CIRQUE, Vol. 12 No. 2 A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim by Michael Burwell

CIRQUE A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim

Volume 12, No. 2

Anchorage, Alaska

Cover Photo Credit: David A. Goodrum, "Post Canvas #1" Table of Contents Photo Credit: Jack Broom, "Echium" Design and composition: Signe Nichols ISBN: 9798840739990 Independently Published ISSN 2152-4610 (online)

Published by

Anchorage, Alaska www.cirquejournal.com All future rights to material published in Cirque are retained by the individual authors and artists. cirquejournal@gmail.com

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Sandra Kleven Michael Burwell Editors & Publishers

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Larry F. Slonaker was born and raised in Great Falls, Montana, and graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He worked as a reporter and columnist at the San Jose Mercury News. He and his wife now live in California’s Central Coast, on a place just large enough to accommodate a few horses, a few dogs and several (fixed) feral cats.

THE COLLECTION

ALASKA’S #1

LITERARY PUBLISHER Established in 2018

Fish the Dead Water Hard by Eric Heyne These poems appear for us like cairns in a dark wood and we read them with delight and curiosity. — Emily Wall $15

to promote fine writing from Alaska and the Northwest

Dale Champlin The magic of Dale Champlin’s exuberant narrative, like Callie herself, is impossible to tie down. Beyond a braided story that will buckle you, the cascade of poems reveals a sensuous and hard, lonely and austere landscape. —John Morrison $15 Out There in the Out There McDonnell’s stories are forceful, tender, violent, funny, and thoughtprovoking. — Monica Devine $15

One Headlight, by Matt Caprioli Like no other book…it will entertain you as it crushes you . — Martha Amore $18

In their innocence, young children are at once naïve and brilliantly perceptive. Miss Tami, Is Today Tomorrow? Kindergarten in Alaska: Stories for Grown-Ups. By Tami Phelps Illustrated by Tammy Murray $20

November Reconsidered Marc Janssen’s satire takes a lyric yet steely look at a market’s cereal aisle, an eighth-grade English class, a Toyota dealership, a California mall on Black Friday, a Happy Hour at Charlie Browns. Although he never flinches from the dark realities of life, Janssen also gives us moments of assuaging respite. -– Paulann Peterson $15

Baby Abe: A Lullably These verses from Ann Chandonnet, imagine scenes from Abraham Lincoln’s life, from his 1809 winter arrival in the world to his third birthday (1812). $15

Silty Water People, by Vivian Faith Prescott, is a collection of poems exploring the effects of assimilation on contemporary Tlingit/Scandinavian families in Wrangell, a small island community in Southeast Alaska. $15

More Poetry

The Lure of Impermanence by Carey Taylor. These poems, firmly rooted in the Pacific Northwest, flow with clearly defined imagistic lines and understatement. -– Christianne Balk $15

Karen Tschannen

Wassilie's poems are a wellspring of keen observations, written purely from the heart, with a sense of deep time and connection to place. — Kathleen Tarr $15

Poet, Leslie Fried is an archeologist of the soul, digging through the fractured histories of ancestors, and her own past — Tonja Woelber $15

Echolocation by Kristin Berger. In a time of diminishing truth and light, this book locates beauty and holds space for its returning. – Annie Lighthart $15

Apportioning the Light, Karen Tschannen A life lived to its fullest, a craft perfected so that it seems seamless, the highest compliment I can give to any writer. – Tom Sexton Holy Ghost Town is a remarkable book-length evocation of a very special place. In the genre of place writing, it compares to “Paterson” by William Carlos Williams. —Derek Sheffield $15

Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North, by Karla Linn Merrifield In poems of intimacy and celebration, elegy and generous mythologizing, Karla Linn Merrifield’s new book is teeming with the ‘minute particulars’ of her Alaskan travels. —Ralph Black $25

Stories: Fiction and Nonfiction Surfacing from Vietnam, by Paul Haeder These 17 fictional stories confront the estrangement war veterans and their families have dredged through lives which are heroic because they all are survivors. $20

Leah Stenson, Life Revised Her ability to probe the human condition with such elegant prose and heartfelt poetry is a treat that remains fresh and vital to the last page. —John Sibley Williams $15

Sean Ulman does what few are capable of doing by appreciating the delicate and minute details of the Last Frontier’s harsh and wondrous life and then setting it in motion to the ebb and flow of a small, Alaskan town. —Rickey Gates $15

Doug Pope writes about the Alaskan backcountry better than any writer I’ve ever read. -– Jonathan Evison $15

An offbeat Tom Robbinsesque romp that stands tiptoe on the brink of erotica and oozes with sexual energy and honesty that will skip your heart, cause a belly laugh, and have you ponder exactly what the fairy dust of lovelust is really all about. -- Monica Devine $15

Rick Steiner's Oasis Earth is a book of great importance at this moment in human and planetary history.

Like Painted Kites by Clifton Bates Celebrating our shared humanity, this engaging collection of poetry and prose will have you begging for more. Deb Vanasse $20

Gretchen Brinck The Fox Boy In 1968, fresh from college, Gretchen Brinck became the lone child welfare worker serving a remote region the size of Oregon State. The Fox Boy recounts her work in rural Alaska, her encounters with abuse, injustices against Alaska Natives, controversial adoptions, and the tragic disappearance of Gabriel Fox. $25

Glorious first-growth NW forests—wild and free and lovely—seep their wildness and more into the loggers who harvest them in the US ’70s, and the women who love them. – Kerry Feldman $15

Cirque Press 3157 Bettles Bay Loop Anchorage, AK 99515 www.cirquejournal.com Order books via email to Cirquejournal@gmail.com And on Amazon.

Cirque A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim

CIRQUE was stablished in 2008 by Michael Burwell to give writers and artists of the region more opportunities to publish their work. Sandra Kleven joined Cirque, in 2011, and seven years later, they founded Cirque Press. Cynthia Steele serves as Associate Editor and Paul Haeder is a regular contributor and collaborator.

Michael Burwell

Cynthia Steele Sandra Kleven Paul Haeder

Margo Waring writes beautifully of place, time, memory, and aging. -- Nancy Lord $15

Coming Soon On the Beach by Alan Weltzien Also Between Promise and Sadness by Joanne Townsend Yosemite Dawning Shauna Potocky

Staff at Cirque Press Buffy McKay is a poet of power. In Salt & Roses, she looks hard at life across a range of free verse, villanelles, and haikus, and leaves us with poignant and glimmering lines that can stop you dead in your tracks. -- Doug Pope $15

Sky Changes on the Kuskokwim by Clifton Bates

Cirque #24 June 2022 Feldman’s storytelling is expertly crafted, visceral and raw though he skillfully manages to squeeze in charm and tenderness to boot. In other words, this book has it all. -Monica Devine $15

Cirque Press 3157 Bettles Bay Loop Anchorage, AK 99515 www.cirquejournal.com Place orders via email. 50% off for retailers cirquejournal@gmail.com

Kettle Dance A Big Sky Murder

“I felt like I was swept downstream in a fastmoving river, bounced off rocks, swirled into eddies, and spit out on the bank to dry. Feldman’s storytelling is expertly crafted, visceral and raw though he skillfully manages to squeeze in charm and tenderness to boot. In other words, this book has it all. A meaty, passionate, sexy mystery that will twist your gut. Take a big bite and chew a while on Feldman’s whodunit.”

It’s really, really good. —Monica Devine, author of Water Mask

“Crisp dialogue drives the action at high-speed in this short novel that takes place in a small town, where a local boy who left to become an LA detective returns from an Internal Affairs Group investigation as a suspect in a gruesome murder. Add romance and lust. What more could you want?” —Ron McFarland, author of The Rockies in First Person, Subtle Thieves, and Stranger in Town

Sandra Kleven Michael Burwell Editors & Publishers

About the Author Kerry Dean Feldman is a Montana-born writeranthropologist, currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He is co-founder of the Alaska Anthropological Association (1973 – 74). Kerry is the author of Drunk on Love: Twelve Stories to Savor Responsibly (Cirque Press, 2019), and Alice’s Trading Post: A Novel of the West (Five Star/Cengage, 2022). He won national competition awards for short stories during his Montana teens, but he put publishing fiction aside until he experienced and “knew enough” about life to offer stories in genres that helped him understand his own life better. Kettle Dance is his homage to noir mystery novel writers and filmmakers. He lives in Anchorage with his artist-wife, Tami Phelps.

SUMMER 2022 FROM CIRQUE PRESS

ON THE BEACH: POEMS 2016-2021 Deeply moving, and deeply felt, On the Beach stands with the finest poetry and nature writing ever produced in the Treasure State. – Brady Harrison, author of The Term Between: Stories I wish this poet was sitting at my kitchen table, wise-cracking and spinning tales. His eyes and his heart are wide open. His intellect, both electric and electrifying, strikes lightning poem by poem. He’s humorous, humble, humane. At the height of his artistry, this poet winks and claims he’s “ever more certain of what I don’t know.” – Lowell Jaeger, Montana Poet Laureate 2017-2019 Always in search of the solution to the mystery of himself and the relentlessly interesting cast of characters he tends to come across, Alan Weltzien throws his poems into the abyss and in so doing, staves off the inevitable long enough to make us ponder what we’re doing, wonder who we are, and why we do what we do. – Aaron Parrett, author of Maple & Lead: Stories

O. ALAN WELTZIEN, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Montana Western, retired in May 2020, closing out 40 years of full-time teaching. Weltzien has published ten books and four chapbooks, including The Norman Maclean Reader (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage (University of Nevada Press); A Father and an Island (Lewis-Clark Press, 2008); and Exceptional Mountains: A Cultural History of the Pacific Northwest Volcanoes (University of Nebraska Press, 2016).

Available on $15

In their innocence, young children are at once naïve and brilliantly perceptive.

Dear Miss Tami, Thank you for teaching me to think and read. I hope you never die. Love, Alexander

Author Tami Phelps

This heartwarming book maps the humor and curiosity of kids as they learn the meaning of words and the logic that underpins their experiences. In these vignettes for grown-ups, Tami Phelps, a Montessori teacher for 20 years, describes encounters with her students as they process the world around them. ~ Monica Devine, author, Water Mask Miss Tami, Is Today Tomorrow? Kindergarten in Alaska: Stories for Grown-Ups By Tami Phelps Illustrated by Tammy Murray $20 Find on Amazon.

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Callie Comes of Age Callie’s indomitable spirit corrals everything she does. Self-reliant, quirky, intelligent, sensual and untamed, she throws herself wholeheartedly into every new experience. For full effect, read Callie Comes of Age as you would a novel. The overall trajectory is best considered as a single narrative. In Callie’s search, each poem leads to the next discovery, her voice and personality irresistible as we follow her from childhood loss to adult resolution. Callie doesn’t question the grit required to get through her daily chores on the cattle ranch. An arid landscape dictates her hardscrabble existence. Ultimately, there’s a mystery for Callie to unravel. —George Champlin

Sandra Kleven Michael Burwell Editors & Publishers

Callie Comes of Age is pretty darn masterful. The magic of Dale Champlin’s exuberant narrative, like Callie herself, is impossible to tie down. Beyond a braided story that will buckle you, the cascade of poems reveals a sensuous and hard, lonely and austere landscape. The sharp characters and sure-handed narrative pull us, while in a rhythm that alternates between shuffle, gallop, and gusty breeze, the poems with their details of snake belly, scar, and bone won’t let us go. —John Morrison, author of Monkey Island Ringing with an exquisite lyricism, Dale Champlin’s amazing Callie Comes of Age—a novel in the form of poetry—holds me in thrall. Set in the harsh ranch country of the American West, which shapes her life, Callie’s story evolves from an early childhood filled with tenderness and a strong sense of belonging into a grim tale of a sexually precocious and fiercely independent adolescence, in which glimmers of a dark secret begin to emerge. The deftly nuanced narrative kept me on the edge of my seat all the way to the end, throbbed by wonder. —Ingrid Wendt, Oregon Book Award winner in poetry, author of Evensong

ABOUT

THE

AUTHOR

Dale Champlin, an Oregon poet with an MFA in ﬁne art, has poems published in Willawaw, Visions International, San Pedro River Review, catheXis, The Opiate, Pif, Timberline Review and elsewhere. Her ﬁrst collection The Barbie Diaries was published in 2019. Three collections, Leda, Isadora, and Andromina, A Stranger in America are forthcoming. Ever since her daughter married a bull rider, Dale’s been writing cowboy poems. Memories of her early days hiking in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the bleachers at Pendleton Roundup, and summers camping at Lake Billie Chinook imbue her poetry with the scents of juniper and sage.

New from Cirque Press B

uffy McKay is a poet of power. In Salt & Roses, she looks hard at life across a range of free verse, villanelles, and haikus, and leaves us with poignant and glimmering lines that can stop you dead in your tracks. When she captures the ethereal essence of inner and outer landscapes, you can imagine her with the likes of Mary Oliver and Elizabeth Bishop, sipping tea and swapping lines about fish. —Doug Pope, author of The Way to Gaamaak Cove The gorgeous poems in Buffy McKay’s Salt & Roses traverse the wilds of Alaska and comb the watery landscapes of Rhode Island and Scotland. McKay’s connection to each place runs deep, and these roots she shares in a generous and loving way. In one poem, she illustrates how ancestry lives in a smoked fish and her mother’s word for it: dunghnak. This collection sensually explores the lands dear to McKay, family homelands which nourish her body as well as her soul. She captures life’s beauty with a wide-angle lens. Yes, there are salt and roses within these pages, but also cancer, death, loss, and regret. More than a book of poems, Salt and Roses is a book of prayers. —Martha Amore, author of In the Quiet Season and Other Stories

Buffy McKay Roberta “Buffy” McKay is of Scottish and Inupiat descent. She enjoys writing about memory, time, and place, and has written poems since age 3. First published in the We Alaskans section of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Anchorage Daily News in 1993, her work has appeared in various literary journals including Cirque. She has won scholarships to the Community of Writers, Olympic Valley, CA and Billy Collins’ master class at The Key West (FL) Literary Seminar, and remains grateful for their value and life lessons. “I’m inspired by my environment and geography and their effects on me. I’ve lived in some incredible places and had some amazing adventures so far in this life, and that seems to turn into poems.” Currently, Buffy can be found beachcombing with a new dog, Benji, in New England and writing her autobiography, To Sir Sean Connery, With Love.

Sandra Kleven Michael Burwell Editors & Publishers

FORTHCOMING FROM CIRQUE PRESS

FISH THE DEAD WATER HARD Poems Though centered in Alaska, Eric Heyne’s poems travel the world. Brilliantly observed and buttressed by a strong poetic craft, they take us to the spot and open our eyes. Whether set in the Brooks Range or at the Acropolis, a steady thoughtful voice holds the book together, while intimate poems of family life embody Heyne’s core emotions. This collection resonates with life. John Morgan, author of The Moving Out: Collected Early Poems, Archives of the Air, and River of Light: A Conversation with Kabir In Fish the Dead Water Hard, Eric Heyne shares Alaska in summer, when hieroglyphic lichens “spell out their slow story in a dead language.” During brutal, long winters, ice fog fossilizes all trace of life. He mourns a young one gone too soon who leaves us “to mourn the impossible lives of the living.” He honors a beloved stepmother who “talked to us like we were worth listening to.” These poems are dispatches from above ground, where the poet asks “What else can’t I be?” He advises those of us not quite ready to go yet to “just assume you’re still in love.” Eric Heyne shows us, with delicacy and grace, the quality of light in a forest half eaten by leaf miners, then wonders about what forest his daughter will see. That succession-in-progress, like a five-armed sea star, is “balanced and incomplete, like poetry, like life.” Peggy Shumaker, author of Gnawed Bones, Just Breathe Normally, and Cairn These poems appear for us like cairns in a dark wood and we read them with delight and curiosity. Each word of Eric Heyne’s poems is stacked with intention and meant to show us something about the complex and layered woods we are walking through. Heyne doesn’t shy from the darker moments—the fear of a biopsy, the loss of sexual desire, the warming of our world. But these poems are also markers, built to help us find our way. “And someone, awaiting migration, finds/this stack of stones on the horizon and is no longer alone.” Emily Wall, Professor of English at the University of Alaska, and author of Flame and Breaking Into Air

Eric Heyne is a Professor of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He has published scholarship on American literature and critical theory in a number of journals, and is the editor of Desert, Garden, Margin, Range: Literature on the American Frontier and the University of Alaska Press edition of Jack London’s Burning Daylight.

AVAILABLE ON $15

Water the Rocks Make

by David McElroy

Alaska Literary Series

University of Alaska Press The poems of Water the Rocks Make commit into words the turbulence of emotion and thought stirred up by life’s events: family trauma, psychiatric instability, the legal system, the death of a loved one, identity, cultural displacement, work, loss, creativity, and through everything, love.

Water the Rocks Ma ke by David McElroy Available on Amazon and at local venders. $16.95 David McElroy is a retired commercial pilot of small planes in the Arctic and a former smokejumper, fisherman, taxi driver, and English teacher. He is the author of four books of poetry, Making It Simple, Mark Making, Just Between Us, and Water the Rocks Make. He has been published in regional and national journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Cirque, Anteaus, Poetry Northwest, and Chicago Review. In 2016 he was the recipient of the Andy Hope award for poetry.

NEW FROM CIRQUE PRESS

CIRQUE

Growing Older in this Place A Life in Alaska’s Rainforest Margo Waring’s poetry is tuned to the pitch and roll of the seasons. Just as spring returns cyclically to Southeast Alaska’s beaches, forest paths, and mountain peaks, youth too ebbs and flows in the present tense, permeating old age. In this, these poems teach us to let memory carry us forward with the same agility that it carries us back. I will listen to my stream, writes Waring. Hear it dissolve in the sea. – Corinna Cook, author of Leavetakings

Margo Waring writes beautifully of place, time, memory, and aging. Her years of attention to the changing seasons and climate of southeast Alaska uncover, like March’s melting snows, her awareness of life’s gifts and the losses that come to us all. – Nancy Lord, former Alaska writer laureate and author of Fishcamp, Beluga Days, and pH: A Novel

M AR GO WA SSERM AN WARING

MARGO WARING grew up in working-class Brooklyn and began an academic life (New York University, University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin) of study and teaching. She relocated to Juneau, Alaska, in 1969, where she still lives with her husband, son, and several beloved dogs. Margo’s poetry has been published in Cirque, Tidal Echoes, Alaska Women Speak, electronic venues, and locally at Bus Omnibus and Writers Weir.

Available on $15

V o l . 12 N o . 2

From the Editors

Readings in August 2022 15 — Juneau, Alaska 17 — Seattle, Washington Summer of the Soiree. In August we plan events in Juneau, AK, Seattle, WA, Hood River 27 — Hood River, Oregon and Salem, OR. A soiree is more intimate than a public reading, allowing conversation; time 28 — Salem Oregon to hang out and celebrate a new issue. Cirque #24 contributors will be invited to read and local fans of Cirque and local writers will fill out the cast. Those who attend will read their work to those assembled. Contact cirquejournal@gmail.com to get info on joining us. Publisher, Sandra Kleven will be traveling with Associate Editor, Cynthia Steele. Thanks so much to Christianne Balk, Leah Stenson, Amalie Hill and Hearthside Books of Juneau for hosting. Twenty-four issues of Cirque have come out since December of 2009 when Michael Burwell gave the go-ahead to the first issue. Sandra Kleven was among those published, setting the stage for a long partnership. Mike’s original vision was simple: to create for writers of the region more opportunities to publish their work. In 2018, we founded Cirque Press with essentially the same goal. Too much good writing was languishing, waiting for decisions from larger presses. Even if accepted, it might be another year before the book came out. We decided to step in, publishing books of writers from the region. Since the founding of the Press, we’ve published more than thirty books. See the Cirque Press ad in the front section of this issue for an idea of the books we’ve published so far. Interested? Query us at cirquejournal@gmail.com What is Our Mission Today? We are committed to the creation of a literary community. We are interested in writing of place, noting how literature impacts the places described, elevating, revealing, somehow making it more real. We are especially interested in building the base of literature related to Alaska’s frontiers — tragic and magical rural Alaska. Always, our focus is serving writers, poets and artists; giving all a place to showcase their work. Is Cirque Political? When necessary. Your Support Sustains Us. We are not connected to an institution. We are not grant funded. You keep us in print with all you provide — through your writing and your donations. Support us via PayPal.com to cirquejournal@gmail.com or send your donation to Cirque Press, 3157 Bettles Bay Loop, Anchorage, AK 99515. Poetry Competition. Toward the end of supporting Cirque and poetry, we are calling for poems that speak to patterns, chaos, or current events. Find details on the topics at Submittable. An entry fee of $25 will cover 5 unranked prizes of $100. Poet, David McElroy, whose most recent collection is Water the Rocks Make, has agreed to judge the entries. Winning poems will be published in a special section along with others selected from those entered. Go to: cirque. submittable.com/submit —Sandra L. Kleven - Michael Burwell, editors Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rims Sandra Kleven and Mike Burwell, Editors Cynthia Steele, Associate Editor Paul Haeder, Projects Editor Signe Nichols, Designer Published twice yearly near the Winter and Summer Solstice Anchorage, Alaska Our mission: to build a literary community and memorialize writers, poets and artists of the region.

CIRQUE

A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim

Volume 12 No. 2

VOICES OF UKR AINE

Cynthia Steele In Solidarity with the People of Ukraine: Poetry of the Invasion 22 Evgenia Jen Baranova Memory 25 Dale Champlin These Blue Memories 26 Lyn Coffin Not Orpheus. Not David 26 A Sestina on Destruction 27 Brittney Corrigan No-Fly Zone 27 Nancy Deschu Two Haiku 28 Helena Fagan As Bombs Fall on a Materity Hospital in Ukraine 28 Leslie Fried The Hotel 29 Kristina Kryukova Look Up, Above Yourself 29 The Voice 30 Claudia Castro Luna Tomorrow and the day after again and again 30 Francis Opila Weight of the World 30 Tatiana Retivov On the 40th Day 31 Julia Samorodova It's November 32 Judith Skillman You Watch 32 Cynthia Steele Waiting in Ukraine 32 Thomas A. Thomas Erasure 33 Carolyne Wright "We Have to Close the Sky" 34

NONFICTION

Wilhemina Condon The Garden of Eden 36 Mike Bates Murres Can't Dance 37 David Cheezem Consist 42 Luther Allen clutches 46 Matt Witt They Say the War is Over 46 Clifton Bates Parallel Lines 50 Larry Slonaker Dan Cushman and Stay Away, Joe 53

FICTION

Sherri Hoffman Big Boat 58 Dan Tremaglio One More Piece of Night I Reap 59 John Helde Resuscitation 60 Katie Kane The Empire Builder 65

POE TRY

Luther Allen squalicum beach 73 Lana Hechtman Ayers The Loveliest 75 Laura E. Bailey Wrack Line 75 Karen Bonaudi Open Door 76 Michelle Bonczek Evory The uterus is a fickle vessel 77 Kristina Boratino Nancy Lucille 78 Ronda Broatch In the Unzipped Pine I Find the Beetle, Asleep 78 Mark Burke Salvation by Arithmetic 79 Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum Glitter Gulch 80 Vic Cavalli Chevy Survival 81 Dale Champlin Little Bird 81 Rapt and Aware 82 Susan Chase-Foster A Triptych of Illuminations 83 David Cheezem Easley, Missouri, April 9, 2018 84 Linda Conroy A Three Point Hitch 84 Brittney Corrigan Death Haiku 85 Mary Eliza Crane Prayer 86 Nancy Deschu The Pilot's Dog 86 Consequence 87 Thomas Elson One Morning Each Week 87 Amelia Diaz Ettinger Double-Crested Cormorant at Tamani Pesh-wa 88

Helena Fagan Łódź Ghetto Courtyards 89 Robert Fagen Bleak House 90 Amy Fair Witchcraft 91 J.V. Foerster Lost at Sea 92 Trina Gaynon Covered Bridge 93 Jeremy George Calling at An Elder's House 94 What Matters & What Goes 95 Elizabeth Mehl Greene Deer at Dawn 96 Paul Haeder Grandfather Told Me to Watch for Crows 97 Jim Hanlen Ode to Lemon 100 Bill Hollands The Age of Innocence 100 Curt Hopkins Harry Matthews 101 Corinne Hughes Flights 102 Marc Janssen Artemision 102 Jill Johnson Night Smoke 103 Susan Johnson Renewing Our Vows 104 Martha Kaplan Dreaming of Hokulea along Highway One 104 Keith Kennedy I'll Bring Heart 105 Casey Killingsworth And one more thing 105 Ariana Kramer Tokitae 106 Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis Aeolus at Hanford 107 Gary Lark Social Graces 107 Eric le Fatte Shadows 108 Sherri Levine Jesus in Cowboy Boots 108 Sue Fagalde Lick Picking Berries and Dandelion Greens 109 Linera Lucas Two Deborah Butterfield Horse Sculptures, Ten Years Apart 110 David McElroy Requiem in Snow 110 David Memmott A View from the Summit 111 Donna Mendelson Frank's Place 111 William Miller Victorian Heaven 112 Pamela Mitchell Instructions for My Sons 113 John Morgan On The Body: A Zuihitsu 114 Francis Opila The Three-Legged Coyote 115 Timothy Pilgrim Reviving Kilter 115 Vivienne Popperl a deeper ruby and smoldering eye 116 Diane Ray Pink Snow 117 Willa Schneberg There Are Countries, 118 R.J. Rice The Horizon of Love is Mourning 119 Lex Runciman The Past Is Ending Soon 120 Tom Sexton Quiet 121 At Eagle, Alaska 121 Judith Skillman Transubstantiation 121 Craig Smith The Flag 122 Kathleen Smith September 122 Connie Soper Terminus 123 Leah Stenson Healing Water 123 Mary Lou Spartz "If there's anything I can do . . . " 124 Kelly Terwilliger Black Bear Running Down the Road 124 Jim Thielman Calm 125 Georgia Tiffany Absence 125 Lucy Tyrrell Open-grown Oak 126 Gary Wade Inconsequence of Walls 127 Vivian Wagner Ice Melt 127 Margo Waring Single Traveler 128 Morning Williams Two Haiku 128

FEATURES

Cynthia Steele Artists of Cirque — Joe Reno 130 Sandra L. Kleven Mistakes I Made Loving Joe Reno 134 Paul K. Haeder An Interview with Poet Emily Wall 139 Cynthia Steele AWP Back to Live: Back to Reality 145 Jackie McManus A Review of Dale Champlin's Callie Comes of Age 147

CIRQUE

Paul Haeder

The Incredible Magic of Stomata Cirque is the oxygen expelled for artists to live and thrive with their magic In our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself —Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy It may seem odd opening up a short introduction to a literary magazine with leaf stomata allusions, but that is the gift of the artist who blesses this issue with the cover shot. David A. Goodrum has given up his image for all to reshape into new meaning. Ironically, it is life on earth those leaves provide. Simple but magical photosynthesis. Fundamental to life on Earth. Get it? Those leaves illuminate physics and biology based on gas fluxes and plant growth through the Earth factors of light, water and CO2. That’s the beauty of the issue—life for the writers and graphic artists is galvanized to the exchange of light and air, the duende of each person’s passion. The cover image is reflective of a different sort of seeing, something akin to infrared vision, or the light waves bees or arachnids can sense. These are leaves in decay, too, which is the second life of photosynthesis. The forest litter, the detritus, the death of spring and summer’s magic turned into humus. The microbes and fungi and nematodes eating away at the dying leaf. Without that process, the world would have no garden, no soil. This issue is the global garden explored in many forms, until the reader discovers nonfiction pieces weaving word nests into our collective consciousness. The writers build narrative through literary catchphrases, and long forms of light and shadow to capture the essence of life itself. Personal essays, and then a piece on murres. So goes this issue. We have David Cheezem’s, "Consist," containing prescience from Simone Weil. This for me implants the groundwork for this issue’s multilayered garden of poems, stories, essays and artwork: The material world—the world weighed down with gravity—offers two ways to deal with suffering: pass it on to others like a tethered ball, or sap others with a cry for pity. Either response is an imposition, a kind of theft. Inflicting either pity or pain on another is "base," because it robs that person of energy. War, boats, PTSD, fathers. Long dead western novelist. That’s just in the nonfiction section, which then transitions into fiction: Celia, a widow, is captured in story. A man and woman talking over dinner. Then a fictional account of a trip on the Empire Builder, the Amtrak route between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest. The route is 2,200 miles. With stops in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. Poems rhapsodizing like warblers and others as latent memories fixed in photographic depth. As many a great voice has said: poems are lamentations, or the capturing of lost youth, or some moment in a shadow, or venturing to explain the gravity of a wisp of cottonwood balls hitting placid water. Our call of the wild, too, is etched in many of these poems. Nature, so to speak, is inscribed into many of the poets’ music. Alaska, Mexico, Missouri, and many other places these poets call home or have set down roots, until their words cleave earth and hands mold wet clay into poetic magical amphora. With this Cirque, we are shaped by the power of that magic, the simplicity in the complexity of life here, as leaf veins and epidermis and stacked mesophyll cells are so much like our own origins, our bodies, and the flow of life from heart and gut to the mind, into these amazing kites that fly at night, or early in the morning dew. The work of artists, as they feel the shape of the world in that leaf, imbue a simple structure that has given us this home where we all can come into each other’s life through literary and artistic sharing. This is this Cirque for me.

V o l . 12 N o . 2

This is your garden of words and visuals, with all the white and negative space as valuable as the forms themselves. Find those surprise blossoms here, as we see Cynthia and Sandy tag team on an artist both women want Cirque readers to know: Joe Reno. The garden is glowing with our own vision of sky, soil, sunflowers, wheat. As a collective, we readers come to the issue’s opening 20 poems with our own complex and varied perspectives on what is happening in Ukraine. Space, ebb and flow, and locked in time, Cirque will captivate and illuminate. It is the staff of life for artists, like that leaf, to find growth and ego and psyche building through the very act of breathing essence into our words, into those paintings and photographs. Artistic creation, through photosynthesis. Paul Haeder, Projects Editor Central Coast of Oregon, June 2022

Looking Beyond the Curtain

Tami Phelps

CIRQUE

VOICES OF UKRAINE Cynthia Steele

In Solidarity with the People of Ukraine: Poetry of the Invasion

Steadfast

As of this writing, Ukraine is at day 93 of the RussiaUkraine war. Casualties are difficult to measure. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have died since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. This issue of Cirque provides a forum and breaks down its own walls for that forum. We sent out a call for writings in response to the invasion of Ukraine and all that has followed, not knowing what to expect. This special section and all who worked with it stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. A trickle and then a stream of submissions issued forth and we gift them to our readers with one heart.

Robin Lindley

I sought inspiration to illustrate such an offering. I saw a stained-glass art piece glowing in a Homer, Alaska window of a fisherman and his wife. The image of a dove holding an olive branch. Vivid blocks of glass held fast by a cement setting met me through the window. Ukraine heavy on my mind, I’d rented their small home for the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference this May. With tremors still in my soul of Jericho Brown’s words against and about violence, such as in Psalm 150: “Something keeps trying, but I'm not killed yet.” I asked my short-term landlady, Jane Wiebe, about the artwork. It was constructed by her

V o l . 12 N o . 2 father-in-law Herman Wiebe (d. 1985), and the glass held great meaning about the artist’s Mennonite background and personal belief in nonviolence that inspired all of his work. Perfect, I thought. His son captains Alaskan waters, and his wife had invited me in for tea. I told Jane of the handful of poems about the invasion of Ukraine. About Evgenia Jen Baranova’s poem “Memory,” translated from Russian to English by Sergey Gerasimov, a Ukraine-based writer, poet, and translator of poetry. Evgenia asks, “What lingers in the bluish memory?” The answer may be found in the heart-wrenching end of this poem: No home, no friends, no flowing river, just the rusty hook of memory sticking in the deserted heart. Ironically, Baranova, born in Kherson, Ukraine, lives in Russia and is the author of a book of poems, Rybnoye Mesto (The Fishable Spot). This reminds me of how rivers all come together, like many little, rippling rivulets. Another poem translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian is by Kristina Kryukova. “Look Up, Above Yourself” describes a “bottomless, endless” sky and a country. The absolute and chimeras intertwine in that mystical country. And since the beginning of time, everything's marked by the divine touch. And it's not terrifying to vanish, So I am quietly, silently burning... She reaches out to a creator with hope, but the speaker’s pain is tangible. Her poignant “The Voice” describes a rebellious blood that travels through her veins, and this blood cries out: …while any sound I utter is rough and brief. All that lives in me boils, flows like lava down and out through the fingers of my tired right hand. This is what it is to write poetry—doing the thing that we must. The writing that defies suppression. She describes this so well. Julia Smorodova’s lovely lines in “It’s November” reveal wonderfully fragile and human moments between

strangers draping a coat over shoulders and looking forward to the future New Year when …We'll have a party, Olivier salad, the sour smell of some booze, fireworks in the concrete yard clouded with prickly cold. Tatiana Retivov has lived in Kyiv, Ukraine since 1994, where she runs an Art & Literature Salon and a small publishing press. The narrator in Retivov’s “On the 40th Day,” watches life leave a body, wondering if metempsychosis (transmigration at death of the soul into a new body) is viewed through Agenbite of Inwit (remorse of conscience). Nonetheless, a person’s presence (Dasein) remains even through their “final gasp.” For these words, we lift our borders so that these writers may share with us what they experience so far away from where many of us are. Sandy Kleven sought to publish Lyn Coffin’s “Not Orpheus. Not David.” after seeing it posted online. More than 30 of Coffin’s books are published by Doubleday, Ithaca House, Adelaide Books, etc. This poem speaks of the hero many have come to share, Volodymyr Zelensky: And if he dies, we will make ourselves harder than stone in astonished grieving. Our heads will be higher, our hearts will be keener, the more the madman lays us waste. Coffin later submitted “A Sestina on Destruction,” which combines the sublime—the hauntingly and beautifully disturbing moments of loveliness frozen in times of horror in this truly great poem that I wept upon reading and rereading. The stairs are littered with glittering glass, a door downstairs is leaning from its hinges as if gagging, plants overturned, clothes flung, windows fanned out on the floor, walls crumbled, light coming through holes like hungry mouths... One must remember this poem like Ukraine, like the piano player that disintegrates within the lines of the poem. Oregon poet and author of multiple collections, Brittney Corrigan, submitted “No-Fly Zone,” that explores the world of war in Ukraine by imagining that, instead of

24 warfare, birds filled the sky. From the perspective of the birds, as “we,” she writes: Before, the blue roof of this country veed with snow buntings. Rock sparrows. The vanity of yellow-billed loons. Now, the sky is crowded with shelling. Alaskan nonfiction and poetry author Nancy Deschu writes using science and the landscape and submitted two, strong Haiku with her own images of gunnery bunkers and landing strips. A poet who splits her time between Juneau, Alaska and Cape Meares, Oregon, Helena Fagan describes herself as a grandmother in her poem “As Bombs Fall on a Maternity Hospital in Ukraine,” her arms emptying of her granddaughter, back to her parents and flashes on Today, fortune determines that bombs fall elsewhere. Babies and bombs in one breath… Fagan brings two worlds together in a massive twinge of empathy for the babies of war. Alaska-based poet Leslie Fried combines her own dreams intermingling with the Ukrainian war in “The Hotel” — a place where the recently made homeless have gathered: souls drift in to crowd the lobby packing un-packing tears, slaps and slingshots dirty pillows, a sacred scroll the hallways and stairwells are poorly lit People of various walks of life all with meager belongings co-mingle, seeking shelter and more. Francis Opilia’s “Weight of the World,” serves as a meditation on weight, bones, and a wish for lightness. The young woman holding a sign in “We Will Rave on Putin’s Grave,” my own poem, responds to stories but primarily photographs in newspapers on the bombings and attacks on Ukraine—images that stay with me of people and situations I see long after my eyes close. The symbols of justice, the numbers that we keep looking to see updated in various locations like Mariupol:

CIRQUE Kyiv half empty where women sleep huddled in a house cellar men dead in battle, a small son hears muffled detonations in the distance What do these locations mean strategically in war? What do they mean as a homeland? What it is to awaken to war? While Richard Stokes’ “Images Hammered into Memories” brings home the horrors of current war: “Dark plastic bags lumpy with dead bodies,” the poem also brings back the graphic nature of First World War poems, making it a painful read. This is the poet’s intent. “Medics in blood-stained scrubs. Babies crying. / Crackle of fire, the ratta-tat of small arms, / earth-shaking explosions…” from Ukraine “… shock the consciousness / of the comfortable.” May these poems make the reader less comfortable. It is good and fitting that we be uncomfortable with war and all its leavings. May those who wandered without a home because theirs was blown to bits know that we felt, for one moment, a fraction of their displacement. Though we know to varying degrees the ravages of war, from reader to reader, may we stop for a few moments and imagine, or reacquaint ourselves with it. These perspectives and reflections on war are succinctly put in brilliant yet embattled moments and from many geographies. May we all break down walls to know the pain of others. I cannot forget the words of Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others where she says: “…set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may — in ways we might prefer not to imagine — be linked to their suffering.” The words that Judith Skillman chose in her poem “You Watch” discuss the game of football and how passive it now seems: “I watch you watch / and I remember this is a game. / The real war is outside / where rain pours from a door / in the sky.” Are we a nation of watchers? If so, imagine what we could accomplish if we, too, looked up. When we imagine the pain and loss of the Ukrainian people, may we all feel, in some way, part their land’s watershed and bloodshed through the words of these poems. We are linked to their suffering; may we find ways to be an active part of their recovery. There are so many ways and means to help refugees. The first is to read their words and to engage in their situation. Then, become

V o l . 12 N o . 2 rivulets to their rivers. In remembering their pain, may we never forget that, as Thomas Thomas illustrates in his poem, “Erasure,” it just takes “a nanosecond / light smoke dust” for any one of us to be erased.

Evergreen

Jack Broom

Evgenia Jen Baranova

Memory What lingers in the bluish memory? Not so much, just some details: the lazy lion, the corner sofa, the monkey with oranges in the gym. The spiked ball, and when they closed my lacerated eyebrow. the cinnamon roll, the crunch of Chinese sneakers. The fever, the dreadnoughts of cows, and their thick milk before dinner. Sunflowers. Sagan. What does it have to do with sadness? Till Eulenspiegel, and other meinelieben. Things that burned me out, scorched out, things still remembered by heart. Some remarks and three or four books. So now what? A bird's nest on a branch. A construction site in December. The view of the site mentioned above. No home, no friends, no flowing river, just the rusty hook of memory sticking in the deserted heart. Translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian

Mend Ukraine

Tami Phelps

CIRQUE

Dale Champlin

These Blue Memories

Lyn Coffin Two Poems

after bell hooks

Not Orpheus. Not David.

Putin takes his heavy hand to flesh and wound a bleeding wound

Descended here with nearly nothing underground in cold and dark, petals on a stone black bough laid on blankets thinner than words, a patchwork quilt of autumn leaves we litter this metro sarcophagus, this station like a fallen cross. Women and children in the dark woman by woman, child by child.

Putin puts on costume of war takes them slow killing makes them hostile Bombs like blue snowfall lingering hurt unending hurt

I sleep and seem to hear him call my name and I arise and go. I climb the stairs, his narrow back guides me like a wire star. I follow him into the upper world and find a hell of noise and fire and buildings and bodies and bombs exploding. And he turns and for the first time sees me. And his smile is that of my father's ghost. And he takes my hands and says,

Putin brings on slow killing things generals bring their tanks generals bring their dress uniforms Where will we be after heavy work is done? burning memory a poultice of forgetting

"Eurydice, woman I love, You need to survive. Go back, I beg you." So I go back, waking on stone laid out on the surface of a massive metro, one station of a shot down cross.

Take oligarch mansions make them into refugee hostels never give them back Erect a pavilion with roses and ivy a bench on the lawn that bodies may rest

But I, if called, with the ashy taste of Hades drying on my lips, I would follow him into defiant death. As would all, even those with children. And if he dies, we will make ourselves harder than stone in astonished grieving. Our heads will be higher, our hearts will be keener, the more the madman lays us waste. For we have found our improbable hero, our mythic boy who holds a flute, holds a stone in his steady hand.

Red Aspen Leaves

Matt Witt

Not Orpheus. Not David. Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

V o l . 12 N o . 2

A Sestina on Destruction February light falls through the window slantwise, and in the falling light, the woman sits at the piano, captured in a handheld video. The camera does not make a move as the woman pushes back a cloth cover, dusts off the piano keys as if in dismissal. The uncovered keys seem to turn away from the open window as if afraid of drafts. The camera backs away, pans from the piano and woman to the floor. At first the viewer can't make out what's wrong. The camera, in steady hands, examines the floor, like a child on its hands and knees, fingering a ring of house keys, a paperback like a moth about to take flight. Then the broken frame of a window, chunks of something, a dented shade...The woman starts to play, plays as if calling music back into the piano. The camera moves back to her, then away again like a child, haltingly, while piano, music, woman merge. Melody spreads from the piano keys, scatters like light, flying out the window. The camera begins descending stairs. The stairs are littered with glittering glass, a door downstairs is leaning from its hinges as if gagging, plants overturned, clothes flung, windows fanned out on the floor, walls crumbled, light coming through holes like hungry mouths torn into the side of the building, things disordered, disarranged, upset, blown apart, blown down, damaged, turned to rubble, destroyed. But not the camera or the woman or the grand piano, intent on making music, saving a beautiful moment from chaos silting everything like so much dust. The woman stops playing, takes the cover, protects the keys. The hand-held camera comes back. The window stays open. The camera clicks off.

Brittney Corrigan

No-Fly Zone The world is strong enough to close our skies. —Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine Before, the blue roof of this country veed with snow buntings. Rock sparrows. The vanity of yellow-billed loons. Now, the sky is crowded with shelling. Buildings crumble to rock in the dirty snow. We nest among artillery fire. A hunter is not afraid to shoot life down from the sky, do what is necessary to survive. The dogs run out, carry back the dead in their jaws. Bird or plane, what might drop out of the sky? We follow corridors toward escape, hope we are not picked off like Skycutter pigeons huddled together on a line. If we close the skies, allow only birds to unfurl their feathered bodies against gathering clouds, what would fall then, in the cold? Blood, or the silence of snow?

CIRQUE

Nancy Deschu Two Haiku

Ukraine, 2022 Rusted landing strip — pink flowers puncture old wars, now, again, carnage

Helena Fagan

As Bombs Fall on a Maternity Hospital in Ukraine my grandbaby snugs in my arms for a few more moments before flying away with her mama. They journey from Alaska to catch the baby of a dear friend entering motherhood on her own. Today, fortune determines that bombs fall elsewhere. Babies and bombs in one breath, and yet

Gunnery bunkers long overgrown with lush grass — but now, brutal war

these women hold faith and courage, offer children to this broken world. I battle images of their bravery ending in blood and fire. My heart tightens before my grandma arms empty. Determined to bear witness, my sorrow and gratitude balance just enough to let her go.

V o l . 12 N o . 2 Leslie Fried

The Hotel Floors one to twenty-five a solar system to wander from the penthouse to the loo the highest of the high the lowest of the low how long will you be staying? where will you go? souls drift in to crowd the lobby packing un-packing tears, slaps and slingshots dirty pillows, a sacred scroll the hallways and stairwells are poorly lit stars in a sensitive role dim to a flicker moloda zhinka by the lockers with blood under her skirt sexy punk boy with a guitar crying for his mother highest of high lowest of the low how long will you be staying? where will you go? from the rooftop piscine where water soothes the stuck to the bunker behind the banquet hall where the frightened bivouac awaiting the boot how long will you be staying? where will you go?

It must be morning birds circling around the spire above the courtyard of the old church I remember it well as a girl now as an old woman with hands withered ever struck by beauty that remains. Note: moloda zhinka is Ukrainian for young woman

Kristina Kryukova Two Poems

Look Up, Above Yourself Look up, above yourself. You will see bottomless, endless something, with successions of coppery bright and dim lights, where untroubled bears have walked around since time immemorial, where demigods wash their winged horses in a milky river. The absolute and chimeras intertwine in that mystical country. And since the beginning of time, everything's marked by the divine touch. And it's not terrifying to vanish, so I am quietly, silently burning like wistful Pollux burns out in a head of Gemini. It's already midnight, late in September. Harvesting the cold, misty aether, I whisper just a few words, Oh, Creator, you are unmatched! How can I possibly fathom your mysterious, astonishing world?

CIRQUE

The Voice Thumps of rebellious blood wander in the downstream of my veins. My tender voice pulses in my wrists. It was not born on my lips; It's entirely under my skin, while any sound I utter is rough and brief. All that lives in me boils, flows like lava down and out through the fingers of my tired right hand. And look, my soul is clean, undisguised. And a blade of graphite has pierced the heart of the white page. Translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian.

Claudia Castro Luna

Tomorrow and the day after again and again The father leans over the body of his son the small boy immobile, a film, or something dusting his slender arm The father leans over the boy, shaking his shoulder calling his name The father calls over the boy’s shoulder touches his arm the same way I wake my son up each morning Lucas I say, wake up sleepy head it’s time to get up The father leans over and touches the boy’s

bony shoulder the elbow’s 45-degree angle sticking over a blanket the way in sleep we shimmy our way out of warm covers limbs enacting the kinetic joys of our dreams The father leans over the boy touches his shoulder his thin arm, elbow, hair The father leans over the boy shakes him, calls his name he, covered in a film or something like that The father calls the boy’s name but sobs startle his throat thick frogs, the sobs slimy and cold leaping from the murky swamp his stomach became when he felt the weight of the film covering them something endless a night without the echo of stars night the day after night again and again

Francis Opila

Weight of the World I awake to the weight of the world. Barbarity has invaded Ukraine under smoke screens of bluster and fire, juggernaut of death. Consider a white bird bone I found some time ago. Maybe in the backyard? the wetlands or forest? The bone, as long as a postcard (of sunflowers) is polished, so thin, so light, maybe a femur or tibia or a radius in a wing. Sometimes

V o l . 12 N o . 2 I want to break it to see how strong it is. Today already has enough destruction. What species is this? It's not a small bird, not a ground bird like chicken or quail. Perhaps a wading bird? An owl? A crane? A bird designed to fly. And what species am I? The same species that invaded Ukraine? My bones are heavy,

Tatiana Retivov

too heavy. Show me, departed bird, how to fly. Let me glide in today's blue sky, let the wind carry me, let thermals lift me to a place of lightness

On the 40th day I began to wonder About metempsychosis, How subtle it was: “Watch your step!” Or was it viewed thru My agenbite of inwit?

On the 40th Day

Prevailing, as it has, Over my perpetual Search for the miraculous. No longer hearing those Footsteps in the hallway, Or your sighs echoing The wind at dusk. However your spirit, Or is it your soul, Seems to be charging The solar lights hung From the branches Of my apple & pear trees, In the grey November sky. They blink frantically To reassure me That your Dasein is Unwavering, despite Your final travails, The fluttering eyelids, Then that final gasp. Rain and Maple

Carolyn Adams

CIRQUE

Julia Samorodova

It’s November It's November. I am thankful that it has shared with me: cereals of snow, white millet, sieved dust. Despite all distances, blinking like an ultrasensitive eye, a blue star watches me sitting in the back of a car. Singing along with the nearly dead springs, I'm plummeting down into winter. Soon, so soon the New Year will walk over the earth. We'll have a party, Olivier salad, the sour smell of some booze, fireworks in the concrete yard, clouded with prickly cold, and a stranger all in tinsel, will put, without asking, a coat on my shoulders. And I'll be thankful. Translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian.

Judith Skillman

You Watch In all seriousness the antics of grown men who throw a pigskin ball back and forth— gladiators with shoulder and knee pads, sweat pouring from their foreheads and black paint beneath their eyes. I watch you watch and I remember this is a game. The real war is outside where rain pours from a door in the sky making the tide rise

until it covers roads and drowns houses. The other war is when children move into the quick where Kalashnikovs held by mercenaries, fascists and despots, fire and kill. None of these men are like that. They are only practicing in case the hour arrives inevitably as history to announce it is time to take no prisoners.

Cynthia Steele

Waiting in Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy David against Goliath, Ukrainian existence punctuated by sirens Yuri stands at his terrace mornings to see whose flag flies If the Motherland Monument stands He remembers stories of grandparents fighting the Red Army Years after the end of World War II Love and rage provide the strength to stay alive, to stay in Ukraine No one knows what fresh hell tomorrow brings Kyiv half empty where women sleep Huddled in a house cellar men dead in battle, a small son hears muffled detonations in the distance

V o l . 12 N o . 2 Thomas A. Thomas

Erasure Four people winter hats, gloves, man in street, woman on sidewalk with child, and smaller child, winter coats, boots backpacks containing everything left to them walking quickly away from shaking earth bombs artillery shells not running not slipping or tripping or knowing how many miles they must hurry and WHUMP

a nanosecond

light

smoke

dust

three bodies

on the

sidewalk

the man just

erased

all gone silent

aerosols of

blood

and

bone

Momento from the Miocene

Janet Klein

CIRQUE

Carolyne Wright

“We Have to Close the Sky” —Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Mariupol Maternity Hospital, Ukraine) She lies on a stretcher hefted by flack-vested medics who hurry across piles of rubble from the bombed-out hospital whose blank-windowed shell still smokes in the near distance beyond fire-twisted trees. The medics are bulky in black parkas, black knit caps and emergency workers’ badges on their shoulders but the woman is bare-headed, in a gray sweatshirt, sleeves pushed up above her elbows, one bare forearm raised as if still warding off the blasts that shattered glass and blew out clinic windows and walls whose dust coats her face with a mortal gray. Her other arm curls around her full-term belly, caressing her bloodied lower abdomen in the photos not blurred to hide the spreading gore. Does she feel the child that strokes her? The stretcher-bearers’ breath as they jostle her in their scramble over broken brick? The only color, almost a clash in this ashen scene, is the watermelon blanket thrown over the stretcher and onto which she bleeds — dark pink with black seed-dots and the green of leaves and tendrils under her torqued figure. We never learn her name. Brought to another hospital and C-sectioned, she cries out, Kill me now! as her child’s life drains away. Her husband and father come and take them both. Do they bury her in the watermelon shroud? The war is three weeks old, the ground littered with paper scraps, or is it snow? Voices we’ve come to believe in beg us, We have to close the sky! We have to close the sky!

Healing

Tami Phelps

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Peace

Herman Weibe

CIRQUE

NONFICTION Wilhemina Condon

The Garden of Eden I have a beautiful garden, a little oasis in the city of Seattle. It sits high above the street on a double lot, surrounded by mature birch, lilac, and dogwood trees. Soft borders of sweet william, sedum, and sword ferns frame the lawn and rock roses line the walkway. On any given day the garden smells of daphne odora, star jasmine and spice viburnum. In the spring, when the dogwood outside my bedroom balcony blooms, it’s as if I am floating in a sea of white blossoms. But I did not create this Eden. The garden was created by someone with an eye for design and a gift for the pairing and placement of plants. I have neither the patience nor the vision of a real gardener. I bought all this beauty. I was so captivated by the woodshingled cottage, in the middle of the well-established meandering garden, that I ignored the leaky roof, the water in the basement, and the squirrels in the attic. Not long after moving in, I found a small stone plaque underneath the over-grown hydrangeas that read “Mother’s Garden.” Perhaps the couple that lived here Pansies before were the type who called each other mother and father. More likely, Mother was his mother, who lived in the small, odd-shaped bedroom at the top of the stairs. The room has no closets, and I can’t shake the feeling that Mother died in that room without even a place to hang her coat. But Mother’s garden is now my garden. I happily mow the lawn, rake the leaves, and trim the unruly verbena. Because of my proclivity to let things get out of hand, the garden is a lot less tidy than when Mother lived here. I like it that way. I have learned the names of the plants and the trees and have observed their habits; in this way I have made the garden my own. When the pandemic hit, I intended to make full use of the garden. What better recluse? Where better to isolate? I arranged my lawn chair underneath the jasmine covered pagoda. I finally had the time and the perfect place to tackle Moby Dick. I wasn’t much beyond, “Call me Ishmael,”

when the disembodied voices of my neighbors entered my consciousness. I can’t see them, thanks to the thick hedge of camellias, but oddly, because my hearing isn’t great, I can hear every word. I soon make out that my neighbors are a couple with two young children, Brady and Bethany. The children are old enough to talk, but not old enough to say anything interesting. They seem to be around all the time. All the time. The children are never left alone in their fenced back yard. Mommy and daddy supervise their play. “Good job Brady, nice sharing Bethany.” A litany of positive training. Every move watched and correction made with a soothing voice, “Bethany doesn't like it when you hit her Brady.” I want to yell “Of course she doesn’t; that’s why he does it.” But it's not my job to raise Bethany and Brady and I go back to Melville, irritated and annoyed at their drivel. As the summer progresses, there is a flurry of home improvements on the other side of the fence. They build a new deck, install a family size swim-tub with six jets, a giant trampoline, a bouncy-house, a swing set, and a sand box. They Lucy Tyrrell spend their days pressure-washing, leaf-blowing, drilling, and barbecuing. Every square foot of their yard is now a funhouse. I have no desire to see what they actually look like; I never prune the hedge more than I have to. I’d rather pretend they did not exist. I’d rather pretend I lived on an island. I’d rather pretend I owned an oasis in the city. I started to call them the Andersons after the neighbors in Robert Stone’s short story, “Helping.” The Andersons were over six feet tall and blond with perfectly straight white teeth with two tall blond children that were athletic and gifted. My neighbors start each day with a brisk workout on their side-by-side pelotons, drink protein smoothies, and consider the ingestion of carbohydrates a moral failing. They are a pleasing, wholesome, healthy family, that I, like the protagonist in, “Helping,” have come to hate. I have taken to wearing headphones.

V o l . 12 N o . 2 As the pandemic deepens, on some days the Andersons are the only voices besides Melville and NPR in my head. As I make my way through Melville’s cavernous sentences, the sounds of the Anderson children splashing, shouting, and whining by day are replaced by the tinkling of wine glasses and what sounds like lovemaking in the hot tub by night—dear God no more children.

pandemic turned me into a misanthrope? Certainly, the Andersons have. One day I surprise myself by shouting out loud, “I want none of your happy shallow life Andersons, none of it.” There was a moment of silence on the other side of the fence, as if they were considering what I said, before the cacophony began again. Brady and Bethany are growing taller. When they jump high on the trampoline, their heads pop over the hedge and they smile at me with frightening toothy grins. In the end, I exact a double-edged sword type of revenge. I adopt Fergus, a corgi that barks at nothing and howls at the moon. He ruins the Anderson’s most intimate moments, and mine too.

Mike Bates

Murres Can't Dance Inscription

Carolyn Adams

By now it is clear that Mr. Anderson runs the show. He is in charge of the equipment. Mrs. Anderson is his helpmate in his home building projects. He instructs her on how to drain the hot tub and hose the deck. She must be his second wife; no first wife would put up with so much mansplaining. What deal was struck with the devil, that Mr. Anderson took on the role of the shepherd and overseer of the family, and Mrs. Anderson the patient listener? By August, I hear a tinge of anger in Mrs. Anderson’s voice. Is it the beginning of rage? Will it lead to a showdown? My therapist once gave me a book about women who, seemingly without warning, leave their husbands after years of marriage. The husbands all had the same incredulous reaction, “I just asked her to make me a sandwich, she got up, picked up her purse, and walked out the door.” I want to yell, Run, Mrs. Anderson. Just run. Run while your legs are still strong enough to carry you, run before you boil over, run before you end up in a made for TV movie.” I've been caught up in a bad soap opera. Not one authentic word coming from the other side of the hedge. Everyone is playing their part, every line scripted, a parody of a happy life. Why don’t I believe all this happy togetherness? Why is it my version of hell? Why am I waiting for this happy family to implode? Has the

The murres returned to the rock yesterday. You know, that species of marine bird often referred to as the penguin of the northern hemisphere, the common murre? And that massive intertidal monolith, the looming hulk of basalt rising some two hundred thirty-five feet in the shape of a French haystack above the Oregon coast that serves as a marine rookery during the summer months? Those birds returned to that rock yesterday, and the spectacle was magnificent. I’ll admit there may have been a time when my response would have been the same as yours, somewhere between “say what?” and “so what?” To hear the common murre described with reference to the beloved penguin might very well be a disservice to penguins as far as I was concerned. The common murre might look a little bit like the penguin all dressed up in a cheap imitation of black tie, and it might dive deep beneath the ocean surface for food, just like the penguin, but everybody knows that murres can’t dance. Pop culture notwithstanding, the common murre can do something a penguin can’t. The murre can fly, if you want to call it that. They’re not exactly aerodynamic, and their narrow wings have to beat furiously just to keep the silly birds airborne. Think hummingbird, and you start to get the picture. But where hummingbirds are highly maneuverable, the murre, not so much. The murre’s neck is long and its tail short, so its wings give the impression in flight of being set back on the thorax, behind the bird’s center of gravity, as though pushing the bird through the air rather than providing lift.

38 The murre seems to have one speed in the air, fast. It’s a dead sprint whenever one of them launches from point A to point B. And since point A and point B are very often the same place, the nest — or what approximates a nest in the murre world, when they’re at the rookery, the only thing you tend to see of the silly birds during the summer months is one or two or three individuals, and sometimes the entire bloody colony, launching themselves for a madcap dash out from the rookery and after a wide, torturous loop, a madcap dash back in again, one, two, maybe three times before returning to the nest in a touchdown that resembles something between a controlled crash and a “seat of the pants” landing. Let’s just say you High Tide won’t see many Hollywood executives lining up to make a feature length movie any time in the near future about a misunderstood common murre with happy feet attempting to find his place in this bewildering world. It’s just difficult to get excited about a species of bird that can’t dance, doesn’t fly very well, and, I might add, makes a mewing call when it’s in the rookery that sounds rather like a cat in heat. But something happened to me this past year that would change all that, a couple of things if I’m honest. I found myself anticipating the return of the murres to the rookery this spring with all the eagerness of a celebrant awaiting a papal mass. And when they finally made their appearance, those plump, little birds with stubby wings and a grating call didn’t disappoint. Their return took on all the pageantry of a biblical epic, something like the exodus of God’s chosen people out of Egypt, their forty years of wandering the wilderness, and their crossing of the Jordan River into the Promised Land all rolled into one, all of it with the pomp and circumstance of a Cecil B. DeMille blockbuster. In May last year, in the middle of lockdown, I had what’s known in our culture as “a moment.” I won’t bore you with the gory details, except to say that, for me, the experience was transcendental. One minute, I was outside on our deck soaking up the bounties of spring, the sights, the sounds, the fragrances, and physical sensations of life returning to the coast after an extended slumber. And the next, I found myself in the embrace of an intention that seemed to me in my state of euphoria to connect

CIRQUE everything on this planet as both a means to an end and the end itself. I refuse to call the experience religious, given the obsession of religious leaders in our country with the myth of American exceptionalism and the preoccupation in some of our houses of worship with politics as a tool to force God’s hand on the timing of the “Second Coming,” and I’m hesitant to acknowledge that it might have fostered even a shred of spirituality in my life. There are far too many people purporting to speak for a “higher power” these days, when the most I can claim is I had a personal and intimate encounter with nature. The only thing I’m prepared to say is I found myself occupying all my senses Matt Witt afterward, that all important gift of sight I’d relied upon my entire life, often to my detriment, together with hearing and smell and those tactile faculties, touch and even taste. I was a child, again, immersed in a world of color, sound, fragrance, and texture as enchanting as if I had been experiencing it all for the very first time. Even something as fundamental as breathing, the simple act of exchanging gases in the lungs, old for new, would become a journey of discovery as cool air would enter my lungs with a sensation of alacrity and spread with an invigorating jolt to every nerve ending in my body. And the birds as the loudest, most gregarious, and hardest to ignore visitors to our little corner of the world, after tourists, of course, particularly the birds of the rookery, would come in for my scrutiny. The things I would see, hear, smell, and feel over the next six months would begin to change my perceptions of birds, all of them, not just the murres. It was more than just that convenient metaphor of a marine rookery for the human condition, that familiar insanity of thousands of individuals going about their lives within the boundaries of a geographically confined community. I would observe among the birds of the rookery acts I could only interpret in terms of those higher human virtues, fidelity, nurture, persistence, cooperation — among species and between them, and courage, as well as acts suggesting those petty human vices, anger, distrust, and selfishness. *

V o l . 12 N o . 2 I might have been a little bit suspicious when I saw a group of northwestern crows engaged in a bit of slapstick if I hadn’t been introduced to that peculiar ethology as a child watching Looney Tunes. But I started to become intrigued after watching a gull venting its kidneys, quite literally, on an eagle after chasing the eagle down for the pleasure. And I was almost convinced when I heard a song sparrow compose its mating call from the collection of peeps, pipes, pips, rolls, twitters, chirps, whistles, and clucks in its repertoire of musical elements. But I wasn’t sold until I saw a pair of house finches engaged in a public display of affection, touching beaks in the tree just off my deck like a pair of love birds — an impression reinforced a couple of days later when I interrupted the pair in the throes of a lover’s quarrel. The more I watched the birds, the more convinced I became that they’re not so very different from us. And the more I recognized in their behavior, the more I wanted to watch. I was caught in a cycle of operant conditioning, proof of that article of faith that one must love the imponderable to understand it only to find in the process of understanding that one has grown to love it all the more. Over those short months of spring and summer last year, I convinced myself that birds of the Northwest Coast, and in particular the birds I saw nesting out on that rock were capable of a range of behaviors I attributed to consciousness, including empathy, play, adaptability, and affection. All of them, except those ridiculous murres, if I ignored their similarity, whenever a bald eagle appeared, to the denizens of QAnon reacting with agitation to each new conspiracy theory involving that cabal of devil worshipping pedophiles running the country, the deep state within the deep state within the deep state, or something like that, from the basement of a Beltway pizza establishment. And even the murres, I suppose, when I tried to reconcile their peculiar routines in the rookery, in particular their tendency to launch themselves from the rock at random intervals and race in circles around the rookery with a viable survival strategy. Common sense would suggest the silly birds should have been conserving calories for the trials ahead, just like every other creature of the wild when they aren’t nurturing their young or foraging for food. And yet there they were, every day, several times a day through the spring and summer, taking a mad dash or two around the rock as though they had nothing better to do at that moment than stretch their stubby wings with a bit of exercise after a day caring for the kids. Red Rock, Blue Rock Jill Johnson

39 Spring would arrive late this year. After a string of bright, warm days in late February, the weather turned cooler, again, and by cooler, I mean downright frigid given the high humidity of the coast, and a stiff breeze blew down from the north almost every day. The rookery would remain unnaturally still well into April. Even those ubiquitous gulls seemed to be taking their own sweet time, and a good many of them winter within sight of the rock. A handful had taken to roosting on the rock around the middle of March or soaring above it on that cold north wind. More would join in a slow trickle through the last two weeks of March and into April, and by the last week in April their numbers had reached critical mass, a full complement of western, California, and ringbilled gulls, hundreds of them roosting upon the rookery, or soaring above it, or shuttling off to their favorite sashimi bar for a snack of herring or sardine and their favorite stiff drink, sea water, shaken, not stirred. But those goofy common murres, they were all but missing in action. Apart from a couple of brief appearances, they were conspicuous by their absence. They showed up a couple of times in February and March to fly around the rock in their usual state of confusion. Then after an hour or two they’d disappear to whence they came somewhere out there in the water beyond the rock to do whatever it is the crazy birds do when they think nobody is watching. I’d been down at the foot of that rock as early as the first of April in years past for the local observance of “Hands Across the Sand,” the global day of activism in support of our oceans. Just two years ago, the air was so full of nesting murres that a tufted puffin I might have been watching when I should have been projecting my intentions in a global moment of silence couldn’t make its way back to the nest through the flak. It has been disconcerting the last several summers to find adult murres washed up dead by the dozens, victims of malnutrition through those critical months at the nest as the forage fish, herring, sardine, and anchovy, on which the birds rely for sustenance, have moved farther out to sea with the rise in the surface temperature of coastal waters. It wasn’t until the last week in April that we were able to get back out on our deck, my wife and I, with the aid of blankets and a space heater. I was pleased to learn through my trusty binoculars that the murres hadn’t traveled far, not more than a quarter mile from the rock, floating out there just beyond the surf. But their absence from the rookery had become a personal obsession, by then, and I spent the week speculating whether the murres might be trying to tell us something, as the canary in the coal mine,

40 so to speak, about anthropomorphic climate change. Then, yesterday, dawn broke under a thick blanket of mist. The sky cleared about noon to reveal a fine spring day redolent with life and resplendent in warm shades of green and blue. I joined my wife on the deck in shorts and shirt sleeves, a glass of iced tea in hand, and my Audubon guide in my pocket for those all-important distinctions after months of indolence between a northwestern crow and a standard crow, or the pelagic cormorant with the curious white patches on its flank and the Brandt’s cormorant, or even a male Swainson’s thrush and a female song sparrow. I’d wandered indoors mid-afternoon to refill my iced tea when my wife called out, “come quick; you gotta see this.” I rushed out with her summons to see the murres rising from that black slick parked out there beyond the rock. At first, it seemed the birds were content to tease themselves from the water, as though pulled from it in strands that would break of their own weight as they lengthened. Except that these strands consisted of birds, silly murres to be precise, not twined fiber, wings beating in their furious way as they circled above the rest of the flock. One strand rose, and then another, and then a group of birds, and then the whole crazy flock; what was left of it in the water by then, lifted en masse to form a dark cloud on the horizon. Half struck out south in a wide loop clockwise to the west, and the other north in a wide loop clockwise to the east only to splinter into smaller groups that separated in every direction as they approached the rock. Within seconds, the airspace around the rock was filled with the crazy birds to an altitude of a couple hundred feet above the surf and a radius of a quarter mile. My wife would speculate there were hundreds of them, thousands, and she might have been right. I’ve never seen so many birds in one place at one time. No sooner had the murres splintered than a couple of strands met head-long along the northeast exposure of the rock, at the point two hundred feet above the surf where the basalt wall pivots inward. One strand of birds making their approach counter-clockwise from the south and east turned back on themselves in a hairpin maneuver I would have thought impossible for those clumsy little birds while the other strand making their approach clockwise from north and west shifted direction up and over the rim as momentum of near collision carried birds from both strands to the summit where they hovered like angels teetering on the head of a pin. The entire sequence felt like more than just your

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Low tide: Sea Foam and Basalt (first appeared in Ilanot Review)

David A. Goodrum

ordinary murmuration, that instinct of birds to mirror each other in flight. I could have sworn there was intention in their movement, purpose in the apparent chaos, as though some master choreographer found a way to express the order of nature with the apparent confusion of a thousand screaming murres. The implications were almost too much for my fragile senses after the cold, dark months of winter. It was good to be back out on the deck again attempting to commune, through the murres of all things, with that intention I’d encountered in my moment of transcendence. The weight of the procession would begin to carry the birds over the summit after little more than a couple of flaps of their inadequate wings, and they spilled down the sheer drop on the southwest side elevation. As more birds gathered at the summit, that trickle would become a steady stream, as the murres tumbling from the summit formed eddies in its wake that spread out in the air above the base of the rock. I couldn’t tell you whether every murre out there made that short jaunt up and over the summit, though that was my impression. My gaze was diverted by the commotion developing in the sliver of space a hundred feet high and a couple of hundred yards square right in front of us between the deck and the rock. When I attempted to focus on individual birds, I could just make out patterns in the confusion, circles of swirling energy, or parts of them at any rate zipping around in front of me in three dimensions. If a murre here or murre there, or a lot of murres here or there, left the circle they were in or flew across the motion of the circle they were in — into the path of another circle, that seemed to be okay. Since so many of the birds seemed content to break rank,

V o l . 12 N o . 2 it was easier just to pull my gaze back a bit and take in the entirety of it, hundreds of crazy murres darting about like charged particles forming a part of the organic whole. The effect was mesmerizing, the energy, contagious. The movement evoked celebration, not rote. Those birds were caught up in the moment every bit as much as I was. Each and every one of them seemed conscious of its own small role in the spectacle, willing participants in a solemn observance, a pilgrimage, perhaps, to that altar where it had begun for most, if not all those birds when they were brought into this world. It was a pageant, a procession, a joyful expression of gratitude before the existential act of reproduction, a supplication of thanks to that intention that binds life together as means and end, and a prayer, perhaps, that the season would usher in a new generation of birds. And they weren’t done yet, those murres, not by a long shot. As quickly as they’d assembled out there in the first place or reformed into a procession for their assault on the summit, the murres were at it again. A change of direction here, an adjustment of elevation there, the reassignment of birds from one group to another, and all a sudden the murres had reorganized themselves, this time into a half dozen circles arranged in what felt like holding patterns in the airspace around the rock. From the corner of my eye, I noticed movement again along the northeast elevation at the point where the birds had just made the ascent to the summit. When I looked in that direction, I saw a clutch of a couple of hundred murres hovering at the point where the wall pivots inward. As I watched, twenty to thirty birds separated from the clutch and landed where the slope flattens, and then almost as soon as they’d landed, launched again to fall like rocks until their stubby wings established enough lift to carry them back to the staging area while another group of murres flew in to take their place. Just then, one of the bald eagles that has taken up fulltime residence along the coast happened to make his first appearance of the day. As the big, bad predator lumbered across the quarter mile of open space between its forest aerie and the rock, its cold eyes surveying the chaos for opportunity, the gulls put up the alarm, and the murres scattered to the four winds — most of them at any rate. But those stubborn murres were a persistent bunch if nothing else. No sooner had the eagle departed, its victim twitching in its talons, than they began to regather from wherever it was they’d scattered to resume where they’d left off. Within minutes, murres could be seen shuttling on

41 and off the rock again, determined, I figured, to complete the last leg in a ritual that for me had taken on the gravity of a year-long pilgrimage from the rookery and back again. The sequence would repeat itself several times over the next hour or two. The eagle would appear, the alarm would go up, and the murres would disperse in a panic only to regroup as soon as the eagle had departed at the point where they’d left off. I’d already had enough. Two, maybe three, minutes had passed from the time the birds had first stirred themselves from the water to the time the clutch had positioned itself in front of the rock, and another ten minutes before they assembled again after the eagle appeared. It might as well have been two or three hours as far as I was concerned. I was exhausted. I mean, who can say for certain how time passes in those moments of rapture or whether it passes at all? We would share a libation or two, my wife and I, hers viticultural, mine herbal, careful to check back in with the birds from time to time to confirm our good fortune. Afternoon softened into evening. The sun continued its relentless descent into the sea. The temperature cooled as the light of another day in paradise faded to dusk. I retired for supper certain that I understood the common murres just a little bit better. It’s accepted fact that birds don’t have souls, or some nonsense to that effect. To impute an act of worship from the operation of blind instinct, and not just worship, but devotion to some nebulous intention that sounds suspiciously like the Earth mother, Gaia, why that’s preposterous, right? You might as well come out and say it; you’re thinking I’m just another one of those crazy Democrats, a liberal — a socialist if the popular invective is correct, a tree-hugger, and a vegan, no less, one of those whack jobs who thinks nothing of pushing his elitist views on real Americans happy to look the other way if it means they can purchase what they want when they want it without thought for the environmental cost — though I’m inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt if you’ve managed to read this far. You’re probably right, not that it matters, not anymore. I’m beyond caring. This morning, I woke to see what looked like murres nesting up there on the rock. I grabbed my trusty binoculars and rushed out onto the deck. Sure enough, there they were standing upright on the rock, shoulder to shoulder, three to four rows deep like good little soldiers, on every patch of open ground not already covered by beach grass or occupied by the gulls. The murres are back, those remarkable little birds, and I couldn’t be happier.

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David Cheezem

Consist The search for equilibrium is bad because it is imaginary. —Simone Weil Simone Weil, when her headaches overpowered her, “had an intense longing to make another human being suffer by hitting him in exactly the same part of his forehead.” That is not who Simone Weil was. * One time—and only one time—my father whacked me with a riding crop, a rod encased in leather. We were hunting for seashells on Sanibel Island with my mother. That is not who my father was. *

Misfit

Sheary Clough Suiter

Staid, balanced, at home in the physical world, feeling a little of what a gymnast feels, slithering into a perfect landing; what a free-climber feels, leaping from one goat-ledgehand-hold to another; what a tightrope artist feels tiptoeing 500 feet over the gasping crowd.

I can stand on one leg. For seconds at a time. *

For seconds at a time. *

Simone Weil: The material world—the world weighed down with gravity—offers two ways to deal with suffering: pass it on to others like a tethered ball, or sap others with a cry for pity. Either response is an imposition, a kind of theft. Inflicting either pity or pain on another is “base,” because it robs that person of energy. *

There’s a story about the 70th Infantry Division in which my father served. The bureaucrats issued sleeping bags to the soldiers before they departed for Europe. Those zippedup sleeping bags—those “death traps”—scared the hell out of the soldiers. As soon as they landed in France, they exchanged sleeping bags for blankets. *

In his early years, when he awoke in the shack where he was born, my father would plant both his feet on a floor of Oklahoma soil. Thought you should know. * When I was 15-years-old, I hated Sanibel Island. I don’t think my father cared for it much, either. My father, a shark who could not breathe standing still. Vacations of any kind were hard on him. *

The blankets were cumbersome to carry, so every morning, each soldier would drop their two blankets in a trailer. Every night they’d pick up another pair, never knowing who used them last night, or whether that wet spot was mud or blood or vomit. * The rental home on Sanibel was bathed in soft, warm colors. There were seashells everywhere. Clean, shiny,

V o l . 12 N o . 2 bleached shells. Large conchs. Small spirals. A coffee table book with photographs of shells sat on a table by a regal wicker chair.

French resistance, she “died of tuberculosis…refusing to eat more than the rations of those suffering Nazi occupation in her native France.”

My mother needed the wholeness, the unbrokenness of shells. And she deserved it. She had married too soon, had seen her own life subsumed into the world of my charismatic father. Couldn’t the world give her two weeks of seashells, sunsets, and peace—fuel, perhaps to repair a troubled marriage?

* When I was—Four years old? Five years old?—my father told me the bird-in-the-bush story. A live bird squirms in your hands. You want to keep that bird (herein referred to as Bird One) but you’d also like the bird in the bush (herein referred to as Bird Two.)

* And me? The whiney teenager? I needed to not be the young man strolling the beach hunting seashells on an island resort. I needed to be Eugene Debs. * Eugene Debs: While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. * My father must have seen what my incessant whining was doing to my mother. * “…[T]he people who stood, motionless from one to eight o’clock in the morning for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do so in order to save a life.” Oh, Simone, doesn’t doing good have its own energy? Doesn't it lift your chest, make you feel lighter, more alive? But then, you’re no longer standing in line to save someone’s life. You’re standing in line to lift your chest. * What would I know about saving anyone’s life? * According to the short bio in her posthumously published Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil was badly burned while fighting the fascist in Spain. Later, in London with the Free

To get Bird Two, you need to hold an angry, fluttering Bird One in one hand freeing the other to pick up a stone to throw at Bird Two. If you’re lucky, and if your aim is good, you go home with two birds. You’re probably not lucky. I didn’t get it. Why were we throwing stones at seagulls? * Simone understood materiality as a closed system. Fuel for good only comes from outside the system, from grace with wings that defy gravity: from “grace to the second power:” wings that fly down to our level without gravity. But to make room for grace, we need a void. Everything that makes us comfortable, makes us complacent, accepting of who we are, avoids the void. * Simone: “Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself that makes this void.” * Simone fought against fascism in Spain, in France, and in London. But her theology—unless I’m not grasping— seems too stoic for an anti-fascist. Her theology needs suffering to create a vacuum for grace to enter. But if suffering is so essential, why alleviate it? Why right wrongs? And yet, as I type this, I feel I can almost grasp it: soft, crystalized snow warming and bonding in the sun. * After several days’ hunting shells the regular way, strolling on the beach quietly, cooled by breezes, letting the waves reveal their gifts from under the foam, my father got a tip:

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a means for a higher-productivity shell hunt. A work crew had been dredging on the other side of the island, dropping mounds of mud and debris in a nook away from the beach. From these 12-feet-high mounds, we could harvest more shells-per-square-inch. * I know about those gross blankets from a document written by Raymond Brubaker. Brubaker almost got my father killed. At least, that’s how my father saw it at the time—again, according to Brubaker. Early in the morning, my father ordered Brubaker to lead the men across a bank of railroad tracks. Brubaker didn’t want to go. Already, several dead soldiers lay on the tracks, and the sniper was still out there somewhere. But they would have to cross those tracks eventually—and it was only going to get worse.

father’s position. They picked him up, strapped him in on the side of the tank, and crinkled away to safety. * Can we talk about me now? And David climbed the mountain of shells and mud, speaking to the salt-flesh air that lay on his skin, and dampened his jock-itchy corduroy bell bottoms--of his hatred of seashells and suburbia (and the father said “Stop.”), how there was real life somewhere out there beyond the pretty houses and the swimming pools and beaches (and the father said, “David. Stop.”) and how the mother and father trapped him here on this resort island where—you just don’t understand that this is not who I am, not who I want to be (and the father said, “David. You need to stop.”) and if you would just understand how much I hate it here, how much I hate being the kind of person who collects seashells by the seashore. David, come down here.

Only the bird in the bush. It’s not clear in Brubaker’s report why my father was where he was when he got shot. At one point earlier in the narrative, we see him crossing over, but he reappears back at the abandoned building shouting up at Brubaker to get going. Had he crossed the tracks and come back? I can’t tell, and there’s no one left to ask. We see him get hit, falling on the tracks, a bullet in his back, rolling into a shallow depression, bullets whizzing by. I don’t know how long my father lay there before someone finally located the sniper in a church steeple. Brubaker got shot, too, but it was just a nick. * My father found a God in that ditch. I can almost imagine: not just that time passes differently in a crisis, but that time has no handle to grab onto. If you could only say, “I just have to hold on for five minutes”—but you can’t know that. You’re handleless. The sun is pouring down, but it is dark. Nothing visible gives you hope. Only a kind of acceptance. An “OK God, I’ll take what you give me.” Simone’s grace. *

I remember thinking that the rod encased in leather wasn’t going to hurt much. Leather is soft, pliable. No biggie. * I’m 63 years old. I think my father was younger than I am now. If I were in his shoes today, I would never whack that whiney 15-year-old me five times with a riding crop. But I might want to. Is that who I am? * Let’s go back to the people waiting in line for one egg to feed their family. Simone Weil doesn’t seem to love them. They are good people, like people waiting in line at the post office: Did your cousin find work? Did your grandfather get the landlord to fix that back step? This is going to be another frosty winter. Well, not quite. Simone’s people weren’t in line for a KitchenAide arriving in a package in the mail. They were waiting in line for one egg. *

A tank took out the sniper, then crinkled its way to my

Reach to the Clouds Susan Biggs

V o l . 12 N o . 2 Is that all Simone would eat, her body fighting tuberculosis? *

That’s who Simone Weil was. Maybe there were two Simone Weils: one in the power-chord, and the other here, in these lines. Maybe the two Simone Weils didn’t talk to each other. *

I’ve always loved Hayden Carruth’s poem “Emergency Haying” for its power-chord ending: And I stand up high on the wagon tongue in my whole bones to say woe to you, watch out you sons of bitches who would drive men and women to the fields where they can only die.

She should have lived longer. We needed her after Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam, climate change. We needed to hear Simone and Martin Luther King Jr. discuss a creative tension between the spiritual and the strategic.

I’m not so selfish as to subject her to the war on terror and the return of mainstream white supremacy. But with a full life, she would be fresh in our memory even now, a clarity and warmth that could only have grown gentler, more— graceful—with age.

That is who Simone Weil was. That is who I want her to be.

A man who once lay seriously wounded for who knows how long now lay on a bed, wrapping the five-year-old in a one-armed embrace, sing-songing the story of the bird in the bush, my head on his chest. His words are soft but also firm, like the pillow of his chest, sonorous, and soothing. I don’t get it, but the clean bed, the soothing voice, the rising and falling envelop me. He rubs my prickly-haired head, reassures me that it’s okay I don’t understand, and lets me sleep.

The speaker in the poem is a humble “desk-servant, “word worker,” who is drawn into a day of voluntary hard labor, helping a friend harvest hay. In the crescendo leading up to that power chord, the speaker’s aches and pains “recall” greater suffering: the suffering of Christ on the cross, and, later, the suffering of enslaved and oppressed farmers. my hands are torn by bailing twine, not nails, and my side is pierced by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way

That’s who my father was.

my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended on two points of pain in the rising monoxide, recall that greater suffering. The image dissipates for a moment, then explodes in a spasm of subversive self-destruction: I have a friend whose grandmother cut cane with a machete and cut and cut, until one day she snicked her hand off and took it and threw it grandly at the sky.

Rose Petals At The Beach

Annekathrin Hansen

46 Luther Allen

clutches the trip down to paria canyon/lee’s ferry from laramie. my ’64 ford truck, old and beat-up even then, out into the dry flat nothingness anchored against the book cliffs, and the clutch rod snapped. i could get it into one gear— second—and we ground into the dust-bland humorless derelict almost-left-off-the-interstate fringe-mormon town of green river. a beat-up garage, a beat-up sign that said welder. welder was about 50, either an eighth grade dropout redneck or an accomplished serial killer, poorly disguised in a baseball cap. hard eyes, clipped hair. sweat and grease. took a long look at us, me with shoulder-length hair in a bandana, jack and sue in a cast off vw. none of us had much. got a problem, don’tcha. said it without a smile. this was before sue jumped off that ledge in red wall canyon. backpack still on, into my surprised arms below. holy shit, but neither of us fell to our deaths. long before any of us had kids, before my daughter somehow dropped their infant daughter on her head by the side of the road (now, after more than three decades, we’re beginning to think there was no real damage done). before jack got his doctorate, when he and sue were still eating out of dumpsters. we had little money and no other option. i stared at his rig, the fizzled ends of welding rods piled on the stained concrete and said looks like it. the rusted metal, the faded paint, the dry desolation ran out to every horizon. his eyes went there and didn’t seem to return. there was a moment of silence. he said well, give me the rod. it was a statement of judgement and finality. he turned and walked away, we stood there, just stupid. after a while he came back, handed me the brazed rod and said two bucks. as far as i know, the rod is still in one piece, fixed. just plain fixed. today i took my current truck into a dealership. jack and sue are retired, their daughter newly pregnant at 38. my daughter is in dc, married to a guy who works at the pentagon. my hair is short, the grey coming. i watched judge judy and serial soap operas while they worked on the seventeen-year-old truck. just a touch of condescension when i checked in—i could tell they didn’t want to work on an old starting-to-rust truck. a place with shiny floors,

CIRQUE air freshener, commissions. slick shoes, carefully tousled hair. we were able to diagnose the problem. a new clutch will be needed. a little under $1500. he smiled when he said it. i left, nursing the friction point, thinking he wouldn’t last a day in green river. but i might not either. i didn’t fit in green river that day, but it was the right place for me to be — in transit, exploring, very little tying me down. maybe the welder saw that. and now i don’t fit into the current cultural commercial glitz, and that dealership was the wrong place for me. as i grow old, i fear most of the world will be like that. yes, i have my refuge, my ten acres, but it is not an island. the wrong places are taking over and i will be increasingly anachronistic, dissociated, disinterested. staying more stubbornly in my own small space where i mostly can’t be fucked with. maybe that’s how the welder felt, and knew it was coming for me, too. an act of kindness, generosity, was all he could provide.

Matt Witt

They Say the War Is Over “Sir?” says the bus driver, a bald-headed, old-school looking Black man in his 50s. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you again to keep your voice down. You’re distracting me and disturbing everyone else.” The young Black man he is talking to rises out of his seat and walks forward until he is standing right next to the driver. His hair is disheveled, and his green army surplus jacket is several sizes too big for him. “You think I’m scared of you?” he shouts, with his hands waving wildly in the air. “I’ve been to fucking ‘Nam and you think I’m scared of you?” “Go ahead,” he says to the driver and begins to chant in an unnaturally slow, steady cadence: “Shoot. Me. Motherfucker. Shoot. Me. Motherfucker. Shoot. Me. Motherfucker. Shoot. Me. Motherfucker.” It is early morning in the fall of 1970 and the bus is nearly full with people of all ages and colors — some wearing work uniforms that suggest that they are janitors or clerks or waitresses going to work, plus a few old people

V o l . 12 N o . 2 clutching a purse or shopping bag, and a couple of hippies who smell like dope and look like they haven’t been to sleep since sometime yesterday. And me. I am going this morning from the tiny house where my girlfriend Evy and I live near Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley to the Army Induction Center in Oakland, where I have been called to take my physical as the last step in being drafted by the army for the Vietnam War. As the young man continues to scream at the driver, I can see on passengers’ faces that they are as scared as I am. None of us moves or speaks. We don’t know if he has a gun. Or if he is about to assault the driver. Maybe we should be thinking about what we can do to help the situation, but it seems we’re all mostly just hoping we get to our destinations alive. Suddenly, the driver pulls over to the curb, the brakes screech, the door opens, he exits slowly down to the sidewalk, and invites the man to join him so they can talk. The man is so caught off guard by this that he steps out too. I can’t hear their conversation, but Basket Tomatoes somehow, now that there is no audience, the man calms down and walks away, talking to himself but no longer focused on the bus or the driver. The driver limps back up the steps and gets back behind the wheel as if nothing unusual just happened, passengers return to their own thoughts, and we are moving again through streets I know well. I am 19 and from a middle class white family and should be in my third year as a college student at Harvard, but I dropped out, and now I am paying my $25 a month share of our rent by delivering the Berkeley Gazette before dawn six days a week. I borrow my friend David’s old Volvo each morning so I can cover more customers by throwing papers out the car window onto stoops and into yards. Now the bus is passing a bank that I drive by on my paper route. Recently, there was an explosion there while I was delivering papers. I was a dozen blocks away at the time

47 but had a hunch it was a bomb, though I didn’t know where. When the blast was followed by sirens, I was afraid that since I was one of the few people out and about at that hour the cops who came to investigate might decide that I’d make a convenient scapegoat. But I finished my route, returned David’s car, and made it home without encountering any police. From what I read in the Gazette, no one ever was caught. It could have been set off by some group like the Weathermen, fed up that marches and rallies and voting for anti-war candidates wasn’t stopping the war fast enough. Or it could have been the FBI, which I knew had infiltrated the anti-war movement on my campus and in many other places to provoke actions that would give protesters a bad name. Soon the bus is leaving the area where I have my paper route and is passing through parts of town I’m not familiar with, and I turn to thinking about what the war did to that screaming veteran, and about the day ahead of me. The 1-A notice I got in the mail, telling me I was being drafted and needed to come for a physical was no surprise. Morning Williams I knew when I dropped out of college that I would lose the student deferment that protected middle- and upper-class kids like me. I had applied for conscientious objector status, which would mean doing alternative social service instead of fighting a war I didn’t believe in, but my local draft board, made up of old conservative white men, had turned that down. My options now are to be sent to Vietnam or accept a prison term of up to five years if I refuse. When I think about going to Vietnam, I think about Jake, a white kid only a few years older than I am, who stayed with Evy and me for four or five nights a few weeks ago. He met Evy at a park where she had gone to paint with watercolors as there was no room for her to do that at home. He told her he was a veteran and that he had no place to crash. We took him in without hesitation, even though the kitchen floor was the only space for him to lie down, and encouraged him to use our shower, which he badly needed.

48 Jake’s father is an auto mechanic. His mother works at a bar. He told us he figured he’d get drafted eventually anyway so he signed up. We stayed up late listening to his stories about being deployed across Vietnam’s border into Cambodia — “Nixon says we’re not in Cambodia, man, but that’s a fucking lie.” In all Jake’s stories, it was other people in his unit who shot at villagers without knowing who they were or which side they were on — it was never Jake himself. But no matter who actually did what, the one thing that was definitely true was that Jake was a wreck. I would go out to drive my paper route and come home to find him wearing a pair of my pants or my favorite old corduroy shirt even though I didn’t have a lot more clothes than he did. It was like he was subconsciously trying to trade in his body and his mind. No matter what time of day or night, he was constantly on edge unless he smoked a joint or two. Since it was obvious it would not work for him to stay with us very long, Evy asked him one morning if he wanted her to find him a veteran’s support center to help him out. That afternoon, she and I went to buy some brown rice and vegetables for dinner, and when we came home, he was gone without a trace. As the bus heads toward downtown Oakland, I find myself humming Arlo Guthrie’s song, “Alice’s Restaurant,” about how he was disqualified at his draft physical because he had once been arrested for littering. Too bad that won’t work for me, although I still think about the time I too was arrested before I dropped out of college. I was charged with trespassing for participating in an occupation of the university’s administration building in a protest against the war. I was just a freshman at the time and was supposed to look up to the crusty old professors who taught political science and history — some of whom were consultants to the Pentagon and the State Department. But the real role models my friends and I were attracted to were the older students who held teachins and forums outside of class. I remember one speech in particular by a woman who was a senior. She was so short she had trouble bending the microphone down far enough to talk into. But when she began speaking, she pulled together everything I had been learning from organizers like her. The U.S. was fighting on the side of rich landowners and corrupt generals in Vietnam who kept the rest of the population in poverty. Big companies

CIRQUE were profiting from the war while villages were destroyed by bombing and millions were maimed or killed. The politicians and commentators who propagandized for the war were making sure their own sons didn’t have to go — “chicken hawks,” she called them. When teach-ins and other protests weren’t getting action, that woman and some other students took over the administration building, and hundreds of others like me decided to join them. I supported the protest’s modest goals — to get the university to stop hosting an army officers’ training program, to establish a Black Studies department, and to stop driving up the cost of working class housing as the university expanded into surrounding communities. Like other students, I was also excited to be directly confronting the power of the establishment, even if only for a short time. After holding the building all night, we were alerted that hundreds of cops were arriving outside at dawn. Along with the other protesters around me, I stood up, facing the front doors, which were made of glass and were chained shut from the inside. We locked arms or held hands, mainly to try to stay calm as we heard the sound of billy clubs shattering glass and the screams of students in front of us. Dozens of people were injured, but I only felt a few whacks on the back as the cops herded us out to police vans that would take us to jail. It still amazes me that the administration overreacted like that, setting in motion a week-long student strike that forced the university to give ground on all three demands. And I still smile at the memory of how a bunch of us, thanks to a skillful lawyer, beat the trespassing charge on a technicality — though that is why I don’t have an arrest record that would get me out of the draft now. I have read about guys in my situation who are going to prison in hopes that will encourage others to resist the draft, and I respect that. But letting the government lock you up and put you away seems like just letting them win. I will move to Canada to live before I will do that, though I don’t know what that would mean for Evy and me. I love her like I have never loved another human being, but she is her own independent person — that’s part of what attracted me to her — and I can’t imagine her just cutting off her ties to the U.S. to follow me to another country. But before I worry too much about Canada, I need to see

V o l . 12 N o . 2

if I can fail the physical today. My friend David has hardly eaten a thing for a month now after he read that the army won’t take you if you weigh less than a certain amount for your height. That’s another strategy that is not an option for me. I am not that thin to begin with. I have to have another plan.

homosexuality — would be part of my permanent record and follow me around for the rest of my life whenever I applied for a job? They had had such hopes for me, they had worked so hard to give me opportunities in life, and then I threw it all away by dropping out of college, and now this!

After I got my 1-A notice, I went to see a Quaker draft counselor who gave me the phone number of a psychiatrist I might want to see. I got an appointment within a few days. The psychiatrist had a desk and a couple of chairs in the basement of his house on the San Francisco side of the bay. He kept the space dark — just one lamp on his desk — and his manner was all business. No small talk. No joking. Just answer his questions and that’s it.

I understood how they felt. I knew they loved me. But I felt so strongly about the war that I would not have had the letter withdrawn even if I could. And anyway, society was changing. I knew other boys who had slept with boys, and girls with girls — sometimes as a one-time experiment, as it was with me, and sometimes as a first step in discovering who they really are. It was not the big deal to me that it was to my parents.

“Have you ever had a homosexual relationship?” he asked like he was reading from a checklist.

The bus finally drops me within walking distance of the Induction Center on Clay Street. I know it has been the site of multiple protests that resulted in arrests and police riots, but since I only moved to the area recently, I have never seen it. It’s a very institutional, multi-story building, and for hours I am sitting and waiting, completing one test, being sent to another floor, and then sitting and waiting again for the next measurement or set of questions to answer. There are a few other white boys like me with hair down to our shoulders and long beards, but most of the guys, no matter their race, are more clean cut. For long periods we are forced to stand around naked — even when we are just waiting and could be clothed. It’s as though the process of breaking our spirit has already begun, and the army wants us to know that we are under its complete control.

I told him about the time when I was traveling with my best friend and we had to share a bed and ended up sleeping together. The psychiatrist’s pen scribbled faster but his face didn’t change expression. He knew and I knew that homosexuality is grounds for disqualification from the military, but neither of us acknowledged that out loud. After a few more questions, he abruptly stood up, said he would be sending a letter to my hometown draft board, took my $50 in cash, wished me luck, and showed me to the door. After a few weeks, I asked my father to go to the draft board in my hometown to make sure the letter was there. My father had been in the infantry in Europe in World War II, slogging through the freezing winters in the trenches, earning a Purple Heart medal after being wounded in the leg. It’s been 25 years since he came home and went to work as a salesman, yet he still won’t talk about what happened over there. While he too is against the war in Vietnam, he has also told me that there are good things about being in the military — that it “makes a man out of you.” While I knew he wouldn’t be thrilled if he saw the psychiatrist’s letter, I had no one else to ask. Since Evy and I couldn’t afford a phone, I had to call my father from a pay phone to find out what he had seen at the draft board. As soon as he and my mother heard it was me calling, they let me know they were beside themselves with anger and frustration. Didn’t I realize that a psychological deferment — especially based on

At last, I’m told that I have completed every step except to go see the army psychiatrist, which will be my last stop for the day. He’s in a small room, so we are sitting closer than I would like in my very nervous state. He is skinny and bookish looking — the first army person I have seen all day who doesn’t look like a soldier. “I have in your file a letter from a doctor in San Francisco who says that you have had a homosexual relationship. Is that correct?” he asks. “Yes,” I say. I figure this is like a courtroom scene you see on TV, where it is better to say as little as possible to avoid saying the wrong thing. The army shrink doesn’t ask me to tell him more about

50 what exactly happened between my friend and me. I don’t know if he finds the details distasteful or whether it’s just not important for him to know. Instead, he cuts right to the chase with what sounds like a prepared statement he always uses in situations like this. “I want you to know,” he says, “that many young men who have had homosexual relationships serve in the armed forces anyway and, as long as they keep it to themselves until they return to civilian life, they have no problem.” I stare straight at him, without expression, and let him continue. “I tell you this because this kind of deferment is a very serious thing and I want you to know that I have the discretion if you so choose to allow you to pass the physical anyway.” I act like I am giving his offer the serious consideration he thinks it deserves, and then, continuing to say as little as possible, I tell him, “It would not be my choice for you to ignore the letter.” “All right,” he says, quickly turning his attention to the forms in front of him and signaling that our interview is over. “I will report that you should be given a psychological deferment. You will be classified as 4-F.” After some final paperwork on another floor, I leave the Induction Center and go down the street to a place to eat that I noticed on my way in. I’m eager to get home to share my relief with Evy, but after so many hours under stress without food I have to get something to keep me going before I get back on a bus. The place is packed with other young guys who are there for the same reason so there are no completely free tables — only a few empty chairs next to people who are already eating. I scan the room and see a table for two that has one empty seat and a young Mexican-American just starting to wolf down a grilled cheese sandwich. I ask if I can join him, and he says it’s fine, so I sit down to eat a tuna sandwich and a banana to tide me over. We introduce ourselves. He says his name is Rafael, but a lot of people find it easier to just call him Ralph. He is medium height like I am but stockier. He says it took him a few hours by bus to get to the Induction Center from

CIRQUE the Central Valley where his father and mother work in the fields. He asks me if I was over at the Induction Center too and how did it go. “Fine,” I say. “No problems.” I don’t reveal more because I don’t know what he would think. “What about you?” I ask. “It went great!” he says, and breaks into a huge grin. “I have flat feet, and I was so afraid they weren’t going to take me. They saw my feet, but they decided to just let it go. My brother is in the army, and really I don’t know what I would do if they didn’t take me.”

Clifton Bates

Parallel Lines A Brief Memoir My dad, of course, had a much nicer fishing rod and spinning reel than I had. After he made a cast, I liked to hear the bail on his reel make the nice, solid clack when it shut as he started to wind in his line. Especially in the evening when the lake was calm and the sounds of people talking somewhere on the lake carried in the night air as I slowly rowed our way back to our cabin as he made casts. The only other sounds besides the distant voices and the clack of his bail were the wooden oars in the metal oarlocks and the occasional rustle of water around the bow. It was a large lake filled with a variety of fish. Some wooded areas, cabins, and a few nice homes were along its shore. It hadn’t been poisoned and stocked with hatchery trout as most of the lakes in the area had been. There were perch, largemouth bass, catfish, suckers, silvers and rainbows. Sometimes we would anchor and still fish for perch, catfish or suckers. In the evening we would cast a surface lure toward shore in a lagoon with lily pads looking for a strike from a largemouth bass, or we would slowly troll across the lake with a spinner or Flatfish for silvers or rainbow trout. My dad was certain these fish were wilder, tasted better, fought harder, and were healthier than the hatchery fish which he scorned. My spinning reel had a half bail which seemed to be the cause of many tangles and frequent loops and knots in my line. My dad’s was a full bail, and he seldom had issues with snarls. Often he would continue with his casts while

V o l . 12 N o . 2 I impatiently wrestled to get things straightened out so I could get back to fishing. On his belt, my dad had his fishing knife in a leather sheath. His father made the blade from a car spring, and he wrapped the hilt with a winding, hard strip of smooth, dark leather. He put the stiff sheath together with brass rivets. It was a good-looking piece of work. His father sent it to him when he was in the war in France and Germany. He made and sent him another knife that was doublebladed that my dad kept in his boot as he trudged across Europe. I have the sketches of that knife and the notes my father sent to his dad asking him to make it for him and describing what he wanted. It is a deadly looking knife. It is now in a drawer in my wooden chest. Parallel Lines My father and I also went pheasant, chukar, duck, and dove hunting in the fall in Eastern Washington. We were fortunate to have a connection with a couple of wiry old widowed farmers who allowed us to hunt on their property. One grew sugar beets and corn, the other had fields of grapes he sold to wineries. They were brothers and each had his own battered, lonely, unpainted two-story, faded gray farm house with chickens and a dog. The one old farmer with the beets and corn had a cleared area a couple miles from his house where he had three dilapidated horse drawn Barnum and Bailey Circus wagons he used as storage sheds. The faded lettering on their sides could still be read, “Barnum and Bailey — The Greatest Show on Earth.” We slept underneath these wagons on some straw we gathered. The farmer’s threelegged, black dog would stay with us and go with us when we hunted. It was something to watch the three-legged dog stand on two legs and point when he spotted a bird. Sometimes when we were at our camp in the evening, if I persisted, my dad would tell me about things that happened in the war. It was rare that he continued talking without me prodding. He told me how he caught a German out at night after curfew in Stuttgart, frisked him, and that is how he got the 9mm German Luger he gave to me before he died. He told me about walking through the bombedout University of Stuttgart and finding in the wreckage

51 the beautifully made, finely engineered microscope that now sits on my bookshelf. He said he tried carrying it all in his pack as he marched on, but as many others had to do, he soon needed to lighten his load. So, he took off the base, tossed it aside and just kept the top part and a box of exceptional lenses. When he returned home, he made a new metal base that looks like the original from the factory. He told me about when he and the guy he was buddied with were walking across this open area where they were to dig their foxholes for the night. They remembered this sheet of corrugated iron they spotted earlier that was laying on the ground a ways back. They ran, grabbed it, and dragged it to the fox hole they dug and used it as a roof. He said that during the night mortars fell, and they heard pieces of shrapnel clang and zing off that sheet of metal. He said they were cozy and happy in their covered hole. Another time when he shared another foxhole with that same buddy, this guy got out of the foxhole to urinate. My dad said he was a Mexican man. He was standing there doing his business when a shell landed nearby. It hit a pile of bricks and a piece of brick was blasted through the air. It hit that guy right in the kidneys. My dad said he went to the ground like a sack of rocks. He cried out loudly, wailed and he went into shock. He was sure he was mortally wounded. It took a while for my dad to calm him and convince him that it wasn’t a piece of shrapnel, just a piece of brick, and that he was just bruised and he was all right. I finally asked him how he got some of his medals. He explained that one was from the time he and his squad were way out past the enemy lines. As they moved forward, as usual, they strung a radio wire back to the base. That’s how they kept in contact and reported what was going on and could call in artillery. My dad was the platoon sergeant. He was maybe twenty-five years old. All the others in his platoon were three to seven years younger than him. As it happened, they lost radio contact with their base. They were out there on their own. It was a thick, foggy morning. Couldn’t see a thing he said. He grabbed hold of the wire and started following it back to see what

52 was wrong. He didn’t know it, but he was in a clearing when he found the break in the wire. He knelt and got his tools out of his pack and started repairing the break. This is when the fog lifted. He was out there in the open and the Germans started shooting at him. Instead of ducking and running, he stayed there and finished repairing the wire. When he was finished, he told me that he stood, ran, hit the ground every once in a while with the butt of his rifle and rolled. Just like they taught him in Basic Training: duck and run, use your rifle, hit the ground, roll and make your way accordingly. When he finally reached his platoon and was safe, he discovered the bullet hole through his back pack. My dad was a great fan of Basic Training. I wanted a clearer idea what things were like, so I tried to get him to describe things. Where were all the people, what was going on? What did it look like? It was mostly rural areas we walked through with fields, farm houses and barns. Most everyone had left he said. Houses were vacant. No one around. No dogs, horses or cows. It was quiet except for war sounds off in the distance. We would go in a house. We didn’t bother anything. We’d use dishes. Sleep on the floor. Once when I got sick, I spent three days on the kitchen floor in a farm house. The medic said I had pleurisy. It’s an infection of the liquid around your lungs. They don’t call it that any more. I could hardly breathe. It hurt like hell to breathe or to move. I wasn’t scared of bombs or bullets then. I was scared of sneezing or having to cough. I remember him telling me that he thought it would have been a beneficial thing if some city in the United States had been bombed during the war. I don’t mean I wish people were killed or hurt he said. It’s just that Americans didn’t understand what it was like in Europe. People in London, Paris, cities in Germany dealing with rubble, destroyed streets and buildings, everything in chaos. He died long before what happened in our country in 2001. After the war, he told me that he wondered if it would have been any easier fighting in Asia than in Europe. I don’t mean this to be any kind of racial thing he said, but he just wondered if it would maybe have been psychologically any easier killing someone who didn’t look like yourself. In Germany and France, he said it was just like killing the people you knew and grew up with. The enemy looked just like me and my friends. After they finished in Europe and the war was over there, he found himself on a ship headed to Asia. He wasn’t done fighting yet. But then

CIRQUE Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened. When I attended my father’s funeral years later, some guy stood up and talked about my father for about a minute. Maybe he was from the funeral home. I’d never seen him before. He didn’t share any of my father’s war stories or even that he had been in the war or say much about him at all except that he worked for this company for so many years and raised a few children. The stranger could have added that my dad was a mechanic, welder, carpenter, plumber, electrician, juggler, calligrapher, an amazing ping pong player, and he was so quick he could catch a fly buzzing in the air between his thumb and forefinger. When I looked in the coffin afterwards, there was my shrunken dad in a suit several sizes too large for him. What the guy said and the cadaver in the coffin; that wasn’t my dad. At the time my wife was dying in a hospital in a different part of town. So, I wasn’t involved with any of his arrangements. He was dying in one part of Seattle, she in another. I was a mad man then. My dad was very coordinated. His nickname when young was Squirrel because he was so fast and agile. Of course his positions at baseball for the VFW were short stop and pitcher. He was a tap dancer when a pre-teen then he became a roller-skating marvel. He tap danced to music on roller skates. When he was held by his feet and swung in a large circle by another skater, he would swoop down and “kiss the floor”. Once too much of a kiss occurred and all his front teeth were knocked out. That’s where he met my mom; at a roller-skating rink after the war. They were roller skating lovers, arm in arm. My father had been with my mother for almost a quarter of a century when a peculiar thing happened. I was just two decades old when it happened. At that time, I was struggling to make money and pay for my rent, food, car and gas, and university tuition. I lived in a squalid room, slept on the floor, and attended the university. I had the flu most of the time, and I bought chicken livers labeled pet food from the grocery store for about thirty-seven cents a container. I’d put them on the stove with some salt to boil for dinner. I walked to the nearby bar and drank a dollar’s worth of ten cent schooners of beer while they boiled. It was a bit of a tough time for me without what happened happening. It happened over a two-week time period. My father worked as a transmission engineer for this company before the war. He went to Europe and did what he did and when it was over, he returned to work for the same company. He had been with them for a total of thirty

V o l . 12 N o . 2 years. Well, without any warning, they went bankrupt and simultaneously, without any warning, his wife decided to leave him for his best friend. So, my father, in less than fourteen days, lost his job of thirty years, his retirement, his insurance, his company car, his wife of twenty-five years, his best friend, and as a little kick to rub things in, without any warning, his dog died. Prior to this my father certainly loved his beer. But now he loved bourbon from morning to night. He started in the morning and lasted as long as he could. I figured that if anyone ever had a reason to abuse alcohol, he certainly did. I’d go check on him as often as I was able. I still had a key to the house. Once I found him passed out on the bedroom floor with the German Luger in his hand. Another time he had fallen down the stairs and he lay in a heap, passed out in the stairwell with a broken wrist. Another time I visited, and I thought he was just sleeping on the couch. When I went to awaken him, he turned and I saw a white, bloody towel wrapped around his hand. He was drunk and pushed an ice cube down into the blender and severed the tip of his finger. He just wrapped his hand in the towel, finished the bottle of bourbon, and passed out on the couch. I was used to carrying him to the doctor or the ER. But one day when I went to see him, it was early in the day and he was quite drunk. I figured enough was enough. I picked him up in my arms, and bodily carried him to my car and drove him to the veteran’s hospital and admitted him into alcohol treatment. He stopped drinking until he got out. There was a lot of shooting going on when dove hunting. They flew fast, there were lots of them, and the limit, at that time was fifteen a day, thirty in possession if I recall. They were delicious to eat, and they were hard to hit. It was like skeet shooting; they came fast and from different directions. Once I was walking on the farmer’s dusty, narrow farm road with my twelve gauge, Ithaca Featherlight. It was cold in the mornings, but this was a hot day and my dad was a ways away next to me walking along a drainage ditch with his Remington. It had a ventilated rib which I was envious of. He was a bit behind to my left when he called. He called my name, and I turned to see him looking at me then point his shotgun in the air, shoot, smile and put his hand out where he stood and easily catch the dove as it fell from the sky, seemingly all planned and executed on my behalf.

The three-legged black dog was standing next to my dad and the little critter wagged his tail heartily as he looked up at the bird my father held triumphantly in his hand over his head. It was the Greatest Show on Earth. Before he died, I went to see him. He was in a stark hospital room. I couldn’t tell if he was dead, unconscious, or sleeping. I sat in a chair and looked at him. I detected light breathing. I just sat there thinking about him, about my wife. After a while, I realized he had opened his eyes. I said hello to him. He stared off. I asked, what are you thinking about dad? I am not sure what he meant by it, but he answered with his last two words. “Parallel lines.” He died at 1:20 on a Sunday afternoon. A few months later my wife died at 1:20 on a Sunday afternoon. It doesn’t matter now. Nothing Matters; that’s the title of the next and last book I plan to write.

Larry Slonaker

Dan Cushman and Stay Away, Joe The notion of woke-ishness, or woke-dom, or whichever suffix one chooses to grab and attach, has permeated and divided a society that already seemed predisposed to fracture anyway. The field of literature is certainly no exception. If one sets aside the woke-word itself (which has taken on a weight in excess of, and beyond connection to, its original usage), one still encounters the issue (let’s call it an issue) looming or lurking around publishing, and in a highly influential way. That is true not only of discussions about what’s being printed now, but what was printed ever—and not just in the canon, but also in the various nooks and crannies of popular literature, around the world and around the corner, from north to south, and yes, even east to…West. The mythology of the American West that was formulated in the 19th and 20th centuries was as cracked as the Liberty Bell—in large part because it was invented mostly by western European immigrants in their “settlement” of the West. This simplistic narrative conveniently ignored the indigenous people who, oh by the way, were well-established in the region for centuries. Thankfully, the one-time fever of Manifest Destiny today seems, at casual glance, like not much more than

54 a vague malaise. Light dawned, Mountain/Pacific/Alaska Standard Time, and it’s now a given that there’s so much more to the story of the West than the vision of European immigrants and their descendants. If that’s woke (sorry, the issue), then most folks smarter than a turnip are glad for it. Great; we’ve gained at least that much. But in the process, it sometimes is circumspect to ask: What, if anything, has been lost? Consider the case of Dan Cushman. It’s been about 20 years since the death of Cushman, who, as a prolific novelist of Westerns and other adventure-type tales, was a literary celebrity in the region. He earned a spot midcentury in the select Montana authors’ circle that included A.B. Guthrie, Jr. and Joseph Kinsey Howard. Cushman achieved particular notoriety with a book called Stay Away, Joe. Feted by (some) critics, chosen for the Book of the Month Club, transformed mind-bogglingly into a Broadway musical, and even more mind-bogglingly into an Elvis Presley movie, Stay Away, Joe made Cushman a literary celebrity in his adopted hometown of Great Falls, and well beyond. That did not last. Even in Montana, which like so much of the West is populated by devoted readers who have a special affinity for native sons and daughters, Joe has largely faded. And that’s to the relief of many. It seems if it’s remembered at all, it’s mostly as a harbinger of contemporary sensitivities about white people writing wayward fiction from the point of view of non-whites. The kerfuffle over American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins comes to mind. I enjoyed reading Joe years ago, as a teenager. Decades later, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that certain sections of the novel have continued to stick in my mind. After reading The Way West and The Big Sky, or any of Ivan Doig’s novels, in time I retained almost nothing. But after just one reading of Joe, I still found numerous passages adhering to my brain, including the protagonist’s funny and spot-on description of young bull’s advantages over an old one. Having meant for years to reread it, I finally ordered a hardback copy a while back from Amazon for ten bucks. The plot was much as I remembered it. The synopsis: Louis Champlain is an impoverished Métis originally from Canada. He now lives in an area evoking the country around Cushman’s childhood home of Box Elder, Montana, near the Rocky Boy’s Chippewa Cree Reservation. The story opens with a visit to Louis’ shack from a local bigshot and a U.S. Congressman. They bring jaw-dropping news:

CIRQUE As part of a government experiment to help so-called landless Native Americans (in this novel, “Indians”), they are giving Louis a herd of 19 Hereford heifers and a young bull. Louis can hardly believe this splendid windfall, but his good fortune is immediately shattered by two simultaneous disasters. One, a horde of friends and well-wishers and notso-well-wishers hear about Louis’s luck, and show up uninvited for an impromptu party that runs deep into the night. Short of cash and provisions, Louis gives in to pressure to feed the revelers by slaughtering one of his new cows. (He does not learn until the next morning that the beast they barbecued turned out to be his lone bull.) Two, his son Joe, a rodeo bronc rider and Korean War veteran, shows up at the party out of nowhere, commanding attention with a most imposing figure. Here’s where Cushman’s attention to language and detail, honed over the writing of dozens of novels, displays itself. Joe was six three or four; an extra two inches were added by the heels of his riding boots, and his huge white hat made him seem taller yet…. He had a fresh haircut, and his sideburns were held stiff and comb-marked by pomade. In addition to the boots and the big white hat, he wore Pendleton stockman’s pants, a scarlet shirt with decorative pearl buttons, and a fawn-colored silk crepe neckerchief knotted like a four-in-hand and held to his shirt-front by means of a large Navajo silver concha. On reading that, one definitely envisions a figure. (Uh, maybe not Elvis, though.) The rest of the novel chronicles the damage suffered by Louis, his wife, Annie, and daughter, Mary, as a result of the antics of the beer-guzzling, woman-chasing, bankcheating Joe—and the inevitable attrition, one-by-one, of Louis’ prized herd. My general impression after undertaking Joe this many years later is that, on one level, it’s a light read, mostly engaging, told with some vivid language (and some that’s clunky, too), and featuring an entirely sympathetic character in the endlessly-misfortunatebut-ever-optimistic Louis. To me, it’s also a page in an old rediscovered scrapbook, featuring a vivid black-and-white snapshot of the time and place. But in these times, there is the whole other level that

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Light and Clouds

Lucy Tyrrell

must be considered: the desperate real-life situation then of Native Americans, both on and off the reservations. When Joe was published in 1953, the status of Native Americans in the West was comparable to that of Blacks in the South in the same time-period. Social segregation was a fact of life. My memory of Native kids in elementary school is that of raggedy waifs so shy and deferential they almost never spoke. They were bullied without mercy, when they were paid attention to at all. The older I got, the fewer Native students there were; and when I got to high school, all the Native kids seemed to have disappeared from class entirely. The town where I grew up, Great Falls, had a vibrant downtown at that time, but if you strayed a block or two off the main, you found yourself on Skid Row, where Native guys panhandled and drank from paper bags. In much of the West back then, there were a few distinct castes: the merchants, the farmers and ranchers, and the Native Untouchables. I was not one to deplore this at the time. In fact, I made not much of it at all, other than to accept it as How Things Were. And aside from the nuns and other charitable folks who ministered to and aided the landless Chippewa, Cree

and Métis living in squalor on the infamous Hill 57, I think most folks in Great Falls were as indifferent and ignorant as I. Cushman, in Joe, actually evinces a much more sympathetic attitude toward Natives. He grew up among them, in Box Elder and Big Sandy and other small towns in northern Montana. The Great Falls Tribune published a feature on Cushman in 1994 in which he spoke with great fondness of a Métis named Champagne, who befriended him as a child. “He was a very personable and intelligent guy” Cushman said. In interviews with Brent D. McCann, who in 2001 wrote a comprehensive master’s thesis on Cushman at the University of Montana, Cushman identified Champagne as the inspiration for Stay Away, Joe. But for all Cushman’s sympathies, the book is also very much a work reflecting the mindset of the mid-1950s. Various depictions of Native women are condescending and insulting—Cushman seems to describe every other Native young woman as “slatternly,” and the other “s” word is used several dozen times. Aside from Louis, most of the Native men are drawn as mere stooges, even when they aren’t drunk. Then there’s the underlying question of whether a white man can legitimately write at all from a Native’s point of view (although nearly every Native character in the book is a “breed” of one quartile or another). None of this seemed to matter at the time. The plight of Natives then was an afterthought, if it lurked in mainstream thought at all. So, it’s not a surprise that the book—distinctly light on “plight”—was celebrated in mainstream Montana on its release, and for many years after. As McCann documents, there were highly favorable reviews in the Tribune and the Montana Magazine of History. Plus, there was the national Book of the Month Club selection, in which the novel was compared to Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat. Some East Coast publications’ reviewers were not impressed, but the New York Times review praised its “brush strokes that are sharp and true….” Cushman admitted, at least partly in jest, that he had qualms. After publication, he said in the Tribune article, "I stuck my head (out) around the reservation to see if anybody wanted to take a shot at me." But no: "They said they liked it." The general goodwill among Montana literati toward Joe was to change, however, in a well-publicized way. An excerpt was supposed to appear in 1988 in The Last Best Place, a well-respected,1,000-page-plus anthology of distinguished writings about Montana. But the accomplished Native novelist James Welch famously

56 vetoed Joe from inclusion. (An excerpt from Cushman’s memoir, Plenty of Room and Air, was included instead.) McCann interviewed Welch, who died in 2003, about his objections. "I thought (Cushman) portrayed the Indian people, the family and so on, as fools," Welch is quoted as saying. "And, if I remember correctly, when they get the herd of cattle…to celebrate they kill the bull. That is just a total farce. Indians aren't that stupid and I think it implies Indians are that stupid.” McCann asked Cushman about the criticism, and the anthology exclusion. He replied, simply, "Perhaps younger people don't want their ideals clouded.” Welch’s misgivings are certainly understandable, but his criticism seems at least partly unfair. Or, yes, clouded. For example: Even as a teenage reader, I understood the slaughter of the bull not as an act of stupidity, but one of malice—some of the partiers were clearly jealous of Louis’ luck, and they orchestrated the act on purpose. And it’s not accurate or fair to characterize all the Native characters as “fools.” Annie is the voice of wisdom throughout the book. She sees through Joe from the moment he steps onto the place, all the way through the moment at the end, when the guys from the credit union haul away the hulk of his car, a once-cherry Buick he’s converted into a forlorn living space. And then there’s Louis. It’s he, after all, who is the protagonist of the novel. Joe—lying, callous, conniving, and utterly lacking in conscience—is basically a psychopath. But Louis possesses an indefatigable goodnature and a transcendent calmness about his place in the world. In the face of catastrophe, he finds solace in his pastime of carving animals out of wood. Describing Louis’ retreat to this diversion on one difficult morning, Cushman is at his best: The pine was quite damp, so it was tough, and its grain was a richer brown than usual. The wood with its dampness smelled like fall—a different smell than damp wood of the spring. The fall dampness was everywhere, making a shine on the frost-tuned leaves of the bushes, giving the mountain valleys a misty purple cast, turning the pines a purplish green, and giving Louis a slight pain in the joints of his shoulders. He did not mind; it was the way of nature, and soon the sun would grow warm and drive the pain out of him with a good feeling that he could not get from donning his old mackinaw.

CIRQUE Cushman was a prolific writer, and his novels ranged from pulp and post-pulp to more literary efforts. But Stay Away, Joe was his pinnacle, and by all accounts he was quite proud of it. Today, though, it’s all but forgotten. Doug Giebel, Cushman’s nephew, who has been trying to establish a place for Cushman’s archives in Big Sandy, told me, “There's little if any interest in Joe these days.” Twenty years after Cushman’s death, it’s pretty clear that Stay Away, Joe has profound shortcomings. With its clownish characters and lurching slapstick, it will never be lumped in with the distinguished literature of the American West. Beyond that, though, in the unceasing glare of modern sensitivities and sensibilities, no contemporary publisher would give it a sniff. But for all its faults, in some ways it’s a book that is true of a time— which I think has an intrinsic value. As McCann told me, Cushman “found a way to describe something he loved with all its complexity, i.e., the people of the high plains of Montana during the middle part of the 20th century.” And just as Joe is true of another time, it also depicts certain actions and events that were true of people. Not “a people.” Just people. And sometimes, when you pick up a novel, that’s all you can ask.

Friends

Brenda Jaeger

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Screws

Jill Jonson

CIRQUE

FICTION Sherri Hoffman

Big Boat Celia was a widow who lived alone at the Mill Creek Community, her condominium isolated and nowhere near the historic creek, and for eighty-four days,she'd been without her car. During the first month, her son drove her in his Suburban—more of a truck than a car—as if they were a family again, though she knew he did it outof guilt. He'd shown her the DMV notices stamped uninsurable— the worst form of cancelation. Celia argued that her accidents, three in a year, had been minor. Taillights, bumpers, a broken rear window. She might die without her car. Don't be dramatic, he'd said and punched the hole through her driver's license, per the enclosed instructions. Later he returned with his oldest daughter for the gold Continental with suicide doors he'd named Big Boat when he was a kid. Celia watched from her kitchen as they taped signs in its windows, the garish FOR SALE softened by a swirl of hand-drawn daisies that made the sign look like a headstone, which sealed her defeat. Shadow Dancer Eighty-four days without her car, Celia became weightless. That morning, she ate the last egg with the heel of bread, toasted. Her son was busy. Wait for the weekend, he'd said. But she knew he wouldn't drive her to her store. Not to Harmony's. It'd be that warehouse where everything came in enormous packages, and she'd end up with another ridiculous box of toilet tissue and a slice of pizza on a greasy paper plate. Celia licked the end of her pencil and added "eggs" to her grocery list. She would not wait. The sun was pleasant as she set out in her square-

toed shoes, two crisp twenty dollar bills in her billfold, and a plastic bonnet in case the weather turned. She carried her blue handbag in the crook of her arm. At the top of the hill, she stopped to catch her breath. Heat prickled her neck. She'd only ever driven to the grocery, and the sidewalk veered from the expressway. It dipped into a tunnel, water-cool, the ghostly breath, Celia decided, of the dead lakebed below the city, its water absorbed by the desert until what was left became the Great Salt Lake. Celia emerged into a wild greenspace filled with the sounds of water. In developed areas, Mill Creek was diverted underground, but in this forgotten corner of nowhere, it tumbled in the sunlight, bordered by sedge and willow, a battered chain-link fence along its bank. The walkway forked three ways. Celia gauged her bearings against the rise of Mount Olympus on her left and picked a path that felt right. It pleased her to know north from south. Her son thought Gary Thomas her simple-minded. She'd seen his pity, tinged with alarm. Let him see her now. Let him drive his truck to her condominium this weekend to find it fully stocked. She secured her purse and set out again. But it was snagged, caught from behind. The force of it spun her around, and she came face-to-face with a man, a full head taller than her. One hand on her purse. "Let go this instant." The man did not let go. Celia yanked hard. The man's arm flopped with her efforts. "I know who you are," she shrilled. He let go. She fell backwards into the fence, and he came after her. Celia screamed.

V o l . 12 N o . 2 The man put up his hands, as if he was being robbed. "Imma help you up, you ol' biddy." Celia scrabbled in the dirt. "Don't you touch me. You thief. You purse snatcher." But she let him take her elbow. He was skinny and sallow, more of a boy, with yellow hair cropped on top and shaved to the skin below like a sailor. She'd known sailors at Pearl Harbor, where she'd been a nurse in the Second World War. But this man-boy, he was no sailor. "Who are you?" His smile was more of a smirk. "You said you knew." A trembling flush made her talk too loud. "Mind your manners." He eyed her. "Where's your people, missus?" The noise of distant traffic was muted by the roil of the creek. "Harmony's grocery. They'll come for me, now I'm late." She glanced up the path. "Any minute." He laughed, short and nasal. "This ain't the way." Celia licked her lips. The boy tipped his head. "I'll take you. For a price." Breathless, she nodded. She followed him, not too close, through a break in the fence. Beyond dumpsters and rows of apartments. Down a hill. Her legs becoming spaghetti-soft, she focused on his square back, his shirt frayed at the neck. At last, a bricked alley landed them on 33rd above the shopping plaza, Harmony's at its center. An orange sun hovered to the west beyond the Great Salt Lake. How could it be so late? Fatigued with thirst and heels burning, Celia tried not to limp. Mid-block, a stairwell dropped into the Harmony's lot close to where Celia had always parked. Eighty-four days without Big Boat. "I can't tell you how grateful I am. I was really lost. Ha!" She hesitated at the top of the steps. The boy scanned the parking lot. "I don't see your people." "Oh? Don't you worry." Her mouth dry as sand. "I'll just pop in. Back in a jiffy." She stepped down a stair. A tug jerked her back, and relieved of her purse, Celia became weightless, launched, arms out, as if floating on water. The parking lot flew up to meet her. Against the warm asphalt, she gasped. Startled. A swell of footsteps and voices broke over her. How did it

come to this? She was too tired to think. She closed her eyes, and the din became the currents of forgotten waters buried below the city. If she could choose, she hoped the wet heat spreading under her cheek would absorb her into the ancient lakebed. If only to give her rest. If only for a minute.

Black River Blues

Gary Thomas

Dan Tremaglio

One More Piece of Night I Reap The ground is hot to the touch, even through the kikmat gloves. My bagman keeps bumping into me every time I pause. This used to make me loudly swear. I remember swearing, the echo of forgotten god names. Not anymore. Some of the meteorites are only an inch deep. I can see them glowing blue through the layer of dirt as I reach down and snatch them up with armored fingertips, flinging them to my bagman behind me. Sometimes if the meteorite is bigger than a brick, he will stumble and maybe mumble, but that is all. We never speak. I used to pity bagmen, having to haul the glowing loads up and down row after row. I don’t anymore. Me, I spend all day bowing and kneeling like a goon at prayer, but I feel no pity. I feel no gratitude either. All I feel is blue, the draw of it, the blue flame burn on my fingers and palms. I

60 chuck each glowing chunk into my hunched bagman’s backpack. At least he has his knees intact, I think. Occasionally the meteorites are deeper than six inches and I have to dig. The soil is soft for all the fires. All the ancient trees the meteor shower incinerated during the great bombardment have been turned to ash, a former forest cum coal black plain. It’s easy to push a little dirt left, push a little dirt right, until a blue glow blooms from the bottom of my depression. One more piece of night I reap and flip it to my porter. His bag is half full when we reach the row’s end. A bell tolls from camp in the east and I stand up straight for the first time all day. All the other pickers do too. Bagmen cannot. This burn we’re working stretches an hour’s walk both ways. We wait for an old electric truck to buzz along the relief route. Another will be by soon for the bagmen and their loads full of moonlight. Coffee awaits us in the hall along with bowls of peas. A simple meal I do not hate. I ate plenty of this before when I was a student, before I was a sculptor, before I was a poet, before I tried my hand at film, before I sang, before I cooked, before I went back to school, before I decided tomorrow is the only art for me and shoved everything I knew inside a bag and went. Years of mining meaning from cafés and campgrounds on hillsides outside little cities where a library lined the plaza in the middle of which a marble fountain proudly pissed. Two women with blue eyes and long black hair were with me in those days. All our red wine shared from one ceramic cup. This was before the great bombardment obviously. What started in October lasted until November and by year’s end every border had become a wall. I’d already sold my passport anyway. The blue rush of the northern night camps quickly became the new manifest destiny, a move-north-youngman sort of thing. Every tablet, every car, every phone, every furnace, every boat, every plane, every bank, every base, every heart, every brain, all powered now by the new blue. Blue is what means. Blue is what makes. These are the words written across the lintel we pass beneath as our truck arrives back at camp. Everybody in the bed hops out, eighty or so in all, three men to every woman, all of us wearing all-black overalls and bald. The women shave their heads here as well. There was a friend I remember two dorms down who asked me when I first arrived if I liked this look. A lot, I told her, thumbing behind her ear.

CIRQUE How long ago was that? Entering the hall, I lean in for my retinal scan and take up a silver platter onto which a bowl of peas is placed. I sit between two others. Steam weaves with nothing before my face. I never wash my hands. Black-stained all over, they look like the hands of a child who’s been writing all day with a feather. Count what on fingers. Here’s a moment to take stock but I do not need to, do not care to. My knees ache. A decade plus of picking magic rocks. Even with my petty one-point commission, I have already accumulated more credit than I ever soberly hoped for. Surely I could afford to purchase an apartment on the second floor in some pleasant cosmopolis, eat well, meet friends for drinks, attend concerts, spend two weeks a year visiting the shore, take off my socks, smoke, read, pay to have hot river rocks rubbed along my thighs. None of it would mean more than what it really is though, a feeling, a flicker of lightning lighting up lobes in my brain. Blue is what means and that is why I’m here, isn’t it? When dinner is done, I am off to bed. I am a spectacular sleeper, by the way. So many people here hate the inside of their eyelids, but not me. Me, I am asleep as easily as a phone powering down. I don’t have one of those anymore, a phone, though I used to love passing people hunched over them on sidewalks at night, their faces blued by the uplight. Light like that is nothing I’m short on now. Maybe I will never leave this place. Our company has been harvesting the current burn for months now and many pickers believe we will soon move farther north. Lots of hands will cash out then. I won’t. Not long ago all these rocks fell from outer space and set the forests afire and I began pacing back and forth, back and forth, pulling their light from underground. Honestly, I don’t know what else there is to do.

John Helde

Resuscitation “I just like sports, you know, all kinds, football, golf, jujitsu. I like tennis.” “I like tennis.” “There you go.”

V o l . 12 N o . 2 “Haven’t played in a long time. Years.” “What happened?” “Gave it up,” she says. “There’s one good court,” he says. “Behind the high school.” “I like soccer.” She grips her chopsticks so hard the tip of her finger is white. “When I was in my twenties, I used to play in this league, but I quit.” “Why?” “I got too damn cold,” she says. “We’d go out all year round, you know, like in November, in shorts and t-shirts, and I’d freeze my ass the first forty-five minutes. By the time you get all nice and sweaty and warm, it’s over.” She pokes at a little piece of broccoli in her noodles. “And then the wind comes up, your jersey’s all sopping and you freeze again. I don’t stick with things I don’t like. I don’t like being uncomfortable. I don’t like being cold.” “We could go play tennis sometime.” “I need a new racquet; my father broke mine. What’s that you have?” “Chicken,” he says. The meat slips off his chopsticks. “I can see that.” “Oh, it’s chicken with, I don’t know, some sort of, like, soy sauce or something.” “These noodles are undercooked,” she says. “What do your folks do?” “That’s kind of personal, isn’t it?” “Well, I don’t know, I thought…” There’s a furrow, like a picket fence, at the bridge of her nose. “I just wondered,” he says. “My dad’s a mechanic.” “At a gas station.” “No, he works on trucks, you know, fleet trucks.” “Oh, diesel mechanic. Cool.” “For like thirty years.” “What does your mom do?” “She works at a gas station.” “Oh. Which one?” “The Shell. Out on Burroughs.” “That’s my favorite gas station.” “Your favorite gas station?” Across the room a man lets out a big, hearty laugh. “Is she a mechanic?” he asks. “Is she a mechanic? What kind of a question is that?” “I know a couple girls who work on cars.” “They don’t have mechanics at that gas station.” Of course not. “She’s a cashier,” she goes on. “At the mini-mart. You’ve

61 probably seen her in there.” “I doubt it. I always do the debit. Easy in, easy out.” He tries to grab a clump of rice. “My sister works there too,” she says. “She needed a job to save money for school, she said, I don’t really care what I do, I just need a job. So my mom, she got her a job at the gas station.” “Pay pretty good?” “Are you kidding? It’s a sucky job. I used to work there. You think it’s fun to stand on your feet all day and sell Ring-dings and Penthouse to horny truckers?” “It’s a job.” “Well that’s it. I just took it because I got out of school and I didn’t know what I was going to do, and mom said, I could get you a job at the Shell, and I said, whatever. ‘Cause I didn’t know what to do. And so I was standing there ringing up Ring-dings when this fireman walked in.” “So that’s how — ” “Yeah just random like.” “And now you work a hundred some hours.” He quits the chopsticks and takes up a fork. “I need to. For the foreseeable future. That’s just the way it is. Seventy-two hours a week.” “See that’s like, practically twice what —” “Twenty-four hour shifts. Work a shift, day off, work a shift, day off.” “Today’s your day off.” “No, actually somebody’s dying across town and I just wanted to grab chow mein with you...” A jab of tenderness in her look. “But I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t have a problem with it.” “You like it that much?” “People depend on us. Better than working in a gas station.” “Seems like it’d be rough.” “Not really.” “Hard to have a, you know, have someone in your life.” “Well I don’t have one of those, so that takes care of that, doesn’t it?” There’s a line where her finger turns red to white, where the blood stops, in the joint. “I mean, I just like that feeling of, I walk out the door at five,” he says. “And the paycheck’s the same every week.” He shoves a chunk of chicken in his mouth. “I thought you said you don’t have a job,” she says. He swallows too soon and the meat goes down like a stone. “I mean when I had a job. When I will have a job,” he

62 says. “I had an interview.” “Where?” “I can’t talk about it.” When he looks up, she is staring at him. “I shouldn’t,” he adds. “What is it, anti-terrorism or something?” “No. I just don’t want to jinx it.” “You’re superstitious?” He takes a breath. “I just had times before when I got jinxed. Once I see that paycheck, then I’ll feel better, you know?” “See I’d rather work seventy-two hours, and have that paycheck,” she says. “Given the situation I’m in.” “Oh, yeah. We never really did talk about that.” She gets real interested in her plate. “We could talk about it now,” he goes on. She winds a noodle around her chopstick. “I mean, while we’re all comfortable and everything…” Her silence agitates him. “You’re still married. You said.” “Still legally married.” “Uh-huh.” “’Cause of financial reasons.” “Financial.” “I’m trying to save up enough to get out of it for real.” “How soon will that be?” “Might take a while. It was a nightmare. You don’t know.” Her eyes are light green, her pupils wide. “I don’t mind knowing.” “You don’t want to know. And it doesn’t help I’ve got a father who comes down getting all in the middle of it.” “My old man was like that,” he says. “What I remember of him.” “Family can be very unhelpful. You need to trust yourself.” A punked-out waitress pushes in to refill their waters. “What did he do, your father?” “I told you, he’s a mechanic.” “No, what’d he do. To your husband.” “Let’s not talk about it.” “But. It’s interesting.” “No it’s not,” she says. “I could tell you about the time we pulled a blind woman from a burning tree.” “I want to hear about you.” “You’re too personal, that’s your problem.” “Whoa, that’s kinda —” “I didn’t mean it that way. I just mean — you gotta be careful.” He takes a drink, water trickling down his throat. He’d followed her lead and passed on beer. “What do you mean

CIRQUE by careful?” “I mean… careful. I mean — don’t go prying into people’s lives too quick.” “But we’re just having dinner. Talking. You know.” “Not on a first date.” She sips from her plastic glass. “Hey, I’m not usually like this. Coming off a shift I can be kind of cranky.” “That’s a lot of hours you work.” “Well I don’t mind it.” “Did your ex? I mean, did he mind it?” “Look, my ex… I made a big mistake. I’ll never do that again.” She snags her last noodle and slurps it. “He shoved me into the wall so hard I broke my wrist.” “Oh.” A group squeezes by on the way to the exit, portly men in plaid shirts working toothpicks in their molars and laughing. She is looking at him. The plate glass window reflects his distorted image through disembodied headlights. The silence goes on too long. “It gets dark pretty early now, doesn’t it?” “The thing is this, you know?” she says. “I can understand people who have tempers, because I’ve got one for sure, my whole family does. We can scream at each other and two hours later set down to dinner. But we’d never get physical. So when he did that, I was like, forget it. And it was because, what? You know what it was? He was mad at me because I was following him around because he was sleeping with my friend. He’s freaking out at me? I mean, excuse me? I am not the one in the wrong here.” Her eyes dance and flicker. “Are you gonna finish your chicken?” she says. “You want to try some?” “I hate to see food wasted.” He wishes he could say the right thing. “We can get a box,” he says. “My fridge is full of boxes.” “We could have a cheap dinner over there sometime.” “I don’t think so.” “C’mon.” He laughs. “I’ve got, like, nothing in my fridge.” “You gonna get this job?” “Don’t know. I hope so. They said they’re looking at a lot of people.” “That’s what they always say. You know what convinced me to do EMT? They’re not going away. Worst case, county puts in layoffs, I move to the next county. They always need EMTs.” “Because people are always doing stupid things.”

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Heat

Nard Claar

She smiles a little. She leans back and folds her napkin. “If you knew all the stupid things I’ve seen people do,” she says. “I guess so, huh?” “Like this guy who slit his wrists on a cat food can.” “Jesus.” “Not intentionally.” “You must have some cool stories.” “Just stupid stories.” “At least when he broke your wrist, you could take care of it yourself,” he says. “Let’s not talk about that anymore.” “I broke my arm in high school.” He gives up on the chicken. “I was rolling down Mercy Hill inside this old tractor tire.” “What the hell’d you do that for?” “It was fun. Even when I broke the arm. I’m glad I did it. I’d do it again.” He is excited now. She stares hard at him, like she’s trying to make a diagnosis. “My mom comes to get me in the hospital,” he goes on, “and I’m so proud of myself, I’ve got my cast, and I’m just like ‘Mom, look at this!’ And she’s just like… ‘Jesus… what have you done.’ Just like that, ‘Jesus.’ She was so mad. I thought she’d be excited. Or something. I don’t know what I thought. We drove home, she went to make a Lean Cuisine, and that was the last I heard about it.” She takes some time. “Well. People don’t always act the way you want them to.” “I wish they’d try harder, that’s all.” “Wishing isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “When I turned eight, I wished for my dad to leave and I blew out all the candles on my cake, and the next day he was gone.” She looks away, to the dirty white clock over the window. “I just mean — you have to rely on yourself,” she says. “And that’s a good thing.” “But, okay, say…” He leans so far his sleeve dips in the soy sauce. He dabs it with his napkin. “Say you go out on a call and, like, resuscitate somebody or something. They’re relying on you, right?” “That’s different.” “How is it different?” “That’s my job.” “Hey — take a look at this.” He holds out his right hand. It’s awfully near the candle, but the candle is an LED and cold as the rest of the place. “I got this thing.” “Look — I’m not — ” “Just look at it.” “Why? “I’m just wondering —” “Wondering what?” “I don’t know. If I should be worried,” he says. “I don’t have health insurance. It’s been there like three, four weeks.” “Where?” “In between — right there. See?” “I’m just trying to get it in the light.” “Oh. Your hands are cold,” he says. “It’s okay. Do what you need to do.” She examines his hand, gently turning it one way, then the other. “You’ve got nice skin,” he says. She gives him a withering look. “I don’t think you need to worry about it.” She wipes her hands on her napkin. He jiggles the bubble of flesh. “You sure? You want to look again?” “It’s a wart. My brother used to get them.” “So what do I do?” “Just let it be. I mean, I’m not a doctor, but it looks like —” “No, that’s what I wanted. Your professional opinion, or whatever. A wart. Okay. Well. Okay.” “Let’s get the check,” she says. “Will you marry me?” … “What?”

64 “Will you… marry me. You know.” “What kind of a question is that?” “I don’t know. I just feel really strongly, and I’m just thinking, you going back to your fridge and me going back to mine, why not say it.” “Are you serious?” “Yeah, I’m serious. I know. What the hell, huh?” His laugh sputters up from deep inside. “You’re a strong person. Gentle touch. You’d make a good mother.” “I’m a crappy mother,” she snaps. The waitress clatters dishes, singing in a language he can’t understand. “You mean —” “I suck. As a mother. Alright?” “You’ve got a kid?” “Yeah. And I’m married.” “It’s over. You said —” “It’s not over over.” “So… When it’s over over… Why are you laughing?... What?... What’s so funny?” Her shoulders shake. “You know nothing about me.” “I know more than when we stepped in here —” “Because you violated all the rules of the game —” “You don’t need to yell.” “I’m not, I’m just — I need the check.” “Here. It’s okay.” “What are you doing? Why are you touching my face?” “You were laughing so hard.” “I wasn’t laughing.” She shouts to a busboy in headphones. “You look good,” he says. “You look kind of pink and, you know, full of life. Let’s just talk, okay?... You know what I think?” He watches her rearrange her chopsticks, brow furrowed, green eyes darting to the emergency exit. “I think maybe you don’t want to believe somebody can love you.” “Not somebody I just met five days ago in a wreck.” He is coming awake: the violent, disembodied thumps. The asphalt pressing into his back. Her ivory face, against black sky, tight in concentration. “You rely on yourself,” he says. “Who are you anyway?” “I’m me.” She holds her head in her hands. “I’m a guy who’s had some dumb, shitty things happen to him —” he revs up, reckless now “— whose father’s gone, whose mother’s given up, who lost his job ‘cause he tried harder than his co-workers —” “You were dead,” she says. The spiny waitress delivers

CIRQUE the check, click. “That’s what a heart not beating and lungs not breathing is.” “You know the first thing I thought? Why is this — this beautiful girl beating so hard on my chest? Like she’s beating me up.” He laughs. “I’ve seen a half dozen or more in your shoes who didn’t make it. But you were too drunk, and now you’re too blind to realize how stupid you are. How lucky you are.” “You want to know who I am? Huh? I go to meet my mom at bingo, but she calls and says she’s tired. I go into Christy’s, have a few, but no one’s around, no one worth talking to. So I get in the car. Just keep driving. Out Olympia. I’m going a hundred, I don’t fucking care. I just want something to happen.” He grips the table, his fingertips white. “Then I hit the curves, you know? Something says… Don’t go crazy. Maybe there is a reason to stick around. Maybe I just don’t know it yet.” He crunches the last ice cubes. He leans back. A fan goes on. The breeze rustles a strand of hair on her shoulder. “I would never hurt you,” he says. He tosses it out, easy, like a warm-up serve. Her eyes hold his. “You can’t say that,” she says. “Why not?” “Because you will. And then you’ll be a liar.” … “I’ve got a bottle of peach schnapps,” he says. “We could have a drink. Wash down the chow mein. You can check out my tennis racquet.” “You play tennis?” “Didn’t I say so?” “I used to play, but —” “You gave it up.” “I gave it up. You’re right.” “Now what‘d you do a thing like that for?”

Urchin

Jim Thiele

V o l . 12 N o . 2 Katie Kane

The Empire Builder I. Crude By Rail Heading north and west from Chicago, the train filled up the closer it got to the Frack. You might say that it “filled up on its way to Williston,” but then you’d just be revealing that you didn’t know anything at all about the oil boom, or about North Dakota for that matter. Of course, you wouldn’t be alone in your complete, benighted ignorance. Nobody except for the Native people who lived there and a few German ranchers and Scandinavian beet farmers ever knew a damn thing about the place. Nobody cared or even thought about North Dakota except during its three oil booms. Any other kind of knowledge had been generated during the stealing of the territory in the nineteenth century—during the taking of land away from the Mandan, the Hidatsa, the Hunkpapa, the Anishnaabe, the Sisseton, and all the rest of the original Indigenous people. Otherwise, the state was wasteland, at best, and at worst, a joke. Some obscure late-night comic once suggested that the whole state should either be given back to Canada or made into a national cemetery. “Wow, just think of all the land we’d get back everywhere else from their cemeteries if North Dakota was turned into an enormous necro-state!” Funny. No one but Indians and the animals and birds and grasses thought about the muddy power and beauty of the big river, the tender brutality of the lands carved out of sharp scoria and other colored rock into canyons, ravines, gullies, buttes, mesas, hoodoos, or other such geologic forms. The tender little pothole lakes nestled in the long grass remained unseen, and few knew about the black soil in the east, about the soft color of sunset in the light humidity of the air, about the ten mile high wildness of the thunderhead clouds that rolled over the prairie in the summer. And then there was winter—sharp, killing, graceful, and ivory and dark at once. No one from another place could appreciate winter’s delicate, bone-breaking season. Oil, of course, changed that calculus of disregard, and the state became known. The syllables of its name were on the tongue of every jackwagon who was looking to strike it rich in the oil frontier, to be American, to link up with the snow-white hands of the national dream. And once it was laid open to the corporate eye, all was changed, again: the

river and creek water at once turned saline, the blackness of the night sky was torn into light by gas flares, birds that passed over their ancestral migration path were left forever altered—feather conjugated to frack fluid. The prairie pothole ecosystem of North Dakota has always, until oil, provided a haven for breeding and travel. Avian migration has always been about change in food availability, change in habitat, or change in weather, and sometimes, the journeys are irregular (nomadism, invasions, irruptions), or the movements happen in only one direction. These kinds of migratory shifts also apply to human bodies in need; humans who can also take flight. A good number of those set in motion in the early twenty-first century came out to the Bakken on the flight path made by “The Empire Builder,” the long-distance passenger train that runs from Chicago to the West Coast —the route built in 1929 out of the fragments of an earlier project of subduing the land and the people who lived there. Just like a toy train, The Empire Builder had coiled back on its tracks and was moving through a familiar circuit, the new land grab, the new catastrophe, the new wracking of the land, the new Boom. America repeats itself and sometimes it takes the same train to get to the same station. II. Observation Car The voice was loud and straight out of the Deep South, as so many of the voices clamoring in the Frack were—just one kind of tone sounding out of the chorus of the great unemployed of the Recession in the early twenty first-century. The Recession a bust, proceeded by another kind of Boom, and then, a housing bubble burst, collapsing with the pressure of a wind. The cycle. The alternation. The voice was loud with easy, oily money. “I told him that I would be god-damned if I would let him drive my new Lariat. I bought that truck for myself out of the money I made hauling fuel to the pads for the C&J. And I’ll be god-damned if he sits his dirty ass down in my rig.” “It ain’t even registered yet, so I myself can’t drive it. I just take the little dog, Tom-Tom, out to the truck and sit in it and smell the new. Just breathe in all that new.” “I got that dog, you know, but I also got me a cat that likes to read the King James Bible.” People walking the aisle back to the dining car. So many coming to the Boom lands of North Dakota to try again to be American in that old way, in that white

66 way that made money out of other’s bodies and land. Their own bodies themselves becoming fodder for the machine. They just didn’t know they were being eaten, drilled into, becoming oil in their poison injected flesh. The spending, the sex, the drugs, the soul-killing work, the money, the wages always covering over the drill site—the deadly point of entry. “Like I said, I got me a cat that likes to read the King James Bible.” It was clearly important to indicate that King James was somehow involved in the business at hand. The cat wouldn’t read other translations of the bible? Maybe it was a cat with a consciousness of Christian denomination. Clearly not a Catholic cat. “I got me a cat that likes to read the King James Bible.” “What you talkin’ about?” They were traveling together. Didn’t they know each other well enough to have had this conversation about the cat before? Seems like a thing that might have come up at some point prior. But it is also true that the time it takes to travel by rail and the odd intimacies it generates among strangers and friends gives rise to story. Story that everyone in the car can hear, if voices are loud enough. “Every time I open that Bible, that cat, well, he just jumps up on my lap and puts his paws down on the verses I’m reading.” “Ssshhhhaaa!” An expression of disbelief. “Cats can’t read.” “Well, this one can, but only if it’s the King James Bible.” “How do you know he is reading?” “Well, I made me a test one night. I got a book that was the same size as the King James Bible. Same color and all. I had some me trouble finding one just like it.” “Pass those potato chips, hey.” “I opened that book, the one that looked like the King James Bible, and called him over to read. ‘Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.’ Well, that cat just sat there on the floor and looked at me, like ‘What do you want with me, woman?’” “There ain’t no potato chips in this bag.” “That’s when I knew I had me a cat that could read the King James Bible. I made the test and the cat knew the difference.” “I swear.” The sound of the cars rumbling through the eastern prairies of North Dakota provided the undercarriage of all this talk, making the conversation rhythmic in a hectic kind of way. In Williston, lots of people got off. The workers

CIRQUE going back to the Frack. Workers getting on too, after their hitches. The place was suddenly a cramped kind of cosmopolitan with the un-moneyed coming from Ukraine, from Georgia, from rural China, from Seattle, from England, and from places that you couldn’t find on any map. The train was like the Orient Express during the Cold War, dangerous and full of people who did not necessarily comport well with each other. Oil was part of the fuel the train burned to run. III. Dining Car I haven’t been through this country since the late 80s when Ener-Kel made me into a Landman for a short time. They recruited me out of Williston where I was working at the high school cleaning floors, and they teamed me up with a “Certified Landman.” The guy was white. I mean he knew how to cure titles but couldn’t always get the signatures on the paper, you know? He wanted me along because he needed an Indian smoke screen— the Assiniboines and Nakota from Fort Peck wouldn’t necessarily sign for white boys. Not even if they were careful enough to swap out their shiny new cars for old Ford F-150s before they showed up, you know? Leases for oil rights generally work like this: A company purchases the right to drill for oil underneath an acre of land by paying a one-time upfront payment, called a bonus, and a percentage of the profits earned on the well, known as a royalty. On Indian lands additional laws also apply, dictating who can negotiate for whom and how the government has to oversee the agreements. —Abrahm Lustgarten We went on a road trip down I-94 from Mandan, to West Fargo, and on to Little Earth down in the Cities. Lots of Indians living there, right? Stan was trying to get the Bird lease done. He’d been like working on it for a couple of years. He had hundreds of signatures already— all people connected to the divided land. We had a few signatures left to get from people living off reservation after Relocation—or living off reservation because Indians like to move, you know? We did get some of the signatures around Poplar, going into mobile homes and old homes along the lake, or going into Williston—places that I knew well, you know? The signature page for that Bird lease was five pages long with 400 or more signatures for the lease

V o l . 12 N o . 2 of the land at the drill site. 400 signatures. All my relations. All their royalties. For over a century, Indian families have seen valuable land resources diminish as fractionated ownership increases with each passing generation. As a result of the General Allotment Act of 1887 reservation land was divided up and allotted to individual tribal members. When an allottee died, title ownership was divided up among all of the heirs, but the land itself was not physically divided....Parcels with fractionated ownership can have hundreds or even thousands of owners. —Indian Land Tenure Foundation We were looking for three or four more signatures on that lease, even though Stan was always working multiple leases. For the Bird lease there were two women down in Little Earth in Minneapolis and two men along the way. Stan knew where to go. It was always like he had been there before, which he probably had. It took a while to run some signatures to ground, you know? You had to go back more than once. If we got those three, our job would be done and Ener-Kel could begin exploration work on the land, anyway. Stan was an asshole, right? He was always like “Gotta secure those permissions: the company can’t drill without ‘em.” He worked for Ener-Kel since the first oil boom in the 1950s in North Dakota and Montana. By the late 80s it was just bust—the second boom dried up, right? But Ener-Kel still wanted those signatures. Can’t develop without the leases, and leases need signatures. It all seemed kinda stupid to me then, like the oil was drying up, you know? What’s the point of getting leases on dry land? But, now? The Bakken. You can bet Ener-Kel hit that play running, right? It was like they knew. Get the leases ready for what’s coming. The first place we went to was a dive bar out on the far edge of Mandan. We got there at noon. There was no sign telling you that it was going to be a bar you’d be walking into. Nothing to let you know that it was anything at all, you know? Just a gravel parking lot and a two-story building with garbage cans knocked over out in front. It smelled like skunk beer and cigarettes and no cleaning. Dark inside with green neon. And everyone in there was half-wino, you know? Stan talked to the bartender about the guy we were looking for, and he pointed to a door. It didn’t seem like it,

but there were apartments upstairs, right? We climb these rickety stairs, looking for apt whatever number it was. It smelled like mildew and piss up there. Condemn it or burn it, just for starters. Most tribal leases now are sold by tribal governments, while allotted leases are negotiated between Indian owners and companies, with BIA involvement. Before entering into lease negotiations with oil and gas companies, Indian mineral owners often do not know the value of their resources. These owners are at a disadvantage when negotiating such critical matters as the dollar amount of the bonus bid, the royalty rate, and time frames for drilling the first well. Once signed, a lease agreement is a binding contract. —US Government, Oil and Gas Leasing in Indian Country: An Opportunity for Economic Development We finally found the apartment, right? The white woman who opened the door was small and like, round. She wore shorts and a baggy t-shirt and half her teeth. “Wha’chu wan’?” Stan said “We’re looking for Cecil Fox. He said that he....“ “He ain’t here, but he’ll be back. He’s gonna sign.” I mean, it wasn't like he wasn't gonna sign, there was nothing like that. He just wasn’t there, right? She leaned into the doorway and looked us up and down while she took a big bite out of a cold hotdog she had in her left hand. It wasn’t hot, it wasn’t even cooked. It’s just this cold hot dog, right? And she's half chewing on this thing the whole time she's staring at us. And I'm watching her mouth. I'm like, “She got enough teeth to eat that thing?” Stan and I are both, like, fascinated with her eating this hot dog, because it's something out of a cartoon. I mean, it is. And at the same time, when we're talking to her, you know, and she's chewing on this hot dog, this big cockroach just walked up the side of the refrigerator. And Stan and I looked at it like “Jesus.” She didn't bat an eye. I don't even know if she saw it, or even cared, or anything. So, we said “OK, we’ll be back,” and we just turned and walked down the hall. And we’re walking, and I went “What if she just grabbed that cockroach and just threw it in her mouth with that hot dog?” Stan busted out laughing. I was, like, “God, that cockroach was huge!” It freaked us both out, you know? The place, the smell, the poverty. We got in the car, and we headed to this other guy's

CIRQUE

house down the road. Stan knew where it was right away once we got to West Fargo—it was five minutes from the highway. We parked in front of this guy’s house, and he's home. He goes “Yeah, c’mon in.” There was kind of a dark room where the living room was, and then a kitchen, and then a kind of a dining room off the kitchen. It’s a small house, but the living room had the heaviest, thickest shades you ever saw, you know? They were all drawn. It was dark as the dead of night in there, man. It was a hot day, you know? I mean it's 80 degrees outside, right? I’m in basketball trunks and a tank top. The guy says to me “Have a seat in the living room.” Stan sat down at the kitchen table. It was one of those old, classic 70’s tables with the metal legs, and the chrome, and the coffee stains on the top you know, and salt and pepper shakers, on that table. Stan had the paperwork with him. . .and no, no, no, no, no, hold on. When we got to that guy’s house, he was there. Yeah. We went in, but the guy said he needed to have a drink. He asked Stan to go get him a 6-pack. Well, Stan had done this before. He used to carry that shit in his trunk. He knew. He knew what these guys needed, right? I think we got a carton of cigarettes and a 6-pack of beer out of the car. The guy was like really happy. He opened a beer and a pack of cigarettes right away. He was smoking and drinking, and he looked super rough, man. But Stan signed him. He took the guy through what it meant, and, you know, if they get anything or whatever, you'll get this amount, and it's this percentage. The guy put his name on it. Techniques the AAPL (American Association of Professional Landmen) recommends. • • • • • • • •

Speak their language Open with an offer Know your target price and limits Don’t anchor low Don’t be adversarial Learn to love silence Be prepared with a counteroffer Never rush it

Stan was a notary too, and he notarized everything that he got signed. Anyway, Stan was in the kitchen getting this paper work signed. I was in the living room sitting on the couch. I'm, like, “Oh there's a coffee table there in front of me and there's a TV across the room.” I could kind of see that, and there was a like a love seat over there, and then a longer sectional couch. I sat in the

Cogwheel

Jill Johnson

middle of this couch, kind of sitting on the edge. Like I didn’t lay back on the couch or anything, you know? I'm just kind of sitting there, like, temporary, and I'm listening to them in the other room, and I'm looking towards the light in the kitchen, you know, and then I look around the living room. I look down at the floor, and I'm looking, and I'm going “Oh, there's something weird here. Well, this is kind of strange.” I'm looking. I'm going, “There's something crawling around on the floor.” Then, I’m, like, “Holy, there are bugs all over this floor. Oh my God, everywhere.” I was like, “God, it's moving,” and I got the hell out of that living room. Like, right now. It freaked me out, you know? I walked right through the kitchen, and walked out to the car. I mean, Stan was done, he was getting ready to say his goodbyes, or whatever, you know? I said “Hey nice to see you.” I went right to the car. Stan came out, and he said “Oh, you must been ready to go,” or something like that. I said “Stan, there was bugs all over that couch and all over that floor. I didn't want to get them on me, and I didn't want to bring them to the car.” I'm like “Holy, it scared the shit out of me, man.” He just started laughing. The place was infested. It was absolute poverty. I was like, “Ho, these people in their day-to-day existence live in absolute poverty”

V o l . 12 N o . 2 which, I know about, right? Or I did back then, anyway. There was no food in those houses. There's no...I mean, there's nothing, right? About getting Cecil White Bird to sign, I think Stan said “I'll come back for it another time because I want to get to Minneapolis and get those signatures tonight,” and so we kicked ass to Minneapolis, and got some shit done out there. This Lease shall continue in force and the rights granted to Ener-Kel (LESSEE) shall be quietly enjoyed by Ener-Kel (LESSEE) for a term of Five (5) years (the “Primary Term”), and as long thereafter as operations are conducted on the Leased Premises, or as long as well(s) producing Oil and Gas in paying quantities or well(s) capable of producing Oil and Gas in paying quantities from the Leased Premises or from lands unitized or pooled therewith, in the sole judgment of Ener-Kel (LESSEE). I didn’t like that job. It made me sick to do it. All those people signing away what they didn’t know they had, you know?

and to be safe, away from the frenzy and the risk. Also, it was hard to find a place to sleep in Williston or anywhere near there. And too expensive. An elderly couple would allow Huiyin and Fei Hong to stay in their farmhouse in exchange for work, and there were already a few other Chinese families, women and children, in the area. Zhang’s cousin, who had worked the oil rigs for several years had told Zhang about looking in Shelby for places where the family could stay. Today they would say good-bye to each other, but Zhang would go out to Shelby on the train to visit as soon as his hitch was over. Last night the family stayed in a grassy place by the brown river, sleeping in their blankets, as they had been for a week since Huiyin and Fei Hong had come in on the train from Chicago. Zhang would not bring his wife to the old trailer in the camp where he would stay after they left. There were many men sharing and living in trailers in that camp—workers for Earthwell Energy, Schlumberger, and other companies. It was a dangerous place for women and children. It was a dangerous place for men too. So much drinking.

IV. Coach Car: 25 Aisle and Middle Seat All the people here were so strange, so fat. So alien. And the food so bad. The monstrous brown buns with the liquid sugar sauce. And why so much cheese on all the food? But the family was here to make its way, to grow and to prosper, to move away from the endless work of the farm near Gaoling, from the failure of the shop in Philadelphia—forget the hunger. The life of their son was most important. Liu Zhang could feel the roughness of the jacket that he had just bought at the store named “Murdoch’s” where pig supplies were mixed in with work clothes and horse saddles. There was a man in that store buying very tight pants and a big hat. He wore an American flag T-shirt decorated with an evil looking, yellow-eyed bird. Zhang was careful not to stare. He stayed very focused on buying clothes for his job at Earthwell Energy. He was the replacement security guard at their Flat Rock drilling site. The new clothes were grey, stiff, and creased. As he walked to the train, the pants made a sound like an envelope opening. Over and over again. Huiyin and Fei Hong would go west to Shelby, Montana where Zhang had found a place for them to stay

Faultline

Jim Thiele

Huiyin had been so excited this morning. She had made liang pi, cold noodles, for breakfast over Zhang’s little camp stove, and she and Fei Hong would be able to take the food on the train, which left Williston at 11:07 this morning and would be in Shelby at 5:17 that night. She had been happy. But now that Zhang was walking them to the train car and finding them seats, she started to quiet. Other people on the train were looking at them, again, as they had when they traveled from Chicago. He told them he would see them in a month and left them in the top part of the train car.

70 They could not see Zhang waving goodbye into the windows of their car. He was gesturing on the wrong side of the train, and the sun made it hard to look anyway. Mother and son talked to each other for a while after the train pulled out of the Williston station, but gradually their voices became more and more hushed, until they fell silent altogether. The hum of other languages grew louder, and discussion of a pet cat could be heard. V. Sleeper Car The interior of the sleeper cabin was dark. “We’ll get to Spokane tomorrow morning, and then we got to lay low until the company says go.” “I don’t give a shit if we aren’t supposed to smoke. I am going to burn one right here, right now. They can come after me if they want.” “Where are we going after Spokane? I don’t know. L.A.? Vegas? Alaska? Fuckin’ the dark side of the moon? Anywhere hands can’t be put on me, that’s where we’re goin’. It’s not only the tribal cops that are looking for me since they found my own private dumping ground and those hot socks. It’s the Feds now too. Finally doin’ their job now that television is involved. They know it was me that dumped the socks, they just don’t know who I did the dumping for. That’s the question, because that’s where the money for clean-up is going to come from. If it ever does.” “You say that I fucked up my life? Darlin’ I’m a roughneck; my life was already fucked before this thing here. Don’t you know that the Patch is nothing but full of people who screwed it up the first-time round, tried again and fucked it up again, only this time they got paid a lot more for doing it?” “The socks? Hauling frack waste? That’s not even a job, sugar, and it sure ain’t no job for a dab hand rigger like me, who knows the crude. I spit sweet light crude and crap frack fluid. I was born to drill, not to haul the left-overs. NO fuckin’ thank you, ma’m. But you know better than me that after that fire on the Rockin’ J and after Buddy’s amputations, I wasn’t going to get hired nowhere that drilled. They said I was partly to blame for that business because of I didn’t know how to call the pressure build up, but I say it was the bad luck that woman rigger brought with her.” “Hauling those socks, though? Worst work you could get. No one wants ‘em, not the company, not the state, and sure as hell not me. Driving around in a leaking truck with a load of orange, radioactive filter socks looking for someplace to dump them, and then shoveling them out

CIRQUE the back end. I’m probably staring down the barrel of some kind of cancer, just about now.” “But, let’s be honest, there ain’t no job security in rig work. Not here, not in Texas, not in Oklahoma, not Wyoming, not nowhere that is oil.” VI. North of the Tracks: Wait, Precise Geographical Coordinates: 48 degrees, and 13 minutes, 59 seconds North; 101 degrees, and 17 minutes, and 32 seconds West: 48°13’59”N 101°17’32”W; Less Precise Location, near the Cleetwood Rig—true name the Mouse River Basin. The Gray Tiger Salamander sucked her tail and rocked back on her spine, curling in on herself while looking down on the death scattered in shrunken bodies around the hard, rotating thing that smelled of rotting mud and dead sucker fish left three weeks on the river bank. No salamander liked come up from the burrow unless it was spring or the rain was heavy, but the activity of the upright ones and their life above ground, not-in-thewater, needed to be watched, although almost never could anything be done in that watching. The days were far behind when the Wahpeton used salamander claws at the edge of their ceremonial lodges and the Mandan put Thunder Beings and Salamanders on their pottery to represent the above and below and the great wheel of life and death. Even their own European stories of the salamander and its sacred fire told in occult wisdom and in the texts of the ancient Greeks had been abandoned, sold by the servants of the turning machine. The salamander gets no food but from the fire, in which it constantly renews its scaly skin. The salamander, which renews its scaly skin in the fire— for virtue. —Notebooks of Da Vinci The Grey Tiger Salamander looked down at the many of her kind who were killed by the oil well’s wastewater. A flowback accident. A spill into the river and into the water table. “Flowback will contain the chemical additives used during hydraulic fracturing; thus, flowback is an industrial wastewater that requires proper treatment and/or disposal," according to Cornell University's Water Resources Institute. It takes a lot of water to frack a well. A single shale well may use 2—8 million gallons over its possible lifetime, depending on the geological characteristics of the

V o l . 12 N o . 2 particular “play,” or formation, involved. Large volumes of fracking fluids are injected underground at high pressure. Much of the injected mixture resurfaces within the first 2 weeks after pressure is released on the well. This so-called flowback tends to have high levels of lead, ammonium, selenium, salts, and other contaminants, like radium, a radioactive element. Some scientists say that it will take hundreds of years for the water table in Western North Dakota to clear, to again be able support life for its native animals and amphibians and fish. All of the salamanders and frogs and snakes closest to the rig had come out from their burrows and logs and water puddles when the flowback of the fluid had come, in a wave, over them. In their attempt to escape, their bodies lost life, desiccating in the sun on the pad around the rig. They died in the hundreds. Plains Spadefoots, Green Snakes, False Map Turtles, Grey Tiger Salamanders, and their kin the Ordinary Tiger Salamander. All their bodies strewn about the rig in clenched movement stilled by the chemicals in the water. The Grey Tiger Salamander uncoiled herself. She flicked out her tongue, smelled the dirty air, and began to slide back and forth across the grasses, moving toward the rig with its trailers. In the light of the evening her variegated tail looked as though it was flickering, licked with the smallest of fires, the beginnings of flame. For virtue. “Empire Builder” was originally published in the online journal Twelve Winters

Traces in the Sand

Yellow Lichen

Matt Witt

Annekathrin Hansen

Original 176 Vic Cavalli

CIRQUE

V o l . 12 N o . 2

P O E T RY Luther Allen

squalicum beach march 2 it is spring here grey and green only the second we have seen in the northwest. last night i talked to the buyer of our place in colorado. there is still snow on the ground it's been a rough winter and they are selling the house. after work i walk on squalicum beach. a young woman the long pier glistering straw hair low tide enticing in her sunset solitude the water and sky abyssing out to greyness somewhere past seattle and she smiles as i go past. down the beach stones smooth as the cheek of a young girl nestled, rooted in the saltgrit. running, loping in the fading light til the blood begins to surge the heart hurts and then heals the shins begin to splint... as happens more quickly now as i soften and droop and grow more brittle with age more bitter/sentimental, aware/dull cynical, despondent, and hopeful patient/restless secure/insecure and perfect in my inconsistencies. waiting is not mere empty hoping -it is an inner certainty — i ching oh, the endless tyrannical mindclutter.

on the trestle (no, i’m sure that here it’s called a pier) running a rusty pipe far into the bay large unnamed birds, settled wings cocked to the coming stars hundreds, eyeing the blood orb softening into the murk. they ignore me. and i am pleased by that. and pleased by the vision -- a premonition i easily settle into -of a hundred years hence when our ilk and our ways have self-destructed leaving the rest of life in peace. just like this. but without us. beyond, the shore stretches a panicked pavement of rock more wreckage of old bellingham. the whooshing of determined current giving the illusion of movement to an anchored post. i have little urge to go farther. the rest looks much the same and there is enough here for a long time and besides it is darkening as the earth pulls me away into the black. a patch of fresh water in last light oozed from some timeless seep trapped beautifully amongst the boulders in its pregnant sterility.

CIRQUE

i jog back, easier now to be greeted by huffing young men even later than i am smartly dressed and pushing themselves bringing their dogs down to shit on the beach. the long pier is empty of the woman. i remember how it is now in colorado: the drab worn colors, mud beneath the snow cold, yet dustless winds only small peeps of green. i turn up the ravine toward home flood into the warm and chill of this delicious spring this green jumble of blackberry, salal, and vine maple spy the first skinny slug of the year and find something between a thought and a feeling: perhaps it would be ok in a hundred years if the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of my friends were here cultivating steaming mussels singing songs with the salmon the ravens the sea the scudding clouds

Fallen

Lucy Tyrrell

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Lana Hechtman Ayers

The Loveliest The milk of moonlight spills silently across the night yard. A slight rustling in the underbrush lets me know I’m never truly alone. Being awake at such blue hours, my thoughts grow vibrant as counterpoint to lightlessness, generate nubs of inspiration that often burble into poetry. The air is cool and crisp, scented with leaf mold and fallen pine needles, the mulled wine of many seasons living in one place. I keep the porch light off most wakeful eves, allow my eyes to adjust to night sky, surprisingly bright and ambient. Stars silver and red, coral and gold twinkle against the many-fathomed sea of space above. Even overnight clouds glow as if lit from within. As a child, I lay on the lounge chair so many restless summer twilights, seeking rare meteor streaks, and secretly aching for the spaceship to come fetch me back to my true home planet, where sunshine was a myth, or at the very least, shunned. Nearly some sixty insomniac years on Earth, and I’m finally fully acclimated to a middle-of-the-night life, mostly with ice cream cones and old black and white Capra comedies. Yesterday, I walked in 3 AM rain with my little shadow-colored dog, she a sniffing machine, me a wet sled being dragged along. Dry cemetery hours, I’m often melancholy for the pitter pat on the roof, the sight of drops rippling wide arcs across oil-dark pooling puddles. This overnight, I woke after only an hour’s rest, got dressed, and took myself outside for yet another meditative tour of nighttide. There’s peace in the rhythmic twitter of insects, plaintive wisdom in the stark cries of nocturnal birds and beasts. Should you care to come visit me soon, I’d be happy to share with you the loveliest of un-sleeps.

Laura E. Bailey

Wrack Line No line today between sea and sky, no horizon, only an idea of shore, a division between safe harbor and narrow escape. Waves scrape arcs of foamy white across a sullen blue. Breaks form up and fall apart, threaten bones and steal breath. Sets swell up from depths to tempt surfers, sleek as otters sliding over a cliff. Dancing skating drowning. The line today between sea and land is an innocent churn of foam, a tease, grains of sand slipping so gently underfoot, I mistake it for an embrace and then I stumble and fall. A black dog chases a yellow ball, an inky smear on the polished slick of low tide. A whiff of decay, and he abandons pursuit, pulls hard towards the ragged sweep pushing against the dunes, a morning tangle of debris left behind after high tide relinquished the shore.

Divided Interests

Sheary Clough Suiter

CIRQUE

Salt-slicked feathers fan in two mirrored curves, their sweeping grace arrested, sand spattered across sightless eyes, stilled corpse a mockery of flight. The ball, abandoned, bobs in the low tumble where sea teases shore. All I (once) believed buried, nothing is hidden now.

Karen Bonaudi

Open Door The empty room, the door wide open like a wound, all the old signals missing: ajar--I’m coming back closed--I’m in for the night--

I will be your blanket in winter, in summer, your shade. I am the warning that whispers to you of trouble around the bend, the pen you use to write

empty now except for the extension cord lying on the carpet, all the abstracts in a pile on the floor.

across your page. You will smile in morning sun, drink tea and spread memory of me like strawberry jam across your toast.

Now you are gone and doing, just doing. I see you forever standing on the top of a mountain like the poster I brought you once from Colorado. Everything here still, just the dog’s nose following the top of my pen as it moves across the page. Sometimes I rise early just to catch the dawn, just to catch that common miracle that used to light your face, your faint smile of wonder and of knowing. Pink Nail Patch

Gary Thomas

V o l . 12 N o . 2 Michelle Bonczek Evory

The uterus is a fickle vessel In the bay, oysters open and close, an eye, a mouth, lipped tight. Like a bivalve, an ovary does its thing, stringing out pearl after pearl, bubble after bubble, silent speech balloons evaporating over our mouths like smoke from a train. Back to the sky you go, forever forward we chug. If I had a baby, maybe I’d name her Pearl, small girl emerging from the shell of me. But, as you must have sensed, I don’t have a baby and it is such a loss this not having someone to name. As a teenager I’d compile lists of names in the back of notebooks, a girl column, a boy column. I’d swirl them in my mouth like fine wine tasting every essence, every suggestion. Avery, Apple, Emerson, Plum, for a long time my grandmother’s name, Aleksandra, or, a combination of both my grandmothers, Annazandra, Zandy for short. Pearl…bubble…cloud… This week, on a flight bound for Dallas, a heart meant to stay in Seattle was left behind on the plane. This is what we can do today: fly pieces of ourselves around the world. Implant parts of ourselves into someone else’s body. Leave our hearts absentmindedly behind. Puff…Puff…Puff. Last year, a nineteen-year-old who tried to kill herself with a bullet to the head and survived, received the first ever face transplant. We wait to see if her body rejects it. There is never a guarantee an embryo will implant itself in a womb, let alone one face take to another. Years ago, leaving the mountainous Pacific Northwest for the flat Midwest was like leaving my heart on a plane meant to stay in Seattle. It was like trading one face for another. I’ve never stopped longing for those rainforests, volcanos, moose knee high in a river, drinking the river, pissing the river. Longing to replace tornado warnings with tsunamis, to look out over the bay water and see oysters opening and closing, my ovaries stringing out pearl, pearl, pearl.

Uluhe

Jim Thiele

CIRQUE

Kristina Boratino

Nancy Lucille The yahtzee cup growls as great-grandma shakes up five weighty dice that will soon determine her fate. As they erupt onto the memory-scarred oak table, I watch her licorice-red-lips curl up into a smirk as she takes a drag off her marlboro cigarette. She pushes her thick, rimless glasses up towards foggy blue eyes that still held hope her storm would pass. The biting breeze of emphysema had raced in fierce-wreaking havoc on once hearty lungs. “What a crummy roll,” She says, while adding up all the dice. “I guess I'll have to use my chance.”

Ronda Broatch

In the Unzipped Pine I Find the Beetle, Asleep Its dreams go on for a thousand mornings. To the funeral for the crow who dropped from the sky, one hundred more arrived and made a circle of sound. When the forest was razed, the sky mourned. Ferns opened to catch what fell. Because the doe and fawn feast on pears, I forget to worry the myriad scientific experiments fermenting in my fridge. I’ve become prey to the dragonfly, to the long lens of my latest Nikon. In my ribcage flames acer palmatum and evening honeysuckle, a crushed berry. Each unpainted rose opens like a kaleidoscope. When I was young I carried what mattered in the deep long pocket of an army coat, in the soles of Converse shoes color of stage-dive, of morning-after cigarette smoke. What burns is what I gave of myself all too often, mornings bargaining with a faceless god for one more chance at redemption. The pine beetle sleeps, the tree slowly zips its flesh around it like a coffin.

Pathways

Jim Thiele

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Mark Burke

Salvation by Arithmetic Dogmas cobbled from numbers, the eightfold path, the trinity, the seven deadly sins, hell’s nine terraces of crime. There is the miracle of nineteen, the arithmetic of prayer wheels multiplying grace in the wind, birth-date excuses provided by the twelve signs of the zodiac. Each a mathematics of morals, strategies for atonement, inventions to amass credits, barter against the penalties for sin and placate some final arbitrator, hop-scotch to absolution. Any system of trade requires consistent exchange rates to keep the market predictable and a book to consult for adjustments, calculate forgiveness credits like travel points. We lie in the dark and devise self-serving recalculations, rig the scale with the excuse of intention. When night settles into silence, the hush of reckoning begins, metal beads squeal across abacus rods and we pull the covers up, wonder if all the others dancing around distant stars dream they are the chosen ones too?

Echos Jim Thiele

Facing Thought

Nard Claar

CIRQUE

Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum

Glitter Gulch Certainly the Denali Borough and all the businesses around the Denali have been suffering from the COVID crisis, so local hire is certainly an option because what we wanna avoid is bringing in people from all over the United States or elsewhere into these smaller communities where healthcare isn’t so easy to get to. —Pete Christian, National Park Service Alaska spokesperson Not all that glitters is gold, or even Fool’s Gold, though you’ll find some of that here, even now, in the shuttered gift shops shadowed by Denali, hushed in harsh winter, dulled by that corona we all know and [hate]. Drive that stretch of road claimed by the Park Service, today, and you might catch a ghostly local, hired last summer to trap the few tourists brave or dumb enough to travel to the town that’s not a town at all, but a makeshift village, a collection of cabins and eateries littering the highway like fungi, only worse — less natural — in a time of disease and turmoil. There are assumptions that next season will be better. Until then, no souvenirs are sold, no feverish fingers point to the Great One, no mouths gasp in awe of it. Only the caretakers, minding locks and frozen pipes, say hello every morning, whisper, “goodnight.”

Hinged 2

Jill Johnson

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Vic Cavalli

Chevy Survival Parked in the forest, The pale yellow dust Penetrates to the internal hinges Of the old Chev; it veils The cracked glass And paint—a blank embrace Pollinating a machine.

Dale Champlin Two Poems

Little Bird What you taste here in the trees is my amber light. What you see down low is my wet silver eye. —Michael Burwell, “Self Portrait as Two Tiny Gods” You have come to hear her soft song and find—so like a thrush in crinoline— beyond the gravitational divide, her milky eyes the color of mist on the tide. You recount all the wishes in your sleepless nights, your lonely bitter lips, and find a friend in the shift and rustle of petticoats. You come rushing over the meadow. She catches you in the snare of her young arms, and you are both the same height, of one mind, taken off-guard, unloosed, lapping and spinning as full sails. Goldfinch

Gordon Harrison

You don’t worry what Grandmother Gaia, Mother Ceto and Father Phorcys think. You are youth-reckless, excited but unafraid, and for the first time—glad you’re alive. —Inspired by Amalia Guglielminetti, My Voice

CIRQUE

Rapt and Aware —after Michael Burwell Those fish, the ones with a snout like a saber, gleaming coins for eyes, bodies long and sinuous yet here we float, our flesh clothed in soft green mold. Though we sing with two mouths, our thoughts are one. We come together on the cusp of the sea—fascinated by the shape of your hand, the drape of your arm, the way your throat sieves silver water. We were inventing a language. Something to do with our mouths, our tongues curved elusive in the sea caves of our teeth. Under waves imbibing light from above, at first glance we pose nude in scale and fin, spinning eel-beautiful down-dangling fish-like. After dark we lure and bob. We are two salamander sylphs, water embodied, blue and aquamarine as hazy scrim. What you feel in the sea is our octopus reach. What you see below is our wet silver gaze. What you hear tonight is the wail of the waves. Two halved spirits we bivalves— flail shriveled fingertips white and ghostly. We have swallowed the bait—hook, line & sinker— swilling salty spritzers in our underwater saloon. Watch us surf the breakers. Listen to us croon.

Ice Frog

Janet Klein

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Susan Chase-Foster

A Triptych of Illuminations I. Circle Hot Springs, Alaska Most of us were asleep when the wolf wails cut through our dreams, two, three, five, eight, a Fibonacci of howls and hoots a nebula of Canis lupus songs spiraling around us, an invitation to forget it was negative 40, we were unfurred, we would likely freeze if we stepped outside in our flannel pajamas.

It never came, the flash, though the sun set religiously.

But who can resist the call of the pack?

III. Mount Cook, New Zealand

We raced barefoot across snow, shape-shifting, yipping ancient hymns under the undulating curtain of shimmering green energy until the pain in our naked paws brought us to our senses and we padded back to the cabin, wrapped ourselves in qiviut blankets, fell into four-footed dreams. II. Bahia de Banderas, Mexico When the wind ceased clattering palm fronds and no-see-ums had not yet arrived for their evening meal, we’d trot to the beach, each with a bottle of Scotch, flop against the brick wall, our toes tucked in a blanket of warm sand and gaze across the sapphire sea to the edge of the world, waiting for the green flash at sunset.

But the moon always arrived, sometimes a golden sliver of Cheshire Cat smile, sometimes a hibiscus moon, red and dripping like a street dog’s tongue. Only once, as Luna glowed green and luminous as the Northern Lights, we toasted her.

That still and silent Southern Hemisphere night at Aoraki, the three-summit, cloud-piercing glacial mass of South Island prominence, a celestial light of startling intensity burst through the lens of our cabin window, flooding us awake, insisting we merge (or be blinded by awe) with two swirling arms splashing and smearing billions of suns and planets, glistering green gas clouds and all manner of matter into a spiral of cosmic milk, bright-white as dawn on a blanket of spring snow, an eye-melting swath of illumination in the vast dilation of night.

CIRQUE

David Cheezem

Easley, Missouri, April 9, 2018 A trail and a river. Still cold before the land greens up. If you want color, find it in shapes and shadows: Tangled scab-skinned arches. Deadwood embarrassing the river. Find color in the dirty river-- the river Lewis and Clark drank “straight.” At the marina where I camped, dinner at the big table, chicken fried steak. Self-serve. Loneliness is a tourist, doesn’t know how much casserole is too much. After dinner, in my tent, listening to the electric guitar spilling out of an RV, perfecting its lick, over and over. A year after I passed through their lives, the river would flood.

Night Shift

Lindsey Morrison Grant

Linda Conroy

A Three Point Hitch She thinks of all the work she’ll do, spreading hay bales, feed, and hauling wood. The hitch behind allows quick coupling of implements, rakes, excavators and the like, and she admires the kingpin, the main pivot in the steering of this novel thing.

She’ll climb aboard in summer clad in denim shorts, an old worn shirt, her leather boots, and practice, learn the operation of this sudden rig, move with the expectation of the chores, shine its tiny windshield, and park it where she’ll see it from indoors.

Her partner hasn’t seen it yet. It’s hidden in the barn, a place he never goes. She bought it while he was away at work, driving his own enormous truck and living in another woman’s house.

She loves its glossy green, its black roll bar, its promises of loyalty, longevity, when all else in this chapter of her life appears to need to change.

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Barn

Jill Johnson

Brittney Corrigan

Death Haiku A rabbit is not as quiet as you might think. Depends on the hawk. A sunflower bends at the neck, face picked empty by birds, withering. The frost-antlered skull, cast in shades of ice and white, holds fast to the ground. Unwinged in the sand the gull is part air, part sea. Salted undoing. Field mouse or maggot, which is the more beautiful? Bodies intertwined.

Entangled

Sheary Clough Suiter

CIRQUE

Mary Eliza Crane

Prayer I will not disturb the man at prayer. He stands on salmon stones in fur topped boots, a silent straight backed spine. I back away to claim my own piece of river, my own stretch of slate gray sky. Who knows what gods or demons hold him as we're passing through the eye?

Cobble Beach

Lucy Tyrrell

Thomas Elson

One Morning Each Week One day a week, my family did not begin our mornings with bacon and eggs or even a bowl of cereal. I would wake to complete silence, followed a few minutes later by mumbling, feet shuffling, then stomping across floors. Palms slapped doorjambs. Stay in bed. Stay quiet. A few angry yawns. Throats clearing. More shuffling. But no sounds from the kitchen. The three of us prepared separately. Then a few muttered questions. Avoid this part. Do not respond. Do not engage. Eyes flashed toward wall clocks. Do not think. More bathroom sounds. Doors closed. Teeth brushed. Remain silent. Just do what you need to do and be quiet. Stools flush. Water runs. Doors open. Hangars move across dowels in the closet. Voices: Father, “Hurry up. Aren’t you ready yet?” Mother, “Just be patient.” Father, “We can’t be late for church.” Mother, “It’s only a few blocks away.” Father, shouts at me, “What the hell takes you so long?” Pretend I don’t hear. Too busy getting ready. Voices. Words that are forbidden where we’re going. Father, “---damn it. You do this every week.” Mother, “Just wait in the — damn car.” Repress.

The kitchen door to the garage slams against the wall, does not close. Garage door rolls open. Engine turns over. The roar of a gunned engine. Do not feel. Inside the house — the relative calm of an armed truce. Do not trust. Mother, “I’m about ready.” Me, “Me too.” Quiet. Until the horn honks once. Horn honks again. Horn blares constantly, then stops. Do not ask. Horn honks again, twice, then again, and again. We walk to the garage together. There’s nothing wrong here and don’t you dare tell anyone about it.

Confrontation

Sheary Clough Suiter

V o l . 12 N o . 2 Nancy Deschu Two Poems

The Pilot's Dog Bering Glacier Field Camp, Alaska Coyote skulked down the slope, danced circles around the husky, bowed down like a dog in play. Then, pressed shoulder to shoulder, they trotted off together across the tundra. The pilot scanned the vastness, shouted her name into the glacial air, flew hours, searching the landscape. The sun slipped low, shadows grew, the plane landed, the dog still missing. Then, on the ridge they appeared, two silhouettes, side by side. The pilot crawled uphill, rope in hand, pleading, whispering memories, circling the Dog with his words. The Dog took a few steps forward, Coyote followed closely, and there Dog stood — halfway between Coyote and man. Quickly, the pilot tossed the lasso around the husky’s neck, the same rope he used to tie the plane down so the wind would not carry it away. Now, in the dusk, as we walk towards camp, the dog tugs against the rope and whines. Coyote dodges through my mind. I turn quickly — and see an apparition, then Coyote disappears. But when I look down at the husky, I see her nose is more pointed, her body more lithe, her eyes sly and brighter.

Hatcher Pass Ridge

Consequence There is a threshold on snow, pressure, angle, timing. The burden of weight gathers, and one more step of one caribou strains the surface, collapses a cornice, setting off slabs, that sweep away the herd of ninety. Swimming through billows of snow, bodies spin up to the airy sky, press down to the gauzy white, legs and antlers tangle and snap, each vaulting turn takes a toll, until the mountain gives up, and the torrent relents. A stillness on this April day, just the spindrift lacing the surface of the snow, a flock of geese clucking overhead, flying to their arctic nesting grounds. There is no sign of that final footfall, or the tumbling lanky deer, only bits of antler, a hoof poking out, an icy eye peering skywards from the settled snow.

Annekathrin Hansen

CIRQUE

Amelia Díaz Ettinger

Double-Crested Cormorant At Tamani Pesh-wa Phalacrocorax auritus Driving down the gorge alongside the long ribbon of the Columbia you see them pose “spread eagle.” Witness prehistory in the inky black of feathers that help them dive seeking crustaceans, or small fish in those haughty beaks that they hold high. An aristocrat with the neck of a snake. Easy figure to identify in these waters which no longer hold wooden canoes laden with fish to trade. Auritus, do you carry in your dense bones how these waters rushed without the treachery of dams? Does the taste of salmon, in these long-gone trading posts marked with pictographs, linger on your tongue? Do you miss the aura of unrestrained water? Do you see the vigilance of the One That Watches? Tsagaglalal guards your clever angle and silence until you go to roost. Your specter is written on these rocks, a keepsake.

Land and Water

Nard Claar

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Helena Fagan

Łódź Ghetto Courtyards Poland, April 1998 Rybna 12 This building contradicts Jake’s memory of last home where he left his mother to volunteer for work in Auschwitz. They told us it would be better. He shrugs, white head tilted back, hands raised to the sky. How could we know? Pacing crumbling courtyard, he searches memories worn and altered by years of holding and sifting. Dark haired woman steps from shadow into light, our guide translates: My family owned this place before the war, owns it now. Just last month I returned Jewish belongings to their community center, now that there is one. Drakarska Street The Jews come back to claim their property, men shout, slouch toward us, hands in pockets, faces twisted with suspicion; ragged children edge closer, slender weeds, timid smiles; dusty yellow dogs nose into our hands, ghost faces glint in windows.

Stages

We are the rich American Jews they have always expected, a threat to life in these crumbling brick buildings likely claimed after the last gas truck left for Chelmno, the last cattle car for Auschwitz. The worst part of the city, always has been, they claim through our guide who tells us, It’s time to go, quickly, quickly, as the men move closer, pull hands from pockets, flash them in our faces.

Gary Thomas

CIRQUE

They want your money, we should go, we should go. But Mom holds steady, eyes searching for her mother, the tiny space they shared, the furniture factory where she labored, the attic where she hid and where my adolescent nightmares spirited me. I’m almost relieved she sees nothing she knows but somebody fetches the lady with stringy white hair, shuffling slippers, scrawny legs. I lived here before the war, the guide translates, The Nazis forced us out to make room for the Jews. There, her knobby finger points to where the factory once stood. Mom’s eyes dart futilely, still nothing to anchor memory, so we turn back to the glaring men, the graffitied walls where Dirty Jew dripping in black letters shrouds the star of David, then board our bus, travel in silence past the dirt blackened concrete buildings of Łódź.

Robert Fagen

Bleak House We live in a house with a back bed and a back wall open to the air. Above the dry boards of morning sorrowing angels bend toward earth. The world turned long ago from this unfinished place. We do not want to stay here but there is no way out. Trees spread bare arms and weeds choke the yard. My sisters are never hungry though they reach cold hands to the light. Even as children we did not try leaving. Long crying nights had made it our only home.

Wood Door, China Camp, May 9, 2021

Teri White Carnes

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Amy Fair

Witchcraft It was on the side of one mountain in a coastal range, thick with mist and stamped stems and leaves and broken boughs, where she fell in love with him. It was at the coast itself, winter winds and rain pelting the windows, where she thought, "this is the last time." She did not threaten, or even speak. She made it true, told him afterward.

A year passed without a funeral, now almost two. She knew she would sleep alone from that point forward, and she knew she would poison the story she told to me, to everyone. Two nights after that hard, lonely death, she dreamed she flayed the skin from his body, and made a book that started with the last chapter first. She knew if she could remember and record their uglier memories, she might find some path through those years. She might find the ingredient that soured the dish.

She did not follow his path, those last two years of his life a mystery. Much of their time together, still a mystery— still a low whisper in her ear every time it rains, every time she knots her own hair around a stub of pencil.

She marked all the openings of her fragile memory with chalk, and she worked with locks of his hair wrapped around the stubs of her pencils. In that story, she conjured a better version: attentive, handsome, responsible. She didn't worry about truth, and he couldn't object.

Grief

Morning Williams

CIRQUE

J.V. Foerster

Lost at Sea There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea. —Khalil Gibran 1. Always again the oceans next wave. The sand, thinning beneath my feet

of meditation to rock and sand. When winter comes it’s a burgeoning lover with biting winds. There is no more authentic love as it breaks the body as it tears boats apart.

I’m giving it my sadness to carry away sweeping out beyond the ships into better storms.

It builds with its passion icy sculptures over lighthouses, against the shore. Painting painting whatever is there in a sweet rhythm of passion. Tucking each object into its arms of ice.

I am trying with each step to catch the bursts of foam like it’s kiss can replace you.

3. I was born in a shifty green hospital smelling of my mother’s ether.

I accept it’s coming and going it has its reasons you never really did.

The black and white habits hanging over us as I was pulled out with cold metal clamps. Nuns washed me from my mother’s blood and caul. It was the last time I’d be so close to her or God.

Go slower I whisper as it laps me go slower please… don’t forget me when you rush out. When you forgot me I wanted to be swallowed away slipping into a tide of indifference longing for a fever that compelled me to move forward move forward. 2. I was born on the Great Lakes. There is no salt or tide there. The water often sits with a steady stillness at the shoreline then gives a lazy roll

4. I stand at this ocean and think of how spring rains are melting the ice far away on the lake where I was born. Its warm tongue tasting the shore and piers freeing them up to live again. I came to the Pacific later in my life as if it was my mother it terrified me and I loved it for that terror. The water, a salty brew I drink from its womb always trying to enter deeper and deeper curled into its enraptured arms.

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Trina Gaynon

Covered Bridge The covered bridge nears completion, Built from the center of the roof out. Any amateur knows you begin Construction with the frame, seeking for Flat edges, sorting colors as you go. I was always better at the bright work.

Protecting the puzzle and fold it, for For the time being, out of sight. I go From sky to high contrast, seek completion Down the center. Where the river begins To cascade it foams white, works Its way between rock and weed out

I leave the ends suspended as quick work Slows. It can wait for completion. So obediently back to the frame I go. I eye pieces of sky. It's not long before In distraction I begin to pick blues out, Pawing through the box eager to begin.

To a black pool along the bottom. Out Of the jumble fingers seek for One piece here and there to work Into one empty spot where it will go Easily. So many empty spaces, I begin To put off attempts at completion.

When did jigsaws and the pandemic begin To take on gray tones as I work? My right eye developed a fog long before I took on this frame that defies completion. Better to move on to orange foliage out Behind the bridge. With nowhere else to go

Piece work a blur, brown rock shines out Copper bright on completion, alchemy for Wherever I go, the patience to again begin.

On a rainy day, as we shelter in place, I go About making the broken whole. I begin To accept how dreary this project is without Corrected vision. For days, I work Instead to bring this sestina to completion. I pull back the cover I find useful for

On the Boardwalk

Jack Broom

CIRQUE

Jeremy George Two Poems

Calling at An Elder's House I had forgotten but then I remembered calling at an elder’s house near the beach road on the older side of town, where the horizon was a dome & the ice a city in the background. I was bumping around the village with Craig, over dirt roads not scraped smooth in a month, his old red Subaru handling the washboard just fine. We parked in front. I remember her ice-cellar’s hatch was open, a hole in the ground between us & the front door, open to its own carnivorous underworld, open to ancient, continuous, & practiced habits—meat, blubber, maktak, fish, caribou ribs with venous fat—its ice walls dripping miniscule sweat beads. Once inside the house, I saw a blast of silence from an old TV in a corner, tinfoil curled like a comma at the end of its antennae. The walls framed seal skins threaded together like the house was a thing once alive, a set of survival skills. We are having a hard time finding some legends to tell, we have run out of old people, she said. Her voice was blunt as fracture. Everything seemed to indicate that the place was alive, a village & its people forewarned, despite casualties of truth or obsolete attention. Even though it was given to a deep pulse underneath. Even though it was prone to drowning. I looked at her looking at me & perhaps wondering who is this stranger in her house. Her eyes beheld a sense of time that was grounded in blue & white & the sun purging itself from watersky. Somewhere, elsewhere, but not here, not today, a story will emerge to balance the vacancy, the silence, the pounding.

Door Detail

Jill Johnson

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Jeremy George

What Matters & What Goes An ambulance missed a driveway before turning back, y-turning on Yugit St., retracing its snowy tracks to scuttle a moment of deep despair. A cottonwood from Canada washed up on the beach, its maritime journey miraculous—ice-gouged, salty, bone-white. It beached where the shore is shaped like a mouth, an echo, a yellow flame. The last hour, the perfect hour. Meanwhile, snow is blowing into a crevasse of letters, the name of a place spoken of in past tense. & I’m just waiting, waiting, waiting, because I know what matters & what goes. Like the neighbor’s porch light flashing on & off, or a car’s headlights in a B movie pressing forward on a dark, obscure road, heading for what must be no good end. Or the dog sloping off down the stairs, ears skull-pressed & tail low, to feel if he can the air skulking under the garage door, streetlight thinning in, gathering into bulk. It’s knowing how to define a town swallowed seasonably by the sea, where ice scars the beach & its last heaves resound like first buoys. It’s an unnamed street already squared off for future residence, the memories that will one day fit or not, boxed & archived as securely as posts driven six feet into ephemera, into permafrost. It’s the street the cabby bypassed on his way to a pick-up, headlights shining across the tundra to catch on nothing & still recover the distance back. When he recalls for you the subcontinental village of his youth, where his mother

Snowy Owl on the Roof

ground saffron & peppers with mortar & pestle, where wild pigs root amidst palm trees, so far away, so exposed to heat & monsoon, so much incandescent color, he is showing you the border of himself. It’s crossing a street, one with friends, one with family, knowing how to love a place becoming tomorrow, becoming cataclysm. It’s the way cabin pressure resists hypoxia. It’s off-loading a 737, footprints like animal tracks on the snow-dusted stairs. Even the burst of—20° air above the tarmac overwhelming the jet engines’ idle. It’s the brief descent to cement, then a short frontier to the terminal, leaning into wind both savage & anonymous. It’s the distance, where a gaswell burn determines the arc of earth, as a cargo plane now sidles in north-by-northwest, full of people & things, full of pressing through, full of the return to ice dreams, maktak, whale liver, to the pedestrian occurrence of polar bears on a gravel spit just outside town, to snowmachines gunning it toward the ocean’s resolve & mercy. It’s moonbright faces going from place to place for reasons only the reckoning hours of morning know. It’s the myths resurrected, the way the elders’ stories end that was the end of the story, stories un-changed, stories that have the final say despite new false claims repeated to great effect. It’s the shadow of youngish lovers going their own way in the dark morning, their dream towns recused of streets & streetlight. It’s everyone asking: “Why can’t we find it in the way life seems?”

Jack Broom

CIRQUE

Elizabeth Mehl Greene

Deer at Dawn Portland, Oregon The deer contemplates Portland ruminates on the idea of it reminisces on good old days earlier than Old Town redolent of Douglas fir absent traffic haze enduring mountains still loom less visible now from deer's eye view so she ascends a tall Pearl District building to take good looks at Rainier, St. Helens, Mt. Hood glazed in snow just gold in this light while denizens of the land rise drink their caffeinated morning dew graze on baked grains If we had built this city... the deer begins, but always stops, even plant-covered rooftops cannot completely camouflage the human footprint enough, they lock up delicious rose gardens often drive on wheels when they could run, ravage forests, meadows, streams that this peculiar throng proclaims to love, but like her, they never fail to reverence un-cloud-covered sun Their bridges might be their best urban asset providing crossings without water peril a steel leap over river contour a fallen metal log supports passage— miraculous advantage, perhaps this herd of humans will manage to halt the vanishing of natural expanse, discern ways to coexist, unwreck verdure, and earn the mark of soft footfalls: Respect.

Time2ReTire

Lindsey Morrison Grant

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Paul Haeder

Grandfather Told Me to Watch for Crows centimes, coins collected near Saint Germaine en Laye old butter crock, near sagging shed, my stash all those bike rides through cobbled rain baguettes and batards for the family boulangerie runs for mom, big pot of marinara salad, and the pan, bread of life I kept the change +--+ old lady gave me croutons to feed ducks, but the crows came followed me home on my Junker bike three speeds me racing through town up hills where crows lifted easily I spread the crunchy bread particles crows tipped down for a munch spoke French in their caw-caw language +--+ the coin cache was once-a -week seemingly fewer and fewer, so I moved the crock to my window, outside, where snails, escargot fist-sized mother of all snails, climbed the slick ceramic at dew hours snails I collected for my sister’s garlic concoction, we celebrated the gourmands of Paris +--+ I looked for crows at French school, and when famille took the VW bug to the Riviera, three Kids, mom spoke French, the old man German speaker, too I watched crows at the docks, crows cracking open clams crows at cemeteries my sister took me to with her Kodak the black birds, those crows, smarter than the street cats and mangy dogs kicked around by angry butchers crows somersaulting for sinew, entertaining port-sipping old fellows and grannies three sheets to the wind +--+ those centimes were diminished by a factor of 10 the crows, I observed, took one, and returned with bits and pieces of marble from the quarry a jigsaw puzzle of amazing marble on the roof above my bedroom, the exchange from me the sucker and the corvids, full of French pennies somewhere where the murder ended bird dusk dives +--+

CIRQUE

I spoke with a PhD at UW, in Seattle gift of crows was his lecture crows that would shit on a husband’s black Mercedes, and bring bras to the lady’s kitchen geranium planters but that black Audi — old man squirting birds with hose old lady gifting crow with meats and dry cat food and even if they moved cars around, the shit plunged onto the old man’s car every morning, the sign, and bras from distant clotheslines throughout Copenhagen, lifted as bird gifts to the kibble-gifting Danish lady +--+ in West Texas, I drove like a bat out of hell all the time, late, on this dirt road to the prison job where I taught, my old jacked up Toyota pickup filled with books and essays, and the crows at one bend where chili and onion trucks peeled out where corn kernels spilled from grain trucks my first near collision, one crow, ducked, as I traveled over his road perch, and I stopped, he looked around kept pecking at corn, and again, and again one or two crows, ducking, as I drove over for an entire semester, I skimmed over them they laughed, caw cawing in border Spanish +--+ I was in Arizona, no more centime-stealing corvids but now Hopi and Navaho buddies, aunties’ legends of crow: wisest of birds, at first colored white, friends of buffalo caw-caw-caw overhead when hunters with sharp spears and arrows came to kill buffalo stampeding and tribes starving so one day, a young hunter dressed as a buffalo mingled with the herd, then crows came, “caw-caw-caw, hunters are here” all buffalo stampeded except the one crow landed on the boy buffalo’s shoulder, “caw caw, leave or you’ll be killed” and the boy grabbed him and the tribe wanted to do something with white crow so they tied his feet to a stone, burned him, but the straps burned through, and crow lifted, now singed, black +--+ Or, Snow Owl’s version: How Crow Gave Fire to the People When the Snow Spirit did appear, all the people and animals were freezing and a messenger was selected to go up to kijilamuh ka’ong, The Creator Who Creates by Thinking What Will Be. The messenger was to ask The Creator to think of the World as being warm again so that they would not all freeze to death. Rainbow Crow was chosen to go and he flew upward for three days. He got the Creator’s attention by singing beautifully, but even though he begged the Creator to make it warm again, the Creator said He could not, because He had thought of Cold and He could not unthink it. But He did think of Fire, a thing that could warm the creatures even when it was cold. And so He poked a stick into the Sun until it was burning, and then gave it to Rainbow Crow to carry back to earth for the creatures. The Creator told Rainbow Crow to hurry before it burned all up. +--+

V o l . 12 N o . 2 I sang the dirge under breath as a dozen crows tiptoed, paraded around dead brother crow in a parking lot near a beach, and I held cars at bay, asked my friend to stand in their way to have them circle away from the funeral corvid ceremony, a delight for me those ideas I grasped, when I read, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? Frans de Waal said, “Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.” +--+ hang gliding years ago off Steptoe Butte the wheat of the Palouse like a choppy verdant sea, my glider new to me, circling and turning, to extend the ride… two crows, near my glider’s leading edge right off my tip, cawing and cawing then with flick of tails, down, turned upside down, at my right wing tip gliding with me, then, above, behind upside down all the way as if to say, “nothing doing polyester and aluminum helmet head slow poke” +--+ the crows are there in ancient-new battles men and children and women exploded apart, or just left whole with death concussions, and dogs come from the shadows crows swooping, hopping from body to body shiny buttons from uniforms gouged away the eyes of those facing heavenwards pulled out by grandfather crow taken whole, taken to another place huge brambles where piles of orbs are pushed up, toward heaven +--+ crows holding séances waiting for the last glimmer to milk over devouring what is left of sight vision, some hope or love some human frailty at the hour of death fear and turmoil, eyes crows eat as if to take souls forever into them +--+

Crow

each new crow generation galvanized to the dead humans alive again, toward heaven, as a gift of crows clownish and smart devilish and forgiving crows and their shiny objects tricks like tobogganing down hills or getting drunk on fermented pyracantha fire thorn berries gobbled up just to see what it’s like to be human sad in our cups, forever believing we are above when in fact we are here, with the crows

Nard Claar

100

CIRQUE

Jim Hanlen

Ode to Lemon Say you could live in the yellow hemisphere where the loose air, the light, the season, your life was fragrant and cool and what you drink, cleaned your breath, oiled your words, and will stain your bones, hopefully your very soul. It would be difficult to die and not to be buried, O to linger longer in the lemon grove.

Bill Hollands

The Age of Innocence It’s on TV in the hotel room after. Three brothers (three now) in our dark disheveled suits. The late sun is everywhere in the room. I remember we played together. Being here makes me remember so much. I look at my brothers. Their smiles tell me they see it, too, the life Michelle Pfeiffer brings to this scene. Even Daniel Day-Lewis laughs, how could he not? You have been away a very long time. Oh, centuries and centuries. Already a bit day-drunk we crack open the mini-bar’s little bottles and bags, who cares? I remember we watched those series together — Roots, Rich Man Poor Man… Since you're not tired and want to talk there’s something I have to tell you. Oh yes, dear. Something about yourself? Home from your junior year abroad

Burst of Sunlight

Brenda Jaeger

101

V o l . 12 N o . 2 we were somehow alone that week we watched Brideshead Revisited. Long hair, bearded, you rolled your own cigarettes, I worried it was marijuana, what did I know? I'm tired of everything. I want to get away, go somewhere far. How far? I don't know. I thought of India. Or Japan. As far as that? When did it get dark? We don’t want the movie to end but it does, of course. We leave everything a mess — empty bottles and bags, crumpled suits on the floor, three boys split between two king beds.

One Man's Treasure

Lindsey Morrison Grant

Curt Hopkins

Harry Matthews The weird discoveries have ended, No Vladimir Mayakovsky happened upon, No Baca bought because the cover called, No fairy tale paths to the beyond. But neither will you find the shelves like mountains, Ranging back in ranks of purple shadow, Glinting with the pearly light of fountains Where you can drink your fill of rosy madder. Where you can climb a host of ghostly ladders. To find once-common works requires work Or veneration of a hidden enterprise That locks away its veiled hoard of books Along with bars of gold and tubs of lye. In a generation Harry Matthews Will be as lost to time as Aedituus.

Enchanted Forest

David Memmott

102

CIRQUE

Corinne Hughes

Flights When the fog comes, the town is gone. A glacier forms in silence while we sleep creeping into space that was once our own breath. The fog captures the land, a gentle surprise; I know nothing of where I have been all this time. Shadows of fir trees line the yard. But walking the streets, I could be anywhere. I’ve learned what it means to be a bird.

Coastal Fog

Marc Janssen

Artemision It is the easy thing, to tear down Reduce to rubble Kick over a sand castle And spit at the Spirit to Create. There is bravado in birthing a statue a building a book a creative work great or small An ambition to permanence To encapsulate a thought Notion Philosophy An unintentional philosophy A changeable vision reworked reworked, kicked over and built up even when the original has not changed at all Encased in three dimensions Four, if you count time. From broken foundations the Cretan architect Cheriphron Designed from his muse His spirit For years he and the Ephesians built the Temple of Artemis Over 120 tall marble columns. A temple, a place of worship and festivals, that sheltered the Statue of Diana A marble likeness of the goddess constructed by the ancient Greek sculptor Endoios Said, by some, to be Daedalus pupil. It stood, one of the wonders of the world, for six hundred years.

Matt Witt

103

V o l . 12 N o . 2

And when the Goths came, They wrapped ropes around those precise Grecian columns And whipped their horses. One by one ripped them away Until the roof collapsed. It was to make a point To change the world The destructive zeal to replace one order with another no matter the cost. Not much difference really between those wild eyed invaders And the ropes hanging limp now from the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson by Clark Mills Andrew Mazolli’s marble creation angrily decapitated, body spray-painted broken Carl Bittner’s Thomas Jefferson face down on the sidewalk Piles of books on fire Broken glass in the house chamber The ransacked notebooks of the senate.

Jill Johnson

Night Smoke Standing in the night smoke of the fires to the west, north, the east, ashes of a thousand cremations fall around me: Pale bits of Doug Fir, flying squirrel, blueberry and its tiny bees. It is snowing Ponderosa, Pine Martin, porcupine, turned by the sudden wall of flame into panic and ash. Air quality “extremely hazardous” warns the radio, and why wouldn’t it be dangerous to breathe in black bear held in a crackling embrace, coyote coated in flame, cougar leaping from the last torching tree, flying into eternity.

Storm Over Mountain Landscape

This smoke. I let it burn in me too, A hundred miles away and useless, singing to them Goodbye Oh God Goodbye. All I can offer is to breathe, breathe in the night smoke, breathe in their fiery bits, choking on sorrow. And to wake tomorrow, a forest in my chest my heart howling, singing, flying And holding holding onto Whatever is still wild.

Nancy Deschu

104

CIRQUE

Susan Johnson

Renewing Our Vows What is it I offer? A safe place to be yourself, a willing welcome that settles like a silken cloth so fine it scarcely skims our skins, then stirs, a wisp, a rising, as if some breeze wafts out from our centers, some subtle pulse that soothes us, renews us, lifts us to ourselves. On Edge David A. Goodrum (first appeared in Willows Wept Review)

I offer this now—to be mindful of the cloth, to mirror its sheen, to let loose my breath to rise in the promise of holy breeze.

Martha Kaplan

Dreaming of Hokulea along Highway One White stones, bleached bones wrested from the sea, rest on the beach. Fetch breaks in the wind, sand slips beneath, and cedars twist toward headlands on the coast. Ghost road: a lone traveler, a worn shoe, and salt, dream an illusion of elevation, valley, redwoods, 5:00 a.m. In the fog, glass floats evoke ghosts of ancient nets rocking the whale road, seining the dolphin dance, salmon trail, and sea-avian —

Nancy Deschu

Glass Floats and Net

Sing ocean pulse. Listen for the male humpback whale. Listen for the chorus, one after the other, a coda, as if a jazz riff, singing for love. Wayfinder, follow the flow west. Star path, sun-shape at dawn and dusk. Touch. Taste of swell, a crab-claw sail, tacking. Eye of white tern, atoll of beach, bend, and green. Ocean bent. Headings on Polynesian sticks and cowrie shells, cloud-shapes, wave-shapes, wind and wild, sing sea-green keening for voyagers in a koa canoe. It’s midnight in Honolulu.

105

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Keith Kennedy

I’ll Bring Heart I’ll try to talk more softly when your head is near my chest. I can do that. I’ll fail at other things. I’ll sexualize you, because I want you so badly. I’ll dominate, for I am dominant. I’ll try to listen, even when I’m angry but have convinced myself that I’m still rational. I’ll mistake kindness for weakness. I’ll try to keep us happy. I’ll bring heart — so much you’ll grow sick of it. I’ll take off your clothes when you’re soaking wet and dry you with my own two hands.

Golden

Casey Killingsworth

And one more thing You said all that sugar would kill me, but after all these years I still eat cookies before dinner. So there. You said getting a job instead of going to college would guarantee me a hard life and, well, you were sort of right about that one, but when I look back through the tough times and old poems I guess it was worth it, something to write down, to capture and glorify suffering like it was a firefly. And remember that woman at my kid’s recital, the one who when she met me found out I was the son of Doctor Killingsworth and when I told her I was a truck driver said, “No, really, what do you really do?” and you stuck up for me? You thought the world would end when you end and maybe it will. You thought what we casually call everything would become part of the same maw you became, but look here at this smile, look here at these cookie crumbs between my shiny cavities, look here at this beautiful world.

Carolyn Adams

106

CIRQUE

Ariana Kramer

Tokitae I dream of whales beaching, walk among their dark breathing. Tokitae, how is it you have lived

in the bright walls of containment?

How many decades since you were young and free in the Salish Sea?

Do you dream of your mother? She still lives.

And your captors? What do they feel

when you sing knowing full well

of your kind, its dips and lulls, phrases of who you are, and where you belong?

Tokitae, how is it you spend your days

the song Blue Bottles

staring at a blue wall hardly flicking a fin?

What are you dreaming, Tokitae, from your circumscribed tank? What is it you want us to know?

Note: Tokitae is a member of the L-pod of Southern Resident orcas. In 1970, when she was four years old, she and dozens of other young orcas were rounded up with explosives, boats and planes, captured from Puget Sound’s Penn Cove and sold to entertainment parks. Tokitae was purchased by the Miami Seaquarium in Florida where she was given the name Lolita, and trained to perform in daily shows. Tokitae is the last surviving orca from the Penn Cove round up and the last Southern Resident orca in captivity. To this day, the Southern Resident orcas avoid Penn Cove, the site of the capture, and Tokitae still sings the songs of the L-pod. There have been ongoing efforts to release Tokitae from captivity. In 2017, the Lummi Nation passed a motion to return Tokitae to the Salish Sea. They gave their orca relation a new name to recognize her as family: Sk’aliCh’elhtenaut. The Lummi are leading the efforts to bring Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut home safely and responsibly. Sources: SacredSea.org — Lummi Nation, Salish Sea Marine Sanctuary, Center for Whale Research, Orca Network

Jill Johnson

107

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis

Aeolus at Hanford Aeolus, I, who in intermingled bouts of Throbbing panged for too long who took of what was not mine who looked too far down the River Styx lifting bowl after bowl of dust at sundown who believed like a Pilgrim in a Porno in the powers of forbidden rocks consuming all constellations dreaming of the interstellar ravaging the stars forging U235 and P239 on windy wilds home to the Columbia until sunlight from particles could no longer be drained down to a single dot I who always wanted too much till the heavens bloated and filled drawing inky breath from the birds

hummingbirds

Morning Williams

Gary Lark

Social Graces Our social graces were common or unlearned in the squat house by the dirt road to the river. In the freedom of the fields, along the flood path, where the four-ton-per-acre hay grew, there was tractor logic and mathematics of wind that carried me, unfettered.

wander now, an aging merman on the plains, eyes blue stains of shame O Aeolus: is it true:

Other, cruder families lived about. We saw them, went to school with them, spoke of their poor condition. We had our huge garden. Dad drew a regular paycheck from the mill. I took piano lessons. We were on the come.

What is said of the humming bird, the monarch the mosquito?

But in town, when heads turned away and eyes looked at carpet patterns I knew I had missed something. When I came home with degree in hand my mother looked at it and said she thought it would be bigger. But she knew about perseverance. Still, years later, in a meeting I say something that drops like a wounded bird. I listen for the wind and hear traffic noise.

108

CIRQUE

Eric le Fatte

Shadows for Alex Leavens 1975-2021 We value too little the size our prints make. Our paths push fringes the darkness paints, where light is not so much a certainty as an approximation. Silhouettes conferred by branches and trunks, clouds, rocks, experience, belief sketch edges of the brightness we trust as safe. Inside shadows, bear tracks, children on errands, egos, Euclidian premises bend into grim fairy tales and quantum dilemmas. Custodians contemplate survival. Survivalists draft bullet points for the end of times, even as breezes we carve from thin air rustle the distant poplar leaves. In patches of sun on unbroken meadows, tiger swallowtails cast hourglass shapes on the ground like shrouds of passing ghosts. How are their wings so impossibly big?

Sherri Levine

Jesus in Cowboy Boots During our English session on Zoom, Liberty Chen wears a tinted blue black mop top like Tik-Tok. “I want to learn about life in English, about jokes and swear words. Boise’s so boring,” he says, scrunching his face like a Shar Pei. You know last weekend, I go to Portland, shop for Nike shoes and Tommy Hilfiger’s. I eat at Red Lobster, buy weedy candy, even go to strip clubs.” Liberty moves his desk closer to the screen. “Lobsters so small, no discount. I’m not even feel the weedy candy. Strippers ok. Not very special. The whole time, you know, I think about my girlfriend in Taiwan.” His new haircut looks shorter and combed neatly. He looks like a schoolboy dressed in a white pressed shirt, buttoned up to his neck. Sipping on his Diet Coke, he hums Personal Jesus, from the Depeche Mode video I had once showed him. “So badass, he said. like Jesus in Cowboy Boots.”

109

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Sue Fagalde Lick

Picking Berries and Dandelion Greens As I started out for church at dusk, I saw my neighbor limping up the road with her white dog Harley at her side. She carried a silver bowl of dandelion greens snipped from the yard of the vacant house where they started painting white on gray and left, plastic taped over glass and doors. I rolled down my window. “Grazing again?” “Oh, my chickens just love this stuff and the purple clover, too, but it’s all gone. You goin’ to church?” “Yes, I am. Choir practice on Wednesday nights.” The dog jumped at my door. “Harley, down!” I tried to pet him but couldn’t reach. “There’s tons of blackberries there,” I said. “Enough for a cobbler tomorrow night. I plan to pick them when I get back.” “Berries, huh? Well, that sounds good. We don’t want to let ‘em go to waste. “I wonder when someone’s moving in.” “Dunno,” I said. “Not too soon, I hope.” “Well, you drive safe. Sing pretty.” My car’s exhaust fogged the wooded road as the last sun tipped the evergreen trees. I passed the house with the overgrown lawn. No one was parked in the driveway yet.

Swallowtail Butterfly Dandilion, Hope, Alaska

Nancy Deschu

110

CIRQUE

Linera Lucas

Two Deborah Butterfield Horse Sculptures, Ten Years Apart I saw the first in the meadow by the museum while scarlet poppies swayed around me. My marriage was at its coda though I refused to listen, and looking at art was time I could justify. I had been writing and revising stories that circled but never landed in my home, although the way was marked with silences visible as a scar. The huge sculpture was new since my last escape and stood higher than a war horse. Between its metal sections I glimpsed stone steps leading to the heavy door that would open at my hand. Inside I would linger with red and black Tlingit blankets, like them homesick for rain, cedars, scent of damp wool. Years later I saw the second from under my umbrella as I hurried to the auditorium. Beyond the horse the wet green lawn linked the white wooden halls of the newest school where I would lecture on telling truth through fiction.

David McElroy

Requiem in Snow A clean and lacy delicacy of falling. How it soothes the eyes and muffles the trucks making for some the daytime mystic. If I have this right, in that inner place where I live it is smooth and cool and fits well—the feeling of wearing wool socks then sliding one’s feet into “broke-in” boots that are just brought in from the porch. First the ball and then the arch and heel slide into the corresponding contour of the cold smooth sole. That’s what I would give you as on that snow day when I am air, two weeks dead in heaven, adjusted, at ease, completely at ease.

Meadow Piece at the Lake

New Snow

Annekathrin Hansen

Jill Johnson

111

V o l . 12 N o . 2

David Memmott

A View from the Summit From where I stand looking back on the dual-tracked trail that winds up the steep canyon like narrow gauge the exercise makes sense to me now. I have always followed your tracks scissored through naked larch undressed by wind from the comfortable rut of my practice. Cocooned in silence, breaking new trail I climb the mountain, exposed and unsure, precious heat lost with every breath. Alone at the summit, my nerves numb from ground chill rising through my flesh I stand alone, bent to the scent of your blood in black tracks on a field of white fire. I feel you watching from a place unseen made possible by where I’ve been, beyond the unbroken line in the bright snow. I take back with me to a warm den this possibility of a perfect glide on a well-defined track each stride and stroke unfaltering.

Donna Mendelson

Frank's Place Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. —Antonio Machado, “Proverbios y cantares XXIX” The two-track through alfalfa fields, chamomile growing between its treads, bumps up past chokecherries on the creek side, hits a turn-around at what he lost in the end: pink stucco sugar cube of a house, apple trees with a ladder of knocked-together 2x4s in the grass, rows of arched raspberry canes, mounds of rhubarb out in the sun, so much left ready, waiting, living between the rope-and-board tree swing and center-pole clothesline that I don’t build or plant my days but grow into his abundance of river valley and sky out to the west, ridge snugged in to the east, a tee-pee of juniper trunks uphill near the spring box to cut for feeding the stove by the kitchen sink. I rent his place, sew muslin curtains, leave them open, some of them to watch oranges that fade to purples then blues’ last light, some open to moonlight, star blinks from yard lights on the next slope,

O'Malley Peak Above the Clouds

Annekathrin Hansen

112

CIRQUE

some to first light over the ridge, in fall each dawn later, farther south of a sweet, tough life, the chokecherry jam I can, the chainsaw I heft to see how I look in Frank’s old mirror, taste it all, wear it all while it fits. You could say minus 20s, tire chains made me go my way, but don’t we live paso a paso, turning around sometimes, heading one way after another? I moved on, but I return. Machado’s heart listened back to his riverside poplars of Soria; mine hears cottonwood leaves, tossing, flashing, gold on one side, green on the other, sounding like time over stones in that creek.

Scene in the West

Lucy Tyrrell

William Miller

Victorian Heaven Those slices of greenscape, laced with ponds, bordered by potted boxwood trees, those shaved ices and free organ music were gifts from city planners, reward beyond mill stacks, coal chutes, the six-day, twelve-hour soul-killing shifts, row houses fitted neatly together as prison walls.

Our clouds and harps, fleecy, dreamy enchantment started here and still calls when a sinner is asked to paint the sky he hopes to claim after his sweat greases the wheel of money made, spent, a stone rolled only to roll back, crush bones in their sockets, the tongue that asks why.

Everyone was a winner, died and was reborn on the paths between flower beds, children playing freely on manicured grass, even the clergyman who had to leaven hell’s black bread with something like hope, not Christ’s bloody thorns, his wounds the only doors to the next, better world.

Containment No. 5

Sheary Clough Suiter

113

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Pamela Mitchell

Instructions for My Sons I. place my ashes in a purple velvet drawstring bag take it to the Puget Sound steer your boat north to our beloved Point No Point set anchor watch for the parade to begin we have seen it many times orca chasing chinook sprinkle half the bag there taking care as the wind may blow me back to you human ashes being very light II. keep your eye to the north the silent winged flight will come they will astonish you as they hover remaining in formation so delicate yet fierce are these little dragons they will come as a swarm (so you will know)

in V-formation

stand up sprinkle my ashes on the wings (we have an agreement)

of dragonflies

one by one they will zoom off breaking formation luring chinook who will leap snap mouths III. you will

laugh at the performance only to be outdone by orca who will breach round your boat greeting you

in stunning salutations then diving in pursuit of salmon now nourished by small flying dragons whose wings sparkle with the essence of mama’s laughing spirit

your

Past Future

A. Molotkov

114

CIRQUE

John Morgan

On The Body: A Zuihitsu 1.

One afternoon at the gym I forgot my combination and they had to break the lock. I called home to Nancy to say I felt woozy—she’d better come pick me up.

The world forgotten, memory gone.

Driving home from La Fiamma's with a couple of pizzas, I stop at a red light and suddenly dozens of naked cyclists ride past. A peloton in the nude. Women and men, young and old, sleek, chubby, obese. Most with helmets on, some in underpants, but nothing more. One two-seater is ridden by a bare-assed father and son.

The past is a slow falling snowflake that lands on the pavement and melts.

When they decided it wasn’t a stroke, they checked my heart with an echo-cardiogram. I lay on my side and watched it pumping on the monitor as Zach, the tech-guy, moved his transducer thingy around. I could see the blood flowing in and out. It showed as splashes of blue and red on the monitor.

10. The poem about the father goes back many years. Swayed by a wish for normalcy he moved us to the suburbs, an Ivy League of grass, a lake to visit and for teens to make out by, clean schools. Then he took the commuter train back to the city where he might have raised us. His life would have been easier, but he gave us the best as he understood it.

“The poet is always our contemporary.” Virginia Woolf.

Over the take-out pizza, our daughter-in-law Carla said, “Yesterday I saw an injured bird on the road. It must have had a broken wing. And there was another bird, a crow, standing beside it. I couldn’t tell if it was trying to help the injured one or just waiting for it to die so it could eat it. Two cars came by and swerved around it, but a third car drove right over it. And—this was what was amazing—when the wheel went over the bird it made a really loud sound—really loud— like shattered glass.”

11. Zach is a big guy—former military, I guessed—and he was happy to talk about what he saw, always with the proviso that “This is just me,” i.e. not a real cardiologist. But he thought my heart looked ok. The pressure was right and there was no sign of a prior heart attack.

In the hospital, I said to Nancy, “So you came and picked me up at the gym and brought me here?” And she said, “Yes,” but a few seconds later I’d forgotten her answer and said again, “So you came to the gym and picked me up and brought me here?” The same question over and over at least twenty-five times.

13. Our son’s neurologist, Dr. O., has a strong Brooklyn accent. We told her what had happened to me and she quickly diagnosed it as transient global amnesia. “It only lasts a couple of hours,” she said. “Repeating the same question over and over is the key.”

When I was two and a half, we took the train to Florida, and sitting across the aisle was a troop of sailors coming home from the war. One of them showed me card tricks that were way above my pay grade. Then he shuffled the cards and showed me how he did it. That I thought I might be able to learn. I figured we’d be together as buddies for the whole trip, but in the morning he was gone.

12. As he was getting older, my father told me he was glad to find his sex-drive becoming less urgent. And the first time I called home and said I was staying over with a girlfriend, he calmed my mother down.

14. Someone once called him “the salt of the earth,” but later it turned out that he’d been abusing the women in our family for years. 15. Next day we read in the paper about a world-wide cycling event: “A celebration of the body in all its myriad forms.”

115

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Francis Opila

The Three-Legged Coyote Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge, Oregon At the edge of the winter marsh, she prances on three legs, front left stump dangling, her lush tawny coat streaked black and crimson, tail bushy, her frame full, muscles flexed, ears raised, she glides among the rushes and sedges. Her keen eyes trace the world

Mallard Back

of mallards, shovelers, green-winged teals, wigeons, and buffleheads, searching

Timothy Pilgrim

for one with broken wing or fallen to some avian disease. She disregards the peregrine

Reviving Kilter Abandoned, off-balance, my dark life flows away, like a Montana stream seeking happiness with the Missouri, suddenly diverted, Clark-Forked

streaking above, the eagles perched in the cottonwoods. Only we see her, flicker of ear,

to Pend Oreille, the Columbia, Portland, the sea. Drowned, dream for smooth float, depression swept downstream, no more rapids. Vanished,

steam of warm breath, glint of canines, subtle grin. The wind turns from the north, late afternoon sun sinks, clouds dip in rose, she’s gone, her ghost howls in frigid fog.

any chance for an Eliaden return, mythical, eternal — forgiveness pulled beneath, rivered by undertow. Somehow, I must surface, seize sacred time, surge with new strength into the riffle. Re-breathe, heed central leveling force of existence advising, confess shadowed secrets, love yourself again, accept the current, undulate, flow. I must revive hope, circle each confluential eddy swirling black, beckoning me to shore.

Sunset, October 5, 2020

Annekathrin Hansen

Teri White Carnes

116

CIRQUE

Vivienne Popperl

a deeper ruby and smoldering eye from Rita Dove’s Girls on the Town Thirty seconds across the threshold the music grabs your neck & shoulders shakes you free from questionsyour mother’s worried eyes your father’s raised brows. Across the darkened room you recognize faces lit by swirling silver flashesred lips laughing, eyes outlined in diamond glister. These are your people your sisters in youth. You close your eyes ease your body onto the dance floor. Now the music envelopes. Now the perfume, after-shave, incense engulf. Sweat dampens your armpits itches your hairline. You swirl your psychedelic gold and green tent dress. You feel a tap on your shoulder turn to a wide smile, narrow eyes, a warm hand on your wrist. And the music propels you on and on.

Steadfast

Sheary Clough Suiter

117

V o l . 12 N o . 2

chin pulled up in reverse curl fastened to a gaze of grit. He’s so swiftly gaining ground! We gab on in our runaway hour patina’d with runaway joy and release

Maple and Sycamore

Diane Ray

Pink Snow for Christianne Balk My friend deserves the Nobel in noticing. Pink Snow! she proclaims on the bright lawn sloped to Green Lake where, newly unmasked one year post sequester, we plant ourselves under a flurrying cherry, telling one another our pandemic when my friend, mother of a differently-abled daughter who swims her own stroke through life’s pools, gamely, interrupts: Stop! Look there! with her practiced eye for the unsung valiant. Down below on the lake path speed walks a snowy-haired man, gaunt on a spine sloped like the letter f on a stride of his own invention, precision focused, almost military in trajectory,

Carolyn Adams

as we each brave new ground-first pandemic escape back to the lake under a full-throated trilling cherry into friend oasis lolling about like, oh beautiful word: like normal. I am in the first blush of love for all the noses, cheeks, lips, chins unwrapped and unfurled as the cherry’s pink snow seen as such keeps touching us fragile and whole as a soap bubble floating, this moment we share, this anointing with innocence. But in the damning wrestle of our times our own lives’ blessed moments up against the terrifying lens and countdown even my trained-as-a-naturalist friend and news hound I are ignorant in the instance of our hammock-like happiness of the other pink snow’s bellwether blare, the official Mr. Pink Snow, yet another

118 gloom and doom messenger lurking about on our planet’s frigid tips and edges, paring his fingernails, waiting for us, for God’s sake, to turn off Snooze, for pink snow means algae-produced sunscreen for shielding itself from warming summer ice and snow in the world’s cooking pot of albedo, a surge of light and radiation degrading by sauteing snow. Two and a half millennia past, Aristotle noted pink-tinged ice, natural and innocuous next to our new runaway yield. Would you believe earth’s algae painting the Alps watermelon? Arctic pink-tinged glaciers? Antarctic tundra a look-alike

CIRQUE Willa Schneberg

There Are Countries, The bones speak to us.

—Sofia Egaña, forensic anthropologist ones we live in ones we do not where dismembered skeletons on stainless steel trays will bring justice They howl how the machete the machine gun the hammer extinguish Even dousing with lime & burning them the interred bones hold how we hate and won’t be silenced

for blood-dimmed tide, for killing fields? Meanwhile back in our cherry tree idyll, my friend interrupts us: He’s back! Our unusual walker has made it almost three miles around. Yes! responds my unsurprised friend, living in the dance of such things where any day is a secret Olympics while I consider that we don’t know where he placed his invisible starter gate and how many circles round, and what’s nonetheless still possible.

Edges

Jim Thiele

119

V o l . 12 N o . 2 R.J. Rice

The Horizon of Love is Mourning “Marry me,” I said, running through my mind the right manner for the occasion and settling on the poetic. “We will live at the horizon of love, and it will be forever morning.” “The horizon of love is not morning,” she said. “It’s mourning. A winter sun that melts no ice, makes nothing grow.” “Love is showers of winter moonlight,” I said. “A beanstalk. Silver clouds slow dancing, delivering joy door to door.” “That shows a finely polished contempt for reality,” she said. “Don’t you know you can live life without running to foolish notions? Don’t you know love will drop you farther than it lifts you? Listen, how can I trust someone who thinks that much of love?” The hawthorn bush in the yard greened, bloomed, and dropped its petals as she spoke. Anne. “Love builds the constitution, too,” I said, “and cures spiritual unease.” “It subjects us to unnecessary wear and tear,” she said, her mind turning over my good qualities, and as far as could be noticed, not finding any. “And that bush in your backyard has thorns like a hayrake.” “Your body is like that flock of soft doves on the telephone wire,” I said. “Doves, doves, doves,” she said, “and here and there a flower. Those are pigeons.” She had an unbreakable addiction to facts, Anne, and by now I was in danger of being misunderstood. “Trying to stop love is like putting a chair in front of a speeding train,” I said. “Love is what disaster looks like downwind,” she said. “Love is a kite lifting the heart to the heavens?” I tried. “Love flies you to the shirt-tail end of nowhere,” she said, “and then a crash.” “I have to tell you I am much in demand,” I said in a final throw at convincing her. “Often I have to carry a quirt to beat back the girls.” “I am hard pressed to imagine you doing much damage among the women,” she said. “But you do perk me up some.” Well, I’m thinking all these years later, she may have been right. Love carried us forty years by the surprise of its unfolding; but I admit, walking back from her grave, Anne’s, the horizon of love is mourning.

Alder Leaf Fallen on Driftwood

Matt Witt

120

Idyllic Afternoon in Chaoyang

CIRQUE

Donald Guadagni

Lex Runciman

The Past Is Ending Soon He's 82, and though he would prefer the liquor store, I'm driving him to the pharmacy. He doesn't look at me but asks, have I told you this story?

took off her shoes and socks and let her toes go under. Her toenails were red. Brrr, she said, and smiled. I sit next to her, take my shoes off, too. Do we talk?

And before I say anything, he starts in about an August afternoon he remembers in that long run of weeks before the war,

Don't know. I'm hungry, she says. So, barefoot, I fetch the basket from the car, and when I get back under that canopy of alders and maples,

when Ginny called him, Ginny, older by a year, 17. He had taken her fishing once, west of town, Dairy Creek. No luck. Then it rained. But months later, a Saturday

Ginny has taken off her blouse and bra, and she's splashing water there. She looks up, smiles. When she splashes, that cold shakes her.

before his Sunday off work, she calls. Take me somewhere, she says. Where? That creek, that creek we fished. He knows but doesn't say the water will be too low.

At last she asks, did you bring a towel? Sorry, I say. Me neither, oh well. We sit. The creek makes its noise. She takes her bra, hooks it in front,

Borrow your mother's car, bring worms and poles, a picnic lunch. What time, he asks, when? Tomorrow, one o'clock. And though he hardly knows

pulls the cups and straps around and fits herself in, puts on her blouse, and buttons it. That felt good, she says, thanks for bringing me here, let's eat.… He stops then, makes a small noise. He's come back from where he'd been. And I say no, no, I'd not heard that story.

why she has called — why she has called him — he says yes. That water was low, just as I'd thought, he says, but Ginny liked the shade. She sat on a boulder,

121

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Tom Sexton Two Poems

Quiet —For John Kooistra Thank you for your note saying my poems are so quiet some people don’t hear them. What a wonderful compliment. Years ago, I saw a wolf watching me from a clearing for a moment before it vanished. Everyone said it couldn’t have been a wolf. I knew it wasn’t a coyote from the shape of its ears. It didn’t make a sound, not one.

At Eagle, Alaska A brown bear shaking off winter’s long sleep now that the upriver ice dam has finally broken,

Late Summer Near Sitka

the Yukon rushes past both town and village with a growl while two government hydrologists

Judith Skillman

prepare to measure its flow, but first they have to check their instruments for winter damage. Who will count the snow geese passing over, or the multitudinous songbirds arriving? I could have Wang Wei, my favorite poet, nod to me as he floats by in boat made of cloud, that’s an image that would have made Budbill envious on his stub of a mountain way back East in Vermont, bless his soul, but I’m going to go with the flow.

Luther Allen

Transubstantiation Nothing more than the accelerator at Cern, seven-mile tunnel in the earth, protons traveling almost at the speed of light, voilà. Top quark, alpha god particle said they would be there, though makes no sense. Blood & bread. Take, this is my. . . Not more mysterious than something a millionth the size of a proton. Physicists explain how it will act, react. They say with a flourish what they don’t understand. PhD’s argue online in secret chats where the one defensible posture remains: ungovernable squirm of subatomic world, wafer.

122

CIRQUE

Craig Smith

The Flag I want the old days back When someone flying the flag Was sure to be a good American Instead of possibly deranged When seeing a flag on a truck Made you smile Instead of making you wonder If you were seeing a Jan. 6 criminal

Kathleen Smith

September The Impressionist

Leaves gleam gold in morning sun. Plums purple and glisten. Thin skins stretch tight against the harvest juices.

Lindsey Morrison Grant

From Rosh Hashanah to Holy Cross we will pick and cook and freeze them. Hope for great sauce on the Christmas duck. Hope this fall will bring soft snows under full moons. Hope this harvest will bring the mercy of fewer dead.

Leaves on Tar

Jill Johnson

123

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Connie Soper

Terminus So many old European cities invited cathedrals and castles, staid and stately rooms where treaties were signed—always an ornate architecture, rich with patina-coppered domes, steeples and turrets. When my feet tired of museums bragging ancient relics; when a polluted hot noise pressed down over the somber monuments, I boarded a bus, any bus—paid a few pesos, drachmas, centimes—and rode to the end of the line. Not for the journey itself, or its destination, but for the sake of not knowing where it would take me as that bus lurched into the unmapped margins of a city. Grand avenues blooming geraniums gave way to glimpses

A Moment with Birch

of villages within the metropolis, lively with cafes, and blue-uniformed children. Every neighborhood’s pride its plaza— boys circled footballs in the ragged handkerchief of a field as pigeons shook themselves from the belfry at sonorous sounds of bells ringing the evening mass. One-by-one passengers disembarked until the bus arrived at the end of its route. Terminus, the driver called out. Same word, I learned, in so many languages.

Leah Stenson

Healing Water

Spring Waterfall, Pepper Trail Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument

I missed you today. I’ve watched you cradle people, glide them across the therapy pool. I never spoke to you, but I think of you as a saint who ministers to the infirm, some who must be lowered into the pool on a sling because they can’t walk, like the woman who has no limbs at all. You look into their eyes, the eyes of all of them, as you waltz them around in the warmth of the water. I imagine you are one of the few who touch them. You always look intent, serious, but suddenly you smile. I heard you are in the ER. If you don’t come back, who will hold and guide them?

Tami Phelps

124

CIRQUE

Mary Lou Spartz

"If there's anything I can do . . ." Once the word is out they come offering cheesecake or curly fries. Her brave neighbors at the door, trust they won’t catch cancer just being there. They offer hope. Miracles in Mexico, breakthrough with lab rats, becoming vegan, living on kale.

Grass Widow

Kelly Terwilliger

Black Bear Running Down a Gravel Road

She knows they mean well, but will they sit with her as the hours thin, hear the words it can’t be long now?

Were you more than a thought disappearing into a slope of shade? Shaggy gallop. Gone. Sometimes silence is the hush breathing, inches away. Sometimes silence is a bear long gone.

She thanks each one, gently closes the door, wonders what to do with another cheesecake.

We leaned into the shadows of each other. Or I leaned alone as you slipped away, ferns already rising back from some dark hunger. Leaving the line of that old logging road, stepping into the forest right there— reaching into fur bristling with strange musk— This is all: today, bear, you entered my eyes going away

Morning Williams

Matt Witt

125

V o l . 12 N o . 2

Jim Thielman

Calm

Georgia Tiffany

Absence

After days of windblown water, the river is glassy with soft ripples from ducks and geese. Plus, the faintest breeze puffs banners, grace for gray pilings that fix boat docks in a lagoon. Walking on the river delta I see summer has swallowed green. But gray sagebrush endures wicked dryness. I’ve watched five-petal blossoms rise from flat on sand to stand a few inches high on finest stems. I live between stars below and a star above. When it sets its sisters shine the night.

i. Just one lonely county after another. Here, and there, a carnal mark of distance— collapsed roof, flailing barbed wire in the wind, my mother, three years old, bare feet planted tentatively, tendril of hair, crescent moon of its shadow cut across her forehead, staring across a country burned up in the sun, diverging roads, a decision that could mean something, could mean nothing. ii. We’re heading back with the ashes. Is anything less real than anything else? My mother, a car full of summer heat, this urn of secrets, this part of her that is landscape, the landscape that is her. Can anyone ever look at this country without a deluge of locusts, or a stray at the screen door, or the way wind folds light under the eave, scours out the house, leaves its moans in the bedroom dark?

Jellyfish Sunset at Deep Creek

Denise Hill

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iii. The night my father did not come home my mother said you could love something like that to death. She meant the absence. But what to do with the stray? Seeing it there at the screen door, is it possible from the first lifted paw, the muted whine, she knew about the other dogs, and the girl who would love them, lie with them bundled in animal sleep or spread-eagled in the safe hollow of an abandoned corn row?

Pele's Heat Remembered

Lucy Tyrrell

Open-grown Oak This oak’s gnarled limbs spread open, wide because it sprouted alone in a field. Green lane of time keeps galloping stride. Through leafy summers long it thrives, wood layered on, more branches shield this oak’s gnarled limbs spread open, wide. Come snows and solstice, year’s divide. Huge oak, now flanked by trees, appeals to the lane of time with galloping stride. For wildlife, acorns fall, provide a meal beneath brown leaves concealed, this oak’s gnarled limbs spread open, wide.

Gnarly

Jim Thiele

As decades sum, its wood grows dried. Some bark from limbs now broken, peeled. Yet lane of time keeps galloping stride. With winds and age, the tree has died— now fallen, its crumpled fate is sealed. This oak’s gnarled limbs spread open, wide on earth’s soft resting place. I cried.

Jim Thiele

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Gary Wade

Inconsequence of Walls Divisive stone walls crown the hill, descend field and forest slopes and cross the valley. Come flood time, water will go where it will. Nature doesn’t care at all about walls. Dragonfly on Fractured Paint

Kevin Bennett

Vivian Wagner

Ice Melt The man had watery, red eyes. He’d been day drinking. It was 3 in the afternoon, and he was waiting for a burger. He wouldn’t stop talking to me, about his divorce, his kids in college, his soon-to-be-ex-wife down south, the apartment he was renting through March, his need for a job or two, the fact that he grew up here and hadn’t found anywhere else where he’s at peace. It was muddy there, near the Knik, with Pioneer Peak standing over us, the sun melting ice and snow from the night before. He told me he’d hiked that mountain once, with his best friend, over three days. Right to the craggy top. Finally, we heard a call through the window of the log cabin burger place that our orders were ready. I got mine first and walked away, toward my car, glancing back as the man asked, slurrily, for ketchup, and then I drove away—from him, from the peak, and from the always-there possibility of sliding into one river of grief or another.

Matanuska River Landscape

Annekathrin Hansen

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Margo Waring

Single Traveler Backpack weighs 10 pounds less than myself. Weeks in Brooks Range wilderness. Hike over mountain passes, slide on scree. Ford rivers. Pump adrenalin. Mesmerized watching wolf prints fill with water. Shiver knowing they are close. Stuff backpack, fly to New Zealand. Hike famed routes. Camp on beaches with sand flies. Switchblade angled to attacker. “I’ll cut your balls off, if you try.”

Shadows

Jim Thiele

Morning Williams

Two Haiku for riding bareback at dawn, I want seahorses and a very low tide only the scoters, webfooted, water walking rejoice in rain

Lines in the Sand

Mary Katzke

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Self Portrait Joe Reno

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FEATURES Artists of Cirque This is the first rendering of a regular feature, profiling the artists who make this journal shine

Cynthia Steele

Joe Reno A mystic of the Northwest School, Joe Reno, born 1943 in Seattle, Washington, is a painter, sculptor, and graphic artist. He’s part of the legacy of Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, and Kenneth Callahan. At the age of six, he completed with crayons his first mural, from floor to ceiling on a wall at home. His home since 1950, a Ballard house built in 1911, hides behind an enormous laurel hedge brushing the electrical wires high above. As a young adult, he worked in the mailroom at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and took night classes at the Art Students’ League. Aside from this period in New York and military duty, both in the 1960's, Reno has been a life-long resident of Seattle. In the Army, Reno served in Germany and studied photography, printmaking, and painting. He painted murals at Fort Lewis. While on leave in Frankfurt, Germany, the Staats Museum became his university. Joe has good bones and mesmerizing eyes, which may be seen In his self-portraits. Reno spends nearly all his time at making art. His prolific work is represented in some of the finest collections of art in the Northwest, including the Tacoma Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, the Museum of Northwest Art, and the Bellevue Art Museum. He graduated from Ballard High School in 1962 — the same school that commissioned him to paint a 16-foot mural of Golden Gardens — a long sandy beach on saltwater Shilshole Bay. Ironically, in the mural, a figure sits on a log at Golden Gardens where the artist himself had spent time being truant from school. We step up well-worn stairs on which paint layers show; the layers are memories that linger on the edges. One shoe perched on one step, another on a different step, both pushed against the wall; there is an order to the chaos. We meander around items carefully placed everywhere, as if life itself were Joe Reno’s treasure box, and this place his storage facility.

Reno, an artist perhaps from an earlier time, drinks from an enormous “to go” container in a home with no discernible space. Art above looks down upon him from the ceiling. Art is everywhere. The drink perches on stacks of papers. His home grows full around him: vines in his yard, collections of items. He does not text. He had a flip phone since long before I met him last year. His style is to segue, without transition. He’s bought oranges recently from a stand down the road in this Seattle nook of Ballard. They are juicy, he promises. “I’ll clear an area,” he says. “You gotta try these.” As he slices, his thoughts bounce from oranges to stories from long ago. An old photograph catches his attention and he follows it. Glimpses of thoughts about other times and the people then alive, like his mother. He does so in such a way as to temporarily transport to that chaotic time when he grew up, like many with a series of rotating adults, drink, and violence. And then, we are back to the oranges. The image of Paulette, Joe’s 1964 ink drawing, flashes before my eyes. The swirls of curly hair, then his own fuzzy, thinning, gray mass. I wonder about her. Paulette, furrowed brow, dangling earrings, downcast eyes. I follow along as best I can.

Paulette, 1964

Joe Reno

V o l . 12 N o . 2 He cut the oranges in odd sections and then frees them from their rinds. His talk flits to other topics, the cost of paint and of specific colors—the blues like those he used in his ample painting “View from Magnolia”—a view with which I’m familiar from my five years in Seattle. The painting incorporates orange for the skyline, an orange wrapped with yellow above and below, which turns to a darkening blue on the skyline and in the water, creating a deepening perspective. The orange is cast upon the trees and the foreground, as it would be if we were there. We lament together the cost of cobalt and other worthy shades. He speaks at quite a clip, flitting like the iridescent Blue Morpho butterfly. The black, outer side of their wings cause them to View From Magnolia disappear and reappear in another place within a short time, eclipsing them to predators who then lose track of them. They appear fast but actually fly at a languid pace. Joe is a Morpho talking of blue. I can follow Joe, but not easily. I occasionally lose him and wonder what I’ve missed. I cannot return to a previous topic without the screeching breaks of a free flow of idea—images that only marginally relate to one another. The blue of his Magnolia piece blends into the kitchen furniture on which he cuts oranges, bringing our talk around to pure color without fillers, the quest for sale paint, and the need for stocking up—the practicality within full-time painting. One may hazard the amount of paint Joe has in stock and would probably be right. Like Joe, I can reach a certain meditative state when fixated on certain colors. The furniture looks like an indigo that has yellowed a bit over time. I’ve taken exploratory art at U Dub as well as painting with Mariano Gonzales at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and, farther back, drawing from a prof who yammered as we drew. I appreciate art from many perspectives, having written about it regularly while editing a student newspaper, but before that time from a starker angle. I’d been a nude model, averting my eyes when artists attempted to capture my draped figure as well as maintain their own de-

131 veloping styles. I see their intent. I felt nauseous at first, standing, posing for artists, but I could see in their eyes this quest for beauty, for that aspect of the body sought with the eye of the aesthete not of the hunter. My own aesthete is entranced these days by words and by images through photography. Joe’s passion awakens in me this artistic craze—this mesmerized space that freezes time. He hands me a piece of orange “Good, right?” He smiles, towering over me. He drops the sections one by one on a red and blue platter, freed and falling. I photograph the still and blurred pieces midair. Upstairs, his creative genius thrives. On one bookshelf, a wedding photo Joe Reno in a plastic frame too large for the fading image; white surrounds sides and top. A round, smiling, ceramic Halloween cat wears a witch’s hat. A random eyeball (not real but definitely surreal). A cherubic statue, a magnifying glass or kaleidoscope. A basket with photographs dropped into it, perched inside another basket. “Don’ t touch anything,” Joe says, quietly looking around, concerned for the inanimate. The effort to comply likens me to a bull in a china shop. The space, sufficient for a family of four, is cramped to the point of a narrow path. The treasures take on their own conglomerate feel. Inside and above the bathroom door, a real—though not alive—tarantula is surrounded on both sides by likewise framed butterflies. The song, “I don’t like spiders and snakes, but that ain’t what it takes to love me,” plays in my head. I think, yes, look but don’t touch. No problem. A ship in a bottle glows on the studio area windowsill. A plastic triceratops figure plants his wide feet upon it, blocking the light and creating an ominous effect. Joe takes turns putting paintings on a sizable easel, well-dripped in various shades of the spectrum. Large canvases and framed paintings take up much of the floor space. Some of his work takes on a William Blake-ian feel: deep blue, reds, and yellow with people as amorphous, bending, narrow shapes. He holds up a floral painting of a vase that is filled

132 with intricacies, nuances, and muted tones. “I made this one in a day,” he says from upstairs after I’d already descended. The flowers steal the show. “Very nice,” I replied. “Classic. Lovely.” He smiles broadly. After showing many of his paintings, he turns to the paintings of others that he’s collected. “Tell me if you can figure out who did this painting,” Joe says, pointing to one of a dozen mystery prints, paintings, and drawings. I think he means right now. “I’m not sure, but the style may be familiar.” He brightens even more. “If you can figure it out, I can get you a finder’s fee,” he says. I look a bit suspicious, so he says, “No, really. I have a guy. If you can figure it out.” Life is a puzzle. He discusses apps that help with this process, methods he’s heard about using. He’s not tech-savvy, or he’d do it himself. Some of the images in his home are reminiscent of a time I’d spent working in an antique mall—Hollywood Antiques in Woodinville, WA, back in a time when I chased hot air balloons and had just begun a long-winded jaunt of not drinking. I remembered one of his images specifically of this time. “The frames,” he said. “That’s how you can tell if they’re quality; if they’re done in a time-consuming way that stands over time that’s ornate and difficult to disassemble.” Suddenly, he falls into a rabbit hole, a dark area of his childhood. Drinking and violence and a woman walking downstairs and out the door wearing only a slip. I cannot imagine asking him to rewind and elaborate. It would be like asking someone doing a dramatic reading onstage to back up and repeat “that one part.” A sepia image looks particularly familiar. It comes from a series. I know it’s not a Joe Reno because I’m acquainted with his style, and it’s older than his work. I’ve seen it, reproductions of it, or perhaps versions of it. The frame quality is high—ornate metal on some sort of pounded material. Cobwebs trickle and tumble from the top middle and fall like ivy from the top corners. Evidence it hasn’t been touched or moved in many years. Cobwebs, not spider spins. The figure in the image is perched sideways, one foot wrapped in the other calf. Bare feet. Long dressing gown. Blindfolded. Beautifully intricate dress. Slip-like, now that I think of it. She’s in an, angular position, folded over. That’s it. It’s an 1880’s painting. I know this. I quickly find “Hope” by George Frederic Watts, English Victorian online. A series of allegorical topics. Ah yes, she’s perched

CIRQUE on a globe, playing a lyre with one remaining string and straining to hear it. Sadness and desolation. It reminds me of Joe’s ink drawing of Paulette, of a woman so forlorn, so pitifully sad, like some of the women in Joe’s life from his stories. Joe’s mesmerized by his painting vocation, but he’s also keen on discovering paintings and archaic items by thrifting—one of the only reasons to leave the house. He lights up as he suggests a Goodwill trip. Suddenly in olive green shades of wool—a matching coat, hat, and red and green tie, it feels like a momentous occasion. In the hallway of Joe’s home, I begin talking of the walls and the closeness of it all. I begin to feel the fade in and out. An apocalyptic claustrophobia builds. I laugh it off and talk about how the artwork walks around like it owns the place, using humor to dispel. Still, it looks down at me at all angles. “I’m fine,” I say. Joe begins moving the canvases that block our exit, I fill again with that so familiar encroached-upon sensation. At once, I fail to get enough air. Joe sees and understands immediately. He clears a path to exit and to breathe within the daylight. We join a roped statue he’d carved with peering faces, scattered with a few dark insects, white and stark in the green of the yard. Relieved in the air, we walk to the street past his painted mural of a truck. I wave at a passerby. Joe cautions me not to engage with people.

Untitled

Joe Reno

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The Toast Joe Reno

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Sandra L. Kleven

Mistakes I Made Loving Joe Reno Nothing could make me believe Joe Reno was interested in me. He was a major guy, sought after, and cute. A random girl warned me to stay away from him before I knew who he was. I was the new kid at James Monroe, starting eighth grade. Joe Reno was a ninth grade somebody. What a Kiss I had been kissed once — age 13. It was a stolen kiss at Bothell’s Avon theater. In 1957, girls welcomed stolen kisses. We did not consider it sexual assault. Especially a first kiss — because we could then say with relief, “Finally, a first kiss.” And it was nice, this surprise kiss. Validating. I was kissable. Friday nights the Avon was packed with kids from junior high. The kisser, Ron, was sitting to my right in the seat that butted up against the wall. The only way out was passed me and my friend. Ron lingered there in the dark, several seats over. Then, he got up, brushed passed, turned, leaned in, kissed me on the lips and was gone. Feeling as wild as the rites of spring, I put my hand to my mouth, “Oh, my God!” Seventh grade thrills.

“An Artist with a Random Spark of Genius,” February 21, 1971, Seattle Post Intelligencer

~~~ Mom had left Dad the year before. She moved out, bringing her five… soon six kids, landing us in despair. How does a single parent support a houseful like that…? The pittance of public assistance wouldn’t do it. Dad was heartbroken, probably angry, slow to pay anything. Desperate struggles kept food on the table. Mom worked nights as a barmaid hiding it from welfare authorities. She got mad at me for my “mouth” and threatened to “slap me silly.” Sometimes, she did.

years of unrequited crushes. I was such a crusher! Was this desire nature or nurture — formed as I was by Snow White and Cinderella? Someday, my prince would come. Surely, he would. Songs on the radio reinforced this, bringing in social shaping. My love, my true love, now and forever. Who did write the book of love? Consider the Fish of the Sea

But this kiss…well, things were getting interesting. That Winning Year So, when the year of Joe Reno started (1958), I had that single snatched kiss behind me, as well as my little girl

Even younger than this, when I was 7 or so, fishing was my hobby. I strung a straight branch with nylon leader. No safety pin for my hook. As a second grader, I rode my bike four blocks to the hardware store and bought 5 or 6 tiny barbed fishhooks.

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I didn’t plan to catch fish. I really didn’t, even though I was brutal with my bait. I was in it for the act of fishing. Even so, I approached the creek with great care and study, looking for deep still water. Sometimes water shimmered just under the cut bank. Sometimes it pooled behind a fallen log. Best, was a spot with a mossy, downed log where I could sit comfortably, sometimes for hours. There, I ran the hook through the fleshy worm, skillfully hiding the hook. For years, I went to the creek to fish in that calm scientific way. When I was ten, we moved away from the house near the woods with a creek and moved to the rented house of divorce.

Somehow, I’d lucked into ownership of a silver filigree Friendship Ring. When going steady, girls wore a ring on a chain around their neck — that way they could hide it under their sweaters when necessary. At school, they could show off the ring, dangling on a long chain between emerging breasts. I didn’t have any moves, but I came up with this: I asked two other eleven-year-old classmates to help. New to that school, you could say I didn’t read the room. The kids did what I asked and delivered the ring to Steve. I waited for somebody to whisper “Steve wants to see you. He’s over there.” Maybe, we’d have a shy, sweet, conversation around the corner of a building. After a few days, my intermediaries reported back. “You know that ring you gave to Steve? He gave it to another girl.”

Chapter One Says You Love Me Won’t You Wear My Ring Around Your Neck To Tell The World I’m Yours, By Heck (Elvis Presley) As with the fish, it was the same with young boys I adored. I was fishing and wishing, meditating, and dreaming, but if I ever got one, I wouldn’t have known what to do. And that’s why I made mistakes loving Joe Reno. Alone with my intense emotions toward Joe, I was sure that my feelings were unreciprocated, and yet I felt a connection of spirit that transcended doubts. I could never make the first move especially when caught up like this. I did once and it did not go well. I was inhibited both by past loss and a long list of dictates for girls. Never, ever call a boy. Keep them guessing. Play your cards right. I played my cards horribly. Once I had a secret love, that lived within the heart of me. All too soon that secret love became impatient to be free. Here’s the story. We need to go back to 5 grade to understand the source of my paralysis. Back then, I hoped that the very cute boy, Steve, might feel passion in return. It would be tragic if Steve loved me, like I loved him and I never knew. I had to take a chance. th

This broke me. I was shamed, embarrassed, devastated. I never wanted to see Steve again. If I had to face him, I’d just die. Fifth grade ended and my mom made her move. She left Dad and moved us to Kenmore, about 30 minutes further out, where I went to 6th and 7th grades. It was a bad time: Mice in the kitchen bad. Donations from the church bad. Hiding out from child welfare worker And getting slapped silly for my mouth. That’s how bad. To Know, Know, Know Him Is to Love, Love, Love Him Then during the summer of 1958, we moved back to the city — to Ballard. We rented a house on 85th street. In the fall, I would go with great pride to James Monroe Junior High, like my mom did. Right away, I met the girl across the street. She said, out of the blue, “When you start Monroe, stay away from Joe Reno.” Ostensibly, because he was wild. When school started, I saw Joe Reno for the first time. Ninth grader, tall, blond, lanky, dark eyebrows. I was struck. Our three-story brick block of a school had at its heart the

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lunchroom and auditorium. The hallway on each of three floors shaped a large square. Out of a class, you could walk left or right and you’d eventually return to where you started. When changing classes, even if the class was in the same room, you walked all the way around, because maybe you would see someone. Someone. And with this maneuver I would see Joe. If I saw Joe, I was energized, to say the least. By then I did know how to flirt — in subtle, deniable ways. I was stepping up my game. My girlfriend, Kathy, noticed that Joe left for home at the end of the day from the side door toward the rear of the school. Then, Joe and friends would walk the half-block to 65th, turn right, to go on about six city blocks to 24th Avenue. When Joe and his friends left, we’d hustle out the side door near the front. As a result, they followed us, which was better than the soul crushing act of me and Kathy following them. This arrangement happened “by chance,” over and over. Walking, we flirted and laughed. We didn’t really talk… We laughed at anything amusing the boys did and they did amuse us. At football games, Joe and his friends would sit right behind me and Kathy. At that point, I had not escaped my self-image reducing years of poverty, slapped face, and other devastations with my divorced mom and the other five kids. I didn’t feel worthy of a guy like him. Looking back with experienced eyes, he had to have been interested. He was always there. I might have said something…But the ordeal with the Friendship Ring was just three years past. I didn’t want to feel that blow to the belly again. I would eventually learn of the magnetism carried by a pretty girl, but I was only just becoming a pretty girl, one who played most cautiously at the game of love. Love at 14: Mistakes Were Made First of all, I would try to be wherever Joe might be. At games and dances, he usually was there. And he did come around. As noted, he paid attention to me and Kathy. When he sat behind me at games, I felt him shivering through my body. He did sit by me, an indicator, not validation.

Universal Truth

Joe Reno

And that was a mistake. I didn’t know the words or the activity to pick up on this and do something that would move things along. I also needed to develop “a take it or leave it” attitude; one that saw the many fish in the sea. Instead, there was one boy I wanted. All who came before, in the torments/ torrents of my mind, were dust, and if my mouth spilled wrong words, I’d blow it. I lived up 24th about a mile farther out than Joe. Not yet driving, all of us walked everywhere. Joe’s house was central and on the way to other places but my house was out of the way, a long walk to the north. But one day, when I was outside in the yard, Joe walked by. He stopped and told me he’d just gotten a haircut. He said it was called a “forward.” I was thinking — it looks so cute, loving his sheepish smile. But I didn’t know what to say. All I wanted to do was go into the house and call Kathy, “Joe walked by. He’s got a new haircut. It’s called a forward.” And we would say “Oh my God. Oh my God!” Now, I look back and imagine how this could have been different. If I’d had some level of functionality, I would’ve said “Where are you heading? I can walk with you for a while…” Or even, “Would you like to come in?” That would have been just fine. I had no idea how to push the advantage and, though I was by then 14, well, what do you expect? It was like the fish. What would I do if I caught one? Wild lusty love at 14 does not lead to a good outcome.

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V o l . 12 N o . 2 We could’ve said “Sometimes.” Take a Chance on Me, Baby The next mistake came at what could have been the turning point, but we did not turn. Maybe a year had passed. We were all at the Loyal Heights fieldhouse where they had transformed the basketball court to host a teen sock hop — a dance. Now, there was a bit more interaction, not like prior years, where the girls leaned against one wall and the boys, at the opposite wall, posed without advancing. One of Joe’s friends was Dick Louis. We called him Louie. A big guy. He’d eventually play high school football with Joe who buffed up for it. Louie was a huggable tuffy/softy kind of guy. We had been hanging out that night, kidding around, not dancing much if at all… Eventually they announced the last dance — always a slow dance. Joe asked me to dance. Still my heart. We danced, as done then, embracing, his arms around me, mine lifted to his shoulders. When the dance was over, we parted and returned to our friends. We didn’t even have the sense to go out to look at the stars. But what happened next was the mistake. Through a different lens, it might’ve been the best choice. This was the fork in the road. So Many Good Girls Go Bad After the dance, kids lingered outside, Louie said to me “Do you guys consider yourself good girls?” I thought the right answer was yes. And that’s what we said, because we did consider ourselves good girls. We thought we were being evaluated on the scale we were used to… but new measures of merit were taking shape. We had not learned the new answers. Older girls would have nailed it. We could have asked, “What do you have in mind?” We could have said, “It depends.”

This was the opening. What would have happened that night, hanging out with Joe and Louie? None of us had cars, yet, where wicked opportunities opened. They might have had a hidden bottle or some cigarettes, but I know we would have walked, brushing past each other. We would have been a lot like we were walking home from school -- until they walked us home. We wanted to hang out with these guys. Though we might have become the kind of girls who sneak out at night to run the neighborhoods with boys. Yes! We wanted to be a little bit bad. Kathy and I said we were good girls. And the boys went off in search of girls who weren’t so good. We picked the boring and conventional. I first realized what happened here…as an adult…as a writer, looking back on it decades later. Good-bye, Joe Reno…I Will Never Forget You During the summer of 1959, my mom got married. She and Ken built a new house north of Kenmore, that summer. I’d have my own room and bathroom. Mom gave me my own phone line to keep me off theirs. Still, I begged my mom to let me stay in Ballard. I told her I could live with my Ballard grandma, but Mom needed me to help with the kids and even my grandma was against the idea. I left Joe behind. I just didn’t know how to close the girlfriend deal. Because that’s what I would have really liked — to be his girlfriend. It is funny, looking back now, and thinking about dancing with Joe. I have danced with so many men but that dance with Joe is the only one I remember. So in the moment. They always said it was puppy love, but ever the defiant one, I owned it. At age 21, when the boy I crushed on in 6th grade (not Joe) finally showed some interest, I married him. I stayed true to the magic of love at age 12 — never questioning the wisdom of my child-self. I was married to the cutest boy in junior high for 53 years…until he died last February.

138 The point is, I hang on. My child-self still waiting for resolution and happy endings. He’s got everything he needs, he’s an artist, he don’t look back About ten years ago (2012), I found Joe, supported in this quest by my husband and sons. It turned out that my husband, Rich, and Joe, both served on an obscure Army post in Germany, maybe at the same time. The guys liked each other. Joe had become a successful artist, wellknown in Seattle art circles. Called a younger member of the Northwest School that dated to Mark Tobey. Joe called with condolences when, my husband died in 2021. He supported me and shared the experience of losing his brother, his mom, and too many friends. Joe is 79 and I am 77. When I see him, I still remember and sometimes feel my history of connection. He doesn’t really know this story — well, he may know everything — but I have not said anything much about all this. When I’m in Seattle, I visit him. He paints every day, pushing himself. He has a million ideas. In a way, I’m just as guarded as I was back then. Because of the 5th grade Friendship Ring incident. Joe texts me pictures of work in progress. He can’t text words on his flip phone. Once when driving around Ballard with him, he said, “We’d go up to where you lived on 85th…” I think Woah, they knew where I lived. It wasn’t just that one haphazard time with the haircut… If I had known, it would have encouraged me. Rummaging around in the archives of my life, recently, I found a diary note I wrote when we were young. “Joe said he’d call at 1 pm. Guess who sat by the phone all day. He called at 4 pm.” Called! This happened? I did not remember but I have, in a sense, some receipts from the day. Joe and Louie were not as wild as we thought they were. Joe tells me he didn’t make love until he was nineteen. His mom’s Catholic guilt-tripping had an impact. He thinks about sin and the devil, but, at the same time, he’s creative, free and unfiltered. And he still has magic about him. It’s palpable. Dick Louis became a special education teacher in the

CIRQUE Northshore District. They say he really connected with kids. After he left teaching, Louie became ill and died. As in 1958, Joe and I are friends and this is fine. I still have no moves but I wish Joe would stop calling me Sis. He must think it’s sweet, but I don’t. Our relationship has purity of soul. But if I could, I would put both arms around his neck, like we did back then, and dance to a slow song. Maybe to “Unchained Melody.” We both know the words, belting them out in unison on the phone last week. Oh, my love, my darlin’ I’ve hungered for your touch…a long, lonely time. Joe’s voice sang strong on speaker phone while I blasted the well-known lyrics from a dock in Lake Washington. My friend observed, likely bemused. I found myself thinking, "This man, once a kid I knew, is fun.” Seems kind of rare. A random touch of whimsy. ~~~ Joe frowned as I read him some of this piece. He said I should write about his life in the here and now. The next day he called and said, “I was being a snob. You can publish it. It’s good to have something out there about when I was a juicy chiclet.” So, he was. So, was I. And this I guarantee: I’ll be Joe’s friend for the rest of his life.

Joe Reno Photo by Cynthia Steele

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INTERVIEW Paul K. Haeder

An Interview with Poet Emily Wall On her own journey breaking the chains of toxic Christianity and transforming it into an incredible lightness of feminism I put “interview” in quotation marks, since in the days of my youth, I was a journalist, newspaperman, rooted in some very odd and enchanting places, like Bisbee, Tombstone, El Paso, Juarez and Spokane (and Vietnam, Mexico, Central America). “Being there” meant public interchanges in the face-toface realm, or in a lesser sense, on the phone. I always wanted out of those respective offices, so I ended up walking with my sources from where they lived, worked from or where they held vigil. Sometimes I would be harnessed in for a hang-gliding story, just to see what my source “sees” up there with red hawks, or inside a prison with a counselor and inmates absorbing the steel hell of that realm. In this case, I emailed Emily with questions. Here, now, I have put my own faith in understanding this woman, Emily Wall, through her writing, specifically, her poems. Published interviews of her here and there helped with some of my back-grounding, but the real work was accomplished reading her “stuff,” and then marinating myself in her poems, while seeking the edges, those shadowy corners, embracing all those verbal veronicas she is so capable of sketching for me the reader. A pathway to her spirit takes very little prodding, as Emily Wall’s “self” runs throughout all her work, whether she is welding to Georgia O’Keeffe in those persona poems (in her book Fist) or inculcating us into the religion of birthing (in her forthcoming book Breaking Into Air). She is engaging us to think beyond the limits of narrative. She holds audience with great historical figures, yet Emily is a woman grounded by the great outdoors. She’s a teacher in Alaska raising three young women/girls. I believe poetry is a conduit to a person’s soul, psyche and

real self, no matter how camouflaged each work may be with the lovely trickery of the bard. Poetry is much more bone-chilling and heart-rending, IMHO, than song, even those folk songs. Though I’d have to say the blues really takes the soul, pulls away the skin, and reshapes music into poetry. So a Russian Jew, Abel Meeropol (Lewis Allan), and that Philly born Eleanora Fagan (Billie Holiday) came together to pull out all the stops defining this country. Southern trees bear a strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees Pastoral scene of the gallant South The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh Then the sudden smell of burning flesh Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop Here is a strange and bitter crop Seems fitting I pull out a Billie Holiday song to illustrate the synchronicity of what floats around the mind of a reader and reviewer while contemplating Wall’s work. In the interview that follows, I think Wall delves deep into her personal life as a poet and into her life now as, exvangelical. For Emily Wall, her life is the slow constant work of mother-teacher-poet-feminist. Her MFA came from the same school I graduated from, but with undergraduate degrees in journalism and English. At the University of Arizona, I was steeped in a world of politics, police beat

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CIRQUE +--+ Thank you for these wonderful and deep questions! I just loved writing back to these questions and thinking through all of your ideas. I've attached my responses here--I did skip a few, but answered most of them. Feel free to edit down if needed and to send any follow-up questions. Thank you for engaging so deeply with my work and for helping promote these two new books. Cheers, Emily

reporting, dozens of poets and other writers showing up, literary parties and my own wanderlust to get out of Tucson and end up eighty feet under the Sea of Cortez five hours away. Wall was steeped in the interesting toil of a master of fine arts student of poetry. She is now in Alaska, teaching at the University of Alaska. But first, one of her poems I dig: Freshly Rooted Late Sunday three tourists stop to watch dog salmon running in Gold Creek. The three seem stunned. Maybe moved, maybe not, but still in the face of this rush of water, battered bodies thrashing, gaining on the stream. Their pausing makes me look closer. I see quicksilver bodies growing accustomed to fresh water, the smell filling their noses, the rightness of this place. I see the way their bodies submit, shapeshift to fit this new water, and I am filled with envy.

Paul Haeder: The question I start with, whether I’m interviewing a biologist or a poet, is I’d like to hear whether there was a spiritual background to their life. Was there, to your early life, to your childhood…however you would define that now? Emily Wall: Yes, I grew up in an evangelical Christian household that was conservative and toxic. Like many others, it wasn’t until I went away to college, and even in the years beyond that, that I started to understand just how toxic and harmful those early beliefs were. The early spiritual leaders in my life were racist, homophobic, and misogynistic. Like many exvangelicals I went through some horrific experiences. But I also chose to keep spirituality in my life. At times it has been on a very quiet backstage, but it’s always been there—mostly as a source of comfort. It hasn’t been until recently that I’ve started to see it as a source of power, and that my work as a spiritual woman and artist, is to reclaim that power. Rather than turn my back on that entire community and world, I’d like to see those harmed by it reclaiming it and drawing strength from those beliefs. PH: Why is poetry important to you, to society? EW: I’m interested in how often folks ask me this question: what is the value of poetry? It’s an understandable question, given book sales, but also a discouraging one. What’s even more interesting to me is that so many people write poetry. My entire career—in the classroom, at readings, at community events—I’ve had folks tell me they “don’t read poetry” but they do write it. There are so many closet poets out there! One the one hand, this is encouraging and wonderful, but it’s also discouraging that we as a culture don’t buy poetry and read it. All those

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V o l . 12 N o . 2 closet poets tell me, though, that there is something inherently human about writing poetry or songs. We are storytellers, as a species, but we are also songwriters, in whatever form those songs take. I think there is a powerful human urge to write in a lyrical way. I see it again and again in the classroom; in every class I teach I let my students write in any genre they want, and most of them choose poetry. And I see how writing poems cracks them open—how it helps them really reach in and talk about the deeply personal aspects of their lives. PH: I am highly steeped in memoiric-style writing, whether I'm writing my own poetry, journalism or fiction. The work of yours, Emily, I reviewed includes two famous women —Georgia O’Keeffe and Mary, the mother of Jesus—as well as dozens of people who talked to you about their childbirth experiences. What is one of your most biographical poems—include it here—and then discuss the power in those words.

Georgia and Mary—was a deeply freeing experience as a writer. Persona means “mask” and that’s exactly the power persona writing gives us. It allows us to put on someone else’s “mask” which always means we are freer in some ways. If we have a mask on in a costume party, we get to act in different ways, right ? Writing the poems is that way too. I was able to access some of the parts of my own story that were harder to tell, or share, when it was my own bare face. The Georgia poems, in particular, helped me express some of the rage I feel, living, working, and raising girls in a society that is so deeply misogynistic. The poem “Dear Petal Soft” is one of those poems. While it’s not biographical, in that it’s not my story, the rage in that poem comes from me and my experiences.

PH: You've stated that feminists have balked at you writing a book about a woman who is mythical, Emily Wall and for others, the mother of Christ. Here, from an interview with you:

EW: That’s an interesting question. My first two books Freshly Rooted and Liveaboard, both published with Salmon Poetry, were both very biographical. The first book told of my move to Alaska at the same moment my own family back home was dissolving. The second book tells the story of my years living on a sailboat and cruising through Canada and Alaska. After those two books, I kept telling my story, but in a very different way. By starting with the lens of others’ stories, I was able to explore some of my own experiences in a deeper, more complex way. Collecting other women’s’ birth stories for Breaking Into Air allowed me access to some of the more complex emotions I felt around the births of my three children. Like having multiple narrators in a novel, the reader (and me as a writer) can come to a deeper and more complicated understanding of the powerful act of giving birth when we hear so many stories from various voices. Writing persona poems—the poems in the voices of

She said friends would tell her, “Nobody wants to hear about her.” Finally, “One night in a bar,” she says, “some writers I admire a lot were pushing back, telling me this project wasn’t a good idea — that we should not be allowing any religious figure to talk, even if it is a woman. And I was so mad. I went upstairs to my hotel room and submitted it to every chapbook contest I could find.” [from "Comfort Food: Poet Emily Wall Feeds a Hunger for the Voices of Women,” Profile by Amy O'Neill Houck, 49 Writers Profile] a. Discuss that ideology of not allowing any religious figure to talk. Where do you think that comes from? b. Discuss Mary's feminist groundings EW: That pushback wasn’t from feminists—in fact, it was mostly men around the table in that bar, that night. But I think part of their outrage comes from the deep harm that conservative Christianity has inflicted on so many in our society. I understand where they are coming from— they felt I was giving “voice” to that movement. But it’s something our society as a whole is struggling with right now. We equate “Christian” with “Westboro Baptist

142 Church.” But that’s like saying if you’re Islamic you’re Taliban. We are so quick to dismiss, silence, and blame any spiritual voice right now. And again, I understand it. But in so doing, we also disempower populations that draw strength and courage from their spirituality. I’m thinking in particular of Martin Luther King, Jr., who taught us how a true core of beliefs could be powerful in our work toward social justice. Simply silencing anyone who “believes” is a knee-jerk and unfortunate reaction. I hope in some ways the poems in the Mary book will start to push back against that silencing narrative. Mary’s feminist groundings? I’ll approach this question from a more personal narrative standpoint. I was raised in a household that believed Catholics to be “evil” and “wrong.” Evangelical Christianity has an extremely narrow (and misogynistic, racist, homophobic) interpretation of Christianity. In that tradition, prayers can only be sent to God, who is firmly male (and white). When I was in college I studied in Europe and visited many incredibly beautiful churches. I was struck back then by all the images of Mary, and of the ease with which Catholics were able to pray to a woman. In my late teenage years, that seemed revolutionary to me. I was never tempted to become Catholic because of their approach to feminists and gay marriage, to name a few beliefs. But when I was starting this project and thinking about who I wanted to talk to me, Mary came up right away. I think she might have come from all those days walking around the churches of Europe and seeing her image as a source of comfort and power embedded in my mind. Then I found this wonderful book by Lesley Hazleton, Mary, where she goes back and researches what life in Palestine was like during Mary’s life. I learned that Mary wasn’t white, of course, and the types of work she likely did (Hazelton posits she likely was a midwife or a helper in births), what kinds of food she ate, where she likely lived, etc. and she became more of a person to me, an actual woman I could pray to. PH: Do you think spending your life as a poet and working with words and responding to the world in the way you have gives you, I don’t know, tools to work with looking at the larger questions around existence and origins, birth, life, death, second birth? In Flame, you are working with words around God/Jesus or what Jesus/God is. How do you think about heaven — is that what the under girder is in Flame? EW: That’s an interesting question. I do think poetry gives

CIRQUE us “tools” to approach some of life’s larger questions. For me, writing poetry allows me to take intangible, even abstract ideas, and try to make them real—to bring them literally down to earth. In Flame I have a poem called “Soup” where I imagine Mary living on some street in heaven, maybe in a little house with a good kitchen and spice rack and making soup for her son. Poetry gives us a kind of imaginative bridge to make the unknowable physical, and therefore more real. I talk with my students about this a lot—especially my beginners. Their poems are often filled with abstractions and vague references. We talk about how to use image to cut through that vagueness and how abstractions are a kind of emotional shield—when we’re afraid to really dig in and talk about death, or love, or sexual identity, or whatever we are grappling with. Using images makes those things real to us and allows us to really explore our own experiences and emotions. Starting with images, that building block of poems, gives us access to those enormous ideas. PH: You seemingly are not somebody who goes to those "dark places." I think it’s important for you as a person and poet, i.e. communicator, or prove to me differently. There’s beauty and light in your poetry, and a deep resonance of feminism. Did I miss that? On target? Expand. EW: It’s true, my poems tend to bend toward the light. All my life I’ve turned to poems—William Stafford’s and Mary Oliver’s, to name a few—to find the light in dark moments. Poems can be tools to bring us toward healing and safety and comfort. Stafford’s lines You are not alone/ the whole wide world pours down and Oliver’s line You do not have to be good become mantras to me—songs I sing to myself, by reading those lines and those poems over and over again. I think this is the power of poems—we keep them by our bedside tables, we read them in the quiet hours of the morning, we give them as gifts at funerals and to grieving friends. My friend and poet John Straley has this brilliant haiku where he compares gulls to lanterns on still water and I often think of poems the same way—a single poem is like a white gull, a glow, on the dark waters of our lives. A film student at UAF made a short film of my poem “Sky” and he got it exactly right—the film shows a man in despair and rage and the poem is read while we watch him drinking in the snow. After he made the film (with my permission) he emailed me to apologize that the film had gotten so “dark” and I told him I

V o l . 12 N o . 2 thought he’d gotten it exactly right. He used the poem instead of “interpreting” it and that’s exactly the life I envisioned for that poem. (Here’s the link If you want to watch this short film: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pmg3jiX0ea0&feature=youtu.be.) In a way, I do believe this is feminism. So much content in our patriarchal world is about violence: so many of our movies and TV shows normalize very graphic violence. I’ve been laughed at by many men for looking away—say when someone’s body is being destroyed by acid in a bathtub—“but it’s genius!”—and I just can’t look at it. Our male-centric world focuses so deeply on violence and pain, so focusing instead on nurturing, on images of birth, of prayer, of feeding someone—those feel very feminist to me. In Flame I have a poem called “Blood” where the Biblical men are talking about death and violence and Mary is countering that by talking about food. That’s her feminist voice speaking up: let’s stop talking about the extreme violence of crucifixion and instead talk about the miracle of feeding someone who is hungry. PH: What's the latest typical advice you give to your three daughters about life, living, being in a world with so much beauty and despair? EW: Oh, advice! I started the persona books—Flame and Fist—because I needed advice! I have three daughters, ages 11, 13, and 15 so this is an interesting time in my house. I was writing Fist just as my oldest was coming into her teenage years. This is my book with the most rage, and that probably stems from the ways I see my beautiful daughters being harmed. All three of them are active and athletic, with these beautiful strong bodies, and routinely

143 all three of them are called “fat” by boys and men around them. “Are you going to eat that?” “If you eat that you’ll be fat!” “Wow you eat a lot.” Those are sentences slashed at my girls just in the last year. It’s one thing to grow up yourself with comments like that, and even with a lot of verbal and sexual harassment, but it’s another thing entirely to see your beautiful children treated like this. Yesterday my 11-year-old came home in tears because a boy on the playground told her she had a “fat butt” while she was climbing on the monkey bars. We took a long walk and talked about how boys (and men) use that language not because it’s true, but because they’ve learned it’s a useful weapon against women—those words hurt us, and they know it (of course this boy learned this from some man). I don’t know if you can imagine how discouraging it is to me that we seem to be making so little progress in this area. Many of the poems at the beginning of the Georgia book Fist are about rage—her husband is photographing her and using her body for his own purposes and then cheating on her—and I think I was able to tap into some of Georgia’s rage. Writing the second half of that book, where she leaves for the desert and creates her own, beautiful home was really helpful for me to imagine and write. In “Dear Walking Out” Georgia says “I touch my skin—its hundred tiny scars—its thousand broken roads.” In that poem she is discovering the enduring power of bones, and in living alone on her own terms. PH: From that O'Neill Houck interview: "Spirituality, food and art are three of the most important things in my life, touchstones for me. And I felt hungry to hear from powerful women, all three of whom have survived serious tragedy in their lives, like outright sexism, attempted rape, traumatic things. So I wanted to write; I wanted to hear from them.” a. Define what spirituality is for you: b. Define what art is for you: c. Food/famine/feeding the world, a huge issue around social justice, here, and globally...women are the keepers of seeds, the harvesters, and the ones who cook and feed. Riff with this statement. EW: I love how deep these questions are! I think there is a common thread between art, spirituality, and food, and all three come from deep feminism. These three things

144 feed the world. Spirituality, for me, is service. Our church in Douglas runs a food pantry and I have the honor of running it every Wednesday afternoon. We hand out between 10 and 20 bags of food a week. To me that is spirituality. Sitting in church, praying, singing, listening to the pastor ring a singing bowl—all of that gives me strength, but real spirituality is the work we do in our communities. Our church also runs a backpack program that makes sure kids in the community have bags of food every weekend. Adults in our community making sure the kids are fed— that’s spiritualty. The third book of persona poems—not yet out—is in the voice of Alice Waters, food activist and mother herself. She changed the way we think about food in our country is such a significant way. One of her primary missions was to change food in the schools and I love that this talented chef—with a business to run (she owns the restaurant Chez Panisse)—is devoting her time to changing cafeteria food. She went into a middle school near her house and discovered the kids were eating lunch out of a vending machine! So she raised funds, organized the school administration and community, and built a school garden, then taught the kids how to harvest and make good food. That’s feminism to me—this act of feeding those kids. And finally art, which does the same thing on an emotional and spiritual level. Really good art is a gift—it heals us and it feeds us, in a way that we need as humans. Art by women, for women, shows us we are not alone, and encourages us in our work. At the end of her life, when she became blind, Georgia started to sculpt and she has a sculpture that’s a beautiful, white spiral inward. That piece really speaks to me about the resistance of binaries, of the “cross,” of the male-gaze. My poem about that piece ends “It’s not the living I’ll miss—but the way my fingers—ring the deep song of everything.” All my life I’ve seen women in the background cooking, washing dishes, checking on the children—doing this essential work and yet most often they are “in the background” (often while the men are talking, or holding court, or presenting). I’d like to see us shift to an understanding of how this work is the real work of value. PH: If it wasn't poetry, what would it be for you?...If you weren't teaching-publishing in those MFA-type circles,

CIRQUE would you still be writing poetry…You say you are a story-catcher, alluding to "baby-catcher" midwifery. Are you going to write a memoir? Why or why not? EW: I’ll respond to all three of those here. One of the gifts of writing poems is that I can draft a poem in a relatively short time. I wrote my first book in 15-minute writing sessions each day for five years. As someone with a fulltime job, a marriage, and three children, it’s not easy to find big blocks of writing time, which I think is necessary for prose writing. I’d like to write both fiction and a memoir, but the time isn’t yet right for those projects. I’d love to do a writing residency—at Alderworks in Skagway or Storyknife in Homer—when my children are older. Right now it’s not practical for me to leave for weeks at a time. I have done a number of “weekend residencies” at hotels in town. I won a Rasmuson grant to write Fist and had three weekends—48 hours of pure writing time!—to work and that really helped me as I put together that book. I’ve dappled with novel writing and I absolutely love it. So in the future I’d like to turn to prose. Interestingly, to loop back to an earlier question of yours, the prose writing I’ve done is definitely “darker” than the poetry. So I also need to be in a place in my life where I also have the emotional time to deal with the darker material of my own story. PH: Some of your favorite poets, alive or deceased? And, why are they favorites, in a sentence or two? As I noted above William Stafford and Mary Oliver are two favorites. But to be honest, most of my current favorites are Alaskan poets. I’m thinking of Peggy Shumaker, X’unei Lance Twitchell, Ishmael Hope, Vivian Faith Prescott, Marie Tozier, Heather Lende (yes, she writes poems!), Erin Hollowell, Christy NaMee Eriksen, Frank Soos, and Nicole Stellon O’Donnell. If you don’t have a good library of Alaskan poetry you should start to build one. The talent and depth of these Alaskan poets continues to amaze me. PH: What is the most difficult part of your artistic process? EW: Sitting down at my desk. My students and I talk about this a lot—there is always that moment of fear when we begin. I tell them I wish I could promise it gets easier, but it hasn’t for me. Every day I have to push past that voice that tells me I’m not good enough, that my stories don’t matter, and sit down anyway. Annie Lamott has a wonderful metaphor where she talks about driving right

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V o l . 12 N o . 2 through the “bad neighborhood” of our minds and I love that. Every day we have to resist that fear and keep going, keep writing, keep trying. It can be especially hard after rejections or days when criticism comes to us from readers, but we have to keep going. We just push past it and write anyway. Haeder’s review of Emily Wall’s poetry collections will appear in Cirque #25

ENCOUNTERS Cynthia Steele

AWP Back to Live: Back to Reality This year’s March 23 to 26 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference and Bookfair was Paul Cynthia Steele attended this year’s event and were joined by many others, many of whom are mentioned below. This writing serves as a teaser for those who may wish to attend next year’s conference and may have never been. Whether you are writers, teachers, students, editors, or publishers, we want you to join us. The first day consisted of a morning arrival after suffering long-term sleep deprivation traveling to the East Coast. But wait, it gets worse before it gets better. We arrived at the BnB Cynthia rented—a studio apartment building—that seemed infused with marijuana smoke, which made hauling heavy luggage up three flights of stairs oddly and periodically hilarious. We kept hushing one another repeatedly. Upon reflection, the hushing was probably louder than the initial laughter and talk, but, you know, with echoey stairways, who can tell? The flat somehow smelled neutral, but the hallways never smelled like anything but active toking. Yes, Cynthia will stay at the hotel next year. Always trying to save a buck and help her fellow man and not The Man is the idea. After much sleep on a shared but comfortable queen bed, we quested for food. Our pre-conference agenda included the quest for the infamous Philly Cheesesteak.

This brought Sandy and Cynthia to South Philly, on McClellan St. where for over 20 years, Gooey Louie’s holein-the-wall grocery store shopette has been packed wallto-wall with items to purchase as well as a steady influx of people into its narrow aisle. A deli in the back furnishes the Philly-famous sandwiches along with limited seating. The setting reminded Sandy of the village groceries in Alaska. After partaking of our hot, enormous, meat-filled sandwiches, and sharing as many varied Alaskan stories as the workers and owner wanted—really, we could have probably kept going—owner Bob Carvinett offered to drive us back to the BnB. While the workers closed up shop, we walked the streets of South Philly, taking directions from locals about which streets were safest to traverse. In this traditional area, nearly all the windows and doors of the brick facades of the rowhouses were decorated. This year’s Easter’s décor was early and carefully affixed weeks in advance. Crosses, eggs, wreaths, and, curiously, stuffed rabbits, peering out, house after house, added a glowing mix of beliefs and hope, a welcome and curious delight to the deepening blue, clear night. We chatted with Bob on the drive back and he explained he lived in Jersey, the opposite direction of his drive to our BnB. We thanked him profusely and fell into

146 another good sleep. Next day brought caffeine at the Reading Terminal Market via the Old City Café. In 1890 the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company purchased this block for its new terminal, erecting a new market tucked beneath the train shed and tracks. The street-level market once reverberated with the sound of trains rumbling overhead. Reading Terminal, home to 70+ family-owned, small businesses, included Lessie's Chicken & Waffles, which is not to be missed, but one of the most iconic eateries is The Dutch Eating Place. Servers are traditional Pennsylvania Dutch in plain clothing and prayer head coverings. If Cynthia turned up MIA here and there, she could always be found at Reading Terminal. Setting up shop...After the Coronavirus shrunk the 2020 AWP and last year’s conference went entirely virtual, with gratitude and masks, Cirque’s crew joined the 6,000 in-person attendees. In addition, 1,000 virtual attendees watched the presentations. Many of Cirque’s people— those published by the journal and/or the press kicked back at our table. Fortune smiled on our long, literary chats, as with friend of Cirque from the Salem Poetry Project Don Krieger, who spent time reading some of Cynthia’s stories as she read his poems from Discovery published by Cyberwit and When Danger is Past, Who Remembers?—a hybrid chapbook of lyric essays, poems, and photographs, published by Milk & Cake. Others joined us at the conference table and on walkabouts, such as Joan Nockels Wilson, who did readings from her The Book of Timothy published by Red Hen Press. Cynthia and Sandy and many others have read Joan’s book of her journey from Anchorage, Alaska, to Rome and Chicago, spanning thirty years that leads to a confrontation to gain a long-absent admission from the priest who abused her brother. Joan invited Sandy and Cynthia to Fergie’s, an upstairs-downstairs Irish Pub with perfect food in the heart of Center City, to hear traditional Irish music with a band of more than ten on various instruments with vocals that at times stunned the patrons to silence. David McElroy remained present with us throughout much of AWP, celebrating his 4th collection of poetry Water the Rocks Make, a series of journeys through eddies, operating rooms, log-jams, boxing rings, childhood kitchens, dreams of flight, court rooms, and forests. David and many other friends and Cirque authors came by out table, such as author Matt Caprioli, whose One Headlight: An Alaskan Memoir Cirque published in 2021. Friends

CIRQUE stopped by for logistical chats, books signings between panels, talks, and exhibitions. Connie Wasem Scott, whose poem “The Shape of My Hand” Cirque published in the 11.2 Land Ethic Issue, chatted with us, as did James Engelhardt, author of Bone Willows, a poetry collection published by Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press.

(left to right) Cynthia Steele, Joan Nockels Wilson, David McElroy, Sandra Kleven, and Tom Mitchell

Claudia Castro Luna, Washington State Poet Laureate (2018—2021) stopped by the booth to say hello to Sandy, who had gone on walkabout, but visited and snapped a selfie with Cynthia. At the University of Pennsylvania, David McElroy, Joan Wilson, Sandy and I attended a party, joining Olga Livshin (who’s had three poems in Cirque 4 and 5) and Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (the latter whose “Late 1940's Photograph” appeared in Cirque 4.1). There, we ate traditional Russian food and sang an animated Happy Birthday song for Julia, from the popular Cheburashka cartoon, along with Anna Halberstadt. The party was followed by a walk and Poems & Stories by the Cheburashka Collective, on March 24 in the Slought Galleries, with writers who are emigres/refugees/firstgeneration from countries that were once a part of the Eastern bloc. The poets encouraged us to “think about the devastation that is not only taking place but has taken place over a much longer period of time, and not only in Ukraine”…although Ukraine does “bring our awareness to the long histories of dispossession and displacement.” Sandy and Cynthia joined those who staged reunions in hallways and local eateries, those who now embraced those only known and seen on Zoom via readings. For over a year, first Sandy and then Cynthia joined Larissa Shmailo’s group on Saturdays with other mostly East Coast writers. We had intently written, most frequently from a prompt, our poems, book chapters, and other

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V o l . 12 N o . 2 independent work. In our first face-to-face meeting, we sang silly songs and invited a telephonic group member to join who couldn’t be there in person. Shared food was the binder for our group—Sue, Rachel, Audrey, Cynthia, and Sandy—and many others who did not know when they might be able to join in person again. For us, it was heartfelt after seeing each other’s faces after so long. It was natural and normal to hug the people we had never met in person. We saw people from many readings, and we struggled to acquaint ourselves with the faces now seen in the real world. Seeing others that we’d only seen online brought comments like “Oh, hi—great work. Portland? Seattle?” Their poems and stories to this point more real than their bodies. Hopping from booth to booth, sharing about the journal, buying T-Shirts like “Books Saved My Life,” or of Thoreau voicing “the Barbaric Yawp” brought a feeling of commonality, and there reigned an overarching feeling of positivity. The culminating event was the panel reading that Sandy participated in. Of note, Cirque plans to put together a reading for next year with a group of our own writers, so please email your interest to Sandy. Sandy’s

panel included Anna Fridlis, Meg Tuite, Jonathan Penton, and, in absentia, but whose work was read, Larissa Shmailo. The panel theme was “Writing Resilience: A Reading by Neurodiverse Writers”—for writers affected by trauma, addiction, and/or mental illness who presented their stories. The stories, at times cringeworthy and at times funny or incredibly sad, always presented life (and writing) as a triumph of the human spirit. As it is so often for so many of us.

REVIEW Jackie McManus

A Review of Dale Champlin's Callie Comes of Age Cirque Press, 2021 148 pp., $15 ISBN 978-168524706-5 Callie Comes of Age is a haunting coming-of-age story that could fool you with its lyrical, almost casual language. Prepare your heart. It is full of a staggering anguish. When significant people die, it is a shattering experience for Callie, the young protagonist of Dale Champlin’s collection, who had already lost the three great loves of her life/and she’s just turned fifteen (“Callie Writes the Novel of Her Life”). Grief has all the markings of a girl acting out: pornography (in this case as close as she could get to it with a Cosmos article), masturbation, promiscuity, sex with an adult, drinking, hard work, and thoughts of suicide. Six

148 years old when she experiences the first loss, twelve with the second, and a young teen with the third: the suicide of a boy she loved, Callie is reeling. You could argue some of these things are “normal” teenager behavior. You’d be wrong. Here is Callie at twelve years old in the poem “What Happened Next”: I rooted around under the kitchen sink… nabbed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, admired the black label, took the almost full bottle into the bedroom, and gulped down a couple of swigs. “10 Best Sex Tips Ever,” was the title. The first tip was, “masturbate every morning.” I missed this morning because of my Dad’s funeral. So I better get on it.

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distracted Callie just enough that the whip-end of barbed wire snapped taut and dug into her muscle… And then “In Her Brain Castle,” Callie has no sense of how she has come to such a pretty pass. Even now she has no idea of the fragility of her day-to-day condition. Do you remember me, Mother? Callie howls. But there are always gifts in a story. Yours, mine. In Callie Comes of Age, Callie’s mother has gifted her with knowledge and the power that comes with a name.

To get off I recalled how mother’s hair fell past her butt… And I remembered the beauty of Diego’s slow smile. In “A Trace of Wind,” Callie’s mother depicts her marriage that had become life-threatening and, before she could convert her new knowledge to power, she journaled the truth for Callie before she disappeared. The day Daniel set me down in his landscape, first day on the range, I didn’t recognize the swinging ranch sign overhead as the sword of Damocles or the nightmare of a guillotine ready to chop me in half. I was fooled by spring— Contrary to what our society likes to peddle, grief does not have closure. Grief comes with us; it is not left behind. Callie integrates grief into every little thing she does. We hear its quiet voice in “It’s Amazing What Leaves and You Don’t Miss It”: The next day Callie was stretching wire… Somehow a whiff of juniper—something like her mother’s jasmine shampoo-or a bluebird perched on top of a near post singing its heart out

Dale Champlin

Whether Callie is Callie or Kali, she embraces both. The language will at turns comfort you until the story tears you apart. In “A Reckoning,” Callie knows her existence is a gift. She sees herself there in the stream, a thing to be caught or cupped, a whirl of water in rushed fall— …Held.

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Champlin employs quotes from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, which Callie had read at least seven times. Gender role restrictions are pushed against in Bronte’s novel just as they are here, and we might be tempted to equate Callie with the heroine, Catherine. That is fair to a point but I would argue sensual gender stereotypes remain, and Callie is less sensual than sexualized and traumatized, which changes everything. Every male she came in contact with, save the boy she loved who killed himself, failed her. In “Callie Knew She Was Hot,” we hear: It didn’t faze her a bit The way boys, middle-aged men, And old geezers stopped dead in their tracks. Callie even felt an ambivalence about her father, some place between anticipation and fear. Wuthering Heights is a novel caught between an old way of life and a new world. In Callie Comes of Age, Champlin has written such a book, one accomplished poem after another, all of it complicated, nuanced, and stunning. Tillie Olsen said, “Every woman who writes is a survivor.” Callie is the heroine of her story yet that empowerment does not happen until the end. I longed to know more. I longed for the story to continue and answer, What next? What happens to Callie? What we do know is that Callie took the truth her mother gave her, took the deaths, murder, domestic violence, the hard work and drinking and sex, and the staggering

fatigue of grief, all of it, stacked cairns, (“Her Mother Speaks”) to build anew. Truths aren’t easy.

Night Sky

Nard Claar

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CONTRIBUTORS Carolyn Adams’ poetry and art have been published in the pages, and on the covers of The Hunger Journal, Steam Ticket, Apercus Quarterly, Apeiron, and Red Weather, among others. She has authored four chapbooks, with one being a collection of her collage art, entitled What Do You See?

Kristina Boratino was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, where her wanderlust soul is quenched daily by surrounding beauty. Kristina has been published in Cirque, Sonder Midwest Magazine, Compassion International Magazine, Route 7 Review, and more. She resides in Edmonds, Washington with her two children.

Luther Allen writes poems and designs buildings from the flank of Sumas Mountain, Washington. He co-facilitates the SpeakEasy reading series, is co-editor of Noisy Water: Poetry from Whatcom County, Washington, and author of a collection of 365 poems, The View from Lummi Island, available at http://othermindpress.wordpress.com. His work is included in numerous journals and anthologies, including WA 129; Refugium, Poems for the Pacific; Poets Unite! LitFUSE @10; Weaving the Terrain; For Love of Orcas; Washington Poetic Routes; Solstice: Light & Dark of the Salish Sea; and The Madrona Project — Human Communities in Wild Places. His short story, “The Stilled Ring,” was finalist in an annual fiction contest at terrain.org. He views writing as his spiritual practice.

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press). Ronda’s current manuscript was a finalist with the Charles B. Wheeler Prize and Four Way Books Levis Prize. She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Blackbird, 2River, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and Public Radio KUOW’s All Things Considered.

Lana Hechtman Ayers makes her home in an Oregon coastal town of more cows than people. As managing editor at three small presses, she has shepherded over eighty poetry collections into print. She holds MFAs in Poetry and in Writing Popular Fiction, as well as degrees in Mathematics and Psychology. Her work appears in numerous print and online literary journals, as well as in her nine poetry collections and a romantic time travel novel. Visit her online at LanaAyers.com. Laura E. Bailey makes her home in Manzanita, Oregon, a small village on the rocky coast of Oregon where the vibrant local arts community she joined in 2003 is an incubator and a crucible for her writing. Laura writes creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, she of which can be found at www.lauraebailey.org Evgenia Jen Baranova is an author from Russia. Her most recent poems have appeared Poetry Northwest, The Raw Art Review, Persephone's Daughters, Panoplyzine, Transcend: A Literary Magazine, and Triggerfish Critical Review. Clifton Bates has written Conflicting Landscapes American Schooling/ Alaska Natives with the Very Rev. Dr. Michael Oleksa. He has been a frequent contributor to Cirque. His second book, Like Painted Kites & Collected Works was published by Cirque Press. Cirque Press will also be publishing his third book Sky Changes On the Kuskokwim. Mike Bates has lived on the Oregon coast for five years. An attorney by training, he gave up a corporate practice for the humbling life of writing. His works of fiction and non-fiction can be found at mikebatesauthor.com Kevin T. Bennett is an American screen and stage actor, director, filmmaker, producer, and business entrepreneur. Originally from Alaska, he is a veteran of the arts with over 34 years of performance experience, his accolades include over 100 productions throughout stage and film. He stars in Peaks and Valleys. Owner of Alaska Stairlift & Elevator, LLC. Karen Bonaudi lives in the Seattle suburbs. She has taught adult and K-12 writing classes, conducted workshops, served as president of the Washington Poets Association, and was instrumental in establishing the Poet Laureate position in Washington State. Her publishing history includes Bellingham Review, Pontoon, Cascade Journal, South Dakota Review and others. Her poem “Exiles” appeared in Take a Stand: Art Against Hate from Raven Chronicles. Her chapbook Editing a Vapor Trail was published as part of the Pudding House Press Chapbook Series.

Jack Broom is a Seattle native who retired in 2016 after 39 years as a reporter and editor at The Seattle Times. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Western Washington University in 1974. His work in photography began in the 1970s as a reporter/photographer for The Wenatchee World, where he worked before going to The Seattle Times in 1977. In recent years, his photographs have won awards at state-fair competitions in Washington and have been featured in previous issues of Cirque. He is a past president of the Edmonds-based Puget Sound Camera Club. Mark Burke’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Sugar House Review, Nimrod International Journal and others. His work has recently been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Please see markanthonyburkesongsandpoems.com Mike Burwell’s poems have appeared in Abiko Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ice-Floe, Pacific Review, Poems & Plays, and Sin Fronteras. His poetry collection Cartography of Water was published by NorthShore Press in 2007, and in 2009 he founded the Northwest literary journal Cirque. He’s been a Taos resident since 2013 where he finally found home among the wild landscape and its wildly generous poets. Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum is a writer and teacher born and raised in Alaska. She has published eight books of poetry, fiction, and photography through her company, Red Sweater Press, and currently serves as the Mat-Su Vice President of Alaska Writers Guild. She also serves as Editor in Chief of The Poets' Touchstone, a publication of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Teri White Carns publishes haibun, tanka prose, and photos, as well as writing law review articles and reports on justice system research (since 1974). She has lived in Anchorage, Alaska for more than fifty years (to her surprise). Her childhood and college roots are in southwest Michigan, with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Antioch University in LA (2017). Vic Cavalli studied the visual arts and photography as a young man, and later in life discovered the potential depth and force of literature. In graduate school, he concentrated on the complex interpenetrating relationships between literature and the visual arts. His fiction, poetry, photography, and visual art have been published in literary journals in Canada, the United States, England, and Australia. He has been teaching Creative Writing at the university level since 2001. Dale Champlin, an Oregon poet with an MFA in fine art is the editor of the Oregon Poetry Association’s poetry journal Verseweavers and the OPA Newsletter. Ever since her daughter married a bull rider, Dale’s been writing cowboy poems. Memories of her early days hiking in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the bleachers at Pendleton Roundup, and

V o l . 12 N o . 2 summers camping at Lake Billie Chinook imbue her poetry with the scents of juniper and sage. She has had poems published in Willawaw, Visions International, San Pedro River Review, catheXis, The Opiate, Pif, Timberline Review and elsewhere. Her first collection, The Barbie Diaries, was published in 2019. Callie Comes of Age, Dale’s second full-length collection, was published with Cirque Press in 2021. Champlin’s next collection, Medusa, is due out in 2022. Susan Chase-Foster writes poemoirs and prose as she wanders through Interior Alaska, around the mountains of Taiwan and New Zealand, along Mexican and Spanish beaches, and Bellingham Bay, where she mostly resides. Her work has appeared in Cirque, Alaska Women Speak, Heron Clan, and other publications. She is the author of Xiexie Taipei, a collection of poems and photos from Taiwan, and the co-editor of This Uncommon Solitude: Pandemic Poetry from the Pacific Northwest. Susan is currently reading and writing commentary on all 100 Cantos of The Divine Comedy. Her blog hibernates at stilllifewithtortillas.com David Cheezem: Is a recently retired bookstore owner with an MFA degree from the University of Alaska Anchorage. He has had poems published in Cirque as well as The Platte River Review, and several opinion pieces published in the Anchorage Daily News as well as the Frontiersman newspapers. After selling his bookstore in 2018, he embarked on a bicycle journey roughly following the route that Lewis and Clark took beginning in 1804. Nard Claar, nardclaar.com, is an artist and also works with non-profits who value the environment, arts, and community. An avid cyclist, skier and artist. His work is currently exhibited in Colorado at 45 Degree Gallery, Old Colorado City, Academy Art & Frame, Colorado Springs, Manitou Art Center, Manitou Springs, and Stone, Bones, & Wood, Green Mt. Falls, as well as at Stephan Fine Arts in Anchorage, AK, Attic Gallery in Camas, WA, and the Encaustic Art Institute in Santa Fe, NM. Lyn Coffin: I have had more than 30 of my books published by Doubleday, Ithaca House, Adelaide Books, etc. Now I can't sleep and am sleepless in Seattle. Wilhemina Condon: My work has appeared in the North Dakota Quarterly, the Atlas Review, MacGuffin, the Antioch Review, and The Blue Lake Review. I received an honorable mention in the Best American Essays of 2013 for my essay “Walnut and Vine.” Linda Conroy is a retired social worker who likes to write about the complexity of behaviors that make us human and our connection to the changing times. She is the author of a poetry collection, Ordinary Signs. Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation, and 40 Weeks. Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2023. Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. She is currently at work on her first short story collection. For more information, visit http:// brittneycorrigan.com/ Mary Eliza Crane is a poet of the Cascade foothills. A regular feature at Puget Sound readings, she has read poetry from Woodstock to L.A, as well as with poets in Novosibirsk, Russia. Mary has two volumes of poetry, What I Can Hold In My Hands and At First Light, both published by Gazoobi Tales Press. Her work has appeared in many journals and northwest anthologies, including WA 129 Poets of Washington (2017) and Bridge Above the Falls (2019), and has also been translated into Russian. Mary also co-curates and co-hosts the monthly Duvall Poetry reading series in her community, as well as Easy Speak Seattle. She is currently working on translations of contemporary Siberian poetry into English.

151 Nancy Deschu writes non-fiction and poetry on themes of natural history and sense of place. She holds degrees in zoology and environmental engineering. Her career fieldwork has taken her across Alaska. She now lives in Anchorage, Alaska. She takes photographs as she travels around Alaska for her work and personal adventures. In her career as an aquatic field-scientist, she took photos documenting her field sites and field methods throughout Alaska. While in these remote areas she also took photos of landscapes and close-ups of images that spoke to her. She is especially drawn to water and rock features, thinking about how the geology, hydrology and biology work to make complex habitats and beautiful landscapes. Thomas Elson’s writing has been published in numerous venues, including Ellipsis, Better Than Starbucks, Cabinet of Heed, Flash Frontier, Short Édition, Sandy River Review, Bull, Litro, Journal of Expressive Writing, Dead Mule School, Selkie, New Ulster, Lampeter, and Adelaide. He divides his time between Northern California and Western Kansas. Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a “Mexi-Rican” born in México but raised in Puerto Rico. As a BIPOC poet and writer, she has two full-length poetry books published: Learning to Love a Western Sky by Airlie Press, and a bilingual poetry book, Speaking at a Time /Hablando a la Vez by Redbat Press. A historical/environmental poetry chapbook, Fossils in a Red Flag was released by Finishing Line Press in 2021. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies. Her short story “A Girl Like Me,” won honorable mention by Ice Colony. Presently, Amelia Díaz Ettinger is working on an MFA in creative writing at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande Oregon. Michelle Bonczek Evory is the author of The Ghosts of Lost Animals, winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize and a 2021 Independent Publishers Book Award. Her Open SUNY Textbook Naming the Unnamable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations is taught in creative writing courses internationally. She mentors poets at The Poet’s Billow and can be found at www.michellebonczekevory.com Helena Fagan writes poetry, memoir and young adult fiction in Juneau, Alaska and Cape Meares, Oregon. Her work, inspired by gratitude, the beauty of the places she lives, and her life as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, carries her through hard times and adds a touch of magic to good times. Her poetry and nonfiction has been published in Tidal Echoes, Cirque, Alaska Women Speak, and The North Coast Squid. Robert M. Fagen lives and writes in Juneau, Alaska. He is a zoologist and recreational dancer, retired from the University of Alaska Fairbanks faculty. Author of Animal Play Behavior (Oxford University Press, 1981) and co-author of Convergence (Dream Farm Press, 2016), he has published poetry in Cirque, Blue Unicorn, Crab Creek Review, Comstock Review, Tidal Echoes, other journals. He has performed the roles of Mother Ginger and Clara’s grandfather in Juneau productions of the Nutcracker ballet. The 2020 production was his 28th consecutive Nutcracker. Amy L. Fair (she/her), born and raised in West Virginia, makes her home in rural Oregon, where she lives on the native land of the Cow Creek band of the Umpqua tribe. She teaches at a small community college and plans to grow old without any grace whatsoever. J.V. Foerster has been published in many literary magazines including: Eclectica, Agnieszka’s Dowry, Red River Review, Midnight Mind, Premiere Generation Ink, Fickle Muse, Oak Bend Review and Women Writers Online, Fox Chase Review, Elohi Gaduji and forthcoming in The Bluebird Word and Fiery Scribe Review to name just a few. She was nominated in 2011 for a Pushcart for her poem “Apple Girl” by Fox Chase Review and included in Rosemont College Press Anthology 50 Over 50. She is also a published painter and photographer. J.V. lives in Portland, Oregon. Leslie Fried turned to poetry after thirty years as a scenic artist in theater and film, and a muralist working in paint and plaster. Her

152 writing reflects her love of imagery as a means for addressing difficult subjects. She draws on the themes of nature, death, love, family and history to weave her emotional tapestries. Her book Lily Is Leaving: Poems by Leslie A. Fried, was published by Cirque Press in 2021. Ms. Fried is Curator of the Alaska Jewish Museum in Anchorage. She has two sons, Daniel and Julien, and a granddaughter Sacha. Trina Gaynon's poems have recently appeared in Apple Valley Review, Mojave River Review, 45th Parallel, and the anthology Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California. Her chapbook The Alphabet of Romance is available at Finishing Line Press. Her book Quince, Rose, Grace of God is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. She has volunteered with afterschool tutoring, ESL literacy programs, and WriteGirl in California. Relocating to Oregon, she leads a group of poetry readers at the local Senior Studies Institute. Jeremy James George spent five years in Alaska and is a teacher, art historian, and writer now living in Chapel Hill, NC. He was a finalist in the Midwest Review's 2021 Great Midwest Poetry Contest and his work is published or forthcoming in Barrow Street, Santa Clara Review, Seattle Review, High Plains Register, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Ice-Floe, Scalawag and Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine, among others. David A. Goodrum lives in Corvallis, Oregon. His photography has been juried into many art festivals in cities such as St. Louis, Missouri, Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana, and Madison, Wisconsin. His intent is to capture images that might instill in others - as they do for him as he makes them - a sense of calm and tranquility. He hopes to create a visual field that momentarily transports you away from hectic daily events and into a place that delights in an intimate view of the world. Additional work can be viewed at www.davidgoodrum.com Lindsey Morrison Grant: Self-identifying as a neurodivergent, twospirit, elder storyteller and contrarian deeply rooted in the lore and roar that's become Portlandia of The Left Coast, The Artist attributes success and survival (if not salvation) to superlative supports, mindfulness practice, and daily creative expression in words, sounds, and images Elisabeth Mehl Greene is a writer and composer working in the DC area, aspiring to closer proximity to Powell’s Books and Portland coffee as she makes pilgrimages to the beloved Pacific Northwest where she grew up and attended George Fox University. Elisabeth is the author of Lady Midrash: Poems Reclaiming the Voices of Biblical Women, and was the founding editor of Untold Volumes: Feminist Theology Poetry. Her work appears in Mizna: Prose, Poetry & Art Exploring Arab America, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Reading Religion, and the anthologies Erase the Patriarchy and District Lines IV. Donald Guadagni is an international educator, author, and writer currently teaching and conducting research in Beijing China. His publication work includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, prose, science fiction, fantasy, humor, academic, photography and his artwork. Former iterations: military, law enforcement, prisons, engineering, and forever the wayward son. A child of the Azores and Europe, Paul Haeder ended up in Arizona, in the Chiricahua Mountains as a newspaper reporter in Bisbee. He followed that avocation to Washington, Oregon, Mexico, Vietnam, Central America. He’s widely published as a nonfiction writer, storyteller and poet. His collection of short stories, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing From Vietnam, was published by Cirque Press in 2020. He’s got novels under his belt, and lots of narratives from south of the USA border ready for unpacking. His penchant for social and environmental justice takes him places most people fear to travel. He’s been a college teacher, social worker, homeless veteran advocate, and faculty union organizer. He lives on the edge of the Pacific, in Oregon, with a wife, snake and cat. He is Projects Editor for Cirque. Jim Hanlen has had poems printed recently in Rattle, English Journal,

CIRQUE Cirque, Earth's Daughters, and 13 Chairs. Jim retired from teaching in Washington and lives in Anchorage, Alaska. Annekathrin Hansen grew up near the rugged Baltic Sea beaches in North East Germany. She attended drawing and painting classes at Art Schools in Rostock and Heiligendamm, Germany. She studied and received an Engineering degree and worked in Germany and Australia. Anne interpreted aerial photos and created many types of maps in land surveying. In 2010 she moved to Alaska. She is skilled in sculpturing, photography, contemporary art, print making, painting and mosaic. Anne graduated from various workshops. Further self studies led to her recent artwork. Gordon Harrison is a Juneau lettering artist and printmaker. John Helde: I’m a narrative and documentary filmmaker. I’ve been writing screenplays and making movies for some time, and I also write fiction. My undergraduate degree in English is from Haverford College, and I’ve studied creative writing with various teachers at Hugo House. I’ve lived in Seattle for about thirty years. Denise Hill, Denise Hill, a therapist (LCSW), also does horror and sci fi makeup for movies and theater. She enjoys glacier cruises, traveling, and chasing Northern Lights. She has long worked the Three Baron’s Fair as a makeup artist and weaver of flower crowns. Sherri H. Hoffman is a working writer, graphic designer, and sports fanatic. Some of her work has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Cimarron Review, Columbia Review, december, Delmarva Review, and others. In no particular order, she loves good coffee, her family, and fishing from her canoe. Bill Hollands is a teacher and poet in Seattle, where he lives with his husband and their son. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, DIAGRAM, The American Journal of Poetry, Hawai`i Pacific Review, The Account, The Summerset Review, and elsewhere. He was recently named a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize. Curt Hopkins: My poems have been published by As You Were, The Bastille, The Awl, 3AM, BlazeVox, Rhythm, Cirque, and others. I have published essays and opinion pieces in the University of Michigan's Cavafy Forum, the Los Angeles Times, CNET, and National Post. My journalism has been seen in BBC Future, the Christian Science Monitor, Reuters, Okayafrica, Newsweek, and other publications. Corinne Hughes is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer residing in Portland, Oregon. Born in the Texas hill country, she has lived in the Pacific Northwest for fifteen years. She spent two years working in the Cascades and in 2016 summited Mount Baker on a beautiful day. She is a 2021 participant in One Story’s Writing Circle, and received a summer writing fellowship to attend the National Book Foundation’s Summer Writing Camp in 2004 (and still isn’t over it!). She has studied with a number of literary nonprofits, and her poetry can be found in Passengers Journal. Brenda Jaeger, born and raised in Alaska, will have a solo show this September at Jens Bistro through the Georgia Blue Gallery. She is listed in Who's Who in American Art. She paints en plein air and teaches online at the Brenda Jaeger Art Studio (http://www.brendajaegerartstudio. com). Brenda lives in her newly remade house with husband-poet Jim Hanlen, his books and her paintings. Marc Janssen lives in a house with a wife who likes him and a cat who loathes him. Regardless of that turmoil, his poetry can be found scattered around the world in places like Pinyon, Slant, Cirque, Off the Coast and Poetry Salzburg. His book, November Reconsidered was published by Cirque Press. Janssen also coordinates the Salem Poetry Project, a weekly reading, the annual Salem Poetry Festival, and was a 2020 nominee for Oregon Poet Laureate.

V o l . 12 N o . 2 Jill Johnson splits her time between Alaska and Eastern Oregon. Feels lucky. Susan Johnson writes in the mountain town of Roslyn, Washington, where she has lived with her husband and their children for over forty years, now welcoming grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She hikes daily on trails along the Cle Elum River watershed. Susan taught in the local schools and the university and joined other educators in state and national writing initiatives. Her work has appeared in Cirque, Earth’s Daughters, Raven Chronicles, Yakima Coffeehouse Poets, Windfall, The Shrub-Steppe Journal, Rise Up Review, Poets Unite! LiTFUSE @10 Anthology, WA129+, Washington Poetic Routes, and Poetic Shelters. Raised in North Dakota, Katie Kane now lives in Missoula, Montana. Kane is completing a short story collection entitled The Deep North, which explores the realities of people in the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain West. One short story from this collection, “Payday Loan,” has appeared in Black Warrior Review Issue 37.1, and a second, “Road Kill,” was published in Salvage #6 Evidence of Things Not Seen, pp. 213-218. A non-fiction/autotheory piece, “Caddy,” came out in Fence Magazine in fall of 2021. Kane was the Arts and Culture Editor of Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-Au-Prince (2017), a volume of testimonials on life in Haiti for the McSweeney’s series Voices of Witness. Martha Jackson Kaplan grew up in Seattle and now lives in Madison, Wisconsin. She is a Pushcart nominee, as well as the recipient of the Zylpha Mapp Robinson International Poetry Award, the editor-in-chief’s 30 Award from Möbius, The Poetry Magazine, and has received two Poets Choice Triad awards from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. She publishes both poetry and flash fiction. More about her can be found at marthakaplanpoet.com Mary Katzke has been producing and directing documentaries in Alaska for 40 years. She graduated from NYU graduate film school in 1992 with an MFA in Writing and Directing Film. Her nonprofit media creation organization Affinityfilms, Inc. has focused on social issues topics, with a career direction of working on hybrid films combining creative narrative and documentary in an ultimate story format. Her film topics have included vulnerable populations of women, children and indigenous people of Alaska and have been on PBS, at Sundance, MOMA, and used in more intimate settings for smaller, local change in public awareness, attitude and justice. Her photographs have been featured in traveling exhibits, in Alaska Magazine, and routinely in FMS, a Facebook group of over 20,000 as the photo of the day. Keith Kennedy writes and rights wrongs. His wife, though left-handed, helps a little. Casey Killingsworth has work in The American Journal of Poetry, Two Thirds North, and other journals. His book of poems, A Handbook for Water, was published by Cranberry Press in 1995 and A nest blew down was published in 2021 by Kelsay Books. Casey has a Master’s degree from Reed College. Janet R. Klein is celebrating 52 years in Alaska. Her writings and photographs focus primarily on the natural and cultural history of Kachemak Bay although her latest book is about Alaska Dinosaurs and Other Cretaceous Creatures. It was co-authored with Deborah Klein, her daughter. Published in 2018 and updated in 2019, it contains scientifically accurate descriptions of Alaska dinosaurs. During her 40-year career working in Alaskan museums, Janet worked primarily in Homer and Anchorage. In retirement she’s enjoying her grandsons, volunteering in Homer, and exploring the abundant fossil flora of lower Cook Inlet. Poet and essayist Sandra Kleven has published work in AQR, Oklahoma Review, Topic, Praxilla, Stoneboat, F-zine and the UAP anthology, Cold Flashes. She was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her writing has also won notice in the UAA Creative Writing and F’Air Words contests. In 2015, Kleven was named to the Northshore School District,

153 Wall of Honor as an outstanding graduate. Kleven has authored four books, most recently Defiance Street: Poems and Other Writing (VP&D Publishing House). With founder, Michael Burwell, Sandra Kleven is editor and publisher of Cirque. She works as clinical supervisor for a Native corporation. In 2018, Kleven and Burwell established Cirque Press. Ariana Kramer’s poems have appeared in The Poetry Box, Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, Unlost Journal, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Riverfeet Press, Cirque and others. For 15 years she lived in the Pacific Northwest where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Biology from Reed College and a master’s in Education with a focus on Leadership in Ecology, Culture and Learning from Portland State University. She now lives in her hometown of Taos, New Mexico where she works as a freelance writer and is developing her first poetry manuscript, tentatively titled The Wild Ones. Kristina Kryukova is an author from Russia. She lives in Moscow. Her most recent poems have appeared Salmon Creek Journal and Poets Choice. She graduated from the Moscow University of Culture and Arts. She is the winner of several national and international poetry awards and the mother of two kids. Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis is a Professor of English at Saint Martin’s University, a private, Benedictine, liberal arts university located in the Pacific Northwest. She is also a board member of the Olympia Poetry Network. She has published poetry in The Tiger Moth Review, Oyster River Pages, The Windhover, OccuPoetry, Social Policy, Penny Ante Feud, THAT Literary Review, Dark Matter, In Layman’s Terms and the Aji journal. Nathalie lives in Olympia, Washington. Gary Lark’s most recent collection is Easter Creek (Main Street Rag 2021). Other work includes, Daybreak on the Water (Flowstone Press, 2020), Ordinary Gravity (Airlie Press, 2019), River of Solace (Flowstone Press, 2016), In the House of Memory (BatCat Press, 2016), Without a Map (Wellstone Press, 2013), and Getting By (Logan House Press, 2009). His poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Catamaran, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Sun, and ZYZZYVA. https://garylark.work/ Eric le Fatte was educated at MIT and Northeastern University in biology and English. He has worked correcting library catalog cards in Texas, and as the Returns King at Eastern Mountain Sports in Massachusetts, but currently hikes, writes, teaches and does research on tiny things in the Portland, Oregon area. His poems have appeared in Rune, The Mountain Gazette, The Poeming Pigeon, The Clackamas Literary Review, The Raven Chronicles, Windfall, Verseweavers, US#1 Worksheets, Perceptions, Clover, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Clade Song, and happily enough, in Cirque. Sherri Levine is a poet and artist living in Portland, Oregon. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals such Poet Lore, Clackamas River Review, Driftwood Press, Worcester Review, Jewish Literary Journal, Mizmor Anthology, Cirque, and others. She was awarded the Lois Cranston Poetry Memorial Prize by Calyx in 2019. She won First Prize (Poets Choice) in the Oregon Poetry Association Biannual Contest. Her first full length poetry collection, Stealing Flowers from the Neighbors, was recently published by Kelsay Press. Sherri is the creator and host of Head for the Hills, a monthly poetry reading series and open mic. She has taught English as a Second Language to immigrants, refugees, and international students for twenty-five years. Sue Fagalde Lick: I returned to poetry after a long detour in the newspaper business and a better-late-than-never MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles. I have published two chapbooks, Gravel Road Ahead and The Widow at the Piano. My poems have appeared in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Willawaw, Naugatuck River Review, New Letters, Temenos, Better Than Starbucks, Diode Poetry Journal, and other publications. Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, visual artist, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.

154 org). His work also has appeared in Writer's Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. His drawings have appeared in numerous publications. Robin's email: robinlindley@gmail.com Linera Lucas won the Crucible Fiction Prize. Her poetry has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Briar Cliff Review, Clover, Eclectica Magazine, PageBoy Magazine, The Museum of Northwest Art, Redactions, Spillway, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of When Home is Not Safe: Writings on Domestic Abuse, published by McFarland Books. Lucas has a BA from Reed College, an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, and has taught at the University of Washington Women’s Center and Richard Hugo House. www.lineralucas.com Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow (2019), WA State Poet Laureate (2018-2021), and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2018). Castro Luna’s newest collection of poetry, Cipota Under the Moon, is forthcoming April 2022 from Tia Chucha Press. She is also the author of One River, A Thousand Voices (Chin Music Press), the Pushcart nominated Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press) also shortlisted for WA State 2018 Book Award in poetry, and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge Press). Her most recent nonfiction is in There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Vintage). Born in El Salvador, she came to the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children. David McElroy is a retired commercial pilot of small planes in the Arctic and a former smokejumper, fisherman, taxi driver, and English teacher. He is the author of four books of poetry, Making It Simple, Mark Making, Just Between Us, and Water the Rocks Make. He has been published in regional and national journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Cirque, Anteaus, Poetry Northwest, and Chicago Review. In 2016 he was the recipient of the Andy Hope award for poetry. Jackie McManus is the author of The Earthmover’s Daughter, Related to Loon: a first year teacher in Tuluksak, and the forthcoming Tell It To The Water. David Memmott is the author of The Larger Earth and Lost Transmissions. His poetry collection, Small Matters Mean the World, is forthcoming from Red Bat Books in 2022. Poems recently appeared in basalt, Gargoyle, Triggerfish and Weber: The Contemporary West. Memmott founded Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism and is the editor/publisher of Wordcraft of Oregon. His digital art can be viewed in the Midnight Garden on his author site: davidmemmott.com Donna Mendelson lives in Missoula, Montana, and is a faculty affiliate in the Davidson Honors College at the University of Montana. Her poetry has appeared in The Fourth River and Rendezvous and is forthcoming in Windfall and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. William Miller: My eighth collection of poetry, Lee Circle, was published by Shanti Arts Press in 2020. My poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Penn Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah and Prairie Schooner. I live and write in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Pamela Mitchell: I recently published a poetry chapbook Finding Lost Pond (Finishing Line Press). My poems and essays have been published in several literary anthologies, including The Healer's Burden (University of Iowa Press), A 21st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic (University Professors Press), Water Writes (Codhill Press) and several others. A. Molotkov is a supporter of Ukraine. His poetry collections are The Catalog of Broken Things, Application of Shadows, Synonyms

CIRQUE for Silence and Future Symptoms. His memoir A Broken Russia Inside Me about growing up in the USSR and making a new life in America is forthcoming from Propertius; he co-edits The Inflectionist Review. His prose is represented by Laura Strachan at Strachan Lit. Please visit him at AMolotkov.com John Morgan: In addition to Cirque, my poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, APR, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, and many other journals. I’ve published seven books of poetry and four chapbooks, as well as a collection of essays. I won the Discovery Award of the New York Poetry Center, first prize in the Carolina Quarterly poetry contest, and was a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. My Collected Later Poems will be out soon from Salmon Poetry. In 1976, I moved to Fairbanks to direct the creative writing program at the University of Alaska. I’m still there. With an equal love of sound, images, the written word and software, Signe Nichols has loved working with authors and publishers for over 15 years. The creative outlet of helping artists achieve their design objectives and desires motivates me personally and professionally. Signe is inspired by being around other creatives and meeting Mike Burwell of Cirque in Taos, was perfect professional fate. Signe designed the cover and the interior of Paul Haeder's book Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing From Vietnam; she is the current designer for Cirque Journal and assembled the website pages for Cirque Press Books. You can connect with her at firebirdmediamanagement.com Francis Opila is a rain-struck, sun-loving poet who lives in the Pacific Northwest. His work, recreation, and spirit have taken him into the woods, wetlands, rivers, mountains, and deserts. His poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Willawaw Journal, Wayfinding, and Windfall, in addition to other journals. He enjoys performing poetry, combining recitation and playing North American wooden flutes. Tami Phelps is an Alaskan mix-media artist using cold wax, oil, photography, assemblage, and fiber. Her work has exhibited in national and international exhibits and is included in the permanent collections of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, and the Museum of Encaustic Art in Santa Fe, NM. She is a regularly invited Artist-inResidence at McKinley Chalet Resort, Denali National Park, Alaska. She grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, where she works in her studio loft. Online at www.tamiphelps.com Timothy Pilgrim Timothy Pilgrim, a Pacific Northwest poet, has a few hundred acceptances from U.S. journals such as Seattle Review, Santa Ana River Review, San Pedro River Review, and international journals such as Windsor Review and Toasted Cheese in Canada, Prole Press in the United Kingdom, and Otoliths in Australia. He is the author of Mapping Water (Flying Trout Press, 2016) and Seduced by Metaphor (Cairn Shadow Press, 2021). Vivienne Popperl lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Cirque, Rain Magazine, About Place Journal, and other publications. She was poetry co-editor for the Fall 2017 edition of VoiceCatcher. She received both second place and an honorable mention in the 2021 Kay Snow awards poetry category by Willamette Writers. Her first book, A Nest in the Heart, was recently released by The Poetry Box. Diane Ray is a Seattle poet, essayist, and frequent contributor to Cirque. She was born in Brooklyn and raised in Syosset, New York. Her writing appears in: Women's Studies Quarterly, Canary, Sisyphus, Jewish Literary Journal, Common Dreams, The Seattle Times, In Layman's Terms, Beyond Nuclear International, Drash, Poems in the Afterglow, What Rough Beast, and the anthologies: Sheltering in Place, Civilization in Crisis, and War and Peace Anthology. Diane of late feels born again as a grandmother and ballet student zooming to New York for class, great antidotes to antinuclear activism.

V o l . 12 N o . 2 Joe Reno is a well-known Seattle painter whose work has been published in Cirque several times. He paints in oil and egg tempera, favoring landscapes, florals, portraits and abstract imagery. When asked what is depicted, he has replied, "What do you want it to be?" His work appears in The Pacific Northwest Landscape: A Painted History, 2001. He has shown his work at several galleries including The Museum of Northwest Art, in La Conner, WA. Tatiana Retivov received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Montana and an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literature from the University of Michigan. She has lived in Kyiv, Ukraine since 1994, where she runs an Art & Literature Salon and a small publishing press www. kayalapublishing.com that publishes prose, poetry, and non-fiction in Ukraine. R.J. Rice: I’ve had stories and poetry published in various literary journals, including Manoa, New Letters, The North American Review, and Quiddity, and other stuff elsewhere. I was born in, and currently live in, Montana. Lex Runciman published Salt Moons: Poems 1981-2016 with Salmon Poetry in 2017. Since then, new work has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Coal Hill Review, ONE, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. A new book, Unlooked For, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry this fall. After a long teaching career, first at Oregon State and then at Linfield College, he has returned to Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife of 50 years. Julia Samorodova is an author from Russia. Her most recent poems have appeared Triggerfish Critical Review, and PRESENCE. Willa Schneberg is a poet, essayist, visual artist, curator and psychotherapist in private practice. She has authored five poetry collections including: Box Poems (Alice James Books), In The Margins of The World, recipient of the Oregon Book Award, Storytelling in Cambodia (Calyx Books), and her latest volume, Rending the Garment. Willa has read at the Library of Congress, and has been a fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including: American Poetry Review, Salmagundi, Poet Lore, Bellevue Literary Review and The Journal of Psychohistory. Tom Sexton spends his days walking his Irish Terrier, Murphy, writing poetry, and making breakfast for his wife. Many years ago, he began the Creative Writing program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage and was the English Department Chair for many years. He is proud to say Mike Burwell was his student. His poetry collection Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems was published in 2020 by Loom Press. Snowy Egret Rising from Chester Creek Press is coming out in 2022. Judith Skillman’s poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Threepenny Review, Zyzzyva, and other literary journals. A recipient of awards from Academy of American Poets and Artist Trust, Skillman’s recent collections are A Landscaped Garden for the Addict, Shanti Arts; and Oscar the Misanthropist, Floating Bridge Press. Visit www. judithskillman.com Larry F. Slonaker is an essayist and novelist, originally from Great Falls, Mont., now living in the Central Coast area of California. His novel, Nothing Got Broke, is published by Cirque Press. Craig Smith is a retired Seattle newspaperman who spent the final 32 years of his career as a sportswriter at The Seattle Times. He is a native of Kemore, WA, and a graduate of Bothell High School and the University of Washington, where he was editor of The Daily. Kathleen Smith is a northwest poet with roots in Montana’s Flathead Valley. Her work has appeared in Raven Chronicles, Shrub-Steppe Poetry Journal, Windfall, Cirque, Rise Up Review, Baseball Bard, and The Far Field. She has won several awards from the Yakima Coffee House Poets and is included in regional anthologies from Okanogan Poems, Floating Bridge

155 Review, LitFuse at 10, and 129+ More Poets of WA. She lives and writes in the mountain community of Roslyn, WA. Connie Soper’s poems have recently appeared in North Coast Squid, The Ekphrastic Review, Windfall, Catamaran, VoiceCatchers, and Rain Magazine. She divides her time between Portland and Manzanita, Oregon. Publication of her first full-length book of poetry, A Story Interrupted, is forthcoming from Airlie Press. Mary Lou Spartz is a poet, playwright, and long-time Alaskan and Juneauite. Poetry, writing, or reading never ceases to challenge and delight her. Capturing the joyful and the not-so-joyful never loses its appeal. Leah Stenson has published poetry, essays, editorials, a textbook and a hybrid memoir, Life Revised (Cirque Press, 2020). She’s also the editor of a poetry anthology, Reverberations from Fukushima: 50 Japanese Poets Speak Out (Parkdale Press, 2021). A native New Yorker who spent 16 years in Tokyo, she currently splits her time between Portland and Oregon’s Hood River Valley. She greatly appreciates Cirque’s support and contribution to the Pacific Northwest Literary Community. Cynthia Lee Steele, a published poet and nonfiction writer and awardwinning photographer, is an associate editor for Cirque: A Literary Journal of the North Pacific Rim, and an occasional reader for Poetry Parlay. She has also, for a decade, read plays for the Valdez Last Frontier Theatre Conference. Sheary Clough Suiter grew up in Eugene, Oregon, then lived in Alaska for 35 years before her relocation to Colorado in 2011. Her encaustic fine art is represented in Anchorage, Alaska by Stephan Fine Art, in Camas, Washington by the Attic Gallery, in Santa Fe, New Mexico by the Encaustic Art Institute, in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado by Stones, Bones, & Wood Gallery, and in Old Colorado City, Colorado by 45 Degree Gallery. When she's not traveling the back-roads of America with her artist partner Nard Claar, Suiter works from her studio in Colorado Springs. Online at www.sheary.me Kelly Terwilliger grew up on the Oregon Coast, and now lives in the Willamette Valley. She is the author of Riddle, Fish Hook, Thorn, Key, as well as a chapbook, A Glimpse of Oranges. She works as a storyteller and artist-in-residence in public schools and is presently putting together an anthology of poems of address. Jim Thiele worked as a photographer for a biological text book company for several years before moving to Alaska in 1974. He has worked for The Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the University of Alaska as a biologist. He is a recently retired financial advisor. His photographs have been seen in several publications, including Alaska Magazine, Alaska Geographic, and Cirque. He lives in Anchorage with his wife Susan. Taking photos forces him to stop and really see the world. Jim Thielman lives and writes along the Columbia River in Richland, Washington. He wrote two poetry books with others: Postcards from Jim, with Jim Hanlen and Reflections: Life, the River, and Beyond with Jim Bumgarner and Lenora Good. He also wrote a humor book, The Theory of Wrong about wrong guys. He won the Costello Poetry Prize at Gonzaga University. Gary Thomas: I am a retired mental health professional who enjoys taking the time to see the world through the lens of the camera and my brain. I also like to dabble in poetry as a further expression of myself. I live and play in Oregon and Washington. Thomas A. Thomas, poet and photographer. At University of Michigan, Thomas studied with Donald Hall, Gregory Orr, and a little with Robert Bly. He won Minor and Major Hopwood Awards, and his poem "Approaching Here" was choreographed and performed at UM. His works appear in print and online journals, most recently at TheBanyanReview.org and FemAsiaMagazine.com, and in translation to

156 Spanish, Serbian, and Bengali. His book of collected works, Getting Here is available on Amazon and other sellers. He has been nominated for both Best of the Net and The Pushcart Poetry prizes. Georgia Tiffany’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and literary journals including such publications as Poets of the American West, South Carolina Review, Antigonish Review, and Threepenny Review. A native of Spokane, Washington, she now lives in Moscow, Idaho. Pepper Trail's photographs have appeared in National Geographic, Ranger Rick, Pacific Discovery, Jefferson Journal, and other publications. His poetry has been published in Cirque, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. His 2016 collection, Cascade-Siskiyou: Poems, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in Poetry. He lives in Ashland, Oregon. Dan Tremaglio’s stories have appeared in various publications, including F(r)iction, Gravel, Literary Orphans, and Flash Fiction Magazine, and twice been named a finalist for the Calvino Prize. He teaches creative writing and literature at Bellevue College outside Seattle where he is a senior editor for the journal Belletrist. Lucy Tyrrell sums her interests as nature, adventure (e.g., mushing and canoeing), and creativity (writing, sketching, photography, quilting). After 16 years in Alaska, she traded a big mountain (Denali) for a big lake (Superior) when she moved to Bayfield, Wisconsin. She was Bayfield Poet Laureate for 2020-2021. She coordinated and edited A is for Apostle Islands, an ABC book for all ages. This community collaboration combines the creativity of 26 artists and 26 poets to portray A-Z resource topics in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. Gary Wade: I have been a resident of Bellingham, WA, since the glorious summer of 2005 when I stumbled into Bellingham's poetrynight Open Mic. It is so fine to live in a poetry town. I am a regular poetry reader and performer at several Pacific Northwest venues. Some of my work has published in journals such as Clover, A Literary Rag (which gave me a Pushcart nomination) and Backbench Journal (UK). Other poems are in several anthologies.

CIRQUE Herman Wiebe's Mennonite background and personal belief in nonviolence inspired his work in glass and concrete. He died in 1985. Morning Williams: I wrote my first book 62 years ago. I have been entranced by the muse for as long as I can remember. Most important has been process (not product), privacy (not fame), and free expression (not remuneration). I live in a remote village in the north, where I am generally perceived as a clumsy, aging pioneer, whose major talent is playing forgotten and homemade tunes on a five-string banjo. Between medical interventions I write prose and poetry (often cocooned in letters), paint, silk screen, play music, travel, study, and listen. I am getting old. I much welcome the years for the psychic weight with which they imbue my better work. Once I pulled over and parked outside a redwood grove. With twine I tied haiku written on brown paper to some of the trees. When I came out of the woods and returned to my car, a Japanese paper parasol was leaned up against the passenger door. My idea of a party is writing haiku in foreign languages of which I don’t know a single word. Matt Witt is a writer and photographer in Talent, Oregon. His photography and writing may be seen at MattWittPhotography. com. He has been Artist in Residence at Crater Lake National Park, Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Foundation, Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, Mesa Refuge, and PLAYA at Summer Lake, Oregon. His writing has been published in the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cirque, Jefferson Journal, Trouble, Writers on the Range, and many other publications. Carolyne Wright's latest books are Masquerade, a memoir in poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021) and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009. A Seattle native who has lived and taught all over the country, and on fellowships in Chile, Brazil, India and Bangladesh, she has 16 earlier books and anthologies of poetry, essays, and translation. A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes, Carolyne has won the Pablo Neruda Prize, the Blue Lynx Prize, and four awards from the Poetry Society of America, among others; she has received NEA and 4Culture grants, and she is in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, in June and July of 2022, on the first part of a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award delayed for two years by Covid.

Vivian Wagner's essays and poems have appeared in Slice Magazine, Muse/A Journal, Forage Poetry Journal, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Gone Lawn, The Atlantic, Narratively, The Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, and other publications. She's the author of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington), and several poetry collections, including Raising (Clare Songbirds Publishing House), The Village (Aldrich PressKelsay Books), Making (Origami Poems Project), Curiosities (Unsolicited Press), and Songs of the Apocalypse (Thirty West Publishing). Emily Wall is a Professor of English at the University of Alaska. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry. Her poems have been published in journals across the US and Canada and she has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. She recently won the Minerva Rising Dare to Be chapbook prize. She has five books of poetry: Fist and Flame are chapbooks published by Minerva Rising Press. Liveaboard and Freshly Rooted have found homes in Salmon Poetry. Her most recent book Breaking Into Air: Birth Poems is published by Red Hen Press. Emily lives and writes in Douglas, Alaska and she can be found online at www.emily-wall.com Margo Waring has lived in Juneau, Alaska for 5 decades, nourished by the community and environment, both of which are reflected in her work. Margo's poetry book, Growing Older in This Place has been published by Cirque Press. Also available from Amazon is her chapbook, Sheltering: A Journal in Poetry and Prose.

Forthright

Sheary Clough Suiter

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V o l . 12 N o . 2

Our Vision:

A vibrant community of diverse Alaskan writers of all levels and ages, coming together to find and share our voices.

Our Core Purpose:

Engaging, empowering, inspiring and expanding a statewide community of Alaskan writers. We rely on member support to offer dynamic programming statewide: Free Public Readings with Acclaimed Authors Classes & Workshops to Hone Your Skills Generative Retreats in Beautiful Places to Foster Your Work A Weekly Newsletter & Blog to Help You Stay Connected A Community of Shared Support

Please Join or Renew Today! www.49writers.org/join

158

Sky Changes On the Ku

New from Cirque Press CIRQUE

SKY CHANGES

On the Kuskokwim a novel by

Clifton Bates

skokwim

In the course of a lifetime, so much has changed in rural Alaska. Time has eroded the past ways of living; leaving in its place, a complicated straddling of the old and new.

Bates

The author takes us through the life and hard times of Kim-boy. From family loss to memories gained, Kimboy struggles to find his way and make sense of both time and place. Samuel Crow I could very well have known Kimboy. I grew up in a town on the Kuskokwim at about the same timeperiod. I can attest that Sky Changes brings to the reader a sliver of the life among the Yup’ik during this time. Dr. John Weise

Sandra Kleven Michael Burwell Editors & Publishers

SKY CHANGES On the Kuskokwim concerns the life of a riverine, Yup’ik Eskimo, growing up on the Kuskokwim River. This is the ninth largest river in the United States; a river most people, even many in Alaska, have never even heard about. It is somewhat of an idyllic account of Kim-boy’s life, but it includes harsh realities that are all too frequent occurrences for those living in this unfamiliar land.

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November Reconsidered 159

poems by Marc Janssen

“There are adjustments now To the November rain To the November expectation To the November settlement Schedules and scoldings Homework and housework They adjust to me and I adjust to them.”

Part rant, part meditation, part acerbic commentary, November Reconsidered is a gritty and darkly funny collection of November poems that transports us from site to site, back and forth through time. Marc Janssen’s satire takes a lyric yet steely look at a market’s cereal aisle, an eighth grade English class, a Toyota dealership, a California mall on Black Friday, a Happy Hour at Charlie Browns. Although he never flinches from the dark realities of life, Janssen also gives us moments of assuaging respite. On a solitary walk taken to escape the family hubbub of Thanksgiving Day, he notes this: The cold damp air made exhalation look full and white and alive, / White breath in a reverent day. —Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, author of One Small Sun and Understory

Sandra Kleven Michael Burwell Editors & Publishers

About the Author It would be easy to say that Marc Janssen lives in a house with a wife who likes him and a cat who loathes him. It is more complicated than that. Marc: • was born in Ventura, California and grew up in the State of Jefferson • has a bachelor’s degree in Communication Arts from California Lutheran University • is a veteran of the Ventura poetry scene • has worked as a copywriter, a marketer, a salesman, an employee of the state, and was also hopelessly unemployed • has been published by journals in the US and around the world • Coordinates the Salem Poetry Project and the Salem Poetry Festival His wife is fun, smart and beautiful. His kids are brilliant and good looking. The cat—the cat absolutely loathes him.

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Dan Branch, “ignorant but lucky,” turned what began as a one-year lawyering commitment in Bethel, Alaska into a lifetime of learning, adventure, compassion, and reflection upon what makes a “good” life. His memoir in essays provides a fascinating personal and historical record of western Alaska in the 1970s and ‘80s. While much of what he experienced as lawyer and magistrate is heart-breaking, Branch balances his account with admiration for those he learned from, humility for his own missteps, and a big-hearted sense of humor. Nancy Lord, former Alaska writer laureate and author of Fishcamp, Beluga Days, and pH: A Novel

From the frozen sloughs and tundra of the Kuskokwim River country to the deep forests of Ketchikan, Branch takes us on a “stranger in a strange land” journey with the boundless empathy of a perpetual outsider wanting only to understand what it means to be an Alaskan. Richard Chiappone, author of The Hunger of Crows, Water of an Undetermined Depth, and Liar’s Code

In the tradition of Heather Lende and Seth Kantner, these dispatches from the Kuskokwim are insightful and funny and fully human. Dan Branch has written a heart-breaking book that is also filled with wit and wonder. A true joy to read. Brian Castner, author of Stampede

Dan Branch lives in Juneau, Alaska. His essays and poems have been published in Kestrel, Cardiff Review, Gravel, Metonym, Tahoma Literary Review, Punctuate, Stoneboat, Swamp Ape, Windmill, and Portland Magazine. He received an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Available on $15

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Lullaby for Baby Abe A Lullaby for Lincoln Ann Chandonnet

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This lullaby imagines scenes from Abraham Lincoln’s life, from his 1809 winter arrival in the world to his third birthday (1812). Period objects, foods, verbal expressions and manners are twined into the text. Scenes described are typical of life on the Kaintuck (Kentucky) and Indiana frontiers. Research began with Carl Sandburg’s two-volume biography; and, some years later, embraced the details of Sidney Blumenthal’s A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1849 (2016). Characters are generally true to history with the exception of the preacher, the tinsmith, the shoemaker, the Yarb Woman and the Widder. Although fictional, these characters are typical of individuals who would regularly visit remote homesteads.

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Cousin Dennis Hanks is one of the few family members whose pronouncements about the future of baby Abraham were recorded.

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Illustrated by

Katie Scarlett Faile

Ann Chandonnet Raised on a colonial land grant, author Ann Chandonnet swallowed a deep sense of history as present. A former college English instructor and police reporter, Chandonnet intends her lullaby to reinvigorate interest in Abraham Lincoln’s formative years. Abe was a country boy, just three generations from the Linkhorns of Britain. How did an obscure frontier lawyer and government representative rise to become America’s greatest leader? Chandonnet has won a national prize for wilderness poetry as well as national and state awards for educational writing. She has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. She is also the author of the “Alaska Food” article in the Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink (Oxford University Press).

An Imprint of Cirque Press illustrated books for Children and Adults

Sandra Kleven Michael Burwell Editors & Publishers

With precise, poetic language, Chandonnet evokes the early years of America’s 16th President. Young readers interested in history will enjoy the glimpses of Abraham Lincoln as a baby, as well as the accompanying notes explaining historical and regional terms as well as culinary delights. The book encourages a vivid imagining of early childhood in Kentucky, presenting readers with the cultural and societal influences that shaped Baby Abe. —Emily J. Madsen, Assistant Professor of English, University of Alaska Anchorage

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Joseph L. Kashi Attorney at Law ~ Accidents and personal injury claims ~ Business sales and purchases ~ Commercial and business law ~ Real property litigation 907 – 398 – 0480 kasha@alaska.net www.kashilaw.com 205 East Beluga Soldotna, Alaska

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HOW TO SUBMIT TO CIRQUE Cirque, published in Anchorage, Alaska, is a regional journal created to share the best writing in the region with the rest of the world. Cirque submissions are not restricted to a “regional” theme or setting. Cirque invites emerging and established writers living in the North Pacific Rim—Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Hawaii, Yukon Territory, Alberta, British Columbia and Chukotka—to submit short stories, poems, creative nonfiction, translations, plays, reviews of first books, interviews, photographs, and artwork for Cirque’s next issue.

Issue #25—Submission Period March 22, 2022 to September 21, 2022

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES -- Poems: 5 poems MAX -- Fiction, Nonfiction, Plays: 12 pages MAX (double spaced). -- Artwork and Photography: 10 images MAX accepted in JPEG or TIFF format, sent as email attachments. Please send images in the highest resolution possible; images will likely be between 2 and 10mb each. If you do not submit full-size photo files at time of submission, we will respond with an email reminder. No undersize images or thumbnails will be eligible for publication. -- Bio: 100 words MAX. -- Contact Info: Make sure to keep your contact email current and be sure that it is one that you check regularly. If your contact information changes, make sure to inform us at Cirque. To ensure that replies from Cirque bypass your spam filter and go to your inbox, add Cirque to your address book. -- Submit to https://cirque.submittable.com -- Replies average two to three months after deadlines, and we don’t mind you checking with us about your submissions. -- Cirque requires no payment or submission fees. However, Cirque is published by an independent press staffed by volunteers. Your donations keep Cirque Press going. You will find donation buttons on Submittable and you can also support us via Paypal to cirquejournal@gmail.com. Thanks for your poetry, prose, images and financial support.

For Lithuania Sandra Kleven

CIRQUE, Vol. 12 No. 2 A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim

Articles inside

Susan Chase-Foster A Triptych of Illuminations

Katie Kane The Empire Builder

Rapt and Aware

Luther Allen squalicum beach

Michelle Bonczek Evory The uterus is a fickle vessel

Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum Glitter Gulch

Karen Bonaudi Open Door

Dan Tremaglio One More Piece of Night I Reap

Larry Slonaker Dan Cushman and Stay Away, Joe

Sherri Hoffman Big Boat

Tatiana Retivov On the 40th Day

David Cheezem Consist

Wilhemina Condon The Garden of Eden

Cynthia Steele In Solidarity with the People of Ukraine: Poetry of the Invasion

Clifton Bates Parallel Lines

Mike Bates Murres Can't Dance