Through the Tunnel
Cassandra Vanderhoof
photography
the Moment
Faith Morgan
Folded on the couch in the finished basement of my parent’s house on one of those days during that purgatory of winter, I listen to the clicking of my brother’s controller in his hands just a foot away. I close my eyes and absorb the sounds: that clicking and the action on the television, the hum of the space heater and my mom’s fingers typing on a keyboard in some other room, the soft exhales of the dog, a tire hitting a wet pothole in the distance, a snowblower in the neighbors yard and my dad’s heavy boots hitting the floor mat while the slider slams shut. A shove to my arm as my brother hands me the controller pulls me away and at once, I feel corny, like I’m trying to make a poem of the moment. So, I just play the game.
blue shoes settle Rachel Uon
blue shoes settle— with them, I am an imprint on a washed up plank, the repurposed trigger for the landmines buried under my calloused jacket, over the chest, beneath the bone.
walk with me to the shipwreck and tell me your name, your hands, your future.
I will save the date— tuck it into my heart, weave it through strained muscle— and wear your smile on my arm.
you see the remnants of a pirate’s dream and decide that you can fix it. I call you crazy but I am the one who remembers your birthday. I am the one who will ask for the shape of your trust to be carved into my headstone, painted on my dying cheeks like facepaint for the anxious and relief for the artists, the romantics, the dead
recycle my flesh to reuse your charm, the unobtrusive weapon in the corner where sky meets sea meets
the layer of dirt beneath my nails, next to my conscience and over my pride. you are good without trying and miraculous without knowing.
blue shoes settle, but not for long. there are things to do, places to meet, and memories to let go of.
the date arrives and we are the pirates. at some point, the landmines activated and I was not there. I did not need to be.
Boxed and Abandoned Barbie, Basin Street
Jordan Douglas
photography
Girls Faith Morgan
Spine pressed into the edge of the mirror, I watched as the girls, tiny dancers, moved like shapes, images before me. My girls.
Choreography is like a conversation, I told them. Two separate parts of a whole moving toward something together. The same but different. Still, sickled feet. Sometimes a poem acts like rose colored glasses for a memory that isn’t one’s own. They weren’t perfect. But, they were mine, and I was theirs.
Things of My Mother, Contact Triptych #12
Jordan Douglas
digitally cropped analog film frames
An Ode to What to Wear
Megan Koren
There are many odes sung from my mother’s bedroom from sun-up to sun-down.
(While I have yet to inherit her sense of style, I did receive her night owl ways.)
There are ballads to better times; ditties to delaying; songs about sloth, songs of sleep, songs often sung in a chord of snoring; melodies of maddening coworkers; hymns for unusual happenings of all sorts.
But as I stare into my closet, not the first instance (far from the last), I turn to the same tune time and time again and think of her.
My
Father's Things, Ghost Candle
Jordan Douglas
photography
Fathers and Daughters
Eden Milczanowski
acrylic paint on canvas
Onit
Sandra D. Weiterman Barton
My language lives in the air, brought into my body made sacred words to be shared naaxa (I breathe)
My language lives in the wind, as whispers gliding through the trees onhe tonquat (it sounds good)
My language lives in the waters (mbay), guided by the wind, tumbling over itself onhe pookwaht (it tastes good)
My language lives in the land (key) with my ancestors past memories and
Onit (it is good)
My Father's Things, Pastel Set
Jordan Douglas
photography
My Father Is a Shower Scene in an 80s Movie
CL Bledsoe
My father is cocaine lingering on a blonde mustache. My father is work pants and a Walmart button-up shirt. My father talks so much shit he lives in a toilet. My father has drinking buddies instead of friends. He hates them all the same as they hate him. My father eats undercooked chicken, squirrel with eyes still in, recalled Vienna sausages, rainbow kitten flavor. When my father talks, no one listens. He walks tall and carries a big stick, which he’s never used to play hockey. My father shuts it all down when he doesn’t understand. He’s got work to do in the morning, so keep quiet.
The Garden
Mia Simoncini
photography
Calla Lillies— Zantedeschia Meriel Phelan
Calla lilies, while elegant and ethereal, are exclusively meant to be given on one’s final day. There is no other time that is acceptable to give a flower so representative of the things that calla lilies represent. While beautiful and delicate, and incredibly and increasingly popular in bridal bouquets due to their extreme bridal whiteness and their purifying symbolism, to the great-granddaughter of a funeral director, whose convictions still permeate fifteen years after her passing, calla lilies will never be anything but a funeral flower. Calla lilies are meant to be ordered in conjunction with “We’re sorry for your loss” and “With our sympathies” cards. They are meant to ghost into funeral parlors, shaking hands with the living, and standing alongside the receiving line. They are meant to be laid to rest in a bunch, their stalks neatly arranged, purifying the one that is taking a step into their next station of life. Calla lilies are meant to be delivered to the flower entrance of a funeral home in bags of water so they may not appear as wilted as those they are there in celebration of. Calla lilies belong on caskets. Calla lilies were laid on top of Great-grandmother Bernice Anne Golash-Childs’s casket. The woman said they only belonged at funerals, so of course they were at hers.
12-foot garden
Rachel Uon
I am standing on the edge of a 12-foot garden:
the first: worms, no more parasite than beauty, no less winsome than repulsive. five not-hearts beat: syncopated, diffident, deadened, numb.
next: the compost stinks of sewage; the rot consequential; the filter broken, and here too much water is a bad thing, as if too much is ever good, as if water is ever bad; and what kills, the river or the body that yields to it?
the sun starts shining a few inches down, but it’s so easy to be unaware of the warmth, to turn your back on the light.
there are too many pine needles in my backyard; there are not enough anywhere else. my parents do not enjoy cleaning them up; I do not think we have to.
nearly halfway: the first plant sprouts. there are ghosts in the garden; they wave from the clovers and duck behind the daisies. they died somewhere else, but they lived here.
they whisper that the body became the river. there are no birds in this part of the garden. someone painted a rock and left it, golden idol of the sentient ground, worshiped in earnest by far-away worms; parasites. tenth: there are rocks sleeping in the soil but the tulips grow fine.
it is not nice to look at. it is messy. it holds no uniformity and begs no penance. its dirt merges into your skin and whispers its way into your lungs; repulsive, parasitical, worthy of sympathy. it hurts; dehydration is no solution to drowning; listening to ghosts does not save their lives. I cannot save anything with a worm’s body, a turned back, but maybe a tulip could be enough.
last: I fix the filter, wash my hands, and hope for rain.
Enveloped
Mia Simoncini
photography
Ophelia’s soliloquy
Marina Walsh
O niobe, all tears
To follow thy fathers body,
To resolve my conscience into a dew. Damn him, to visit my face too roughly, To turn away all loyalty.
Husband is little more than a friend and less than kind.
I have bore you sinners, twins. Aconite and marigold, They are their father's children. For they did love once.
I did love you once.
But now you have met another, most devoted. Revenge.
Frailty thy name is man!
To hold such a turbulent mistress. For man may use the metric to measure another. But not his own self, Most wicked is he.
I must now sleep in my orchard, Let me float.
In the unspoken, And let me drown.
For my husband will care for our kin.
Mercy, For all have failed.
Oh to glide like a dove, For I did once love.
Shadow Play
Sonnet Lawson
photography
An Gorta Mór—The Great Hunger
Celia Lawren
I’m staring in disbelief at the bronze sculptures that comprise the Famine Statues found at the Custom House Quay in Dublin, how a person can be alive with clothes and skin that hang on bone like dirty rags, ghostly eyes hollowed out, mouths sag, catching only dust. This is what hopelessness looks like. Yet the emaciated, bent figures stumble forward to go west for a better life, a quest for life itself. The downtrodden from this small island spread their music and literature across all seas becoming an outsized influence around the world. Hunger could not steal their spirit. And now it is the rich who suffer a great hunger, an insatiable appetite of greed. Will they mine the bedrock of good will and charity within humanity and succeed? These statues haunt me.
Incomprehensible
Chloe Brown
mixed media
Star Passing Dan Johnson
You watch them practice as stars, a moving five-pointed constellation, zinging the bright spheroid between them: point, diagonal, diagonal, across, diagonal, again. Kinematics of ball from stick to stick, origin to origin, outside hands, inside hands, bouncers, flips, one-up-one-downs.
Beautiful to see them flare, turning grass to night sky, astro-metrical repetitions between the five points, becoming better, brighter, burning
hotter with every pass in the coordinated asterism of the drill.
The Body on the Steps
Megan Koren
Jane was starting to find the body in the alcove to be a great inconvenience to her.
It had first appeared in the interim between closing Thursday night and opening Friday. The week manager, Mark, had panicked, worried that any blame might be placed on his shoulders and not on the night shift where it ought to belong, and had not reported it. Jane came in approximately six hours later, walking up to the sliding glass doors in her usual manner, distracted by the unique stress of having a back-to-back morning and night shift, only to lay eyes on the body for the first time.
She asked the day shift cashier about the body and was told, in a hurried manner, that it was Night Shift's fault. Mark spent the rest of his shift hiding in the office.
Alone up front, Jane had a lot to think about. She elected not to move the body without Mark's input—she had concerns about the legality of that, and she had been told that sort of thing was unsanitary, anyway. Then there were customers to watch: some customers complained to her of the obstacle, at which she smiled politely, but most simply stepped over it, eyes glued to their phones. Some even trampled across it, sending its stiff arms splaying out, which she found terribly disrespectful. The idea of placing a sign came to her, but company policy forbade the use of handmade signs, and no one had ever taught her how to use the printer during on-boarding. Worse yet to her own plight, some took the opportunity of the distraction to shoplift, which meant Jane was torn away from the front, cutting her off from monitoring both the customers and the body. Whenever she returned and found it still lying there, she could not decide if she was more relieved or disappointed.
It was not until around 6:30PM that the night shift manager finally arrived. Beverly, as always, had an espresso in hand and a look of dissatisfaction upon her overly made-up cheeks.
"Thank God you're here," Jane said. Beverly was the only manager she respected on the job, on account of her consistently high work drive and her lack of care when Jane did not feel like meeting her standard. Beverly took a long, slow sip of her drink, eyes darting around. "Where's Mark?"
"He's not here? He must have slipped out the back." She felt suddenly hesitant. "Did you see…"
"The body? How couldn't I." Beverly sighed sympathetically, placing her hand on Jane's shoulder; a heavy, grounding weight. "No one does anything around here but us. Don't worry, I'm going to contact the authorities. You just focus on running the front."
Jane was relieved of this absolution of responsibility. The rest of the evening passed smoothly, with the words of annoyed customers passing off her like water off a duck's back. She barely even glanced at the body. After they shut up the store and Jane went home, she fell asleep easily with the knowledge it was not her problem.
When she arrived the next morning, the body was still there. The sight of it sank a weight in her stomach.
When she entered the store, the discomfort was slightly relieved by the sight of AJ, one of her few coworkers which she could tolerate. She might even have gone as far to say she liked him, though she knew that bond would quickly have been tested outside of capitalist trappings.
The day was to be sidetracked by a late Truck Day—the weekly arrival of goods to the store. According to company policy, it should arrive on Thursdays; if it was late, the weekly arrival date would be moved to the next day (or however many days it took to finally arrive); weekends were to be excluded. Evidently, the truck driver was not familiar with company policy, as 10 pallets were promptly delivered into the backroom, taking up the entire space as well as any free time their skeleton crew could dream of having. Tagging sales was put to the side in favor of putting it out; customer revolts would have to be handled as a separate matter.
While Jane and AJ were stocking the candy aisle, the subject of the body inevitably returned.
"You would think someone would come by to pick it up. Friends, family…" AJ mused.
Jane took a moment of deliberation, eyes trained on shelves upon shelves of brightly colored bags of sweets. "Might not have any."
"That's a sad idea. You think anyone would come looking for one of us if we died?"
Jane let out a startled laugh. "Jesus, AJ, I don't want to think about that."
"I know, I know. I guess I'm just in a morbid place." He smirked, adjusting a large package of M&M's. "Can't imagine why."
And then the stale air of the alcove wafted in and soured their mood.
It was finally then, the next day, the third day, Sunday, that proved to be the breaking point.
The body had begun to rot. The power of the air conditioning system which stretched out through the store had proved futile in the face of the most natural process of all. Its skin had begun to swell, taking on a balloon-like quality and significantly more of the alcove floor. Its mouth belched dark fluid when a customer kicked it to the side in their entrance to the store, polluting the carpet in such a manner that its abstract pattern could not hide. The smell worsened, if such a thing was possible, a fishymolding rotting smell that pervaded the entire store from the entrance to the pharmacy to the very back exit, and Jane could only take comfort in that Mark could smell it as well as she could. That wasn't even touching on how it had worsened the fruit fly problem in the break room. She was becoming rather concerned with what came next.
But Jane's greatest horror was the lack of reaction to this. There were only a few passing comments about the smell; some were sympathetic to her plight, having to be around it all day and all, while others were snide remarks implying the whole matter was her fault. While the acknowledgement that she wasn't simply imagining the whole thing was appreciated, the tone rankled nonetheless—it wasn't as if the body was her fault.
Eventually the day began to draw to a close, and with it the week. Closing was exacerbated by the leftovers from Truck Day, but it went faster with AJ's presence. He made the work load lighter, and distracted her with conversation. By 9PM, they had managed to count the money, finish off stocking the shelves with the last pallet, wipe down the counters and shelves, and vacuum the most treaded-on paths of the store, neatly dodging the quickly spreading dark stains of the body. They had an hour to leave a note for their boss in the morning and little else.
So, AJ went outside to smoke. Jane followed him.
Jane didn't take the offered hit, as usual, but the airy cloud spewing from the pen enveloped her nonetheless—she imagined herself
relaxing a little, but any placebo effect was ruined when she caught sight of the body, lying in her sight line, still in the alcove, not unlike a glass coffin.
AJ either saw and felt the same or caught sight of her face, as he observed, "Maybe I should have gone to my car."
"Still would be there waiting for us," Jane muttered.
For the first time, Jane really looked at it. Him, really, if her eyes didn't fool her. He was currently splayed on his back, arms outstretched as if to embrace her, swollen and akimbo. His skin was a deep tan, though perhaps once a more healthy shade. His hair was dark, falling out in patches that littered the floor, which even then she loathed the thought of cleaning up. His eyes were dark too, and glassy.
She felt AJ's eyes on her as she pushed herself off the side of the cheap building siding, and walked back into the alcove. She didn't breath through her nose as she crouched down beside him and shut his eyes. The lids were sweat-slick against her fingers.
When she returned to her perch next to AJ, he remarked, "That was a nice thing."
"I guess." She breathed in the smoky night air, the smell of rot still clinging to the back of her sinuses. "I just wish someone would do something, you know?"
"Yeah, me too." AJ took another drag. Glanced up at the winking store sign. "Well, see you next week.
John Fischer
Untitled
photography
Utopia Undone
Louis Efron
perfect pixelated panoramas blossoming with electronically dyed sherbet-colored tulips still unpicked for love or graves
our carefully curated avatars illuminate dark spaces mined in fleshless universes coded to simulate our ethereal souls still connected to us and God transcending mortarless block walls no longer separating us from polished mirrored worlds a chance to live forever or never live at all a promising virtual Shangri-La always at risk of shattering in the reflection of our own imperfect world
photography
Stone Guardian
Riley Treegoob
Moss and Acorns
Joanna B. Easton
Rain and acorns pelt and bang on the tin roof in this rental house, still an unknown stranger. Houses breathe and speak their own language: furnaces thump, floors creak, windows rattle. On day four, I still jump at motion lights, set off by wind, acorns ping-ponging across tin.
Silver-green moss and Old Man’s Beard hang off branches, stretching over the roof in a long-armed embrace. Black tree limbs become highways for grey squirrels and perches for juvenile hawks, both shaking down branches—brown acorns land like bullets. I shiver in the dark, question, then comfort myself back
to sleep. I dream briefly of past, cold lovers knocking on the door of old wounds. It’s raining hard now— so loud, tap-tapping both outside and inside my mind.
I’m south of Georgia, far from home, alone. Moss hangs low tonight, wet and lightless. I toss from right to left. At dawn, the clouds I carry brighten from grey to white.
Sean Murphy
photography
Erie House
Iceland
Abbey Gyurko
photography
Two haikus
Morgan Mitchell
Jan 16
Spring snow is falling past my therapist’s office; I am almost home.
Jan 28
Little flurries fall. I swear, a few hours ago everything was blue.
Shadow Flight - Chair Lift Escapee - Malletts Bay Vermont
Jon Hyde photography
cloud over the mountain.
Jessica Engels
photography
Zen Lake Benjamin Karren
Paddles slice through sun-drenched water leaving cyclones of laundry and unpaid bills in the wake, bypassing a tinnitus of unsolicited opinion— strokes of dawn melt my crescents of self-doubt until the weary paddle naps on my hips and I begin drifting away from responsibility toward that seam beyond the mountains where the water touches the sky.
Symphonies of hermit thrush lull me into quiescence, an incense of pondweed petrichor opens my lungs— a fleeting glimpse of coherence, simply being. Water on my feet awakens me like tingshas, a spool of yellow perch and pumpkinseed fish unravels around my ankles, pebbles caress my soles— my mind a stark stillness in a world of breath.
The Wood Stick
Dan Johnson
Until the early 1980s, all lacrosse sticks were made of wood, typically of hickory or ash.
journey to the center of a tree and you will find the stick the center of a tree is silent, remains strong and still the center of a tree retains power, the power of the root and thus the power of the whole earth so the center of a tree is often gentle, and there is power in gentleness, and more power when you carry gentleness in your hands
Jim Laskarzewski
harumph
photography
Communion
Ariel Kilgore
The top side of a perfect strawberry radiates when it’s ripe the underside can be scarred, bruised, unripe, or chewed
But a perfect June strawberry is not one that should be wasted I am delicate in the hay patch, and I carry a small knife to slice the bleeding flesh of a berry tasted by something small I press the cut pieces into the soil by the roadside by the anthills
With my thumb I squish the offering, mixing it like blood in the dust an offering to share a meal
Then I take the remaining fruit in my mouth warmed by the sun sweet like wine
This is the body of my god given to you shared in a meal with a rabbit and a bluebird and a thousand ants in the only way we could ever commune all tasting the juices of a single fruit
Lost Horse
Evelyn Mercier
photography
Unroofed Devotion (The Carmo Ruins)
Ivory Blanchette
photography
Haiku After the Last Game
Dan Johnson
A horn sounds. Play stops. In the infinite line, you shake the hand of Time.
Erased by Time
Kayley Bell
wall mural and pencil
Alphabet Soup
photography
Riley Treegoob
Whoops!
Erin Boyd
Teeter, totter, tumble and trip; stagger, stutter, stumble and slip; flounder, falter, fumble and flip; goodness, gracious, who washed the floors?
Water Hazard
Arianna Petta
acrylic paint and posca markers on canvas
Live Lobster Grab & Go Fresh. apx 1.25 lb
Jenna Wilbur
I’m standing in the middle of the seafood section of my college’s local grocery store. My long-sleeve shirt is sopping wet and my hand is getting pinched by a creature that has lived hundreds of millions of years longer than humans. I’ll get to the point; I just stole a live lobster from the to-beeaten tank.
In hindsight, I can admit it was impulsive. A girl in her twenties boiling inside the spinning, confusing, fire-hot pot of life cannot seem to do anything right, but she can save one lobster from being eaten. Maybe it was about control, maybe attention, maybe I just couldn’t walk past that tank one more time pretending I don’t see them and feel some sort of way about their imminent deaths: stacked alive, rubber-banded, waiting.
Did you know most lobsters don’t die from predators? They die from growing too big and strong, with shells too thick and no energy left to break free. Perhaps, then, a “quick” bubbling death is kind? Or maybe that’s what we tell ourselves so we can keep buying them by the pound?
I sit on the beach and tip my bucket sideways as the water sloshes onto the wet sand, rushing into a cresting wave. The brown-orange creature scuttles from its container. A girl and a lobster sitting on the beach. Man, my pants and sleeves are really soaked.
Tibetan Tiger
Thalia Guarnieri
second-hand fabric and beads
Jenna Wilbur
photography
Comb Jelly (Mnemiopsis leidyi)
Phil Meriel Phelan
There once was roadkill. That roadkill’s name was Phil. Phil the roadkill had big dreams, well, you know, until.
photography
Mr. Fox!
Evelyn Mercier
I Am Still Angry
Thalia Guarnieri
oil and applique
Jenna Wilbur
Scrawled Cowfish (Acanthostracion quadricorn)
photography
Pebbling
Gentoo penguins choose their mates by searching for the smoothest pebbles and presenting them to their desired partners, termed ‘pebbling.’
Victoria Reed
I start with twenty lines, maybe more, then I search for the most polished words, roughest sentences, sand the surface, half the size; seek, shine, send this: to you.
Deer Sharks - Everybody Likes a Swim in the Ocean
Jon Hyde photography
