Its rooting tendrils shoot deep
winding down into the earth,
embedding in the dark soil
of thoughts rich with the wounds
we still cling to. Clutching great loss
even after it is all over, following loss
even if tiny spines pierce the heel
of our heart, with prickles almost invisible
but we know it is terrible to pry
them out. To think again, to breathe again,
to begin again. Spines press pain into our skin
when we tug the roots, take another breath.

Amy Madson (she/her) is a writer and teacher from Minnesota. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Concordia University, Saint Paul. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Feel Literary Magazine, Lunae Literature & Review, B O D Y, The Nelligan Review and elsewhere.

This was the West Duwamish Greenbelt, over 500 acres of contiguous forest between Seattle’s Duwamish River and the multiple neighborhoods that make up West Seattle. Despite logging, development, and various incursions ranging from the industrial to the recreational, the forest persisted. Forests do, whether humans intervene or not. But we often have our own ideas about what a forest should look like, and purposes for restoration beyond the health and vitality of the forest itself. The Greenbelt, for instance, is also a steep slope shoring up the eastern edge of West Seattle. Without the trees, the homeowners at the top of the ridge might suddenly find themselves on the riverfront.

Twenty years ago, I was finishing up graduate school at the University of Washington. 9/11 was four years in the past and the resulting U.S. war in Iraq had been going on since 2003. Somehow, President George W. Bush began a second term and Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Israel withdrew from Gaza and the terms ransomware, microblogging, truther, and sexting entered common parlance.

I planted trees.

After a wildfire, forests in the Pacific Northwest have their own way of regenerating. Where I live it is widely known that the Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, and western larch thrive in wildfire environments; the thick bark of mature trees insulates them from the flames, and in the subsequent relative absence of competition from other trees, their seeds can spread more readily. Some tree species germinate as the result of wildfire, the heat or smoke signaling that conditions are now right—greater sunlight, less competition—to sprout. Fire is both destructive and regenerative.

Today I am building a home on land that for many decades has been clearcut and replanted. The aftereffects of logging are in some ways similar to fire; fast-growing trees such as cottonwood and alder shoot upwards so fast you can almost hear them growing, while the stinging nettle and foxglove do the same in any sunny verge they can find. Himalayan blackberry, brought to North America by an enthusiastic botanist who also got its place of origin wrong, shoots up its canes in sunny verges and, sometimes, climbs trees. The madrona trees, ignored by the loggers, survive and thrive according to their own peculiar logic: notoriously difficult to establish on purpose, they seed themselves in what seem the poorest and unlikeliest of soils, and then thrive.

Today, I am retired from the career that I went to graduate school for. The Russo-Ukrainian War has been ongoing for over ten years. Somehow, Donald Trump has begun a second term and flooding in Texas has killed over 130 people. Israel began bombing Gaza after October 7, 2023 and at least 58,000 people there have died. I am too old to know what the new words are, or to believe that planting trees will fix any of this.

And still, my husband, my friends and I planted 400 trees on the land where our house is being built: two hundred Douglas fir (not actually a fir), one hundred Western redcedar (not actually a cedar), one hundred white pine (actually a pine). Today, some of their crowns poke out of the sea of blackberry that has defied our efforts to contain it. Ecosystems create themselves, whatever our efforts. Though not yet completed, our house already hosts a swallows’ nest and several paper wasp colonies. Like a tree, it is already an ecosystem.

Thirty years ago a friend put Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower into my hands. The book’s title comes, of course, from the Biblical verse. In the parable, some seeds flourish into new growth; others never so much as sprout, depending on the soil in which they’re planted. The sower, like a tree, keeps scattering the seed, in hopes of the ones that grow. Butler’s novel itself is now a classic, one cited as inspiration by new generations of authors, by creators in every medium; it has been adapted into an opera and a graphic novel. In it, the protagonist’s home is destroyed by fire, and she and her companions, like seeds, must scatter in search of new soil in which to take root. Not every seed survives, and not every seed that survives thrives. All that is necessary is that there be enough.

In the Tarot deck, the card of disaster is not Death, but the Tower, quintessentially rendered as a tower struck by lightning, licked by flame, with hapless people falling bodily into the abyss all around. Tower Time is a time of disaster, when catastrophe overtakes all, and fortresses burn.

A tree might be a tower, from a certain point of view. A fortress, even, a haven for its own living and the other beings that live upon it, from mushroom to magpie. The tallest, oldest trees in Northwest forests are big enough that you could put a spiral staircase inside them and climb to the very top. But even the biggest, oldest, most resilient trees fall eventually.

Somewhere, it is always Tower Time; trees fall in the forest whether or not anyone is there to hear them, and burn or survive wildfires whether or not anyone wants them to. I say this not to be dismissive of tragedy. If anything, it is all the more reason to plant seeds. These might be literal trees, like the firs and the redcedars and the pines. It might be cultivating relationships with other humans, or with other beings who are not human. It might be writing down a combination of words that have never occurred together before in the universe, not even (or is that especially) since the invention of ChatGPT. It might be Venmoing twenty dollars to a total stranger because that’s what they need to keep their phone turned on.

Seven years from now, twenty years from now, thirty years from now, some of those trees will have grown. Or not. The seed, as the parable says, is not a guarantee of flourishing. But if no seeds are planted, then after the Tower’s collapse will come nothing at all.

Genevieve Williams (she/her) is a writer, wildlife tracker, musician, and librarian rooting into the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

I chase shoplifters, search them, see them
naked. whore my hands, rent my mind,
pimp my words. sell shoes made by little hands.

I’ve got half the rent. electricity
cut off. water bill-final notice.

the sun screams epithets at my back,
spits at my face, burns my feet in Payless soles.
it swallows shadows, eats clouds, breathes hot air.

clip on tie. polyblend shirt. Blue Light Specials.
at $3.35/hour, I sew tears with leftover thread.

part time pay. food in plastic sleeves.
registers overflow in green for miles
of vegetable fields. untouchable. corporate owned.

Dolores, store clerk, found dead
in a lettuce field.
gunshot.
domestic violence.

doctor bill. to collections. no health insurance.
no vacation pay, but Ford Escort is too old
anyway. after 1,000 hours of work
a 5 cent per hour raise.

from the intercom,
We met our daily goal!
our department goal!

like idiots we applaud because we’re told
that communists are bad,
that socialism doesn't work,
that unions are only in the movies.

no Father Hidalgo to break chains. no Sally Field to lead a walkout.
the Book of Rosaura Revueltas on the cutting room floor.

the manager. bleach blond stick. beige pencil skirt. dollar signs for eyes.
holds a dollar shaped sponge. its profit sharing.
dunk it in water. it will expand.
from the corner Isabel yells,
I wish I could do that with my paycheck!

What did you say?

we laugh. our call for revolution disguised as a joke.
and I return to tapping on keys, measuring feet, chasing thieves!

Ricardo Moran (he/him) is a past recipient of the Peter K. Hixson Memorial Award for Poetry. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in Beatific Magazine, Cider Press Review, Midwest Quarterly, Perceptions Magazine, East Jasmine Review, The Seattle Star, and Willa Cather Review. He is a former board member and current advisory board member for San Diego Writers, Ink. and is a former associate editor with Zoetic Press. His debut poetry anthology, Not Quite Heaven, from Broken Tribe Press, was published in 2025 and was shortlisted for the 2024 Tribe Poetry Award. He has delivered poetry readings in Albania, Ireland, and a book signing in Norway. He lives in Albania, enjoys traveling, and learning how to say “good morning” in as many languages as possible. In every timeline, you can find him reading, writing, and plotting right here: www.ricardomoranwriter.com

1985

slow drip. mellow brew of cold cow dung
blankets, smears the air with gaseous vapor.

a rickety yellow bus at 7:20am
creaks. cold metal frame. vinyl seat.
English syllables disembark at the curb.

acne caked face. covered
in spindly corduroy legs.
Pierre Cardin cologne.
Members Only Jacket.
hair of mullet. Kmart backpack.
Velcro strap sneakers.

the holy mother scrubs me,
washes my thoughts, rinses my eyes
to erase my lustful gaze
on that guy’s crotch.

my book of Marx melds with Christ of the poor.
but my sword and shield
have not yet found their rhythm.

my father’s arsenal of words
are fists of fear,
of Catholic obedience,
of American pride.

the newspaper maps got it wrong.
the MX missiles live here, on his tongue.
he launches them with my grandfather’s voice for fuel,
built with his father’s father’s hand
to tell me that this school
will save me from the fags.

Bananarama whistles from the cafeteria.
the silver lid on the tall tamal pot clangs
and if i could, I would slip out of this gay skin, slide
it off like a wet, humid husk of foreskin
before I catch AIDS from a boy’s kiss.

sister calls us to lower our heads.
my rosary wraps around bony fingers,
resin beads press against the bottom
phalanx, tightened to the middle,
rub, press corners into flesh.
its fangs, its venom permeate my skin.
my words of submission--its libation.

Ricardo Moran (he/him) is a past recipient of the Peter K. Hixson Memorial Award for Poetry. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in Beatific Magazine, Cider Press Review, Midwest Quarterly, Perceptions Magazine, East Jasmine Review, The Seattle Star, and Willa Cather Review. He is a former board member and current advisory board member for San Diego Writers, Ink. and is a former associate editor with Zoetic Press. His debut poetry anthology, Not Quite Heaven, from Broken Tribe Press, was published in 2025 and was shortlisted for the 2024 Tribe Poetry Award. He has delivered poetry readings in Albania, Ireland, and a book signing in Norway. He lives in Albania, enjoys traveling, and learning how to say “good morning” in as many languages as possible. In every timeline, you can find him reading, writing, and plotting right here: www.ricardomoranwriter.com

Dear Wayfarers,

Each month Wayfarer Magazine is a home for the voices mainstream media too often ignores. We champion the perspectives that deserve to be heard. Below is your first look at our June issue, a celebration of PRIDE and the queer voices!

Thanks for walking with us.

In Solidarity

—The Wayfarers

“On a lonely planet, in a far-flung corner of the Universe, there lives a human, digging in the depths of his soul, so that his species can heal and survive. Theodore Richards’ What Happened to Icarus is a deeply personal, poetic and philosophical book that weaves together real life narrative, social reckoning, cultural reflection and spiritual imagination. It is filled with the heart, honesty and human spirit that is essential for us to find our way. We are falling, but this is a vital part of the story… a story of love and loss and becoming.”

—Joshua Gorman

What Happened to Icarus is Theodore Richards’ ninth book, and perhaps his most personal. It is a memoir, but also the story of our shared journey. In it, he describes his travels as a young man, wandering the world with nothing more than a backpack. Matthew Fox calls the book a “quest” or a “pilgrimage.” He goes on to say:

It speaks honestly to the religious and spiritual failures of the West along with so much else, not unlike the beat poets and Jack Kerouac in On the Road. But Richards travels the full, round, world—and not in an American automobile, but on foot and in buses full of peasants. What Happened to Icarus is a bigger vision for today; Richards is the Jack Kerouac of these times.

What Happened to Icarus is not merely a personal story, but one that addresses the most pressing challenges facing our species today. “His vivid journey is both relatable and revelatory,” writes Drew Dellinger, “as he navigates the difficulties of intimacy in a world of disconnection, conscience in a context of injustice, and cosmology in a land of disenchantment.”

Ultimately, he turns away from the road, “arriving instead,” writes Kirkus Reviews, “at an ethic of care that reframes earlier wanderings as preparation, rather than as a solution.” The third and final section of the book is a meditation on what is perhaps as great a journey as anything: raising a family while the world burns and bearing witness to the adventure of childhood.

The book offers nothing prescriptive. You’ll find no facile solutions. It is a reflection on how we got here and an invitation to engage with the author on the greatest of adventures: the journey into the depths of one’s soul.

We caught up with him to ask about how he came to write it.

WAYFARER: Why now? Why is this the book you felt compelled to write at this moment?

RICHARDS: Some of this, I have to confess, had to do with my own life. It’s a deeply personal book. And this was the moment when I began to understand how my own stories fit together. Sometimes you just feel like you have to write something. And sometimes the work is part of your own healing process.

But I also felt compelled to tell a story that the world needed to hear. That’s where the “world in crisis” part of the subtitle comes in. The world is on fire. We are living in the age of polycrisis. This is something that folks in my own circles have been acutely aware of for some decades now. But recently, with the rise of fascism, with the pandemic, with tangible results of climate change being more and more evident (I could go on) it’s unavoidable. Talk of the polycrisis has gone mainstream.

Along with the external manifestations of the crisis, there’s also the internal crisis. This is where my personal story—everyone’s individual story, really—intersects with the collective story. So much of what’s going on in the world today is both cause and effect of an internal crisis of meaning, the sense that we are unmoored, disconnected.

WAYFARER: How did the idea for using the Icarus myth come about?

RICHARDS: I wrote a poem a couple of years ago that just stuck with me: I want to know what/ happened to Icarus/ after his wings melted away,/ when he fell into the fathomless sea./ This is where the story begins.

I was grappling with my own story at the time—trying to figure out how I got here, how we all got here. The Icarus myth really resonated with me. We are so focused on what Icarus did wrong. But he’s just a child, an adolescent. And like all children—like all of us who carry around our inner child—he wants to fly. And that’s okay. But the descent is unavoidable, perhaps even necessary. As it’s often told, his story ends with his fall. But if the descent into the depths, the sea, represents our inner journey—the part of the journey where we face ourselves—then maybe that part of the story is where the real story begins.

The other narrative that I work with a lot in the book is Dante’s Commedia. Dante’s journey begins with descent. He has to go to hell before he can reach the stars. This is a common hero’s journey, a common mythic pattern. It’s actually not tragic that we fall, but a necessary stage of development. This strikes me as a profoundly important fact.

I wanted to explore what happens to each of us, individually and collectively, after the fall, when we are swimming in the depths. I think this is the heart of the matter.

WAYFARER: What can we hope to learn by swimming in the depths?

RICHARDS: I don’t mean this as a cop out, but the truth is that I just don’t know. I suspect that sitting with the things we don’t know, the mystery, being comfortable with uncertainty, is part of our work right now. This also speaks to the nature of art: it’s relational. We cannot entirely say what a book means until it encounters the reader and something emerges in that entanglement.

But I can say that there will be no easy technological or political solution for the challenges we face until we can learn to swim in the depths, until we can learn to face what’s going on inside of us. That’s not to say that real-world action isn’t important and necessary. Of course it is. But there’s a tendency to bypass the hardest part of the journey, and we cannot bypass the depths if we ever hope to reach the stars.

Look for What Happened to Icarus in paperback and ebook wherever books are sold. Use coupon code PRIDE26 to save 30% on your order through June 2026!

I see you wrestling with yourself
teetering on the precipice of a cliff
numbing your senses with pleasure and pain
unaware that you are steps from the eternal shade

I would not gift you peace
I would not gift you tranquility
I would not gift you calm

I would gift you a storm
so that you seek shelter
and take care of yourself in a safer haven

I would gift you lightning 
so that you have cause to examine the sky 
and reconnect with your North Star

I would gift you an earthquake 
so that you recognise the unsteadiness of the earth 
and move yourself to solid ground

my dear friend 
on the precipice of change
it will not help for me to gift you what you desire 

you will find quiet soon
I pray it is inward peace you seek as you listen to yourself
rather than the silence that surrounds a slowly dying heart

Baillie Aaron (she/her) is an educator and entrepreneur with a background in behavioral science. A graduate of Harvard and Cambridge, she spent over 15 years supporting people navigating some of life’s hardest transitions - most notably, individuals leaving prison and rebuilding their lives. In 2023, she founded Being In-Between, which helps people in career transitions navigate uncertainty, reinvent their identity and shape a future that feels fulfilling, exciting and aligned. She is transfixed by liminality and moments of metamorphosis.

San Juan Mountains, CO


I saw the buck laid out like a busted myth—
legs folded, belly soft, ribs skyward
like someone gave up mid-prayer.

Magpie standing proud
on the chest,
all slick tail and side-eye,
scouting the seam
between meat and morning.

First day—
fur not yet slipped,
no blood, just the hush
before the work begins.

Second day—
a hole.
          Third—
          deeper.
                     Fourth—
                     bone.

That bird knew what it was doing.
Like it had done this a hundred times—
like it had a schedule,
a union card,
a holy assignment.

By the fifth day,
it looked like a heart
still beating
in a hollow cathedral of ribs.

It didn’t mourn.
Didn’t flinch.
Just kept carving
its wild devotion—
answering
whatever the gods asks
a creature to do
with a body,
a hunger,
and a day.

Connor Wolfe (they/them) is a writer, photographer, publisher, and advocate whose work spans over two decades and fourteen titles. Rooted in both literary and visual traditions of storytelling, their practice moves between image and language, often inhabiting the liminal spaces where the two converge. Influenced by the lineage of Beat poets and folk singers, Wolfe’s work is marked by a restless attention to place, impermanence, and the quiet revelations of the road.

They are the founder of Wayfarer Magazine and Wayfarer Books. Wolfe’s literary contributions have earned six Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gold Nautilus Medal for Poetry (2015), multiple Foreword Review Book Awards, and the Nautilus Silver Medal (2022). Their innovative approach to publishing led to two terms on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association, a TEDx talk at Yale University, and a degree from Harvard University through grant programs.

In 2024, they volunteered in the Collections Department at the Museum of Anthropology at Ghost Ranch, assisting in the repatriation of sacred objects under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). After wintering along the foothills of Cerro Pedernal, Wolfe continues to travel, working in both photography and verse alongside their three-legged black cat, momo.

I roamed with my pack of school friends, usually filthy from morning to night, and every second evening we were given a bath. The bathroom was a sparse empty stone room with open drains in the floor and a tap to one side.

—Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

How I Bathed My Father

I don’t remember the first time, or the last. Much of the final weeks of his life registers only as images. A stark tub, glinting tile. Light. Hospice chair in a white bath. My father’s body curling forward, like the early stage of a frond – the name for which, I have learned since, is fiddlehead. He coiled like a fiddlehead. Chin tucked, hands hidden beneath naked thighs. Early onset late stage: a body dying at thirty-nine. I was thirteen.

I’m forty-one now, and I pass my fingers under the fronds of maidenhair in the garden. Their tendrils unwinding in the rocky soil of the Hudson Valley. I used to think my preoccupation with ferns began years ago, when I first visited the fern room at Chicago’s Garfield Conservatory. Feathered palms of tall cycads winged in the light. One of the earth’s most ancient plants, to an eye trained on high plains, looked something like a tropical palm. Some of the cycads were over three-hundred years old. Water slapped stone. A sound like clapping echoed under a sky of paned glass. The air thick, sultry. Textures of green undulated from the walls. The space was designed to reimagine the lagoons of prehistoric Chicago. To step into the fern room was an invitation to walk back in time.

At the conservatory, you were encouraged to lift the fronds of the more audacious ferns and seek out those under dark canopy. To turn the feathery pinnae and find rows of round spore-releasing beads called sori. Species distinction begins here, but I was struck by the fabric of the fern, its soft structure. Gentle in my hand. Such tenderness for a species that survived the ice age.

I thought this was my initiation into ferns. Only later, only now, do I wonder if my fixation began much earlier, the humid air of the conservatory opening my skin as memory disguised. Finger-like blades spread from their stone outcroppings. The warmth in my throat like the air above a steaming bath.

When water raced down my father’s head, he unfurled, his eyes turned to the canned light above him: I’ve written about this before. The first time was the most terrifying. Could I face the memory of my father’s bare body. Listen to water hit the tub’s ceramic floor. See my father’s blood in brown ribbons at the drain. Find my own hands again on his soft back.

My sister was there, too. She, younger than I, reached into the water’s gush with a small plastic container. It was she who washed our father’s hair.

“Seeing,” John Berger writes, “comes before words.”

Remembering the images, it turned out, was not the worst part. It was overcoming the resistance to the memory, confronting the pre-language pain so that I could conjure what I had seen as a child. For almost three decades, I flinched at the knowledge of bathing my father, throttled by fear that I would remember the moment with the same despair in which I first experienced it.

His disease had transformed him into a patient. What had his nakedness made me?

A child bends at the lip of a tub, her arms stretch toward a grown man’s bare back. Another child reaches for the flow of water. The man’s body slumps in a steel-legged chair. Water does not fill the tub but drains. The setting stark. The children’s clothed bodies press against the side of the tub’s exterior as they lean to wash the man, a task which, as evidenced by the stretching, reaching, and awkward angles of their bodies, physically strains them. Even in his demure posture, the man is taller than the girls.

We are not used to seeing children this way. The family roles are inverted: the adult is naked, the children dressed. The girls wear shorts, cotton shirts. Casual domesticity, late 20^th century. Summer. The largesse of the bathroom exacerbates the economic comfort and absence of other adults, particularly of a mother. As memoirist, I can tell you where she is, but that would divert from the image which presents the more uncomfortable fact: no one in this picture expects another adult to appear. The girls focus on the task at hand, not over their shoulders. A woman’s razor and bottles of floral-scented shampoo and conditioner line the tub, but there is no anticipation that their user will intervene. In this image of the nuclear family, no help is on the way. The role of caretaker has fallen to the daughters, and along with the responsibility, its normalization. Illness has changed the children into nurses, the man’s wet slick skin altered their clothing into home health aide uniforms.

Yet, the transformation is incomplete. This liminality destabilizes the image, making it ambiguous, uncomfortable. The children are nurses yet still children. The man’s hanging head suggests mourning or shame. The smallness of the girls is inescapable – their short fingers in his hair. He is their patient but also their father.

The image is not only an image, but also a memory. My memory.

My father is nude, in the sense that my words have put him on display, clothing him in his nakedness. Perhaps this is what I’m attempting to do each time I write about bathing this man: give him a disguise, even if his costume is his dying body. Perhaps I am trying to dress him.

But he is also naked, as I cannot forget the nude man is my father. Was my father. And I never called him father. I called him Dad. He called me Kate.

In the course of re-reading this, I can, in a glance, go from being the woman who wrote these sentences to the woman who lived them.

Yet, the image returns to me, full of possibility: two girls bathe a sick man.

I soothed myself back then, bending at the tub, by imagining one day I would be older and thus far removed. I could try to forget bathing my father. The shower curtain pulled open – close it. Never speak of this. I used to have a process where I counted ahead by years, projecting into the future, a means of a cathartic distancing – Someday this moment will be a year ago, then two years ago, then ten. I saw myself stepping along the linear timeline of my life, the movement an amnesiac.

Twenty-seven years pass and I am in the Städel Museum standing before the empty white bed in Degas’s painting “The Nurse.” We are invited to look through a doorway toward a woman cloaked in brown. The contour of her brow lit perhaps by a window. She seems to warm or hug herself; her limbs are concealed in the folds of a blanket. The moment anticipates a before or after: perhaps she awaits her patient, or she has just finished. A vortex of bright orange strokes appears at the corner of the doorway.

In my notebook, I comment on the archetype of the nurse. The transitional orange space by the bed doubles as a point of transformation: across the span of a life, one will shift from patient to nurse to patient again.

When I gave birth to my son, I labored twenty-four hours, the low intensifying ache making me think of my father. I wondered how it would be to feel such pain knowing it would end not with life, but death. I was crying when my nurse, making her routine check, adjusted the pillow under my shoulders and said, “This is not a trauma.”

She, Sonia, had reached the end of her shift when my contractions finally condensed to give up my child.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Sonia. “It has to be you.” She stayed.

Grasping my hand, her voice at my ear, she told me to channel every sound, every sensation, into a path centered down my body. Push and count backwards from ten. When my son’s body met air, he was passed along a chain of hands that ended with the same hands that helped my father dress for his last living days. And the hands that hold this pen touched the warm skin of his back. They pry the fiddlehead. They wrapped a towel around his shoulders. They write this sentence. They reached for the first touch of my son’s body. They turn the handles of the faucet and stop the streaming water.

How I Bathed My Sisters

We crowded the tub, our kid bodies. Someone’s bent knees pressed against my back. My knees folded against my chest.

Turns at bowing our heads beneath the miracle of rivers from the American West streaming down our necks. Sloshing water with the jostling past one another. Wet hair hanging in curtains across our backs. Who bathes whom? I am the oldest of three daughters. My role is to pay attention. To bathe my sisters is to keep them alive. I will remember the sound of our mother’s knuckles on the pine bathroom door like four hard stones striking in unison. The sound of summer thunder beyond the bathroom window purred. The water like waves in a storm as we each stood, cloudy with our skin, dirt, oil. An echo of embryonic fluid. Our bodies pink, chilled by the air.

Let me be specific: there is one of my sisters, whose name begins with K, shaking water from her limbs. There is another sister, whose name also begins with K, flush-cheeked. Here I am, Kate: seven-years-old, fighting a comb through my hair. Here, my sisters’ grand plea for the brush.

There is a hundred-year plan for the remaining water in Lubbock, Texas, where we are from. The place is too dry for ferns, which need moisture to reproduce. The region’s natural sources dried up a long time ago, and now the rivers and reservoirs from which the water comes will eventually demise. Sooner than we thought, we will be asking, remember the water we bathed in? Remember how it came rushing, almost painfully, into these hands?

How I Bathed a Lover

A yellow house surrounded by three-thousand acres of cotton. Support bars in the shower for the woman who died in the house before I moved in. Sulfur in the steam from well water. Droplets gathering on Michael’s eyelashes. Wet kiss. We wash our smell from one another. I trade places under the showerhead. He takes hold of my hips. The stability bar convenient, necessary. Water lands on the back of my neck, the weight of it. Streams at the corners of my mouth.

I met my friend Dave behind an enormous fern on the porch of William Faulkner’s house. The only thing visible was the medallion of one of his brown brogues.

I fucked a man once at William Faulkner’s house, another friend once told me. My story of the fern encounter is not as salacious. I and the poet, for of course Dave was one, sat on one of William Faulkner’s couches, leaving only to refill our wine glasses, and talked about our fathers. Or rather, being fatherless. A few years later, when introducing him to the son I had with Michael, I asked Dave about his first memory.

“Trying to escape my crib,” he said. Over the course of the same conversation, my baby sucking on a toy ring, Dave told me about the time when, after he’d finished mowing the lawn at his home in Cleveland, he walked inside and smelled his father. His father had, by that point, been deceased many years. The scent of his father stunned Dave before he realized it was his own body he smelled.

Writing about this now, I texted him, asking if he felt grief.

“It was something stranger,” he wrote. “Both profoundly strange in realizing I was smelling me but also like a bit of presence. Not quite a visitation, but a remnant or a residue.”

How I Bathed Myself

Years of habit, this singular private act. Yet, almost no images.

Hands in running water, palms filled with soap. Glance of thigh. Nipple. Darkness of eyelids. Privacy. Absolute privacy. Now towel. Now rush. Now mirror. But where is a full memory of bathing my body?

Perhaps this privacy was a gift. The solace of inattention.

“A woman is almost continually accompanied by an image of herself,” John Berger writes. “From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.” Berger is speaking specifically about women’s bodies represented in visual art. When I read these lines in his Ways of Seeing, I felt the constraint that comes with this unrelenting objectification.

Perhaps the bath had become a space where I’d unconsciously found refuge from watching myself. Taking its sanctuary for granted would be inherent to the catharsis. My friends Kim and Vicki, when reading a draft of this essay, remarked that there could be some relief at enjoying the space of a bath with no accompanying image of myself, a fair point. But a part of me didn’t feel relief. Had I been so conditioned by watching my body being watched that I could not see, or did not bother to see, myself unless someone else was looking?

The absence of the image filled me with a strange grief. Perhaps even this grief was an internalization of objectification. This possibility troubled me, too.

In Berger’s critique, the one looking, the protagonist, is a man. But this role can be appropriated. In her poem “Object/Subject 2: Looker,” poet Kathryn Cowles describes the skill particular to people who are used to watching themselves being watched: “you walk down a street and see / not the street ahead but yourself / walking down the street.”

Neck deep in writing this essay, a part of me wanted to seize agency, to intervene, in my own scene of bathing. To act upon the present in a way that I cannot act upon the past. I made a plan. I would create images of how I bathed my body.

I ask my partner Michael to photograph me bathing. The process, I reasoned, could be an explicit acknowledgement of the woman’s accompanied image of herself. An externalization of the internalized two-placed vision Kathryn Cowles describes: “Girls watch people watch them and so/can picture themselves from away / two-placed. / This is a kind of art.”

Having Michael photograph me, I anticipated, would perhaps not feel so different from when I am walking down the street, or sitting in a coffee shop, or living my life in view. But I would appropriate the role of the one seeing.

I marked five places from which Michael would take photographs in our small upstairs bathroom. Once the shoot began, we would not speak.

As evidenced by this planning, I felt the need to control the process. Part of the necessity was born of the focus the project demanded. But my desire for control also emerged from a quaking, emotional response I experienced at the prospect of the photoshoot. The sensations were physical, a trembling and muscular clench that could produce the risk of guttural and inexplicable tears. These physical responses, expressions of fear, excitement, grief, perhaps shame, intrigued me most. The effects were acute, but I couldn’t uproot cause.

So, choreography, preparation. Blue duct tape for blocking the bathroom in five places.

Afterward: Days loomed with a catalog of images on my phone. I didn’t look at them but for a scandalizing flash of thumbnails that appeared when I opened my photos app to fetch something like the screenshot of the department printer code.

In anticipation of studying the photos, emotion housed physically as the threat of a good cry. I had before myself this task: an attempt to see my body as an image. To let the image surprise me. Perhaps with a memory. Perhaps with a form. Could the images become meaningful?

The project I could articulate; the source of grief remained hidden.

I am surprised by what I notice first: the bright blue spots of tape on the bathroom floor. One on the closed toilet lid. A synthetic, acerbic, interrupting blue comically artificial amidst the stone grays of the bathroom. The tape is loud in the muted space, calling attention to each of the five blocked spots. These markings mar the photos – and I am delighted by their blemishing effect. Adhesive reveals the seams, shows the staging and planning. The blue tape is a reminder that the woman in the images is both subject and protagonist. I asked for these photos, and I directed the shoot.

The sputtering water looks beautiful; in this way, the image matches my memory of it. For I was struck upon entering the bath by the chain of light falling from the faucet.

In what will become my favorite image, there is no clear subject. The faucet appears in the left third, a fragment of knees and face in the right third, light and bathroom tile in the center with no invitation to focus, to narrate. The water blurred by motion. The woman is absorbed in watching the water, in the heat of the bath. Her face has become relaxed.

Warm skin tones against the cool hues of a hard tub; curved lines of back and hair in contrast to the sharp angles of blue tiles. In some photos, her shadow appears on the wall: a woman’s accompanying image.

The images are wonderfully banal. I am reminded of what John Berger describes as the “marvelous simplicity” of the bare body: these arms, breasts, folds in the stomach, slope of shoulders, hands running a loofah over thighs and ribs. A good useful form.

One photo stands out from the rest. In it, I lean forward at my hips, legs crossed. Left hand pressed to the space around my eyes. I remember feeling, at this moment, muscles softening, heat soothing skin, body’s pleasure in the water, and simultaneously the intensity created by watching myself being watched by the camera, the presence of Michael, the premise of my project. I recalled bathing with my sisters. The crowded tub. All the physical sensations combined with feeling exposed and psychologically vulnerable found some release in my briefly crying. But in the photograph, only my hand expresses the complexity. My fingers spread across the spaces surrounding my eyes and temples and press. Although there are photos which contain more overt nudity, it is this photo which brings to mind Berger’s “naked is the self exposed.”

I suppose someone could potentially misrecognize this image as portraying my discomfort with the project. Or perhaps it might appear as documentation of an emotionally charged moment. But what compels me is that this image is the result of a process that produced the conditions which invited the emotions it captured. What I am seeing is a woman engaging in the work of seeing herself. I see in the muscles of her hand a response to this seeing – her fingers hold her head; her eyes are shut; her hands will write what her eyes will see later. Fingers press at places of tension and relief.

A consistent shape emerges: knees folded to chest. Head in a slight bow as if reading. This steadying posture. It is the pose in which I bathed with my sisters. A row of folded bodies in the tub. Folded girls. In the photos of my body, hands cup knees. I see in the images of my knees folded against my chest a kind of embrace. I am holding my body.

I think again of Degas’s “The Nurse.” She is waiting for her next patient; the fragment of a clean white bed rests in the foreground of the painting. Degas’s work with ambiguity is more prevalent in his pastels and monotypes. In “Bather Stepping into a Tub,” for instance, an undressed woman lunges into a large copper basin, mid-step, awkward, her back turned to us, her head hunched, as though startled or deeply absorbed in her task. The pastel, beautiful in its warm hues, is also unsettling. It refuses traditional conventions of the nude – the bather does not turn coquettishly to greet the viewer. Degas obscures the identity and class station of the bather; the piece is thus vexed with 19^th Century anxieties about female sexual promiscuity and porous boundaries of deviance. “The viewer was unable to tell who exactly the depicted woman was,” writes art historian Eunice Lipton, “And, therefore, who he was.” But the narrative in Degas’s “The Nurse” is much clearer. The bed is made, and her next patient is you.

I see now what my memory has not yet seen: the temporary station of holding my body. I tell Michael that I think the grief I’d felt was anticipatory. “Or an acknowledgement,” he says, “of the presence of something you have now that you will not have.”

The non-event of having a body.

The writing has outpaced the remembering.

I have written my way ahead, before it is time to remember what it was like to bathe my own body.

How I Bathed My Son

A whale swallows him. His pink body fills the gray marine mammal imitation. Biblical Jonah, wayward prophet, so unhappy with his calling he attempted to flee it only to be gulped by a whale and from the dwelling of the beast’s gut, repent and accept his fate.

The Moby Smart Sling 3-Stage Tub is made of 100% polypropylene plastic. The trade-marked sling is smart not because it’s automated but because it’s marketed as ergonomic. With your hands, you can lock the sling into two different positions: higher and lower. In this way, the Moby Tub promises to “grow with baby,” through 3 stages: newborn, infant, sitter. The implication is obviously extended use, more for your money, and a gesture toward lightening the guilt – because the guilt does accumulate with the accumulation of plastic baby junk called essentials right at the data point where you’ve decided it’s okay to bring life onto this climate-doomed planet.

The Moby Tub sat on my bathroom floor, a block of rubber, the shape of a whale if I had drawn it. A foot without toes. My baby suspended in the mesh hammock, as though swallowed headfirst, smiling up at me. Belly an island.

He skipped from Stage 1, newborn, to Stage 3, sitter, not out of any precocious developmental leap but because the smart sling’s “higher” setting was a total pain in the ass to buckle in place. And the resulting ergonomics slid my son into a ball, his nose too close to the water.

I almost wrote: the Moby Smart Sling 3-Stage Tub stayed the same size as my son grew, which is factually true. But the tub appeared to shrink, an aesthetic counter-fact to its trademark promise to grow with my child. Obviously, there’s been no false advertising, just standard issue manufacturing grift. The tub appears to become smaller as my child’s legs expand into shapes that would make a baker weep. Water contours his eyelashes. See: head of red curls, white teeth. At the end of the bath, I wrap him in a towel and hold him until he’s dry. His head tucked under my chin. Below us, the tepid water in the gray whale reflects a square of light.

The Moby Tub will live three afterlives. First in memory, second in the landfill, third in the ocean, a kind of terrible ironic homecoming. After I donate it, the tub, passing through a few more families, will likely end up in a dump, where it will transfigure in a process called embrittlement. Exposed to weather, UV rays, and thermal damage, the whale tub will fragment from its macro-plastic form to micro, as though the appearance of shrinking had portended this outcome all along. It will follow something like 110,000 tons of plastic particles in an annual passage to coastal waters, where the Moby Tub will infiltrate the ecosystem of the remainder of its referents, baby humpback whales then, someday, experience a kind of inverted reincarnation toxifying the bloodstream of living creatures.

I was curious if the term embrittlement was unique to plastics. It turns out that it is. The word’s earliest usages appear at the turn of the 20^th century in association with mining and manufacturing. To embrittle means to literally render brittle. Given its connotations with extraction and commodity, the definition has a direct implication: to become commercially valueless.

I can predict, with scientific backing, the fate of my son’s tub. I wanted to write here: I cannot predict the fate of my son’s life, but of course, I can. “We are born knowing our endings,” writes poet Victoria Chang. And we are born, I’ll add, resisting that ending, to the point of almost forgetting what we know.

But I know that it is better to be soft. My son, warming at my chest, already understands this. Perhaps he does yet not know that he knows it, his gentle body wrapped in a towel. Maybe, like my friend Dave, he will encounter the memory of this knowledge. Walk, one afternoon, into its visage.

My child is four-years-old now, I forty-one. He still likes to be held after a bath. We sit on the closed toilet next to the bathroom window. The window overlooks a garden where ferns persist in the shade of trees. I ask my son if he wants to get dressed. He is dry, but he says, “A few more minutes.”

Kathleen Blackburn (she/her) is the author of the memoir Loose of Earth (the University of Texas Press, 2024). Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Texas Observer, swamppink, Gulf Coast, Guernica and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Ohio State University and PhD from University of Illinois at Chicago. She is an Assistant Professor at SUNY New Paltz.

The old man shakes the picture frame on the wall. The frame stayed up watching TV all night.

The old man walks to the park. He places the frame in a stroller. They walk by the tree
where the frame broke her arm. At lunch, he airplanes a spoonful of peas to the frame.
He wipes spit-up from her chin with Windex and a bib. The fabric has tears. It’s the one they gave him at the hospital where the frame was born. Seven pounds, eleven inches.

At night, the old man draws a bath for the frame. He elbows the water. Just right. The
frame floats in circles next to her yellow ducky. The frame hates it when the old man
cleans behind her ears.

The old man hangs the frame back on the wall. He kisses her on the forehead. He huffs on the glass and wipes the lip mark with his shirt corner. He leaves the light on. He knows the frame is afraid of the dark. He checks his phone. “Unread.” He looks at the frame. He smiles. He remembers to pull down chicken from the freezer. The picture frame’s cross-country team is coming over tomorrow. They love his chicken parm.

Jose Oseguera (he/him) is a writer of poetry, short fiction and literary nonfiction. His writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Water Stone, Pinch and Sonora Review. He is the author of the poetry collections The Milk of Your Blood (Kelsay Books, 2021) and And This House Is Only a Nest (Homebound Publications, 2024).

As humans, our lifestyles are in constant evolution, filled with trial and error, beauty and destruction. We are continually breathing into the space that exists in between where we are and where we want to be. If I’ve learned anything from life so far, it is that there is no arriving—there is only the journey and being fully present for it. Which sometimes feels like a battle.

When I can stop fighting with myself, I find I’m living in a way that feels right because I am able to root fully in my life instead of trying to force an outcome that I think I should want. Yielding to what wants to speak through me has allowed me to tell the stories that want to be told. It’s helped me ask others the questions that might help them tell their own. I am far from having things all figured out; I often hesitate and wonder if what I’m trying to say makes sense to anyone (including myself). I fall back into that internal battle more than I’d like to admit. Continuing to put energy into being present for the journey and allowing for course correction helps. Remembering that I am always returning to the parts of my origin that make me who I am helps. Connecting to nature helps. All of these things help me live the best life I can, even during hard times. All of these things help me find my way when powerful forces collide.

Life is a journey–this has been said over and over again by a multitude of humans over the years. Which makes sense, because there’s often a reason things like that get repeated: It’s the truth. And since life is a journey (whether that journey takes you to far off lands or deep into your inner world) it’s best to be prepared so you are shored up and ready to engage in the wayfaring that you’ll need to do.1

Packing List for a Wayfarer’s Satchel: 
(Select the items that resonate with you. Add or modify as needed.)

Map reading skills (for when the GPS fails) 
A willingness to course correct
Nourishing reading material (or at least a few good quotes to chew on)
Energy giving food (and just enough spice to make any dish shine)
Enough pleasure to counterbalance the unpleasant parts
Tolerance for discomfort
Adequate shelter
Creativity 
Courage 
Tenacity
Compassion for self and others
An accurate bullshit meter 
Something to write with and on
Clothing and footwear appropriate for the elements
Tools appropriate for the landscapes you may encounter
The balance of solitude and company that works for you
Love in various forms
Humor 
A beginner’s mind 
A good water bottle and filter 
Faith in fellow travelers
Continual intention to pay attention

Granola for the Road

3 cups of rolled oats
½ cup chopped nuts of your choice (walnuts, almonds, pecans)
½ cup seeds of your choice (pumpkin, sunflower) 
¼ cup sweetener (honey, maple syrup)
¼ cup fat (canola or coconut oil; melted butter) 
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
½ cup dried fruit of choice (raisins, cranberries, cherries, blueberries…) 
Optional: coconut flakes or mini chocolate chips

Combine the first seven ingredients and mix well to coat oats in sweetener and fat. Spread on a greased cookie sheet and bake at 350 for 20 minutes, stirring midway through cooking time. 

Allow to cool. Stir in the dried fruit, and spoon into a sturdy vessel. 

Enjoy handfuls while you’re actively journeying, or for a simple meal with milk, yogurt, and fresh fruit.

Church of Shadow and Light

Share

There is something sacred among the cottonwoods,
pines and black locusts—
a stillness echoing through the branches.
Even the birds sit among the leaves
in quiet reverie.

Among the trees
is sanctuary from a fractured world.
An air of ease
that stills the most restless spirits
living in a world torn apart by hatred, greed and delusion.
Where the different are shunned, children hunger,
and ignorance wears a badge of honor.

Walking along the paths
the aged trees share stories and wisdom—
a world long past.
A world where life was once held sacred.
And all life lived in contented balance.

The trees usher me into their world.
Their scent of sweet earthy decay
invites calm.
The leaves, stirred by wind,
sing gentle harmony.

They trust me, the trees.
They hold me safe among their branches
inviting me to stay.
I whisper to them, “If I stay,
who will share your stories?
Who will carry your wisdom?”

So I go—
The trees hold my spirit.
I carry their wisdom,
rooted in my heart.

Matthew Griggs (he/him) is a poet whose work draws deeply from the natural world, where he finds a sense of belonging, reverence, and quiet transformation. Much of his poetry is written while walking prairie trails or sitting beneath trees, where moments of stillness open into reflection. His writing explores themes of solitude, healing, emotional honesty, and spiritual renewal, often rooted in the sacred relationship between self and landscape. Influenced by the lyric clarity of Mary Oliver and the contemplative wisdom of Buddhist teachings—particularly those of Thích Nhất Hạnh—his poems act as meditations on impermanence, interconnectedness, and the emotional weathering of the human spirit. His imagery is precise and grounded in the specific flora and fauna of the Midwest, inviting the reader into a space of mindful presence and shared vulnerability. For Matthew, poetry is not just an art form but a practice—a way of listening to silence, honoring emotion, and bridging the inner and outer worlds. His voice is both gentle and direct, rooted in lived experience and the longing to make peace with the self. He writes to reconnect with the earth, to witness the quiet offerings of nature, and to remind others (and himself) that beauty and belonging are still possible, even in times of personal or collective unrest.

I feel distant from myself today.
There's a sadness deep within me—
an intense ache from somewhere
that I am lost to in this moment.
Perhaps it's just the dull sky,
pale with heavy gray clouds,
dampening my spirit.

Either way, this muffled gray permeates everything,
just like this stifling humidity.
It distracts my senses from
finding myself

where I wander the prairie
beside the woods
where the trees still hold my spirit.
Somewhere among the grasses,
my self—who I am—lingers still,
rooted in the meadow,
waiting to be found.

Bumblebees gathering sweet nectar
from the blossoms—
guiding me to the paths
lined by bee balm and black-eyed Susans.
Monarchs—guardians of the prairie—
float around me, gently returning
my attention to the present.
A doe stands in a questioning gaze,
so I ask it,

"Will I ever feel
the warming rays of the sun again?
Feel its light on my sun-worn skin?
Will the prairie allow me to remember
what I’ve forgotten?
Will there be strength enough
in what remains of me
to live in that deeper truth—
within a world burdened by suffering?”
But the doe silently returns
with her fawns back into the grass
leaving me to wonder
if I will ever find myself again.

Matthew Griggs (he/him) is a poet whose work draws deeply from the natural world, where he finds a sense of belonging, reverence, and quiet transformation. Much of his poetry is written while walking prairie trails or sitting beneath trees, where moments of stillness open into reflection. His writing explores themes of solitude, healing, emotional honesty, and spiritual renewal, often rooted in the sacred relationship between self and landscape.

Influenced by the lyric clarity of Mary Oliver and the contemplative wisdom of Buddhist teachings—particularly those of Thích Nhất Hạnh—his poems act as meditations on impermanence, interconnectedness, and the emotional weathering of the human spirit. His imagery is precise and grounded in the specific flora and fauna of the Midwest, inviting the reader into a space of mindful presence and shared vulnerability.

For Matthew, poetry is not just an art form but a practice—a way of listening to silence, honoring emotion, and bridging the inner and outer worlds. His voice is both gentle and direct, rooted in lived experience and the longing to make peace with the self.

He writes to reconnect with the earth, to witness the quiet offerings of nature, and to remind others (and himself) that beauty and belonging are still possible, even in times of personal or collective unrest.

From the collection, Blue Marble Gazetteer

Henry grabs the buoy with a boat hook,
wraps the line on a winch and hauls a seven
pot trawl, bits of seaweed and mud
flying off the rope.  Large gloved hands
snatch wire cages as they surface

with a dripping splutter.  Muscular,
with a creased, leathery face,
spindly chicken legs in short pants,
and bulging biceps, he’s Popeye escaped
from cartoons and comic strips, shaped

by seventy-five years of sun, wind,
salt and tides.  Caught in the wire parlor,
several glossy, dark-olive lobsters scuttle
about like giant Jurassic insects.
Shorts and a few eggers, spider

crabs and a starfish go overboard
with a plop, the keepers tossed into
a tank of circulating seawater.
Looking out at clusters of colorful plastic
buoys like a field of floating flowers,

he points a finger: “Greedy sons-of-bitches,”
he says in a voice rising from low growl
to godly bellow, “some of these bastards
with a couple thousand pots aren’t making
a living, they’re doing a killing,

raping the resource.”  In a tattered orange
apron, Henry boasts about his new
Harley, cuts thick chunks of stinking,
oily mackerel, stuffing them into each
emptied trap, a “lobster’s gourmet

fantasy.”  Years ago he was bar to bar
raising hell, igniting fights.  Now
“everyone scrambles when they see
this old fuck coming,” he says. “No telling
 what the SOB will do.”  Henry puts

the baited pots on the rail, slowly
piloting the boat forward, each one
falling with a rhythmic splash, quickly
disappearing beneath sun-sparkled green water.
“There are no laws,” he explains, “just

restrictions on peoples’ lives.”
But he keeps close to the pulse,
tying up his thirty-six-footer each
night beside the police boat.  Hosing
mud, fish oil and debris off the deck,

he guides the boat around a maze of red,
blue, and purple buoys.  “It’s a pirate
business,” he says. “Pricks soaking
pots just to hold ground when fishing
sucks, sabotaging boats, cutting lines.”

Henry fished until lobsters faded
in warming Long Island Sound waters.
A force of nature, he held on until Nature
gave out. “Never pray for me,” he’d laugh.
“No one gets outta here alive.”

David K. Leff is an award-winning poet and essayist, and former deputy commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. He is the Canton, Connecticut poet laureate, deputy town historian, and town meeting moderator. He was a volunteer firefighter for 26 years.

In 2016 and 2017 David was appointed by the National Park Service to serve as poet-in-residence for the New England National Scenic Trail (NET). He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, and has twice been a finalist in the Connecticut Book Awards. David has received two silver medals from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY), and was grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. His work has appeared in anthologies, newspapers such as the Hartford Courant, and magazines including Appalachia and Yankee.

The author of seven nonfiction books, three volumes of poetry, and two novels in verse, David’s work focuses on the connection of people to their communities and the natural environment. He often explores commonplace elements of the world around us that have hidden meanings and unusual links to each other.

David has been the book review editor of Connecticut Woodlands, the quarterly magazine of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association and is now poetry editor. He is a staff writer for The Wayfarer Magazine.

David’s papers are located at the Special Collections and University Archives, UMass/Amherst. View his work at www.davidkleff.com

From the collection, Blue Marble Gazetter

Nearly one-third of the wild birds in the United States
and Canada have vanished since 1970.
     —Fitzpatrick & Marra, The New York Times, 9/19/2019


I awaken to ghost birds,
my ears ringing with dawn choruses past— 
robins, finches, warblers, thrushes, and wrens
erupting in melodies so loud and full I could not think,
my mind carried on a freshet of sound.

This morning is no silent spring,
but a season muffled, slowly choked of breath,
a boisterous choir fading to an ensemble
of sweet chirps and whistles,
not the wall of sound I heard as a boy.

Connecting earth, air and water,
wings and hollow bones morph to totems, portents.
Is there freedom or courage without eagles,
mystery absent owls peering into darkness,
peace and healing minus the grace of cranes?


I need no homing pigeons
when hushed birdsong augurs anxiety and awe,
messages me on the planet’s health.
Must every feathered thing be a canary,
every backyard, street corner and hilltop a coal mine?

David K. Leff is an award-winning poet and essayist, and former deputy commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. He is the Canton, Connecticut poet laureate, deputy town historian, and town meeting moderator. He was a volunteer firefighter for 26 years.

In 2016 and 2017 David was appointed by the National Park Service to serve as poet-in-residence for the New England National Scenic Trail (NET). He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, and has twice been a finalist in the Connecticut Book Awards. David has received two silver medals from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY), and was grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. His work has appeared in anthologies, newspapers such as the Hartford Courant, and magazines including Appalachia and Yankee.

The author of seven nonfiction books, three volumes of poetry, and two novels in verse, David’s work focuses on the connection of people to their communities and the natural environment. He often explores commonplace elements of the world around us that have hidden meanings and unusual links to each other.

David has been the book review editor of Connecticut Woodlands, the quarterly magazine of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association and is now poetry editor. He is a staff writer for The Wayfarer Magazine.

David’s papers are located at the Special Collections and University Archives, UMass/Amherst. View his work at www.davidkleff.com

Who will claim this lily pad,
Island of paradise,
Wile away the day with birdsong
And waterfall spill over stacked slate?
Insects dance before skittering away
When predators advance to revel and marvel,
Lounging in anticipation
Mirth for moments, wings carry
In swirling movement,
The soft breeze,
Lulling the innocents

Mitzi Dorton (she/her) is author of the book, Chief Corn Tassel, Finishing Line Press, Literary Global Book Award finalist in history and biography. A multi-genre writer, she has poetry in Rattle, Shadowplay, Constellations, Appalachian Places, Poetry South, and is a finalist with both the Wilda Morris Poetry Challenge/Peace Poems, and the Golden Ox Micro-Prose Contest. She is a part of two award-winning publications, Rise, Northern Colorado Writers, Colorado Book Award in anthology and G. I. Days, Milltown Press, New Generation Indie Book Award finalist. Dorton is a former reader and reviewer with Nunum and past associate editor with Fiction on the Web.

My mother’s family history is sordid. She grew up the oldest of five children – four girls and one boy in the middle. Her father died of alcoholism before turning forty, and his best friend Fred swooped in and married his wife, my grandmother. The family drama surrounding this caused some serious rifts. Whilst getting sober, my mother accused her stepfather of molesting her when she was young; her sisters supported her in her sobriety and this accusation, but her brother and mother did not – they were in denial and refused to accept any of this as fact. They cut off the family and ceased talking to any of the sisters, who were also going through their own journeys with AA and therapy (with various amounts of success – the youngest, Patty, drank herself to death in the mid-nineties). Regardless, I have multiple cousins on that side of the family that I don’t even know.

Valerie Ann Lawrence became Valerie Ann Caswell when she married Rick Caswell right after high school, as she desperately needed to get out of her family situation. Within a year she became pregnant, and within two she became a single mother, as Rick battled depression, anxiety, and unemployment. After the divorce, he did not pay child support, and my sister Lisa and her survived on their own for a while until my father came into the picture when my sister was four, and she became Valerie Ann Bujold. She used to joke about all her last names, because she changed it again after the second divorce. She’d say that she should introduce herself as “Valerie Ann Lawrence-Caswell-Bujold-back-to-Lawrence-again.”

Around this time she found Wicca. She referred to herself as a witch, she had a coven, she worshiped the moon, and said “thank Goddess” and “Goddess bless” when someone sneezed. She had an altar, wore crystals around her neck, and listened to chanting music of Irish ladies singing about the Earth being a woman and rising and “a river of birds in migration, of a woman with wings.” Her coven had many meetings in the woods, where they’d commune with nature, and dance naked around a fire (I never witnessed this, but I took her word for it). They were good people who were kind and provided her with a sense of belonging in a cold universe.

With her newfound sobriety came new friends “from the program,” and several people came in and out of our lives. The College Professor taught English at a local college, and in addition to being the first openly gay man I ever encountered, he also taught me how to tie a tie. The Crystal Healer took us away to her cabin one weekend and I learned all about the healing energy of crystals. The Homeless Woman and Her Teenage Son lived with us for a time, so she could “get back on her feet.” She took my sister Lisa’s room, and her son slept on the couch in the basement and cooked clay pipes in our oven, which he told me “not to tell.”

Like I said: Weird times. We were also broke, without any financial stability; my parents had stopped paying the mortgage on the house, and at some point of my freshman year of high school, the house was in foreclosure and my parents filed for bankruptcy.

All of this is the backdrop, what hung in the air during Christmas of 1991.

My aunt Michele hosted a large family party every Christmas Eve at her house in nearby Nashua. I always had to wear uncomfortable clothes and hang out with my jock cousin BJ. The sports talk coming out of his mouth agitated me. I hated sports. I tried talking about movies, but he didn’t like movies; he’d rather be throwing a ball around, so I sat around drinking ginger ale while relatives laughed and got drunk on Christmas punch and asked me all the questions relatives ask you when they see you once a year. Add in the elephant in the room, my mother being noticeably absent (in her words, “I can’t be around all that booze”), and the entire family in denial about her alcoholism, this Christmas Eve might possibly have been the most awkward I’d ever experienced. But I grit my teeth and got through it.

The next morning, I woke with the sun, but the excitement of Christmas morning was noticeably absent. I stayed in bed for a while, staring at the ceiling, until I couldn’t hold my pee anymore. When I walked into the kitchen, my mother sat at the table, coffee steaming to her left, cigarette burning in the ashtray to her right, and she wrote in her journal, an activity she had taken up when she started therapy. She looked up at me, and smiled the warmest, most welcoming, genuine smile, motioned for a hug, and said in her sing-song voice, “Good morning! Merry Christmas!”

Mommy instantly made me feel better.

We exchanged gifts; she gave me a couple books and some clothes, and I gave her a miniature pewter figurine – an armored knight with a sword, in an attack position, about an inch high. We loved our fantasy movies. When I went to AA meetings with her, she always called me her knight in shining armor, so I thought it was appropriate.

After pancakes and bacon, we sat around watching TV, reading, and napping, with the occasional snack in-between. My sister made no appearance that day, as she was with her father’s family, and as the day wore on I felt blue. And hungry.

“What’s for dinner,” I asked.

“Hm. I don’t know,” she responded as she looked over at me. She sensed my disappointment, and continued, “You know what? Let’s go out for Chinese food. Like the family in A Christmas Story. And then we can go to a movie.”

Wait. You can do that? You can go to a restaurant on Christmas? And movie theaters are open?

As it turned out, yes you could and yes they were. This has since become a cultural phenomenon; Chinese restaurants go on two hour waits and prestige blockbuster movies open on Christmas day, but in 1991? A novel idea. We went to the best Chinese restaurant in town, in a plaza with a dog groomer and Rich’s department store. Kids always got free Coke, and everyone at the table got a free chicken wing. With only a handful of people in the restaurant, we had our own private dining experience. We brought the newspaper to see what movies were playing (yes, back then you had to either call the theater or look up times in the paper). As we munched on our Pu Pu Platter and Lo mein, we discussed and debated what film to see. We narrowed it down to The Addams Family, Beauty and the Beast, and Hook.

I liked the old Addams Family television show, but my mother - not so much. Hook had that Spielberg magic and Robin Williams, but the reviews - yikes. Beauty and the Beast looked good – great reviews, nice songs, and the Disney animated film renaissance had begun two years prior with the gigantic smash The Little Mermaid. It seemed like a clear choice.

Beauty and the Beast is a wonderful film. It’s the first animated film ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, the music has Alan Menken at the top of his game, and the animation is some of the best Disney has ever produced, blending in some early computer-generated technology. That ballroom scene? Beautiful. I dare you to watch that sequence and not feel warm all over.

However, as great as it is, it isn’t the film itself that I love, it is the memory associated with it that gets me. With the weight of everything, all the emotional detritus flying around me, these few hours with my mother gave me a respite. Her and I and nothing else except Chinese food and a cartoon. Everything else faded away.

We knew immediately we had experienced something special, a “core memory.” We drove home in a silence of unspoken happiness and warmth, unlike the silence I usually had with my father. When we pulled into the driveway, my mother put the car in park, turned it off, and said to me, but mostly to herself, “This day was a ten.”

We had created a tradition, and tried to recreate the magic of the day every year for the next several years, but it never landed. Something about the spontaneity of the day resulted in an unexpected bright spot in a gloomy cloud. My mother always said, “the universe provides.” True. Beauty and the Beast came to us when we needed it most.

Of course I remember all the subsequent Christmas movies we went to after that. My sister came the next year with Aladdin, then Mrs. Doubtfire. Then my girlfriend joined with Pulp Fiction (which Lisa hated), and then Toy Story, and Jerry Maguire. By the time we got to As Good as it Gets, and then You’ve Got Mail, my parents were back living with each other, I was emerging into adulthood, and “Chinese and a movie” became an obligation and annoying. All those movies are fine, in their own right, associated with their own memories, some fuzzy, some clear, some pleasant, others not, but nothing holds a Lumiere candle to Beauty and the Beast.

Chris Bujold (he/him) has degrees in Film, Theatre, and English, and is a public school teacher. Once upon a time he lived in New York City and started a theatre company. He was recently published in Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight and Roxane Gay’s The Audacity. He lives a full, albeit chaotic life with his wife, three kids, and two dogs.

And those days still live. Those suns never set, not permanently.
	No, I rise every morning to meet them—
the same, the same as it’s always been, eternity’s mists
	dispelling with each step taken within.
It still melts my soul to yours. You’re long gone, but the longing
	goes on, anyway. The tug to something
that wasn’t meant to last pulls me through our being impossible.
	From me to you, everywhere in-between,
those happy days together pulse still, at my fingertips,
	rippling in each word I put my hand to,
caressing every memory with the mystery of what
	could’ve been, touching on the meaning of
our being meant for longing alone. It is nobody’s loss,
	least of all, ours, that the timing was off—
The note we left on holds through every hour’s tolling,
	the sign of the times holds true in our words.

Garrett R. Bruner (he/him) is an archivist for archaeology projects, processing ancient Greek script related collections and serving as a site archivist for two Roman villas near Pompeii, Italy. He writes poetry daily since 2016 and it is forthcoming in The North Dakota Quarterly. He lives in Austin, Texas.

It won’t be long until you won’t find me there. It’s been a
	long time coming. It’s been unbecoming,
my holding on, day in, day out, for you to find yourself
	where I’m losing all sense of belonging.
My living, here, just isn’t cutting it. I got a gut feeling
	it won’t be getting much better, either.
With or without you, I’ve got to get going. There’s no promise of
	anything better, but what else is new?
I’m used to it. I’m pro at missing out on what’s plain as day.
	Absence made itself felt at my expense,
and now my soul pays for it, but still, your presence of mind
	made up for it, giving me something to
go off. Some way, I’ll never find my way back here. The time’s come.
	Tomorrow waits for my step, but I’m gone.
It’s all been done before. Off the edge of a silver forest,
	a sliver of an opening offered
a way forward, but, not for two. It took me in, alone, its gloom
	heavy on the boughs overhead, its shroud
light on the ground, its mystery rising as I’m down on
	my knees, its chorus barely a whisper…
Into its twists and turns, my soul remains true—
	in its mists, my step founders and ceases—
in another life, I will keep on walking should our paths cross,
	in another time, we would’ve gone on…

Garrett R. Bruner (he/him) is an archivist for archaeology projects, processing ancient Greek script related collections and serving as a site archivist for two Roman villas near Pompeii, Italy. He writes poetry daily since 2016 and it is forthcoming in The North Dakota Quarterly. He lives in Austin, Texas.

I could hold up my phone
and learn what bird makes this call 
like six cuts of a spade 
followed by a long sigh,
but a house going up needs
more to hold onto: repetition,
perhaps, or a brief un-
knowing. Meanwhile, six months
for the science building to fall, 
and still not really down. Backhoes bow 
through their rough archeology
as if grazing on the foundation.
All spring I watched cranes 
claw open the classrooms, marked 
weeks to summer by floors razed 
which sounds like gone up 
but is spelled like piles of torn concrete, 
more wire than you’d think
now gathered like snarled hair, the nest 
gone wrong. There’s a fence to protect 
us from it, or protect it
from us.  I couldn’t really see
change until I was gone— 
then the difference when I returned,
sky where there hadn’t been sky. 
Now birds, a chickadee flying
to the feeder for a single peanut
he takes to the tree. Back,
then away. Five peanuts. Winging off
through the pollen that floats
like asbestos, a man on a lift
to spray it with water, keep away
from our lungs. Below him, 
another machine stalks through 
looking for salvage.

Laura Donnelly (she/her) is the author of Midwest Gothic (Ashland Poetry Press) and Watershed (Cider Press Review), and her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Missouri Review, Poets.org, SWWIM, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Upstate New York and teaches at SUNY Oswego.