difalco ~ Playmate Amorphous, hazy morning. The fleshy stocking-clad brunette in my bedroom requests a Coca-Cola and a magazine. She is an image from a dated magazine, and I am the printed ephemera crowding the margins. Instead of despairing, I gaze out the kitchen window. Blue, red and yellow dots make up the view, with passing people thicklined in black to separate them from the scenery and from each other. A wandering path with no clear point of departure or arrival meanders anesthetically through different densities of green. “Where’s that drink? I’m bored. I’m really bored.” “Coming right up, hon.” And I am like a defeated nation; fear and dread fill my mind like stick figures fleeing from fire. Many comrades fell during the fighting. The generals are all mad. I need more than psychology to sort out the minefield my thoughts have become. “Hurry. I’m dying of thirst. And I’m dying of boredom.” “There are better ways of expressing society’s failings.” I am not hurrying. I shut my eyes and move through suspended bamboo poles of resentment, into a spot-lit clearing, the poles gently swaying and knocking together behind me like giant wind chimes. Photographic fragments of my past flash by. A lost history. But all memory is lost history. “I’m getting sweaty!” “Maybe you’d rather bleed.” “What’s that supposed to mean? You can’t talk like that to me. I’m American.” “You’re from Buffalo.” “I’m still American.” “You grew up an hour away.” “You don’t own a gun, do you?” The word gun slides into my ears like mud. A chill goes through me. The kitchen looks composed of Ben Day dots. I feel like an opium smoker ~ 12 ~
resting against a monument. I feel incongruous. “I feel incongruous.” “That Coca-Cola better be cold.” The hard edges of her words clack together, then soften and merge to form one sound: “Caw. Caw. Caw.” It’s as if a giant eagle occupies my bedroom, with a giant beak and cruel, horny eyes.
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~ Tim Robbins ~ A Shipment of Joists At the In-And-Out Burger four deaf women curl, straighten, spread talkative fingers. They've pulled off their rings. The brunette with plastic jewels on her chest endangers her nails. First visit to the new trailer in Florida, I get lost coming from the shower. Futilely crosshatching the dark, I marvel at dew fatter than fattest rain. Having screwed me once, Tyler gives my belly a tap or rather takes a tap from it. My navel is neat as a grain. Ancient, pyramid-preserved, it will sprout somewhere beyond pain: words in the plane, tight as my form pressed to the curving wall. New additions: divided lenses, shy amplifiers in the ear’s alcove (as though we have to bug ourselves to spy on loved ones).
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Arch supports like paid companions let us walk but keep us from kneeling. Would these were as decorative as the silk lilies and forsythia that brighten and cheapen your high-ceilinged home, your recent honeymoon in Paris and Rome, your calm amid the flagrance of Versailles (which would have been a battle cry when we were a couple). A new beat has lived in our pulse from the moment we could walk, the moment we could waltz, the moment we tucked the sea into our pocket and sauntered to garden after garden. In the narrowest bed imaginable we fabricated. On the streets of Berkeley we erected our first disagreement. Scaling it abraded our palms and left us panting. Sunday mornings catty corner from our window, the poor and those who aspire to be poor gather to hoist their good news over their heads. The kids hurl it like a dodge ball.
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~ Robert Carr ~ Last Swim I freestyle. Breathing west the salmon sky goes gray, lake surface reflecting clouds of moldy lemon peel. Just weeks ago, bottom grasses reached toward fingers, never touching. Now, autumn thighs are brushed, a bare chest tickled. Caught between lips, teeth, a tangle of blades in goggle straps. I can taste where I’m going. My husband, pushing the season in tight red shorts, waves from the dock to let me know, it’s past time to come in.
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~ Jake Montgomery ~ Chamber The room needs space to watch the bridge lift the road from mist and water. Between calm and terror. The room seems. Have you ever been alone inside a submarine? Is that what death is like? The sun fades. You are the surface and below it, there is nothing of your body, only surface, waves washed into voice, and voice into water, water into nothing, a clean quiet wall of submarine: a fine pale blue. The first day of death, you think you are in the sky similar to the first day of living, but without the shapes. You have lived a life, for Christ’s sake, made love: invent your own shapes. The submarine goes on, the walls move in. On Tuesdays, tuna, on Wednesdays bologna. Sloppy Joe, Sloppy Joe, Sloppy Joe. The room is tidily opaque, full of only rubber, surrounded
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by militaries of water. And water and water filling the mind’s lung. You wonder between breaths. You want the why to cave in, but the where is carved out, and location makes a difference. There are no windows from your thoughts to his or hers or to those of Michelangelo. You live as if tied to a tree, grown inside a whale, dark wet blue abacinated matter. Wallpaper is a room’s heroic impulse, and a backbone, the hero’s walls. You are awake. Are you the hero? Check for leaks. Check the water pressure and scope for enemies. Walk down the dark tunnel. It smells of plastic container and engine. It tastes of room. Walk through the iron muck. The room belongs to time. How long, how far the brink? Have we been here your marriage’s worth of memories? The room will ask clearless, pewter questions with lurches and stillness, bells and drum. Listen to the room’s padded walls become the limits of your thinking, look out. See the empty carnival. ~ 18 ~
Your mother has died. Your father has died. The walls are mephitic. The submarine pushes your skin beneath the soul, beneath all effort, and vision greys in that guttering socket. So hums the iron loom. You fashion new lenses, and these models permit a strain of blindness that caresses the room’s bunk and chair into a memory, of theater. The trumpets found you by the stairs, to which your tired labor had brought little fortune, until it appeared as change in a pocket, a map in hand. That was youth. Then the walls fell, as if the outside world existed, and it may have been true. The room caught the green night sky in your palm. You stood under celestial upholstery like under waterfall. You established the brinks of ambition that allowed you passage. You visited a friend in Cuba, gazed through mist, at clouds over a park, like through a window out of darkness and drew tight circles on heaven’s back, so sure of rainfall. You clapped your hands. You clap them again like a whip, expecting to find—what?—a way out? No, you fall through the names of your life, through the 50c post cards from ~ 19 ~
the Jean-Marie Newsstand, into the room. Somewhere, children kick a ball against temple stone, somewhere plans for another outing. You walk inside the temple, no: you pull the blanket close, lifting a hatch in your mind to a further room, one with less light, less sound, less memory, fewer questions, an altar, less of you.
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~ Joseph Saling ~ Getting On You never knew what we were about, so days turned to pebbles in your shoe. You wanted to quit the path, sow seed and watch it grow. But that place was not for us. I tried to take the bundled twigs you carried to build a fire, but you had chosen each the way a child gets seashells at the beach and wants the next to be better than the last, coated with pearl. You often asked where we were going, but I didn't hear; the wind was so strong it swallowed your voice. You’d scan the edge of sky but found nothing to see. At night you'd walk away from where I lay until I became as distant as the stars that seasoned the dark. The sun and cold made our skin like leather; our souls immune to time. One day we saw a colony of ants go marching off to war. You followed them until you saw their swift red current swirl into a sea swelling with death then watched as red pygmies clashed with giants, picking up their dead and dragging their black bodied foe behind. Later you cried. And when I asked you why, you couldn't say beyond its awful silence. We came on houses built among the rocks and gardens spackling the earth. You asked to stop to splash your face with water from their wells, to rock on weather-grayed porches and feel the touch of another woman's voice besides your own. ~ 21 ~
Later, you found stones and showed me pictures of birds rising unimpeded toward the sun. In towns where farmers sold fresh fruit, we walked among them, sat with them at night. I heard you laugh and saw their light reflecting in your eyes. Brighter than the stars, softer than the moon. A mountain crazed the rim of heaven's bowl. A city rose like the mountain's child. Its streets flowed like liquid music, its walls shimmered like pearl in the morning sun, its windows blazed. You said I should go ahead. You said you’d stay. I lost my way. Against a wall of stone, I watched the lights rise from the city. I had nothing to do but wait for dawn to creep across the sky, erasing stars. The world around me shivered with sound, a staccato dawn, the polyphonous hillside spotted with bird song. And I had somewhere else I needed to be. Having seen the wonders of liquid music and glass on fire and you becoming you, I turned and made my way down the mountain's other side.
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~ Jonathan Douglas Dowdle ~ The Hardest Light We move through a rain of glances, Knowing houses are still built by hammers, Thudding and thunderous In the temples, and beneath the skin. Thin as the construct of time, we skate Through every story's twitch and turn, Where every moment frozen in memory Is still awaiting its moment to burn. What now, in these hours, desolate, Should we bend before, and in utterance, pray, If the avalanche of every other emotion Is torn down by the ricochet? Oh, let your heart fire in its chamber, While all that could be, murmurs, through the night, But we are left with the hammer, and the nail, Building a house of The hardest light.
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~ Mark J. Mitchell ~ Fire She says her husband smelled smoke and left. She never knew what kind of smoke—tobacco, sulfur, oak or hickory— just that he smelled it and went out like a candle.
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~ Chase Spruiell ~ monumental around the corner we never peeked of a building we surrendered that we never did enter. the clay and shale left to commiserate in their what-ifs resigned beneath a white paint that reads: BEARS EARS ELEVATION the earth spans out over the red rocks in sorrow captured by a new power’s course web enslaved again. yet we still believe in hallowed ground, you & I. the romance of reason found us hiding behind the spine of a fiction worth living. found us with only enough money for water, rent, and some of Vonnegut’s thought-food. found us idle in the power shift. found us in a useless political poem. found us American weak. ~ 25 ~
we were discovered with flustered tears peering over one more article about the man living in a national monument stripping away a national monument. his idea of America great again. the ears removed and the bear unable to hear the land’s familiar native tongue as it slumbers into another new America.
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~ Kavona White ~ I Ain’t Crazy Been losing grip Feeling myself quickly slip Into this bed of sorrows But I got work tomorrow I know how this story ends But I’ll enlist my therapist Admitting to my troubles Discussion begins with emotions That have been impossible to sort Between what’s reality and a nightmare Impulses and negative thinking Childhood traumas Daddy and my po’ momma… Are they the reason behind it all? Or am I just too damaged? Irreparable Just an angry black female Fucking her way through life Hanging on by a thread Blaming everyone else in her way Taking hits and blows That’s all a sista knows… Pain is all a sista knows There’s little time to wallow Damn I got work tomorrow There’s all these bills overdue and… Cowardly I give up Running fast Away from existence ~ 27 ~
To hell with this world I don’t need you.
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~ Maryam Barrie ~ Settled by German Presbyterian Farmers Settled by German Presbitarian farmers, it was a town of Feldkamps and Finkbeiners, and my last name was Hanifi. Divorce was taboo, a scandal, it was 1966, and only my parents were divorced, though my mom would not admit it, as my father had not yet given her permission. The neighbors knew though, and Christina across the street would taunt me with it. I’d march Christina over to our screen door, and ask my mom to settle the question once and for all. She’d say, “The answer is the same thing I told you before.” Into that gray air I’d turn to Christina and try on a face of triumph. It wasn’t just that. I was a brown little girl, and loved my brown Chatty Cathy doll dearly. There was one family in town darker. I’d explain the absence of my father by saying that he worked for the CIA behind the Iron Curtain. In Chicago. My sense of otherness was palpable and had a tart tang. I cherished it, though I knew it set me on the outside. I was there anyway. My best friend, Galen, wore green satin pants to school, with three inch high platform shoes. In the library boys would drop off notes at our table that read “Die faggot!” Moving back there after the degree, and marriage, and daughters, one woman I had been in Girl Scouts with earnestly told me, after I had said how glad I was that my husband and mother would be the only ones watching my girls while I taught, “You know, you can put them in daycare.” At the one high school reunion I attended, my very drunk friend hoisted her up onto his shoulder, like Rhett Butler. He was wearing heels, and standing at the top of a steep stone set of stairs, weaving as he yelled, “Am I man enough for you now, Sue?” I wrassled her bottom off of his shoulder, setting her down safely. She was drunk too, and told me tearfully that she just wanted to live in a white picket fence world. ~ 29 ~
Her daughter and mine were in the same third grade classroom. That was the year girls told mine that she didn’t wear headbands correctly, once they’d demanded her help with math. Sue’s daughter, Megan, told mine that it didn’t matter if your feet were comfortable, it just mattered if your shoes looked new. My husband and I wrote letters to the small newspaper. He wrote for gun control, and I wrote about treating gay students respectfully. When my friend died of AIDS, I had a fire in me to leave that town. So we did. I hear from my brown faced students here at the college that it is still not a good place to drive in whilst brown, or to be a brown face in their yearbooks. Let them have their sameness, and the way they are poised now to rule the world.
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~Pamela Hobart Carter ~ Unicorn/Gumball Machine She eyes the red ball, her eye an ebony orb, bigger than the shiny gumball. Its neighbors—blue, green, violet, and yellow spheres—gleam inside the clear glass tank like giant grains of aquarium sand, lustrous. The coin pinched between her square teeth drops into the slot and her ivory horn prods the release of the round rainbow envoy. Glee spreads over her horsey face as the hard globes rattle, beads on a psychedelic rosary, and her polychrome prayers and her whinny are answered when a single plop and clattering roll signal her wished for gift has slid into the chute for her chomping enjoyment. The unicorn extracts with her soft gray lips the red gumball. Isn’t this as we would all desire, that the small worlds we eye and imagine become those upon which we may ruminate and inspire into ephemeral existence at our leisure as we canter deeper and deeper into wild dark forests?
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~ Kathleen Coman ~ The Reasons of course i know why i write because somewhere in the darkness that lies in between the pages of my ugliness and pain you will find light and beauty the fire you need to spark a flame in your soul
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~ Paul Piatkowski ~ Fever My toes are cubes, and no number of blankets can stop this fever burning in my skin while my body freezes and my mind first wanders then settles intensely on a void I try to place. Being sick, Virginia Woolf complained, is a topic writers spent too much time avoiding. My father in law's poems about his cancer, the year before he died, were his best work. All agreed. His "Turkey Buzzards" what his life's work will recall. The sweetness of the moment when he could see the end so near, my toddling daughter at his bedside and his end juxtaposed so clearly.
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~ Marjorie Sadin ~ An Oyster without a Pearl
In memory of Carole Mack My father is an oyster without a pearl. Carole was his pearl. She spoke her mind. Now he is an empty shell, tossed on the shore. Their years together the best of his life. My father is drift wood. He has no home. He lives in my condo till he finds a place of his own. He’s whittled by time, dried wood, washed ashore. My father is a seagull. Complaining, squawking about everything, the dust behind the bed, the room is too cold. He has trouble walking, back pain. A seagull, he lets you know. My father is tide roaring in, as it dissipates near the shore. My father is unafraid as he faces death. My father is an oyster without a pearl. Carole was his pearl.
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~ Bedell Phillips ~ Eclipsing the Grave far from home the old granite had brown spots at the crumbling cemetery her dates on a small square stone sacred sainted mother still their shining light but the grave gives no comfort merely marks the death date her daughter looks away clear sky overhead
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~ Thomas M. McDade ~ Molly V. Walters Children dig foxholes but Walgreens’ pails and castle moats are dry. Mothers keep tykes and tots, not to mention themselves clear of the chomping surf. We hope the wind-taut red danger flag doesn’t apply to a piper cub flying back and forth, back and forth pulling a banner imploring: “MOLLY V. WALTERS WILL YOU MARRY ME?” A bystander claims the daring suitor warms the passenger seat. For God’s sakes, girl launch an affirmative flare. Forgive and forget if that’s the rub. Aeronautics sure beat on one knee. Sprint up and down, up and down the beach a white flag waving. Charm the tots and tykes to assist, body-write YOU BET on the sand. We worry about you and your beau and the pilot running out of fuel. Is that sputtering we hear? Molly V. Walters, we will lend our voices, shouting YES, YES, YES. It’s sure to succeed. We promise to love you unconditionally. The sea will calm and the children ~ 36 ~
will applaud your filling their pails kindly completing each castle.
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~ Tony Gorry ~ Other Lives Afternoon on a darkening street in trees dappled by gas lamps a breeze whispers slyly of winter and leaves stir at my feet yearning for branches above. Houses with glowing windows frame comings and goings within while from the shadows I watch the mysterious lives of others ones I might have known but didn’t ones I might yet know but won’t. Shivering in a sudden gust of wind I resume my slow walk home the lives of those others scattering like the leaves that swirl at my feet.
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~ P.C. Scheponik ~ Chasing the Sun Lightning bugs in jars, blinking luminescence, like God winking, like stars gathered into jars called galaxies, blinking luminescence so we can see our way through space, through time. Eternity folds over on itself again and again until there is no clear beginning, no clear end—just the infinite present that lends itself to dreams of future past. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Who knows how long lightning bugs or stars in jars will last? Unscrew the lids. Let them all fly away. Their great migrations of light will shape our desire to stay and to pray until we finally get it right. We, the children of the night, chasing the sun in our eyes.
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~ Contributors ~ Dean Baltesson is a poet and musician living in Victoria, BC, Canada. He is currently working on a volume of poetry entitled There Must be Words To Describe This. His poetry and can be found in a number of online and print literary journals or on his recent CD Covering Ground. Maryam Barrie, married with two grown daughters, lives in an Oak and Hickory woods between Dexter and Chelsea, Michigan. She has taught at Washtenaw Community College since 1985. She is a read-a-holic, and loves gardening, trees, colors, the earth, Hildegard of Bingen, and poetry. Her favorite writer today is Lucia Berlin. Robert Beveridge makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry just outside Cleveland, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Pulsar, Tessellate, and Scarlet Leaf Review, among others. Robert Carr is the author of the chapbook "Amaranth" (Indolent Books, 2016) and a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry has appeared in many magazines. He lives with his husband Stephen in Malden, Massachusetts, and serves as an associate poetry editor for Indolent Books. Pamela Hobart Carter used to be a teacher who wrote on the side. Now she is a writer who teaches on the side. Some of her plays have been read and produced on Seattle stages. Long ago she trained as a geologist. Kathleen Coman has received a Bachelors of Art in English from the University of Toledo as well as taken graduate level courses in creative writing. Past publishing credentials include: A&U Magazine, Carty’s Poetry Journal, Blinking Cursor Literary Magazine, and others. She has self-published four novels. Salvatore Difalco's work has appeared in a number of print and online formats. He lives in Toronto. Jonathan Douglas Dowdle was born in Nashua, NH, and has traveled throughout the US. He currently resides in South Carolina. Previous works have appeared or are appearing in: Hobo Camp Review, 322 Review, The Write Place at the Write Time, and After the Pause. Tony Gorry has published in JAMA, The Chronicle Review, The Examined Life Journal, The New Atlantis, Fiddleback, Cleaver Magazine, and Belle Rêve Literary Journal. His essay in War, Literature & the Arts was Notable in 100 Best American Essays 2012. His book, Memory's Encouragement, was published by Paul Dry Books. Thomas M. McDade is a Fredericksburg, VA resident, previously CT & RI. He is a graduate of Fairfield University. McDade is twice a U.S. Navy Veteran serving ashore at the Fleet Anti-Air Warfare Training Center, Virginia Beach, VA. At sea aboard the USS Mullinnix (DD-944) and USS Miller (DE/FF 1091). Tim Miller's poem "The Woman of Vix" is part of a larger collection on prehistoric Europe, entitled Bone Antler Stone, which will be published later this year by the High Window Press. Other poems from this collection have appeared in Crannog, Londongrip, The High Window,
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Poethead, Cider Press Review, Cumberland River Review, The Basil O'Flaherty, Albatross, The Journal (Wales), Literary Juice, Bitter Oleander, Juked, Concho River Review, Foliate Oak, and others. His long narrative poem, To the House of the Sun, was published in 2015 by S4N Books. He writes about religion, history, and poetry at www.wordandsilence.com.
Mark J. Mitchell’s latest novel, The Magic War, just appeared from Loose Leaves Publishing. He studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver and George Hitchcock. His work has appeared in the several anthologies and hundreds of periodicals. Three of his chapbooks—Three Visitors; Lent, 1999; and Artifacts and Relics—and the novel Knight Prisoner are available. He lives with his wife, the activist Joan Juster, and makes a living pointing out pretty things in San Francisco. Jake Montgomery is from Southern New Jersey and currently lives in Iowa City, IA. He has studied poetry at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. Catherine Owen has published 13 collections of poetry and prose. Her work has received grants and awards and been toured nationally. Her upcoming compilation of memoirs is called Locations of Grief: an emotional geography. "Funeral" is from an MS titled The Letting Go Poems. Bedell Phillips, a graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, also holds a master’s degree. Her poetry can be found in Gravel (of the University of Arkansas), The Lit Fuse, and Tower Journal. Thrums and Tapestries, her third book, launched October 2016. Bedell lives in Exeter, New Hampshire and Jupiter, Florida. Paul Piatkowski has had work published in a number of journals including Florida English, Naugatuck River Review, Fast Forward, 2River View, and Sheepshead Review. He is currently working on his PhD in English Literature at UNCG Greensboro. He lives with his wife and daughter in WinstonSalem, North Carolina. Nanette Rayman, poetry books, Shana Linda Pretty Pretty, Project: Butterflies, two-time Pushcart nominee, included in Best of the Net 2007, DZANC Best of the Web 2010, winner Glass Woman Prize. Publications: The Worcester Review, Sugar House Review (poem newpages.com), Stirring's Steamiest Six, gargoyle, Berkeley Fiction Review, Editor's Pick Green Silk Journal, chaparral, Pedestal, ditch, Wilderness House Literary Review, decomp, glass, Contemporary American Voices, featured poet at Up the Staircase Quarterly, Rain, Poetry & Disaster Society, DMQ, carte blanche, Oranges & Sardines, Sundog, Melusine. Tim Robbins teaches ESL. He has a B.A. in French and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics. He has been a regular contributor to Hanging Loose since 1978. His poems have appeared in Three New Poets, Slant, Main Street Rag, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Off the Coast, and others. His collection Denny’s Arbor Vitae was published in 2017. He lives with his husband of twenty years in Kenosha, Wisconsin, birthplace of Orson Welles. Rebecca Rose is the Arts and Food Writer for Sun, an alt-weekly based in Santa Barbara County. She was formerly an editor for the website Jezebel and has also written for Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Seventeen, Esquire, and more. She holds a degree in Film and Video from Columbia College and was the co-producer of the documentary film Stones from the Soil for PBS. Marjorie Sadin has recently published a chapbook, Struck by Love, and a full length book, Vision of
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Lucha, by Goldfish Press. She has published her poetry nationally. Marjorie lives in Virginia and reads her poems locally. She is a docent for the Library of Congress and editor of The Federal Poets Magazine. Joseph Saling's book A Matter of Mind is available from Foothills Publishing. He is the runner up for the 2016 Bacopa Literary Review Prize for Fiction from the Writer's Alliance of Gainesville, and his poetry and short fiction have appeared widely in such journals as The Raintown Review, The Formalist, The Bacon Review, Blue Lake Review, and Carcinogenic Poetry. P.C. Scheponik is retired. He is a lifelong poet who lives by the sea with his wife, Shirley, the love of his life and his shizon, Bella. He has published four collections of poetry and has been published in numerous journals. Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist, free-lance journalist, essayist, poet whose poetry recently appeared in Linq, The Comstock Review, Plum Tree Tavern, Mystic Blue Review and is pending publication in Anak Sastra, Indefinite Space. Chase Spruiell was born in Denton, Texas. He spent the majority of the time in his life playing basketball, earning a full athletic scholarship at St. Edward's University. He has a bachelor's degree in Digital Cinema and currently resides in Austin, Texas where he writes music for his two projects: Half Man and Free Kittens & Bread. Kavona White is a “poet in the making." She received her B.A. in Sociology from Norfolk State University. She is an advocate for minority women issues and mental health. Her aesthetic is personal, raw, and real.
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Percy Zimmerman June 7, 2007 - April 10, 2018
Baltesson Barrie Beveridge Carr Carter Coman Difalco Dowdle Gorry McDade Miller Mitchell Montgomery Owen Phillips Piatkowski Rayman Robbins Rose Sadin Saling Scheponik Sears Spruiell White The Big Windows Review Issue 11 Spring 2018 Washtenaw Community College Ann Arbor MI USA