The Big Windows Review, Issue 29, Fall 2022

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 and digital images by Tom Zimmerman, Editor.

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 © 2022 the individual authors and artists.

The Big Windows Review Website: thebigwindowsreview.com Email: thebigwindowsreview@gmail.com

Editor: Tom Zimmerman

Contents Liza Achilles V. A. Bettencourt Jeff Burt Steve Deutsch Katacha Díaz William Doreski John Dorroh Kim Farleigh Jack Galmitz David A. Goodrum John Grey Danielle Hanson Marc Janssen Paul Lojeski Kurt Luchs Ted Mc Carthy Ken Meisel Debasish Mishra Daniel Edward Moore Lucia Morello Martina Reisz Newberry Ken Poyner Sarah M. Prindle Kristy Snedden Daniel Webre Contributors

Two Sonnets from TWO NOVEMBERS: A Memoir of Love ’n’ Sex in Sonnets Fragments Wheel In the Distance The Night of the Butterflies Down the Mississippi Some Local Archeology Old Towns Make Believe Listen So Much Depended Birthmark Alleys Ghosts Always Returning III The Cynic and the Poem Dear Frank “Today I am occupied . . .”

Fixing a Saw Wound Healing The Corona Bus Friday Night at Seven good morning texts The Favorite Meals of Spirits The Importance of a Sexual History Return Sensing the Storm Fog Forecast Man in a Green Bubble

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Liza Achilles ________________________________ Two Sonnets from TWO NOVEMBERS: A Memoir of Love ’n’ Sex in Sonnets Sonnet 121 The gullible female between eighteen And sixty-five has instant recourse to The plentitudes of web and magazine Sagacities:—He’s Really Into You . . .

Or Is He? screams a headline;—but, alas, As I’m not in that demographic group, I’ll add my own bullshit to my own sass And me advise if I should bawl or whoop: If “Did you, L, on dates, think just of me?”

“Are you composing poems for me still?”

“Don’t worry!” and “One-woman man!” cries he, Then—(rosy findings, heart, I shall distill!)— He’s into you,—just doesn’t know it yet.

Next up:—Is Your Intelligence a Threat?

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Sonnet 124 I once, naive, let others choose for me;— Now I’m directing my own classic flick:— I climbed your steps, picked my philosophy— And hoped that sovereignty would do the trick.

Since this one—costar—ain’t no horror film, I checked my head was screwed on super tight:— I’m yours, I’d hint, but only if you will Be mine;—if not, let’s just get laid tonight.

This was a documentary, I thought, In which a tough gal tries to catch a fish But, boringly, is never wholly caught,— Till softened you the light—all dramaish!— And sang, “I’m taking down my profiles, k?”

I—spotlit, doelike—had no lines to say!

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V. A. Bettencourt ___________________________

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Jeff Burt ___________________________________ Wheel I have gripped the steering wheel of my old F-150 truck so many times it has worn away at the top and bottom.

Ah, but the sides, the sides, sleek as if new.

I have gone forward too long, driven to the appointed task, needed to turn left and right more often.

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Steve Deutsch ______________________________ In the Distance We speak so seldom now— phone shy since childhood and the miles between us seem to multiply with the years.

Remember when each new day greeted us like a garden gate opening?

When did the highway become a gravel path?

Last night, I thought of that day we had to hide 8

your father’s car keys.

His daily descent into dementia.

I take the top down on the old Triumph Spitfire, kick the tires for luck, and head your way on the open road.

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Katacha Díaz _______________________________ The Night of the Butterflies She dreamed a linear dream.

She flew somewhere along the River, between mountains covered with lush vegetation, and over a giant canopy, like an umbrella, of brilliant green tall trees.

She was fascinated by the large showy orchids and other exotic flowers blooming in the tops of the forest.

This surreal journey included floating through an array of colored wings and dazzling golden-orange butterflies. She saw shiny chrysalises and was intrigued by the structurally impressive cocoons alongside butterflies stretching newly formed wings in this tropical oasis.

Then, rather suddenly, she was awake, and was in the bedroom alone. No cloud of butterflies; no giant flowers, or Tarzan’s vines and strangler figs with dangling roots climbed the walls. They had been there moments before, she knew, but no longer.

She smiled. Isn’t it sublime and exciting to reconnect with nature’s gifts in a dream, satisfying a severe case of the travel bug during the coronavirus global pandemic.

The Amazon rainforest is a magical place full of hidden treasures.

— A journey to explore tropical Eden beckons!

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William Doreski ____________________________ Down the Mississippi Rafting down the Mississippi, we’re simple enough to enjoy starlight flexing in the current and the grimace of sunlit bluffs.

We hope we achieve New Orleans without tripping over a snag or grinding up on a sandbar.

We aren’t like Huck and Jim evading the clutch of civilization.

We aren’t like the bargemen toting grain, cotton, soybeans, sand, fertilizer, coal, and gravel from this desolation to that.

We’re more like retired couples enjoying cruises with mobs of bridge and bocci players.

We lack the mobs, of course, but we can mock the expressions of the white-haired people in ads.

The river carries so much silt we’re surprised there’s farmland left to farm. Villages above the high-water mark regard us with disdain. Villages below annual flood level look desperate.

We drift without steering, trusting the muscular flow to shape us to its will. The days and nights 11

peel like old wallpaper, exposing landscapes too plain to inspire.

We’ll arrive somewhere, but how to distinguish it from nowhere?

The river groans with old age but never loses its focus, every drop of water employed.

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William Doreski ____________________________ Some Local Archeology In the ruins of the high school I find, among shards and cinders, bits of human bone. They glow like opals, intelligent even in their fragmentary state.

You with your metal detector scout for coins and other trash, your grimace focused so firmly I wouldn’t dream of disturbing you.

I’m going to collect all the bone to calculate the mass of life lost when the old structure burned, twenty years before I was born.

No one bothered to bulldoze the site.

No one cares that the town no longer sends its adolescents to school.

For many years they’ve stayed home, birthing from the age of thirteen, shipping half their human crop every year to state institutions.

The bone-bits are so weathered they’re almost wholly mineral, fossilized scraps of people we might have attempted to love, or at least tolerate. Ivy, that ironic vine, shrouds the walls with their gaping window holes framing views of violet hills.

The blocks of reddish sandstone retain a certain integrity, the material itself much older 13

than the ruins of Athens or Rome.

You find an Indian head penny and a liberty dime. Let’s quit for now. You can buy us lunch, and I’ll show you the bones I’ve found and maybe you can name them.

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John Dorroh _______________________________ Old Towns I want an old town like dusted biscuits in my mother’s kitchen, forget the stretched chrome-and-glass behemoths, all the new shapes that young architects sketched in their heads in their own mother’s kitchens. I want the town to lie down on top of me and make me earn my breath. The breakfast diner with pancakes as large as steering wheels, link sausages, eggs sunny-side-up with bottomless cups of coffee. The family-owned jewelry store with shimmering trinkets hung onto tiny limbs of fake trees, luring customers into their dens.

The hardware store with the husky mascot, standing on the edge of a cliff, howling at a white crescent moon. I want the wolf in my bed. I will rest on the sofa and give her a good night’s sleep.

I want an old town with postal workers who know my name and wear light blue shirts the same color as my mother’s eyes. The candy store with homemade fudge two inches thick and salt water taffy made at the beach down the road. I want an old town with copper roofs gone green and the sound of mourning doves cooing as the sun slides up over the ridge of ancient oak and maple trees. I don’t want to grow up in faux this and faux that and have a soul buried under the concrete that I have to dig out, that I have to fight for when they unpackage another Chipotle, clearing my grandmother’s property for yet one more place to bury my town.

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Kim Farleigh _______________________________ Make Believe We were driving down the city’s main road, my father’s cheeks twitching, a stress rash reddening his face. Short-lived supernovae, flashing upon approaching windscreens, gleamed like “brilliant” ideas.

“They’re jealous,” my father said, “about me having Western Australia.”

Silence normally reigned when he drove.

A hovering magpie forced a kid up against a tree trunk, how to escape current circumstances a common dilemma.

“Jealousy towards a big fish in a small pond,” my father said.

I didn’t know what he meant. His green eyes’ intensity highlighted their smallness.

Green parrots, a local species, dotted the street’s powerlines. They faced sudden death. We faced slow deterioration.

A bus flashed past a bus stop. Ignorant it was an express, a man waved an angry arm. Deeper inaccuracies affected my father.

“Yesterday,” he said, “I made some guys walk back to the Highway Hotel, where we’d been drinking, from that street there.”

The Highway Hotel was a mile away. The area’s houses, behind high walls, exuded emboldening intimacy. Outside that intimacy, anonymity disappeared, enhancing failure’s embarrassments.

“They didn’t believe it when I said I’d bought a property here,” he said. “We got into my car at the pub and drove to the property. I had the title deeds in my glovebox.”

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Where else are title deeds kept?

I battled our mutual inadequacy. Someone I had known years before, whom I had recently run into, had asked: “Are you still full of bullshit?”

“They said,” my father continued, eyes like green fires of dismay, “that I couldn’t have bought it. Showing them the title deeds shut them up. I said I didn’t buy it, I snared it. The previous owner had inherited it. She needed cash fast, so she made a quick sale. When they tried getting into the car to go back to the pub, I told them to walk back.”

His satisfaction’s brittleness opposed success’s solidity. Power creates reality, influence and cunning needed for that.

An ambulance, desperate for arrival, shot by, its red lights flashing like my father’s green eyes.

Years later, I realised he had been sacked for dispensing with potential clients. He had once said: “I dispense with small-order time wasters.”

But small expands.

His first date with the property owner’s simple, but sympathetic, daughter, just before the Title Deed Incident, had flung his imagination over the precipice of exaggeration, stimulating another of his creations of success.

Only my brothers and the property owner’s family went to his funeral.

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Jack Galmitz _______________________________ Listen We're introduced and engage in small talk-String Quartet, Op. 4.

All the score: the notes in each bar, the articulation, the tone; we have so much to learn from one another.

We listen closely.

More than once.

We watch the night paint surfaces and we take notes.

What more can we do?

The music becomes richer, more precise as we draw closer than before.

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David A. Goodrum __________________________ So Much Depended upon the notebook always in my pocket with scribbles and snippets yesterday first in the washing machine then confetti blowing out the dryer vent

*Adapted from a Facebook post by the poet Marc Janssen, 12/21/2021.

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John Grey __________________________________ Birthmark You say that, at your birth, the midwife, in the midst of celebration, spilled wine down the right side of your face.

It was a fine claret, you add.

The stain never did come out.

Another time, you tell me that, being two-faced physically, you’ve done your best to make sure that your nature doesn’t follow.

You’ve always been honest with me.

Everyone else I know says the same.

Your resoluteness is working.

Meeting new people, you don’t pretend the birthmark isn’t there.

There’s no attempt to hide it with a string of hair.

It’s as much a part of you as your bad jokes.

People laugh at them.

You laugh at your own uniqueness.

Your wife says that patch of purple is what first attracted her to you.

She hasn’t seen it since.

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Danielle Hanson ___________________________ Alleys The past strolls down a path, whistling, hands in pockets. Before she moved, our neighbor mixed her husband’s ashes with those from his dogs, and wove them through the alleys behind our houses. He had always sat on his front porch, drink in hand, shouting at passers-by. He was part of the air, become part of the earth.

The wife who left became ghost.

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Danielle Hanson ___________________________ Immortality Let me leave my words on the street to raise themselves.

Let them ferment like fallen fruit— let the rats get drunk on them, let them scatter.

Carve my name on the ice of a river; watch while it melts—let it be carried to the sea and join the currents.

Let me bury my memories just before the water breeches the levee.

Let the coffins be unearthed in the flood.

Let my immortality be quiet, insidious.

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Marc Janssen _______________________________

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Marc Janssen _______________________________

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Paul Lojeski ________________________________ Dear Frank You’ve been dead 6 years.

What, you can’t call?

Can’t write? Can’t knock in the middle of night? Come on, man. Bro, I need a hand, some consolation.

You hear me? Will you meet me on that bright hill, Brother?

A hug for posterity?

One last laugh before the hammer falls? I know you can do it, Frank. This favor is all I’ve ever asked for. Greet me one last time at the crossroads.

Don’t let me weep alone in this darkness.

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Kurt Luchs _________________________________ “Today I am occupied . . .”

Today I am occupied by the corpses of the newly dead, they pour in from the screens of my laptop and television, they leap through my eyes and into my head from newspapers lying on shelves at the convenience store, they settle straight to my feet and it seems there’s always room for more, I am not overflowing and they weigh nothing.

As for their effect on spacetime they take up no space at all and only a few moments at the top of the hour on the local classical station.

My heart can take it.

My heart which can take marriage and divorce and an American hamburger with a fried egg on it.

My soul, on the other hand… my soul, my soul is lost among so many others falling like snow, the silence an ink blot spreading on a tablecloth claiming the white for its own.

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Ted Mc Carthy ______________________________ Fixing a Saw Those years ago, I thought him desolate, the old man in frost, fixing a chainsaw by car light, battling numb fingers; the fading patience of those around was like the cold, to be mastered or ignored.

That he’d catch his death was little more than a child’s admonishment. There were other, newer saws to fetch, to borrow.

No. I can still sense the gritting of teeth, the beam catching his shadow as he shifted on his coat.

He was old, stubborn, unreasonable, waging war on the dark and a spring the thinness of a hair.

No again. He was, as the headlights died and he marked in his mind the place where the last, missing piece rolled, a colossus.

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Ken Meisel _________________________________ Wound Healing “for it was their injured love that made them do it” – Milan Kundera When I cried, I was crying for all of my lifetimes, & something inside of her knew it. Like maybe she was remembering me when I was a potato farmer, in Ireland, & she was holding me after I’d cut my finger off with an axe, or a wood saw or hoe, & so she held me tightly as I heaved out my sorrow, my ache & all my woes. & you know, the stream of our livingness is a white beam with poppies, like florid memories, on it. & so she knew I’d been quite violent, at one point in my journey & even not quite civil, in this lifetime with her. & she could seemingly see just how the sin of something floats, then embeds in the tactile nature of our skin so we can feel it flaring in us as we reenact it alive with another. & so she held me then, harder, & leaned into my face & told me I wasn’t him, not anymore. & that the old Irish hospital I was in, all those slipstreams ago, was stone rubble now, like a collapsed bone skeleton in some green field. & that the stream of light moving through me, just now, with her, was inseparable from how we reconfigure in a body, in a chateau, or in a hotel, just to awaken again as a new resident, healed alive. & with somebody we’ve known all along, down the slipstream of time. & something in me, then, saw in her face that she was a Scottish field nurse, at bedside with me. & she was holding out this hidden washcloth of opposites – of the wounded 28

& the healed one together – in one form. & so she pulled one of the poppies off of it, for it was part narcotic so that it could heal me – so I’d be more patient & pastoral within it, here in my body, & she spread the wound all over me, like medicine, like she was cleansing me with just my own pain. & washing my body with what comes, just after. & she pointed, softly, through the window where together we could see a soft bed of white flower petals, almond petals. & it felt like the old hospital bed I’d laid in but, at the same time, it was now. & I was with the woman who was now my wife. & the wound of all my lifetimes, that violence, that resistance to a light most glad of all that heals & transforms what was pain into deep love, gave over to an overcoming of that world. & into a healing into this world, right here & now.

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Debasish Mishra ____________________________ The Corona Bus The bus has come from another realm with its skin of a graffiti wall made of fresh roses, orchids and hyacinths scattered all over its body It honks outside the gate now And I hurry up for it won't wait When I enter, I see passengers from every place, from far-off China, India, Africa, and the countries down under This bus is cosmopolitan like death unbiased in the choice of passengers The bright faces all dressed in white crane their necks from the windows as though it is their final journey freedom from the drudgery There are no more belongings No luggage for this unexpected journey The driver looks tired yet wears a mystic smile It must be his hundredth trip or more He is working overtime

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When I say, I have nothing to pay for a ticket, he curves his lips some more, This journey is beyond money

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Daniel Edward Moore ______________________ Friday Night at Seven Kneeling made the room feel regal.

You became a staircase of scars I used my tongue and hands to climb all the way to heaven.

Hell is the way it felt to live as if the mind was King, as if landmines left by thoughts were flowers to be picked.

Saluting cruelty’s softer side, something tender, almost kind, raised me to my feet like Christ, pierced by heavy metal.

Terror asked permission to laugh like us: naked tricksters gagging on time, in moments we made matter.

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Lucia Morello _______________________________ good morning texts good morning, my beautiful girl my butterfly girl my every-star-in-the-sky girl my girl, the “my” something i swirl around in my mouth for a moment, allow myself to choke on it allow myself to be comfortable with this idea of possession, of possessing you of being something that haunts and follows the shadow in the background that ruins the photograph

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Martina Reisz Newberry ____________________ The Favorite Meals of Spirits The dark is hungry for our sins, our solutions, our abandoned hopes and our inappropriate projects. It is, I believe, why the spirits love it so. The dark craves fears and arguments and those culminate in the favorite meals of spirits. So, they arrive at night, opening doors, moving furniture, bending silverware, sliding in and out of shadows darker than the great black holes of their birth. Brides without grooms, grooms without heads, children who float over the floors of the dark. The air is rife with hunger. The dim tables bear the food of spirits: thorns and anthems, blood oranges and dumplings made of nettles. For afters, there will be the fruit of the bat-thorn plant basted with the sauce of sweet regret. Come with me, then. Enter the grotto, genuflect, devour.

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Martina Reisz Newberry ____________________ The Importance of a Sexual History Long ago, a man asked me what it would take to get me to go to bed with him.

I arched an eyebrow, said (archly) “Talk pretty to me and my legs will fly open like a car door.”

Later, much later in the relationship, I told him, “Look.

I can play Love or I can play War; just tell me which game we’re playing.”

There you are.

In the entire history of my sexual relationships, those are the only two glib things I know to say about Love, War, or Sex except for “Hello,” and “That is all.”

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Ken Poyner ________________________________ Return The old haunted house, the legion of dares, the field of fumbling sweet encounters. One long line of: dare you to stand on the porch; dare you to throw a rock; dare you to set eyes around the missing front door; dare you to leap into the living room: to shout, to possibly, prayerfully, get Lindsey to be with you inside, to be the ghost of your imagination. Lindsey: blonde hair, a bevy of clasps and buttons and fingers of cloth and bungling buckles and hooks and opportunity and processes. Go ahead. Drag the old mattress found inviting on the dust and broken glass of a second-floor bedroom down the stairs to make it even more brazenly inviting. You are not scared, are you? The stairs creak and would have been at one time the base of stalking monsters, the heavy ghosts of former residents. Outside, boys the age you were seemingly moments ago get to the porch, throw a rock through paneless window, push a face mere inches inside the door, invade briefly the living room, shouting as you and Lindsey stand barely hand in hand achieving nothing, uncertain what could be achieved, the mattress stained and flat on one side, an artifact, a remnant of the glories in the onetime-lives of those who now haunt this place. As simple as the memory, years ahead, of what could have been done but was not, your inabilities coiled suspiciously and hauntingly around you. Listen for clues.

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Sarah M. Prindle ____________________________ Sensing the Storm Utter silence and an unnatural stillness permeate the air.

Thunderclouds loom overhead, chilling the day, darkening the endless sky.

There’s rumbling off in the distance getting closer with each second.

The air is heavy with humidity, with the sound of raindrops pattering on the pavement.

A jagged flash slashes the sky, announces with a deafening crack: the storm is here.

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Kristy Snedden _____________________________ Fog Forecast After his accident fog entered our home.

It lifted on my way to the gym or the office each morning when the sun finally sailed high enough to unfurl my thoughts, to remember my best friend said to call her today or wonder if the landlord fixed the plumbing. I forget the fog is at home.

Last night he greeted me in the carport to tell me he took the dog’s medicine.

He said it with a little chuckle. Then we rested in our chairs. The sun gave her last glint as she slid behind the mountain and the dark inched through our house until, finally, the fog covered me too.

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Daniel Webre ______________________________ Man in a Green Bubble The man near eighty resumes his stooped walk from front porch to mailbox.

It is posted near a busy road cut through the concrete of strip malls. I’m in one of the cars zipping past his tiny bubble of green trees not yet pierced by the ambitions of developers.

I don’t see much but the flash of his life breaking up the Sonic on one side and maybe a dry cleaner on the other, his leftover world no more than an acre tucked between.

I tried counting the cars in his driveway—I think there were two. But that doesn’t mean anything. He could have lived alone—maybe never left—the cars mere reminders of a wife and family and motives that took him elsewhere.

I remember he wore heavy black-frame glasses and grim determination.

Though I wondered if he’d made peace with circumstance and trained his eyes to see only what fit well within those frames.

All this in a passing instant. There were Walmarts and McDonalds enough, further along the road, to make me forget that man and his long walk across a bubble, had I not stopped to write them down.

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Contributors _______________________________ Liza Achilles is a writer/editor in the Washington, DC, area. She is published in the Washington Independent Review of Books, the Silent Book Club blog, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Headlight Review, and Tofu Ink Arts Press. The focus of her blog (lizaachilles.com) is seeking wisdom through books and elsewhere.

V. A. Bettencourt writes poetry and short stories. Her work has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Amethyst Review, and The Wild Word.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife. He has contributed to Willows Wept Review, Heartwood, Bluebird Word, and Gold Man Review.

Steve Deutsch has been widely published both online and in print. Steve is a threetime Pushcart Prize nominee. He is poetry editor for Centered Magazine. His poetry books—Perhaps You Can (2019), Persistence of Memory (2020), and Going, Going, Gone (2021)—were all published by Kelsay Press.

Katacha Díaz is a Peruvian American writer. Wanderlust and love of travel have taken her all over the world to gather material for her stories. Her work appears with Shimmer Spring, Hibiscus, Galway, Pangolin, Ethos, Poetry Pacific, Muddy River, Skipping Stones, Taj Mahal, among others. Katacha lives in the Pacific Northwest.

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Dogs Don’t Care (2022).

His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

John Dorroh has never fallen into an active volcano or caught a hummingbird. He has, however, baked bread with Austrian monks and consumed a healthy portion of their beer. His poetry has appeared in over 125 journals. Two of them were nominated for Best of the Net. His first chapbook was published in 2022.

Kim Farleigh has worked for NGOs in Greece, Kosovo, Iraq, Palestine, and Macedonia. He likes painting, art, bullfighting, photography and architecture, 40

which might explain why this Australian lives in Madrid. 188 of his stories have been accepted by 109 different magazines.

Jack Galmitz was born in 1951 in New York City. He attended the public schools from which he graduated. His poems and stories have been published in various journals, including Otoliths, Synchronized Chaos, and noon: a journal of the short poem. He lives with his wife in Queens, New York.

David A. Goodrum is a writer and photographer living in Corvallis, Oregon. His poems are forthcoming or have been published in Spillway, Star 82 Review, The Write Launch, The Closed Eye Open, Fireweed: Poetry of Oregon, The Louisville Review, and other journals. Additional work (both poetry and photography) can be viewed at www.davidgoodrum.com.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Hollins Critic. Latest books—Covert, Memory Outside The Head, and Guest Of Myself—are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline, and International Poetry Review.

Danielle Hanson strives to create and facilitate wonder. She is author of Fraying Edge of Sky and Ambushing Water. Her poetry was the basis for a puppet show at the Center for Puppetry Arts. She is Marketing Director for Sundress Publications, and serves on their Editorial Board. Previously, she has been Artist-in-Residence at Arts Beacon, Writer-in-Residence for Georgia Writers, and Poetry Editor for Doubleback Books. She teaches poetry at UC Irvine. More at daniellejhanson.com.

Marc Janssen started writing many novels but didn’t finish any of them. He’s a sprinter. Janssen did complete a poetry collection, November Reconsidered, published by Cirque Press. His verse can be found scattered around the world in places like Pinyon, Slant, Cirque Journal, Off the Coast, and Poetry Salzburg.

Janssen also coordinates the Salem Poetry Project, a weekly reading, and was a 2020 nominee for Oregon Poet Laureate.

Paul Lojeski was born and raised in Lakewood, Ohio. His poetry has appeared online and in print. He lives in Port Jefferson, NY. 41

Kurt Luchs (kurtluchs.com) won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize and the 2021 Eyelands Book Award for Short Fiction. He is a Senior Editor of Exacting Clam. His latest poetry chapbook is The Sound of One Hand Slapping (2022) from SurVision Books (Dublin, Ireland).

Ted Mc Carthy is a poet and translator living in Clones, Ireland. His work has appeared in magazines in Ireland, the UK, Germany, the USA, Canada, and Australia. He has had two collections published, November Wedding and Beverly Downs. His work can be found on www.tedmccarthyspoetry.weebly.com Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the Liakoura Prize, and the author of eight poetry collections. Recent collections include: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020), Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018), The Drunken Sweetheart at My Door (FutureCycle Press: 2015). He has work in Rattle, Crab Creek Review, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review, Panapoly, The McGuffin. His new book, Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance, was published by Kelsay Press in February 2022.

Debasish Mishra is the recipient of The Bharat Award for Literature in 2019. His recent writing has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Penumbra, Amsterdam Quarterly, California Quarterly, The Headlight Review, and elsewhere. His first book Lost in Obscurity was recently released by Book Street Publications.

Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His work is in Plainsongs and West Trade Review and is forthcoming in The Ocotillo Review, I-70 Review, Tar River Poetry Journal, Texas Review Press, Ponder Review, Sierra Nevada Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal. His book, Waxing the Dents, is from Brick Road Poetry Press.

Lucia Morello is currently a student at Miami University, where they study zoology and creative writing. They have previously been published in Inklings magazine. To read more of their work, email them at lucia.m.morello@gmail.com.

Martina Reisz Newberry is the author of several books of poetry. Her newest collection, GLYPHS, is now available from Deerbrook Editions. Her other books are 42

also currently available from Deerbrook Editions. Her work has been widely published in magazines and journals in the U.S. and abroad. She lives in Los Angeles, the city of her dreams.

Ken Poyner’s four collections of flash fiction and four of speculative poetry are available from most web booksellers. He was an information warrior for thirtythree years, and now supports full time his wife’s powerlifting. Recent work has appeared in Analog, Café Irreal, Rune Bear, and Tiny Molecules. www.kpoyner.com Sarah M. Prindle received an Associate’s in English from Northampton Community College. She loves reading everything from historical fiction and memoirs to poetry and mysteries. She hopes to someday publish her own novels and poetry collections and has already had her work published in several literary magazines and websites.

Kristy Snedden has been a trauma psychotherapist for thirty-plus years. She began writing poetry in June 2020 as a path to healing when the pandemic magnified the stress experienced by trauma therapists. Her work appears or is forthcoming in various journals, most recently Snapdragon and Power of the Pause Anthology. She is a student at the Writer’s Studio.

Daniel Webre received an MFA in fiction from McNeese State University and a PhD in English with creative writing concentration from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Pinyon, Cottonwood, Paterson Literary Review, The Wayne Literary Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.

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