Vol. 3 Issue 12, "Nameless"

Vol. 3 Issue 12 New York London Hong Kong Philippines

NAMELESS

new reader magazine December 2020 | Vol. 3 Issue 12 COVER IMAGE

Michael Lipsey CREATIVE STAFF Managing Editor

: Kyla Estoya

Associate Editor

: Aira Calina

Feature Editors

: Jazie Pilones, Keith Ayuman

Editorial Assistant

: Neil Gabriel Nanta

Writers and Production Staff

: Sarah Eroy, Celina Paredes, Regie Vocales

Patricia Luardo,Jarryl Ibrahim, Yanya Cortes-Tingzon Layout Artist

: Ronel Borres

Publicists

: Kota Yamada, TJ Delima, Tresh Enerez

Researchers

: Rosielyn Herrera, Marjon Gonato, John Paul Vailoces

CONTRIBUTORS

Bob McNeil, Isabel Lanzetta, Bill Arnott, Jim Jas, Craig Dobson, Lynn White, Henry Hunter, Josh Moody, Joshua Bligh, Andre Mateus, N.M. Leigh

MARKETING AND ADVERTISING

Laurence Anthony laurence.anthony@newreadermagazine.com

SUBSCRIPTIONS

subscription@newreadermagazine.com www.newreadermagazine.com Phone: 1 800 734 7871 Fax: (914) 265 1215 Write to us: 100 Church St. Suite 800 New York, NY 10007 ISSN 2688-8181

Natalia Sinelnik

All Rights Reserved

NRMedia

NOTE

I’ve come to the point in my life where a calendar doesn’t mean anything to me anymore—especially if it says the year is almost over. For a long time, I was stuck in the illusion that 2021 will somehow trigger somebody to push a button, the virus will be gone in a snap, and everything will be the way it was before. But no. The reality is I might still be working from home, and I might still be ordering that killer Chinese food, which by the way recently announced they’ll be open 24/7.

The universe works in mysterious ways.

But kidding aside, what a year! I don’t know which was more stressful—watching the drama unravel itself every chapter of this pandemic, or being part of it. The only thing keeping me sane was art and literature. Now I know it might sound a little ambitious for me to hope that Nameless will be your savior before the year ends, but let’s not forsake the truth that though the year has been extreme, without creatives, it would have been extremely boring. Social media has been one of the major sources for art this year, and it kept opening doors for us to discover a variety of things. I spent nearly most of my hours in a day on Pinterest and Instagram, swooning over one page to another. And I don’t regret it.

I’ve been following this person on Twitter too. His arts and aphorisms entertained me, but for the most part, they kept me grounded and sane. Binge-watching series and movies was my guilty pleasure—when I had the time. So subscribing to streaming sites may not have been such a bad idea during this pandemic. But who am I kidding? The real MVPs were the people who gave us free access to their brilliant and life-changing films! #ArtPrevails I’m not romanticizing social media but apart from the fake news and incomprehensible TikTok videos I’d come across, I’ve seen a lot of people using their channels for mental health awareness, helping those in need, and encouraging togetherness and to stay connected with each other. So yes, these may be troubled times and not getting what we want feels ten times more agonizing, but going through the year with friends, workmates, pets, other writers, other artists, relatives, your family, strangers in the supermarket, random people on the internet who support you and what you do—it made 2020 a fun ride.

Making Issue 12 was fun, and I’m excited for you to see it!

So please, start flipping this virtual page, ______.

Happy Holidays!

K

Contents Feature

Fiction/Non-fiction

10 Bill Arnott’s Beat

34 Shadow Boxing with the Law in the Time of Corona

36 Powehi

Mark-stepper

Bill Arnott

14 Contributor’s Corner: Bob McNeil

Jazie pilones

18 Contributor’s Corner (Fiction): Isabel Lanzetta

Keith ayuman

44 Half an Hour Then Half an Hour Then...

The Hill Farmer is Spirited Away craig dobson

42 Sequestered in Autumn with You

Joshua bligh

64 Storm for Her

Bob mcneil

Isabel Lanzetta

46 Little Wonder Mournful Longing Naked Civilians

66 The River

Andre mateus

28 @stoicmike

68 Zen Dog

n.m. leigh

Kyla estoya

Joshua Moody

24 Down to Earth Kyla estoya

Poetry

jim jas

52 Virus Transformation

Wrapped Up

lynn white

58 Anathema

On The Road

Writing with Nietzsche

henry hunter

New Reader Media 6

Sneak Peek

88 To-Read List

NRM takes on the challenge of bookmarking emerging voices in the indie publishing world, presented in random order.

Literary Work

6

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

Fiction

Manuel Pelaez The Bond Reviewed by Nicole Olson, Hollywood Book Reviews

A coming of age story suited for young and old alike—The Bond by author Manuel Pelaez tells a marvelous tale of a boy with a special friend. Jeremy is a young boy trying to get noticed in California. His mom works in the talent industry and takes him to and from auditions nearly every day. While she offers encouragement and advice, Jeremy storms away to his room when they return home. Jeremy feels lost, incapable and misunderstood by everyone except his Blue Throat Triggerfish, Finn. This is no ordinary fish—he listens to Jeremy’s problems and even responds by nodding his head yes and no.

Not only does Jeremy feel like a failure because he cannot land a role or get noticed by a talent scout, he must navigate the hardship of growing up with parents who are separated. Though they are very close friends, Raymond and Carole are no longer together. In a coming of age story like Jeremy’s, parents play a large role. Since their home is incomplete, Jeremy must turn to his friend Finn to have connection and companionship.

Pelaez adds wonder and excitement to the typical coming of age story with Finn’s legendary history. Not only was he owned by a Great Samurai, he has his own magical properties as well.

Finn turns The Bond into a saga, an adventure full of fantastic elements under the sea. With Finn’s help Jeremy finally finds where he belongs.

The narrator of The Bond speaks to the audience as if he was talking on a stage. Pelaez uses long and broken up sentences that makes the writing read like a theatrical performance. The narrator describes Jeremy’s experience in a believable way—it does not take long for the reader to feel as if they understand Jeremy perhaps even more than his parents do. Even though it is a coming of age story, it does not touch taboo subjects such as sex and drugs. The characters speak with clean and polite language. Though Jeremy is troubled, he is a very grateful and well-mannered young person.

Jeremy is a first generation Japanese American and his experience can resonate with children of immigrants of any culture.

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

7

New Reader Media

INTERVIEW WITH

Morris Wolff 8

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

Morris is the author of Whatever Happened to Raoul Wallenberg?, a book about Raoul Wallenberg.

NRM: What is your daily schedule during the pandemic?

Morris Wolff: Well, it is actually diverse, a lot of fun and quite healthy! I get up about 6 AM and do yoga for an hour, with meditation and stretching, then a choice of early breakfast prepared by my angel-wife, Patricia. I get a choice of oatmeal with fruit or two eggs up with turkey bacon. She is my manager and best friend and watches what I eat.

Then out the door for a two-hour 14-mile bike ride through the woods and quiet places of where we live now in Florida. I smell the clean early morning air, I hear the birds sing to each

Feature other, and I chime in with songs of my own. I am a bit of a free spirit. “Different” is the word my wife uses to describe me to her friends.

I love this quiet, undisturbed early morning quiet and alone time. It allows for creative moments, like writing a poem in my head for my father’s “123rd birthday” as I am meditating on wheels and bike riding. The other morning I found the lines of a budding poem in my head. I shaped the poem as I rode the first six mile Then I stop at a local restaurant, while the poem is still “hot” and borrow a pen and paper, and jot down a rough draft of the first lines. I refine it when I get home. The basic poem came to me in my head while I was riding. When I get back home I either work on refining the poem or write some final chapters on my next book, which is called “Lucky Conversations.” The second book goes to my publisher on November 30, my 84th birthday... just five days away. Hooray!!

NRM: Other than being a hero and saving the lives of several Jews, what is it about Raoul Wallenberg that you admire the most?

MW: Many things. I love his incredible selflessness and his deep concern for others. Also, his great sense of organization.

Working in Budapest to save the Jews, Wallenberg assembled a workforce of 50 volunteers. He purchased buildings and placed the endangered Jews into “safe houses” in apartments in the big buildings, and went to train stations to pull Jews off the trains headed to Auschwitz, Dachau and other death camps, saved 100,000 lives. He placed a Swedish flag over the buildings and prevented the nazis from entering “swedish embassy territory.” Dachau and the other death camps. He was a saint. When asked why he did this work, he answered, “I had no choice!” He journeyed from Sweden at age 32, at the request of the US War refugee board, to do this great work and was kidnapped by the Russians at the end of the War. He was never seen in freedom since 1945. I took up the effort to rescue him in the spring of 1983. I sued the USSR in US District Court.

a story of Israeli Mossad rescue efforts, organized by me, and includes a back-stabbing hypocritical betrayal of Wallenberg by our government, Chief Justice Roberts, as White House Legal Counsel under Ronald Reagan was directly complicit in the betrayal.

NRM: How do you want people to keep your story alive?

MW: That is a good question. Times have changed. We now have a new Jewish Secretary of State chosen by President Biden. This fact is now public. His father, Samuel “Sam” Pisar, a good friend of mine, was saved as a child at age 8 by American tanks and troops from the Holocaust, picked up from the ground by a black tank driver.

Professor Sam Pisar had a deep and passionate interest in Raoul Wallenberg, and his fate. Sam Pisar was the first professor to come out in support of my Wallenberg litigation against the Russians. And now his son is our new Secretary of State and is deeply committed to finding out the truth about Wallenberg’s fate.

Professor Sam Pisar read and edited the complaint that I filed in federal court, along with other distinguished international law professors. His son and I have plans to meet soon after the New Year. We will determine whether top officials in the White House during the Reagan administration actually placed a severe “roadblock” and interfered with earnest efforts to rescue Raoul. In October of 1983, plans were being made in Washington to bring Raoul Wallenberg “home” to a hero’s reception and a new home in Washington DC. We could have done it. He was only 72, and alive. The Soviet government admitted he was alive and they wanted an exchange. What happened? I will meet with the Secretary of State. A new investigation will be made. We will find out.

NRM: Let’s talk about your book, Whatever Happened to Raoul Wallenberg. Working on the book must have taken a lot of dedication especially when it came to research and developing a narrative—what made you decide to write about Wallenberg and his whereabouts?

MW: I wanted the world to know that he was still alive after 39 years isolated by the Russians in Siberia and that we wanted to bring him home. I did my lawsuit in US federal court pro bono and won a $39 million dollar verdict. “That has to be my leverage point for confronting the Russians and forcing their hand in granting his release,” that is what I thought. It is quite

NEW READER MAGAZINE| | 9 NEW READER MAGAZINE 9

Contributor’s Corner

BILL ARNOTT’S BEAT Book Signing and Saying

Yes, Part II: The Book.

And what was the book given to me by the friendly guy at my book signing event? Matt Gutman’s The Boys in the Cave: Deep Inside the Impossible Rescue in Thailand.

The man who bought me the book knew one of the guys involved. I think. Degrees of separation were unclear, dark and muddied as a flooded cavern. If you don’t know the story, twelve Thai boys—part of a U15 soccer team, and their coach—went for an after-practice hike into the underground caves near their town. It was a popular hike—you can clamber and creep a mile and a half into the earth, the caverns the result of monsoon erosion.

The team (ages 11-14) finished practice, and along with their coach, made their way to the popular local hike. It wasn’t yet monsoon season. They weren’t irresponsible. They weren’t misbehaving. Just a group of boys with a well-intentioned coach doing something more than simply practicing. But they get caught in the caves amidst an atypical, early flood that made exiting impossible.

To ensure their safety they were forced to move further inside the underground maze as water accumulated, cutting off their only possible exit.

10 READER MAGAZINE 10 | |NEW NEW READER MAGAZINE

Bill Arnott’s Fiction Beat The downpour filled the series of low snaking caves behind them with a torrent of water, an instantaneous, raging river, leaving the thirteen cut off with no means of escape. They managed to find a small tilting shelf of sandy rock, and there they waited for water to recede or for rescue. The water was due to recede, perhaps, in three or four months. Snacks got eaten. And their pocket of stale air slowly turned to carbon dioxide with each exhale. The book follows the ensuing story from a reporter’s perspective—government, navy, and civilians doing their best to rescue the boys from a dismally inaccessible, submerged labyrinth.

The only possibility of survival for the team, albeit remote, was rescue—a rescue unlike any other. Cave diving is a unique and highly skilled endeavour. A handful of people on the planet are capable of a dive like that—in pitch black, through narrow, snaking caverns with stalactites and sharp rocky floor with no clearance, not to mention dragging a dozen nonswimmers a mile and a half underwater, buried in cell phone- and GPS-impenetrable rock. In other words, it was never intended to be a rescue, only recovery. The first diver discovered the boys (and their coach) ten days after they were stranded. Ten days. And then the rescue planning began.

Spoiler alert: I’m going to refer to the conclusion of this drama. Stop reading if you want to read the book and be surprised. Otherwise, read on.

The ending to the tale is happy. Predominantly. The team and their coach were rescued, against unfathomably long odds. A Thai Navy SEAL died early in the rescue attempt, likely from a tainted oxygen tank and subsequent drowning. He became the face of the rescue—the hero who didn’t make it. The surviving heroes are many. The story’s a good one. For many reasons.

As I write this, much of the world is on its second wave of lock-down, each of us doing our part to flatten the COVID curve. Distancing. Waiting.

Optimism remains, along with uncertainty. And fear. It’s no one’s normal. If my drawing parallels is offensive, it’s unintended. But when in our lives have we been trapped, literally or metaphorically? Survival is hardwired into us. But we don’t survive unscathed.

Survivors scar, and we’re scarring now. Most of us will survive. Positive changes are in fact happening to permanently improve the social landscape. But to believe things will return to pre-pandemic normal is a myth. Our lives, like the boys in the cave and all involved in their salvation, have changed forever.

NEW READER MAGAZINE| | 11 NEW READER MAGAZINE 11

Literary Work

12 12

||

NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

Fiction

NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

||

13 13

Contributor’s Corner

Bob

McNeil

INTVW by Jazie Pilones

NRM: Tell us more about you. What has Bob McNeil been doing during this global pandemic?

Bob McNeil: While possessing a great deal of concern for the

NRM: What pushed you to become a writer, and who were your early influences?

BM: Two people had a profound effect on my need for literary

world, I read and watch the news with a zealot’s dedication.

Moreover, in compliance with common sense and state rules, I wear a mask whenever my work and errands require me outside.

Between you and me, I am content with staying indoors.

All writers—this includes the obscure as well as the most recent Nobel Prize in Literature recipient—should enjoy being sedentary. Also, to write effectively, you need time for isolation.

If nothing else, this pestiferous age affords us long periods for creative endeavors while sitting down. This pandemic, I predict, will sire a new era of philosophical writers.

expression: my father and grandmother. Both eloquent and quite erudite, they loved reading everything. Classical literature and modern material kept their interest. By following them, I became a bibliophile. Early on, I fell in love with poetry.

My grandmother, a former school teacher, suffered from debilitating arthritis and failing eyesight. So, it became my job to read newspapers as well as various volumes to her aloud. Among them, the Bible was in steady rotation. Such an ongoing saturation of words made me want to compose poems and stories.

There is one other point of interest: I was a loquacious child.

My mouth had all the force of a Belgian Draft Horse.

14

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

Art + Literature

Anytime I talked too much, my grandmother would say, “Write it down.”

Unquestionably, it was the best advice I ever received.

NRM: Let’s talk about your recent publication, Lyrics of Mature Hearts. The poems revolve around growing old and facing death. Out of many possible subjects, why choose death and aging? Is there something to love about both?

BM: Young people, filled with delusions of eternal vibrancy, often look upon older people with derision. What they fail to realize is, if allowed the chance, maturity provides abilities such as greater intelligence and experience. Aging is not something hateful. It is an award after years of work-related service on this planet.

Now, about death, I will not let it get in the way of my active lifestyle. Forgive me. I had to share that joke. Seriously, just greet the Grim Reaper, knowing that you did the best with what existence allotted.

Finally, let me address your question. I looked through libraries and bookstores for a poetry anthology about the delightful and disheartening facets of aging. Upon not finding such a book, I started to create it. Talented contributors and a sympathetic publisher made Lyrics of Mature Hearts an anthology that I am proud of today.

NRM: What are your viewpoints on aging considering all the clinical/surgical beauty trends dominating in this era?

BM: I do not understand older people who covet youth.

No amount of makeup, dyes, surgeries, or pharmaceutical products will reverse time.

Growing old is an epic tale. My wrinkles are tally marks for each wonderful or worrisome thing I did. These grey follicles of mine represent my well-earned tenure on this planet.

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

15

Contributor’s Corner

16

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

Art + Literature

NRM: In literature, death is often portrayed as evil and depressing because it takes away people’s life. What are your thoughts on this?

BM: Death, at least for an older person, is neither evil nor depressing. It is the denouement for a long story. Throughout the ever-turning pages of existence, for as long as possible, make your character’s participation into a memorable narrative.

NRM: What would be the best way to confront death and aging?

BM: The closer you get to old age and death, do not obsess about your failures. Approach your final years without the lead weight of worries and regrets.

NRM: How do you remind the people around you to celebrate life and live it with purpose especially at this time of uncertainty?

BM: Almost with the regularity of a chanter, I tell everybody the same thing. Life is a hotel room. Before checkout time, enjoy the stay. Unconcerned with the opinions of others, while in the temporary residence, be a fan of your accomplishments.

Write the books you desire, the songs your ears need to hear, and create the existence you want for the most relevant audience in the whole Earthen dwelling—yourself.

NRM: What is a life lesson you can share to everyone, especially to the younger generation?

BM: Perhaps these lines from a second-person tale I wrote titled “Ubiquitously You” can answer your question: “Each existence will be another autobiographical edition on a bookshelf. Your tome, although awaiting more chapters, should receive herds of blurbs because it exists. Grant yourself a favorable review each day knowing you will wind up out of print at some point.”

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

17

Contributor’s Corner

18 READER MAGAZINE 18 | |NEW NEW READER MAGAZINE

Fiction

LANZETTA Isabel INTVW by Keith Ayuman

NRM: How are you? What keeps you busy during this pandemic?

Isabel Lanzetta: Considering the condition of our world today, and even before this pandemic began, I must say that I am tremendously grateful to be supported and surrounded by the people I love, all in good health. If anything, it is my emotional and physical body that is spent watching the widespread suffering that has permeated our communities on a scale I’ve never witnessed in my (relatively short) lifetime.

Writing, of course, keeps me engaged during this time. Even as the lockdown changed my day to day life, I was able to reconnect with my voice in a manner that wasn’t accessible to me before. This work came out of that time spent in deep isolation.

When the weather was warmer, I devoted most of my time to gardening.

There was something nurturing about watching the little seeds I had germinated in March, when the country first was shutting down, blossom into an overgrown jungle in my backyard. That work was my own pursuit of the small joys that lie around me, and a reminder that all things, even this pandemic, are impermanent.

NRM: What made you write such a tragic yet engaging story?

IL: If it was ever clearer that tragedy is all around us, it is now.

Mortality is its own tragedy, for the person departing their body and for those they leave behind. Still—I like to think of this story as one of redemption more than anything.

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

19

Contributor’s Corner

End of life care continues to be a relatively taboo subject of discussion, as is the aging female form. I wanted to create a story that puts this type of body at the forefront of its narrative, and which illustrates the somber, and yet tender, nature of hospice work.

people from all walks of life return to their most elementary states of being. It is the closest I have seen an adult return to their infancy. It would be an oversimplification to define this transition as tragic or liberating, but I believe there is a great loss in not telling these stories.

As my first work of flash fiction, I knew that the language and the images should be compact but impactful. A story in such few words must hold the reader’s attention until the very end. It was an artistic challenge, but one of my most enjoyable ones.

NRM: When writing a story, is there a character name you always loved, but never had the chance to use?

IL: Interesting that you might ask that. One of the components of storytelling I struggle most with is naming characters. I am a big proponent of meaningful naming, and so I find that often a character’s name will arrive as I write. Perhaps as I continue to create, a name might come to me that inspires a story, rather than the other way around.

NRM: The atmosphere and the tragedy of this short story really grasped me until it ended. Who, or what, influenced you to write a piece like this?

IL: When I was younger, I worked in a residential home for people suffering from dementia. Watching the transition from life to death is one filled with grief and mystery. You begin to recognize that the body is largely a vessel for the spirit inside, more than anything. Age as we conceive it turns on its head—

20 READER MAGAZINE 20 | |NEW NEW READER MAGAZINE

Fiction

NRM: What is the best and worst thing about being a writer?

IL: Writing is a way of translating how I experience and contemplate that which I observe around me.

I write because it’s how I know to move through the world.

The best thing about being a writer is the way it reveals myself to me.

On the flip side of this, perhaps the most challenging aspect of being a writer is that the work I create, whether fictional or not, is inevitably personal. Putting my work out to be received by a wider audience is naturally a vulnerable thing for me to do.

Regardless of whether my writing is received how I intend it or not, the enjoyment for me is in the language, and the passion I hold for the work that I do.

NEW READER MAGAZINE| | 21 NEW READER MAGAZINE 21

Literary Work

22

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

Fiction

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

23

A

film that follows a family breaking away from society to find a new perspective on life, Down to Earth takes us on an inner journey, connecting us with thesource and the mutual path we are walking.

Down to Earth introduces us to the Earth Keepers. In their simplicity and humility, their understanding of humankind is unparalleled. Their stories, their insights, and their knowledge are as powerful as they are identical. Confronting at times, not avoiding the pain points of our human challenge, the Earth Keepers lay bare the very basics of our problems--on an individual level, on the level of community and on a global level.

Amidst the magnitude of their reflections, a message for the future emerges;an empowering and uplifting message, full of hope for us and generations to come.

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

25

Dear Earth Keeper, DOWN to EARTH is not just the launch of a film. It’s the launch of a thought, a vision for the future. The film is not just to be viewed, but to be worked with!The flm helps us become aware of our own personal relevance.

Rather than continuing the aim to change the system or the mindset of its leaders, our aim is to generate people-powered change from the ground up: unlocking the potential of the common people. We hope the film will provoke thought and inspire you to help rediscover the innate wisdom within you to become a responsible Earth Keeper.

We can support this change actively by initiating a new dialogue, where you can gain insights about your own role and develop initiatives that matter, however big or small. We aim to shift conditioned ways of thinking and empower people in the three areas where one’s personal development is nurtured the most: at home, at school and at work. Not only are these the biggest influencers on our views and awareness, they are the environments where we as individuals have the most impact.

26

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

We can help organise screenings with a dialogue in your communities to help unlock the wisdom of the Earth Keepers.

A digital platform will be launched with the release of the film where we hope to inspire you to take action; a base to exchange ideas and access networks to enable us to continue our journey. We do not have to come up with large worldchanging concepts but release ourselves from the (thinking) patterns in which we are stuck, and make a change.We invite you, our fellow change-makers, to be part of this movement.

Please contact us if you would like to organise a screening in your company,organisation or educational institution. Share with us stories of initiatives you have started in your local communities, so that together we can make a bigger impact.

We are not powerless and can make a difference in ourworld, preserving it for future generations.We have all the answers if only we dare to ask ourselves the right questions.

DOWN to EARTH Team

Watch the film now: www.downtoearthflm.com

We had the opportunity to talk to Daphne Laan, the Managing Director of Down to Earth Collective. She was the Head of the Technology and Lead for Women@Google NL, and undertook the experiment: What happens if you follow your heart in a business context and only do the things you enjoy?

Then doors will open unexpectedly.

NRM: Let’s start with you—how did you become part of the Down to Earth Collective? Is there anything personal about Down to Earth for you, or what you believe in?

Daphne Laan: One of the doors that opened was to the Down to Earth Collective. One day I read an article in the newspaper our friend was writing for, looking for a Managing Director, I thought, “Hey that is me!”.

When I met the filmmaker for a tea, he shared the bigger dream using wisdom as an alternative to an MBA, as business schools do not offer personal development in their curriculum. As I was doing a postgraduate Masters in Executive Coaching we found common grounds in the way we work with experiential learning. I decided to take the leap into entrepreneurship.

My personal connection: one of the messages of the film is to follow your own path. I believe we can be a role model shaping our own direction without being limited by the boundaries of a company or what is expected. Around the social impact enterprise we form a wider community with a common purpose. The way we go about fulfilling and expressing is unique, we are approaching world challenges from different perspectives. I also co-founded the company The Board Whisperers; a creative solution to the gap in equal representation by bringing the voice to the table that needs to be heard in boardrooms.

NRM: Can you tell me more about what the Collective has in store for everyone, and what the future of Down to Earth looks like?

DL: DOWN to EARTH is more than a film. It is a call to action.

Through our online film platform we build a global movement to inspire and educate individuals and companies to ignite positive change through everyday action. The Earth Keepers hold on to the keys for a sustainable future by connecting with nature, ourselves & eachother. We work together as a digital ecosystem and pioneer to use tech in a meaningful way. We have two pillars: education and contribution to impact.

Education: to prepare our children to become the generation that turns the tide. We offer a powerful and crucial educational ‘experience’. Help our younger generations to become the future leaders we need. We work with educators to help re-skill and empower students by fostering creativity, emotional intelligence and critical thinking. Essential for entrepreneurship and innovation to meet today’s challenges with an open mind and heart.

Impact: to use the film as a means to contribute to impact. An example is the Earth Keepers project in Indonesia, with the aim to use film as a fundraiser for 5 good causes around wellbeing and sustainable impact. We work together with partners as an ecosystem; to raise awareness to restore the planet or invite people to take action. And show technology is about making things happen you care about, view by view step by step.

We need each other to make a change. Let’s connect worlds, be creative, believe in magic and who knows what will happen?

According to Daphne, here are things you can do to participate in Down to Earth’s advocacy: 1. Share the film with friends, family or your community. During Christmas on www.youtube.com/u/DOWNtoEARTHglobal Host your own screening in schools or companies.

2. Sign up to contribute via We Make Change 3. Amplify our message on social media: @downtoearthfilm 4. (Facebook), @downtoearth_film (Instagram), LinkedIn 5. Reach out to me to support our work as a brand or partner

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

27

Artist Profile

@stoicmike

by Kyla Estoya

“Do not let yourself be deluded by anyone; this is all I teach.”

— Rinzai lineage monk, about 1200

I

discovered Mike Lipsey on Pinterest. It was last year, I think. I wanted to explain to a friend how I wanted the vibe of a collage to look like by showing him an image of a dog’s cutout on a green backdrop. He dismissed me until I completely forgot why I wanted to make collages in the first place—I seriously don’t remember. I’ve always admired collages and I’ve had friends questioning my taste in art, asking why I would admire someone whose idea of a masterpiece is gluing and piecing random images together.

“Well,” I’d begin, “I love how it’s about something, and nothing, and everything.” In most circumstances, they’ll let go and skip the debate.

28 | NEW READER MAGAZINE

Feature

NEW READER MAGAZINE | 29

Artist Profile I Pinned a lot of Michael’s works, and during quarantine, I realized he was one of the few people who have been keeping Tumblr alive. To me, Michael’s works were something new: he gives you a subject, a message, and a colorful background of what I would always imagine to be the sky.

“When I was in kindergarten almost 75 years ago, they gave us this coarse, flakey, yellowish paper and tins of broken crayons.

I’d begun drawing loosely imagined landscapes, something like what I am still doing. How or why, I can’t explain. People find significance in my choice of figures, but they are mainly selected to match the landscapes,” Michael says.

People find significance in my choice of figures, but they are mainly selected to match the landscapes

30 | NEW READER MAGAZINE

During a library sale, he staggered home with forty large books to deconstruct: cheap editions of art books, art sales catalogues, collectible catalogs, cartoon books, photography books, etc.

“The landscapes come first, about a dozen or so, then I look for figures that work in them, the epigrams come last, selected from a huge rough draft that [checking] is 1,802 pages at the moment,” he explains.

He has uploaded over 1500 collages online, not including the places and websites he isn’t aware of. “I search occasionally and also see them on merchandise. Every few months I get a request for using one of my epigrams for a tattoo—I have no idea if or how many might use them without asking. I’ve seen them made into a mobile, an animation, a college catalog, and of course re-blogged with all kinds of filters, which I hate. People tell me about blogs that use my material stripped of attributions, assuming I would be outraged, but I don’t really care, because I

Feature

Everyone who has a personal vision should pursue it, whatever the cost. have no art career to guard, and whatever you put online belongs to the universe, so get over it!” he states. He mentions that these epigram collages were only one of the things he made, but over the course of time, became something he kept doing consistently: “I’ve never expected this single project to go on for as long as it has.” With the pandemic going on, he found more time organizing his archives and spent most of his days creating collages in his studio. “Also on the plus side I have never spent so much time working in my gardens,” he adds.

“I don’t even know if I am an artist, or an outsider artist, writer, philosopher or whatever,” he says, “I decided to simplify my life by eliminating all thoughts of promoting, selling, showing, etc. The main thing is to have the freedom and leisure to pursue doing the work, just for the pure pleasure of the doing. The best chance of living as an artist may be to create an intentional life that provides freedom and security. That said, everyone who has a personal vision should pursue it, whatever the cost.”

One thing I truly admire about Michael is how he reminds us we’re human (I’ll always be head over heels for people who effortlessly have that power), and how he doesn’t know the kind of good influence he has on the internet. With social media constantly giving us access to more things and all these different ways to connect, it’s no doubt Michael’s words transcend from one culture to another, mostly encouraging people to look inward.

“I have no desire to be anyone’s guru or mentor. I’m interested in commenting on things that interest me—my thoughts, observations, and questions,” he explains. Most of what he writes are from classic Stoic philosophy filtered through his own experiences. He believes that during this crazy time in history, stoicism teaches us that we can’t control anything in our lives except what we feed our minds. He says, “If we can just do that, we can face the madness with equanimity and live decent lives.”

Being an artist requires a lot of technical skills. But other than that, it also means producing an idea that is yours; something true. An idea that not only pleases the viewers, or readers, or listeners, but also serves as a cathartic experience for the artist. And if there’s one thing Michael has taught me, it is that.

Photo by Howard Rachelson

NEW READER MAGAZINE | 31

Literary Work

32

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

Fiction

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

33

Literary Work

Shadow Boxing with the Law in the Time of Corona Joshua Moody

I recently received a letter in the mail from a traffic court in a small town in upstate New York. Out of respect and/or fear of legal retribution I will refer to this small town exclusively as Small Town from here on out, but hey, Small Town—you know who you are.

The letter—or bill, really—informed me that the Small Town Traffic Court had graciously accepted my guilty plea for a parking ticket I’d found tucked under my windshield wiper about a month ago. While I had to appreciate the alacrity with which they reached out to collect their prize, I couldn’t help but take issue with two minor wrinkles in my speedily resolved case.

Firstly, the ticket in question was—to put it gently—complete and utter bull, and secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I hadn’t pled guilty at all.

I discovered the ticket following a lovely day spent around a lake with my socially distanced pod of friends—we swam, we sun bathed, we discussed the possible scenarios of the apocalypse unfolding around us. It was very relaxing. The sudden appearance of this unfounded ticket, however, tossed all of my fleeting serenity out the window like so much bubonic diarrhea from a chamber pot.

You see the supposed infraction was listed as “parking in the street,” yet my car was very clearly parked on the grassy shoulder of the road, at least a yard away from the pavement. What’s more, while there were signs prohibiting street parking about a mile away, this part of the road had no signage whatsoever, and we all know the famous saying that isn’t actually a saying but let’s just pretend: “no sign, no crime.” What’s even more, my friend’s car, parked directly in front of my own—while still not parked in the road—was nonetheless at least a foot closer, and yet she found her windshield as clean as my driving record up until this moment.

As you can imagine, I was perplexed and incensed. I huffed. I puffed. I took photos of the scene, the lack of signage and the other three—miraculously ticketless—cars parked in the same area. When I got home I filled out the back of the ticket immediately, checking the box marked “not guilty” multiple times, writing so dark you could practically read it from the other side. Before stuffing the ticket into an envelope and dropping it into the mailbox I even took a picture of my ticket, filled out as plain as day, some wily part of me fully expecting shenanigans.

As the court date written upon my ticket approached I’d received not a word in response to my not guilty plea, so in an

34 | NEW READER MAGAZINE

excess of caution, I dialed the listed telephone number for the Town of Small Town Traffic Court. An answering machine picked up with a message explaining that, due to Covid-19, the court was indefinitely shuttered, and not to worry, because court dates would be rescheduled and no warrants would be issued for outstanding payments.

This was a twist.

Perhaps the message was legit, I thought, and this was the explanation for the radio silence on the other end of the traffic ticket line. And yet, what if they forgot to change the answering machine message? Small Town is, after all, a pretty small town, and it’s entirely possible the limited employees simply hadn’t gotten around to it.

So, in an excess of excess caution, I decided to drive to the address on my ticket at the date and time of my scheduled court date regardless, just in case. I put on a shirt and tie.

I pulled up my pants an inch higher than usual. I gathered my printed evidence photos and finally I entered the address written on the back of my ticket into Google Maps and headed out for Small Town. I pulled up in front of the Small Town Traffic Court with ten minutes to spare before my trial, but imagine my surprise when I discovered that the court was neither open nor closed—it wasn’t there at all. In its place was a private residence, a small log cabin home with a sky blue Toyota Tercel parked in the drive, yet nary a bailiff nor barrister wandering the yard. Thinking maybe the address had been written incorrectly on my ticket I then googled the Small Town Traffic Court.

Sure enough, the address of this cozy summer cottage popped up on the screen of my phone. It was now confirmed—I was definitely in the right wrong place.

Perhaps they knew I was coming despite their little message, I thought. Perhaps they pulled up roots in the dead of night and fled before I could smite them with my hammer of righteous indignation and my sword of copious, multi-angled

Non-Fiction cell phone photos. Or perhaps they never existed. Perhaps I’d parked on the forgotten burial mound of a colonial constable and I was being haunted by the long ago razed, Small Town Horse-Traffic Court. Whatever the case, without a number to call or an address to track down I was out of ideas, so I went home, assumed the answering machine of the court—wherever it might be hiding—was an honest one and moved on.

A week later, however, the aforementioned letter-bill arrived from the Small Town Traffic Court thanking me for my guilty plea and ever-so-sweetly demanding a check for $175.

A bill for a guilty plea that I never plead to a crime that didn’t happen from a court that does not exist— Small Town, you so crazy.

This means WAR, I thought.

This is outrageous, un-American and confusingly illogical! This shall not stand! The next move is mine, and woe unto my enemies, for the very earth shall quake with the fury of my retribution!

Then I remembered that I couldn’t call the court, or find it, or send it a strongly worded letter, and so I poured myself a drink and declared the law itself deceased.

Now, lest you think me rash in my surrender to the eternal knot of the Small Town Traffic Court, I’ll have you know my history with the law runs deeper than this debacle.

It is, in fact, quite personal. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I come from a family infested with lawyers. My father is the Town Counsel of a small town—no relation—in eastern Massachusetts. My brother went to Columbia Law, where he met his wife, and they are both now highly successful practitioners of the so-called “law” in their own right. The law runs in my blood, you see, whether I want it there or not.

If somehow it wasn’t clear already, I most certainly do NOT want it there—it itches something fierce—so in protest of my

ill-begotten law-curse, I jumped the family the rails as soon as I could. I attended Vassar College and graduated with a degree in Modernist Russian Literature, which for the low, low price of $45,000 a year practically guaranteed to take me as far in life as the parking lot. Continuing my rebellion, I then became a childcare professional, first working for a non-profit, afterschool children’s theater, and currently maintaining employ as a middle-aged male nanny—a manny, if you’re nasty. I won’t lie— I’m not a lawyer—this used to be a point of insecurity for me, comparing myself to my family members, what with their hefty paychecks and lofty titles. But as Bill Barr, Mitch McConnell and the Orange Menace gleefully piss away any semblance of legal precedence and judicial decorum in our government and beyond, oh how a part of me relishes the changing of the vocational-status tides.

I derive daily pleasure from torturing my litigious family members, texting each of them with the regularity of a vegan’s bowel movements.

To my father: “Would you please just retire already so I can finally stop telling people what you do for a living? It’s embarrassing.”

To my Sister-in-law: “Would you quit playing pretend with your be-wigged compatriots and get a real job? You have children!”

To my brother: “If your father wasn’t also a scum-sucking lawyer he’d be as ashamed of you as I am.”

Perhaps this is the karmic cause of my confusing war of attrition with the Small Town Traffic Court. Perhaps I’m being punished by the Gods of Law for my utter lack of respect for their domain. Or perhaps the law is, and always has been a conditional suggestion, a weapon to be brandished by those with the privilege to wield it and a shock collar to keep the rest of us from exploring the outer reaches of our predetermined confines. Perhaps, just perhaps, it’s nothing more than a collective illusion that only exists if we all believe in it together, like the mountains of money deposited monthly into my brother’s swelling bank account or Bill Skarsgård.

So, you may ask yourself, is there an answer to this legal conundrum or a thoughtful conclusion to my story of extremely low-stakes injustice? Does my stupid little problem with a stupid little traffic ticket in a stupid little town even really matter?

Of course not, you silly geese! This is America, where the police can murder innocent, sleeping women and only the bullet hole speckled walls receive justice. If you’re looking for a solution to the unrelenting dry heave of reason that is the United States justice system from me, this isn’t that type of essay and I’m not the proper person to provide it.

Instead, I’m going to sit by the phone like a boy with a crush, hoping against hope that the Small Town Traffic Court will finally call me back and give me my day in court so that I can present my irrefutable evidence, prove my unquestionable innocence and, naturally, be found guilty and sent to prison without parole.

You? Go vote.

Josh Moody is a writer, illustrator and comedian living in Brooklyn, New York with his lovely wife and his lovely dog. He grew up in New England, graduated from Vassar College in 2006 with an extremely useful degree in Modernist Russian Literature and then wandered down to the city to fight for scraps with his eight million neighbors. Some of his work can be found in Black Veins: An Anthology of Horror Stories, A Monster Told Me Bedtime Stories: Volume 7 and The Weird… and Whatnot, all available on Amazon.

NEW READER MAGAZINE | 35

Literary Work The supermassive black hole at the core of the supergiant elliptical galaxy M87

Powehi Craig Dobson Craig Dobson’s fiction and poetry were published in The London Magazine, The Rialto, The Literary Hatchet, THINK, Better Than Starbucks, The Dark Horse, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Ekphrastic Review and Active Muse, North, Stand, Prole, Butcher’s Dog, Magma and The Poetry Daily website. He lives and works in the UK.

36 | NEW READER MAGAZINE

They’ve seen one, now.

A meaninglessness of zeros across its godawful maw – that vast, doughnut-shaped plughole which absolutely nothing – let alone your curious bait – can escape, when it’s too late to realise that it’s you who’s caught, you who’s tied to the doom chord, the umbilicus of void reeling your hopelessness in towards wonder’s unglinting hook lodged right in the mirroring trap from which you cannot even begin to fathom the shout that couldn’t even begin to fathom squeaking its way back out – and, even if it could, all that it would say was that you were traceless history, not even a thought fossil, not even the dead light of your hope’s star, let alone the great scientific fisherman you’d once dreamed could cast from imagination’s shore, beyond the border of information – and light, let’s not forget – among rich shoals of unknowing that swarm the dim horizon where your gravity now meets a far graver one, whose heart’s great backward loss pumps everything in, drains the very medium of being, robs a whole universe blind, morning, noon & night, punctures entirety with a dark hunger’s unending, stellar greed – barely even to be conceived, let alone weighed, in the unimaginable mass of its need.

Poetry

NEW READER MAGAZINE | 37

Literary Work

The Hill Farmer is Spirited Away CRAIG DOBSON There are paths here, tracks I have known longer than any other thing.

Orphaned in these hills, I grew to follow the herds.

Penned only with them at lambing time, I’m the lamp carrier, the long man, a crooked figure striding the hairline ways.

Deaf to all but the wind’s worrying call, I never heard the spirit follow, its long stride the twin of mine, its laboured breath in time with my stone-sore bones and view-numbed mind.

Not even the flock knew, their dagged and ragged fears as blind as mine to something neither rockfall nor hunting form.

38 | NEW READER MAGAZINE

It caught me where you’d least expect – not at the high pass, or the tarn beneath The Old Boy’s Head, nor down the long straight way from the East Ridge to the West with nothing on one’s mind to keep such thoughts at bay.

No, it was just there, at the cattle grid, where a lost glove had been left on the footpath sign should its owner ever return.

A wet, draggled thing, its once bright colours struggled their abandoned rainbow pattern in the dull, damp air of morning.

If they hadn’t been back for it yet, they never would, I thought.

And stood there then – a sudden half – the spirit inside me, echoing.

Poetry

NEW READER MAGAZINE | 39

Literary Work

Mark-stepper Craig Dobson

Among a stillness of ferns and dead leaves, under cold boughs behind which, moonless and huge, skies pitch, I hear the river dark with old rain gathering.

A stir of shadows. Some rotting spoor.

My footfall’s blunder rumoured on the water. Beyond the wood, mist-poured hedgerows drown.

Stumbled senses let slip a crouch of shade to rise in starveling light, stealing between the hushed trees as if, ahead, they gave up burning torches and hall-song calling this shadowed hunger on.

Sparing me those feast-licked walls and the blood-cry’s bold unbordering beneath a roof’s flicker of wings – glimpsed through cold boughs barring a huge, moonless sky under which I spill over dead leaves, among a stillness of ferns and the dark river running.

40 | NEW READER MAGAZINE

Poetry

NEW READER MAGAZINE | 41

Poetry

Sequestered in Autumn with You bob mcneil

It matters less now that dark curtains veil our view.

In isolation, days, elliptical as haiku, end quickly, yet our nights scroll to an epic length.

The season dons dour hues that contrast with the carnival-celebratory shades, dancing to our upbeat bond.

Long before the seasonal coldness, the world became frigid from fear.

Under the covers, our oasis, we kiss and disregard every part of the outside.

42

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

Fiction

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

43

Literary Work

S

he still thought of Herself as a person, even as a She. She persisted in this though Her body had long ago turned to bones and dust, dust that lay unmoving in piles around the dark iron frame of Her bed. Whoever had placed Her within these confines had not furnished a mattress. Her skeleton reclined across the metal webbing between the cross rails.

Half An Hour Then Half An Hour Then…

JOSHUA BLIGH

you can follow Joshua ryan bligh on twitter @bligh_ryan.

44 READER MAGAZINE 44 | |NEW NEW READER MAGAZINE

A few bones had fallen to the floor.

She was very much alive. In a sense.

Her body had always been of secondary importance, more an accessory than the collection vital tubes and organs bodies were for most people. Unlike others, She was not limited to a locus of flesh, but could extend Her consciousness and influence far beyond it. When Her body had still existed, it was little more than a soft envelope around what She was at Her core.

The core was what remained.

A mote of Her. A concentrated particle of Her force that, despite its prison, could and did continue to reach into the world, turned and tuned it in ways both malevolent and kind.

Or perhaps this is a mistake of interpretation. For ill or better, Her effects on the world were no longer out of good or evil will, but rather something much more menial (though no less important): a balm on the ever-present threat of boredom.

She did not sleep. The room was all She could remember.

By decree of Her jailor (whoever they were), She had reign over no more than a handful of minutes. Something like half an hour, more or less. A snippet of reality that played over and again in a loop.

Millennia passed within Her confines, and yet Her window into the world remained fixed on a period of time roughly the duration of Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète.

The room was dark.

But She had spent so much time in it that She saw it all despite the absence of light.

All in black though. All of it. If She were to draw the room, it would end up looking like a black page, but She (were Her fingers not on the floor) would be able to point out where each object was within that sheet.

Her torments and gifts upon the world from Time X until Time Y turned quite creative toward

Fiction the end. Indeed, so creative that to others, unfamiliar with Her past work, they would seem mundane. At the beginning She pursued interruptions of the fantastic kind, turning moments of commonplace into outlandish or garish or bizarre, disrupting the lives of those people within her grasp of appointed time. Giant spiders creeping through doors at night, their shadowed forms bathed in midnight hues, the creaks of their mandibles dripping poison. Angels sweeping down from the skies to stop midair a bullet destined for a child’s skull. For half an hour, the world would be filled with the stuff of dreams and nightmares.

Toward those final half-hours She instead wielded her power, Her invulnerable influence, to alter things in ways no one but She would notice. The avenues of cataclysms and terror and rapture had become so worn that they did little to move the creeping boredom.

Biological organisms’ reactions, even to vastly different stimuli were unfortunately homogenous. She could create a complex beast from Her

mind, a perfect Chimera, its body unlike anything ever seen before, the details and design flawless…and a man would respond the same were She to give the ground a little shake or lead a tiger into his home. He’d piss himself. Sending forth any such dramatic conjurings no longer bore the force to distract Her from the knowledge that Her body no longer existed, that She was but a conscious speck, not even a proper she.

One day (or night…all the same really) Her creativity came to a sudden peak with the realization that She had one path She had never thought to explore, one different from all others, indeed apparently antithetical to Her strained efforts at escaping boredom.

She did nothing.

Until that moment She had been director and audience for countless half-hours. A non-influence would be truly novel. To do nothing more than gaze. It simply had not occurred to Her that instead of engaging, She could withdraw.

To not know the moments in their entirety would be more full an experience than She had ever had. Even in Her most minute of changes, She knew a shred of the chain of causality.

But if She did nothing…

If She had still had a heart it would have skipped with the excitement.

The half hour played out without Her. People commuted to work, and She did not change their routes. People lived and died, much as they had countless times before, but She did not guide them, lent not Her voice or will to the results. Everywhere She looked, people simply did. Their actions wove together into a tapestry of existence absent of Her. She watched.

As the final moments of the loop arrived She vibrated.

She realized that never again would She be able to experience this as new. The only deviations could be those caused by Her. From each subsequent loop She could either reach into the world or not, and She now already had not. And She never could not again.

But the loop did not reset.

She shuddered as She saw the world, for the first time in memory, continue to unfold in radiant novelty. New words were spoken that did not come from Her. New deaths. Births.

Stars exploded, launching colors She could not name into the abyss of space.

All of it without Her. Rapt, She continued to gaze, to watch, to observe. And each moment brought so much so new so glorious.

She felt the temptation to reach in. She grew attached to the characters, and mourned when they met untimely ends, She could change it, but She could not bring herself to.

Yes, the temptation to effect was there, but the unfolding scenes paralyzed Her. It rose and crumbled with each tragedy and triumph of the world.

And before She knew it, before She could blink (so to speak), it all ended.

And began anew.

Without her.

NEW READER MAGAZINE| | 45 NEW READER MAGAZINE 45

Literary Work

46 | NEW READER MAGAZINE

Poetry

Little Wonder Jim Jas

I have waited for my existence all these millions of years, just to fall into her eyes.

To see her smile so pure.

See her body rattle and kick with so much joy.

To hear her voice of a million notes.

Hear her voice laugh and sing with new discoveries.

She has filled an emptiness that I did not know was there.

She has sparked feelings that were long ago buried.

Her moist breath could lift my feet off the heaviest of trouble.

Her soft hands could grip, grasp, squeeze any unpleasant memory away.

I know my life will be spent trying to make her understand just how much she means to me.

How much she breaks through.

How much she carries.

And when the day comes when her reach is longer than mine.

When her back is the one that stands straight.

I will look into those eyes once more, before mine are closed.

Jim Jas was born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden, where he currently works as a software engineer. He studied poetry and fiction writing at the University of Sheffield, and he earned a bachelor in English from Stockholm University. Some of his previously published works appear in Route 57 and Literary Orphans.

NEW READER MAGAZINE | 47

Literary Work

Mournful Longing JIM JAS

Where did my friend go lost in the footsteps of his shadow?

When was the young stallion’s approach castrated among all the memories?

He walked with such swagger.

Such confidence, such candor.

Every choice, right there, without hesitation.

He talked like nobody cared and everybody listened.

Like all definitions were shared in the hours of the night.

But then.

Then, something happened.

Something, that is so scary.

That is so common.

He was replaced by a lesser version.

A version that was no longer original.

That was pieces of everybody who created it.

He was gone.

My friend was gone.

And now, when I look into his soulless eyes, mine are constant with tears.

48 | NEW READER MAGAZINE

And now, when I speak into his clueless mind, the heavy stone of regret crushes my chest.

Where was I? Where was I? Where was my direction of friendship?

Where was my stop sign of guidance?

How could I let his being avalanche so far down?

Let it snowball so fast?

Dear old friend.

Come back to me.

Come back, to me.

I will be different this time.

It will be different this time.

I will never blink.

I will never let you slip.

And I promise.

This time.

This time, I will take her out.

Poetry

NEW READER MAGAZINE | 49

Literary Work

50 | NEW READER MAGAZINE

Poetry

Naked Civilians Jim Jas

It’s a beautiful moon-lit winter night. The silver clouds and the star-spangled sky are covered in dead silence.

Hundreds and hundreds of flying war machines are piercing their way through, surprisingly without resistance. In a few moments, they will release tons of fire hell, never seen before on this earth.

The city below has just finished a day of carnival celebration. Its people are sleeping with extra comfort under the false impression of a cultural safe haven. Its tightly packed medieval streets and wooden houses are perfect fuel for the terror above.

A steady wind sweeps across the darkness, waiting for something to catch. As the bombs land, and the roofs are gone, it starts. Air of a thousand degrees, rising into flames.

Spreading with great speed, it strikes fear into everyone in its path. It makes the knees shake. It makes teeth shatter.

And it breaks even the strongest spirit. A paralyzed city listens to all the screams, everyone waiting for their turn.

The engines of terror pause. The sky seems to open up, maybe even a hint of sunlight. The wind leaves the flames alone, lets them work their own deed. People turn to each other, asking and feeling for pain. A sign of relief runs through their numb fingers, down the spine and into the cringing toes. Sirens start, hinting of rescue. The city begins to recover, one soul to the next.

As people run outside, trying to find their children and loved ones, the second wave comes. The unstoppable firestorm reaches it might, uprooting trees, moving vehicles and sucking people into flames. Some try to find cover underground, as instructed. They are cooked alive watching their skin boil and suffocating on poisonous air. Others, run in a panic frenzy, only to have their shoes melt away, leaving them dying as they stand.

When the final hours of destruction are passing, the numbers lost are unknown. The ones that survived have to dig their way through the countless bodies, looking for something to recognize. They might find a tooth. They might find a skull. Or they will just stare into the ashes of memories now filling every crack of the street pavement.

The city will burn for days. The black, thick smoke will cover all clouds, as the world wonders, “are we monsters?” or, “is this the cost we all pay?” Some will argue that all rules have been abandoned and torn up long ago. That they were decided by the enemy. The questions will remain unanswered to this very day. And so will all the bodies.

NEW READER MAGAZINE | 51

Literary Work

52 | NEW READER MAGAZINE

Poetry

VIRUS Lynn White

You tell me that you know my name when for centuries I’ve been anonymous in my comings and goings.

You think you’ve unmasked me now you’ve given me a name.

Well, it won’t help you.

Named or unnamed I’ll spread just the same, never fear!!

Ha ha!!

History writes its own jokes.

You’ll see.

But if you were right, I would be the only one unmasked, such is the irony of history where, hidden behind the mask identities may easily be mistaken.

So, as I float away in the damp miasma I’ll tell you my name, reveal it without fear if you keep it secret, Fear.

Or fear not, if you keep my secret.

NEW READER MAGAZINE | 53

Literary Work

54 | NEW READER MAGAZINE

Poetry

TRANSFORMATION Lynn White

It was a tradition almost a right of passage across generations of young people.

Come the summer they climbed up the rocks right to the top of the waterfall.

Then they jumped feeling the falling water beneath them, shrieking with excitement as they hit the cool pool, feet first, a long way below.

It was a tradition across generations of young people and no one could remember an accident.

But in a risk averse age They knew that the past was no guide to the future, so They put up a fence for safety’s sake.

So now the fence must be climbed with precarious teetering along the top.

If only They knew but They don’t.

They may marvel at the bright squirrels as they run along the fence and up the rocks and gaze in wonder at the multi coloured birds flaunting their glistening wet teeshirt feathers as they feel the falling water beneath them.

They don’t recognise any of them.

There’s usually a way if you look hard enough.

lynn white lives in north wales. her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality.

She was shortlisted in the theatre cloud ‘war poetry for today’ competition and has been nominated for a pushcart prize and a rhysling award. her poetry has appeared in many publications including: apogee, Firewords, peach Velvet, gyroscope review and So it goes. Find lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry. blogspot.com and lynn white poetry - Facebook.

NEW READER MAGAZINE | 55

Literary Work

56 | |NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

Non-Fiction Poetry

WRAPPED UP Lynn White

Usually I walk alone through the woods but today I have a friend, perhaps imaginary, I’m not sure, but certainly friendly, a foxy friend, no less, to bring colour to this time of cold with the darkness closing in wrapping me in a long dark cloak completely covering me so no one can see only my foxy friend, perhaps unreal, and the birds flying free.

If they are real one day I’ll join them.

NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE| | 57

Literary Work

58 | |NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

Non-Fiction Poetry

Anathema Henry Hunter Conditioned air presses small bumps against my sleeves.

Fingertips stretch towards the icy blue dial.

I pause.

Hate, for the way he makes me feel my wallet.

An unyielding bump in a plush leather seat.

An organ bellows and violins scream, a lady climbs to a stunning vibrato! This must be Bach’s…

Red light

I watch the pane slide down. His cracked lips split open, confessing a smile of shattered small teeth.

Chest tight, eyes white, inhale a hissing curse.

The tire’s screech lurches

A slur of thanks, crackles, into croaks, like shaken gravel.

His fists thrust against lungs, filled but without air.

to a halt.

A prayer of thanks dies, with the flap of cardboard against sunken ribs.

Eyes float above the blocky scribbles: “Please, I” “First”? no… “Thirst”?

I cannot help, But look.

Dark sores chase, exhausted veins.

Thin blue ridges collapse, sinking beneath bony ravines.

Oh God, outside my window.

How his dark eyes blaze out from that festering canyon.

Desperate fingers wiggle inside empty front pockets.

If only I might slip into the soft glow of my phone’s screen.

Anything but what rots in the fresh morning air.

Bent over, he chokes on a gentle cool breeze.

I too cough at the reek, that tastes like vinegar.

Mash the button and the window rises once again.

Yet, the glass does not blind.

Watch his rhythmic wretches.

He rocks back and forth and his back…

So many curved, shallow streams of crimson.

Etched by long yellow nails.

Each shallow slice tracing the path of tiny creatures.

Feet crawling unseen but always felt.

Look straight!

His pocked face is rising.

Indifference, swallowing back the hard lump.

I must not turn. I fear the mist in his eyes.

Afraid if I look, I might only see that same sick bastard.

Green Light

NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE| | 59

Literary Work

On the Road Henry Hunter

A crushed shell Red blood drips onto pavement I hear the familiar hiss of him shrinking Only yellow eyes peer out Fear? Anguish? Nothing?

No, I feel the cracks in his body Mercy is the bloody shell Blurring between blinks The shell rests on green grass A spot in my garden Yet only leaves rustle In the cool Autumn breeze I walk away But dream of his outstretched head Looking back across the garden I dream that my childhood The turtle, crawled on

Henry Hunter studied English at the U.S. Naval Academy and is currently studying English Writing at Wheaton College. He is a new writer aspiring to express beauty through language. His interests also include Arabic, philosophy, and Eastern Christianity. Currently he is learning creative writing under Dr. Niho Nonaka and is hoping to study at Oxford for the upcoming fall semester.

60 READER MAGAZINE 60 | |NEW NEW READER MAGAZINE

Poetry

NEW READER MAGAZINE| | 61 NEW READER MAGAZINE 61

Literary Work

Writing with Nietzsche Henry Hunter

The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.

Entice? Well yes, of course. You must lure the tentative creature from the cool recesses of the self. Waft the air with lurid imagery and break off bits of allusion to sprinkle along the ground.

Watch! His upturned nose sniffs in the shadows.

Cautiously he emerges, unable to resist the musk of graphic scenes. Before you know it, the creature is scouring the ground for those scattered references. Their familiar flavors are irresistible when glazed in your unique zest. But your work is not finished.

Slip from your perch and snatch a belief from the now neglected refuge. Slaughter quietly and skewer it over a crackling blaze. Do not be alarmed as its body begins to blacken. Trust that the smoke will reach the creature during its gluttonous craze.

Excellent! You have done well. Following his nose, he stumbles past the threshold. Blindly he wanders into the thick of the unknown. Oh my, look here: he does not even see the symbols lurking in the darkness. This is good, they would be all too happy to claim him as their own.

Finally, the creature topples into your clearing. Ah yes, how he gags. Watch his eyes widen in fear. The source of that savory scent is now shown by the fire; it is his own god who lies charred over the dying flames.

Now! Strike the creature with the hammer of abstraction.

Bash his naivety against the hard edge of truth. Rain down bonecrunching cracks that bludgeon him into absurdity. Swing the full weight of meaningless onto the soft-headed youth.

Alright, alright that is quite enough. I know, this is far too much fun. But do let him crawl away to expire. Oh yes, I agree. Perhaps the next one may put up a fight.

62 READER MAGAZINE 62 | |NEW NEW READER MAGAZINE

Poetry

NEW READER MAGAZINE| | 63 NEW READER MAGAZINE 63

Literary Work

Storm for Her

The hand traced along the bedframe and slowly followed the metal to the table on its side. It felt, gingerly, around the flat top, brushing away breadcrumbs until it poked the edge of a wide toothed comb.

When the nurse did not respond, the hand tapped its handle again, and again.

She looked back towards the woman in bed, but her body moved to indicate it hadn’t noticed the disturbance of this limb. She picked up the comb. The hair on the pillow bristled.

Isabel Lanzetta

The wind picked up, its long body rocking the floor of the valley. The forecast hadn’t called for rain, but the air’s salty taste said otherwise.

The walls were caked in deodorizer and the scent of looming death.

Three days. This is the time it takes ~ on average ~ for the bodies entering the doorway of the shoddy hospice to succumb to whatever crippling effect old age burdens on their skeletal frames. The week had been eerily quiet, all rooms empty but the last at the end of the hall, and the sky had taken on such a cloudy gray sheen that, once inside, it was nearly impossible to tell whether it was night or day.

Curtis had shifted ever so slightly in bed, her head tilting to one side. The nurse took a small lock of hair in one hand. She began to run the comb along its ragged ends, gently untangling knots built by bedrest. She worked her way upwards, each stroke resting closer to the nape of the woman’s neck. Outside, the quiet droplets of rain had begun to fall. The first lock fell from Curtis and into her hand. She gazed at it, thinking of the long-haired dog she had as a girl, who had expelled its hair at each changing season, the thick wads spilling into hallways and curtains and clothing. The old woman had shifted her gaze, and was staring at her intently, palm open. Not knowing what else to do, the nurse set the smoothed mass into the outstretched hand, which took it between two fingers and held it there, teetering on a fold in the sheets.

The nurse loaded a stained plastic tray with three meager dishes: a glass of water, an ambien, and a slice of untoasted bread. Unhurried, she traced the stickered shoe prints down the tiled floor to the end of the hall. Out of habit, she knocked, entering without expecting a reply.

From the once-white sheets a pair of nostrils peered at her in greeting. A wrinkled foot stuck out from the bottom of the twin cot, the toenails yellow and thick with fungus.

Fifty-one days. The woman in bed had not uttered a word since her admission, but had stared silently at the rattling fan above, letting her eyes roll and roll and roll about in circles around her skull. The nurses had taken to calling her Curtis. In part, because her hair was wildly curly, unfurling from her widow’s peak and spiraling into a mass of split ends and frizz into the single pillow that held up her head. This, and because when she checked herself in the nearly two months prior, she had given them no charts or identification from which to prepare for her decline, except to say it’s time. This, and because when asked for the contact of her next of kin and billing address she had simply clucked her tongue at them, hard, and then carefully undressed, opening her arms and waiting for the nurses to drape her in one of their disposable paper gowns.

The tray scraped against the table as she set it down, offering the sliced bread to the greying eyes that had, momentarily, stopped their circling. After several immobile moments, the nurse popped it into her own mouth and chewed carefully. The food was more a courtesy, overpowered by the I.V. dripping steadily into Curtis’ curled hand.

The cold had begun to creep into the open window, brought on by the late season and the clouds. She reached to close the glass panel when five fingers like electric ice grasped the hem of her scrubs.

Below, the older woman had lifted her chin from the sheets, placing one index finger carefully on the linens. This late in the day, the staff had already emptied out of the creaking building one by one, and the overnight shift had hours still to go.

The nurse obliged.

64 | NEW READER MAGAZINE

The storm grew louder, the fan’s whizzing becoming a fluttering bee beneath a chopper’s wings.

The comb moved again, leading the nurse’s hand down and up the tangled strands of hair. The wind picked up. The second lock fell.

Curtis made no motion of surprise at each clump that landed again in her palm with the speed of raindrops on the roadway, only blinking as if with the simple satisfaction of knowing.

The third lock fell, then the fourth, and fifth. The rain had grown heavy-bellied and struck the asphalt lot outside the window as though cannonballing into a community pool. The evening had come, or it hadn’t. It made no difference inside.

As if awakening, the nurse startled at the last curl outstretched from Curtis’ forehead. It tickled the old woman’s nose.

This one came without the comb, loosening itself into the nurses hand and then Curtis’. The bald face before her was completely naked: un-freckled and scratched like the newborn she had seen her sister give birth to a year before.

It wrinkled in odd places, sagging around the woman’s ears and rounding her eyes like globes.

For a moment, the room lay still.

A heartbeat, and then Curtis had taken the thick curls from her hand, popped them into her half-open mouth and swallowed them whole.

The nurse drove home in a hailstorm that night, each splatter of rain a lock of hair falling from the sky. By the time she clocked into work the next morning, Curtis had died.

Fiction Isabel Lanzetta is a student of English and Creative Writing at Colorado College. A poet by nature, Isabel Lanzetta’s work has appeared in Convergence: Best Teen Writers of Arizona, Curios, The Telepoem Booth and Leviathan Magazine. She has been reintroduced to the art of fiction writing in the past year. “Storm for Her” is her first piece of flash fiction.

NEW READER MAGAZINE | 65

Literary Work

THE RIVER Andre Mateus

M

y hands are clammy and my heart is pounding as if it wants to burst through my chest. I take a sip of my overpriced Rum and Coke to calm it down.

“Call or fold, sir?” the pretty dealer asks, urging me to make a decision. I look down at the cards in my hand for the first time and see a Seven and a Deuce, the worst starting two in Texas Hold’Em Poker, staring back at me. I can’t help but smile.

“Sir?” she asks once more, her face not so pretty when she demands an answer. I play with my lucky 5-dollar chip for a second, trying out her patience, and take another look at my cards. Sadly, they haven’t changed at all. My Head’sup opponent, my final opponent of the night, raised pre-flop, hoping to bully me into folding the blind. But I don’t want to play his game. No. I want to match him. I want to be able to tell this story and say I had the cojones to call a bet with a Seven and a Deuce while a million dollars were on the line.

Then again, I don’t want pride to be my downfall. With a million dollars on the line, why not take the safe route, live to fight another round and fold this miserable hand?

“Call,” I decide finally, pushing a fourth of my chips across the table.

It’s not about winning or losing, it’s how you play the game, right?

The dealer, patiently and methodically, starts dealing the flop, the first three of a total of five cards that will be placed on the table, and I detect a slight smirk on my opponent’s face right after the first one is revealed. An Ace. Tricky. Might he have one or is he bluffing? That smirk seemed too well-timed and orchestrated to be real, so he must be trying to bluff me.

Or maybe he really has an Ace and that smirk was a double bluff?

Sometimes I just hate this game!

The dealer shows a King next and ends with a Deuce. My opponent can hardly wait to double his bet.

Every rational bone in my body is telling me to cut my losses, fold and hope Lady Luck will be more generous next time.

66 READER MAGAZINE 66 | |NEW NEW READER MAGAZINE

My instincts and that Deuce, though, are singing me a different song. One that is muffled by the sound of my father’s voice when he taught me to play on our kitchen table. “The trick to being great at poker is not knowing when to call,” he would say, “it’s knowing when to fold. If you keep calling every bet, you’re not a player. You’re an addict.” And then he’d take a big swig from a bottle of cheap bourbon.

Takes one to know one, dad.

I reach for my stack and push half of it across.

The dealer discards the top card of the deck and shows the Turn. A second Deuce. Suddenly, the smirk is not on my opponent’s face, but on mine. I try to disguise it with another sip of Rum as he taps the table, betting nothing.

“I’m all-in,” I say, gathering the rest of my chips.

“Got a Deuce?” my opponent asks, flustered, barely getting the words out as he toys around with some chips.

Let’s see things from his end. My starting hand being Deuces wouldn’t be likely because if that were the case, I would never have taken so long to call with a pair, and only a fool or a beginner would call with a Deuce without also having an Ace or a King.

Since I didn’t raise or re-raise when both of them showed up, it seems pretty clear my hand should not have a Deuce as I’m neither a fool or a beginner. I’m a professional.

Right?

“There’s only one way to find out,” I reply, all cryptic and mysterious, trying to entice him into making me a whole lot richer in the next few minutes.

After some gut-wrenching deliberation, he falls for it and chooses to go all-in as well, revealing a hand of Ace, Ten. I can only imagine how frustrated he got when he saw my Deuce and Seven because he hid it well.

I, on the other hand, didn’t.

My smirk became a huge smile, which in turn became a horrible expression of shock and terror after the dealer revealed the fifth and final card, the River... ...an Ace. There’s only a handful of indisputable truths in this world.

Fiction

History repeats itself.

People are not what they appear to be.

And Aces beat Deuces.

My opponent shakes his fist in the air as dozens of people rush the table to pour champagne all over him. He just won a million dollars.

I quickly move through the crowd to shake his hand, find enough composure to say my obligatory congratulations and run out of the casino. I just lost a million dollars.

Finding a nice, empty spot by the river, I stand leaning on the railing, thinking about what went wrong. It’s not too hard. I should have folded that hand the minute I saw it. A professional would have, so how can I call myself one? I wanted to play it. No, I needed to play it! My dad was right. I’m an addict. Or maybe they’re not such different things. Isn’t a professional just an addict who wins more than he loses? People seem fine with addicts, as long as they win. What no one likes is a loser. And that’s me.

Feeling in my pocket for a cigarette, I pull out my lucky 5-dollar chip instead.

“Not so lucky today.”

I shake my head and throw my arm back, preparing to toss it in the river and stopping mid-motion.

The river. It’s so quiet. So peaceful. So... ...inviting.

Climbing over the railing, I say to myself I’m just going for a quick swim, a little moment of pause and relaxation to end a crappy day on a good note, until some distant voice I don’t recognize as my own shakes that dumb notion away.

“What the hell are you doing? There’s another tournament that’s about to start!”

I smile, squeeze the 5-dollar chip in my hand and climb back down.

It’s not about winning or losing, it’s how you play the game, right?

Andre Mateus is a writer, screenwriter and comic book writer from Portugal with a couple of published short stories and a feature film, Ladrões de Tuta e Meia, produced in 2019, along with a webseries, Avós na Net. Internationally, he authored several comic books and two of his short film scripts, Blood & Tears and The Last Supper, finished at the top of various screenwriting competitions. You may find these and more of my works on my website.

NEW READER MAGAZINE| | 67 NEW READER MAGAZINE 67

Literary Work

Zen Dog N.M. Leigh

B

uddy was my wife’s dog, at first anyhow. She adopted him as a pup from the Asher County dog pound over my objections. I had argued for a purebred so we would have some idea of what we were getting. They’re all cute as puppies.

But Patty had insisted on a mongrel. That’s the word I used. She said you weren’t supposed to call them that. It’s mixed breed, she told me with that air of superiority people assume when they talk about rescuing dogs, or how, really, the dog rescued them, a sentiment expressed on a bumper sticker I’ve seen.

Despite my reservations about Buddy, in time he won me over. He was part golden retriever and part lab, though he more closely resembled a golden, with his shaggy coat and slight build. As with most retrievers he was gentletempered and craved attention. He always had to have something in his mouth, so Patty bought him stuffed toys.

He’d carry them around and slobber on them until they stank so bad you could smell them from across the room, and I’d throw them out. She’d buy him new ones and wrap them up as presents for him to tear open.

Buddy was smart, as are a lot of dogs. What set him apart, though, and made him unlike any dog I’ve ever known, was that he possessed a remarkable calmness, a sage-like balance that emanated from him in waves. I called him Zen-dog and kiddingly theorized that in some previous life, he had been a Buddhist master. All you had to do was hang around him for a while and you’d start feeling more at ease and able to glimpse the Big Picture. I’d talk to him, and he’d stare intently at me as if he understood every word. In some ways it was more helpful talking to Buddy than Patty because he never interrupted or looked bored or made me feel stupid or petty or mean. He didn’t judge. He’d just let me go on until I’d vented whatever was bothering me, and I would be left feeling unburdened, or at least more equitable for a time.

Sadly, Buddy’s wise manner was unable to smooth over everything. This became apparent when Patty and I started having marital trouble. Small arguments began to erupt between us like brush fires and frequently metastasized into rancorous disagreements. Hostile silences lasted hours and then days as our relationship unraveled over a period of months to the point where we lived together though apart in the same house. This discord troubled poor Buddy to no end. Whenever we argued, he’d get upset, whining and panting, or snatching up one of his toys and trying desperately to present it to one or the other of us, as if to

68

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

distract us from our bickering. Sometimes he’d insert his body between ours like a boxing referee attempting to separate clenched fighters. His efforts failed. Patty and I would go on quarreling, barely noticing him because we were so consumed with ourselves. We’d give him a vacant pat and nudge him away, or even scold him for interfering.

When she and I began sleeping in different rooms, he would pace all night, going first from her bed and then to where I slept on the couch.

Even in the half-light of the darkened room I could see him staring plaintively at me as I lay there, as though he were trying to will some sense into me. He got very little rest and, in time, slacked off on his eating and stopped playing altogether. His coat lost its shine. You could tell he was depressed.

Then one day Buddy went missing.

It was late in the afternoon on a Saturday in August. I was in the garage, drinking beer and digging caked grass off the underside of the mower with a putty knife when Patty came in, distressed. She said she couldn’t find Buddy. She’d let him out to do his business and when she checked on

Fiction him a few minutes later, he was gone. He’d never run off before, although he would have had plenty of opportunity. We lived in the country, without a fenced yard, and surrounded by woods and fields.

Patty suggested that we each get into our vehicles and drive around and look for him. We’d either see him or he’d see us and come running.

She would go south toward town. I was to drive north in my pickup.

Before leaving, I went into the house and grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge.

This earned me a cold stare from Patty, who was backing out of the drive when I came out with the beers. I didn’t care. I’d been drinking a lot more lately; usually, as I sat on the back porch with Buddy who didn’t seem to object.

It was a bright day and there was some time left before it would start to get dark. A short distance from where we lived was a narrow two-lane called Bears Den Road. I turned onto it and poked along at about ten miles an hour, drinking the first of the beers and swiveling my head back and forth to see if I could locate Buddy. When I was growing

up, this area had been dotted with picturesque family farms.

But most of them had been vacated since then. There also were abandoned strip mines marked by vast sections of broken terrain covered with coarse grasses and scraggly trees interspersed with pockets of tangled woods. Here and there, deserted shacks and the rusting hulks of mining machinery stood along rutted drives that intersected the public road. Tires, discarded mattresses, beer bottles and cans littered the deep ditches. Locals liked to motor through here, drinking and blasting about anything with shotguns. This worried me, Buddy wandering around with such hooligans about. I thought about coyotes too. They were plentiful, and not only in the countryside but in town as well. There’d been a story in the newspaper about a woman who had let her poodle out in the back yard. A coyote leaped over the picket fence and carried it off. It seemed that wildlife was everywhere. Deer. Fox. Raccoons. The year before, a black bear had been sighted in town several times. It was as if they wanted their land back.

About a mile up the road was a house trailer with four clapped-out cars and a pickup parked in front of it. Some kids were frolicking in a plastic swimming pool. They had splashed water onto the dirt and transformed it into mud.

One of the children, wearing a diaper, sat playing in it. A woman in her twenties was slouched on a sofa on the porch. She was staring at her phone and hardly paying any attention to the kids. When I passed she looked up. I waved but she didn’t return it.

Patty called and said she’d seen no sign of Buddy.

She’d even flagged down some passing motorists to inquire if they’d seen him and they hadn’t. She wanted to know if I’d had any luck and broke into sobbing when I told her no. She fretted about it getting dark soon. If we didn’t find him tonight, she said, we’d make posters and put them up tomorrow.

You see those posters all the time, stapled onto a utility pole or tacked onto the bulletin board at the diner or in the hardware. Lost dog. Lost cat. I saw one once for a box turtle. Usually there’s a photograph of the missing pet and a description along with a number to call or an email address.

Sometimes a reward is offered. There’s a plaintive quality to the notices, and I’ve often wondered how successful they are.

I didn’t relish the idea of seeing Buddy’s likeness on one.

Beyond the trailer with the kids playing was the slaughterhouse. Though it had been shuttered long ago, I remembered if from when I was a boy and it was still operational. What stuck in my memory was the odor you detected whenever you went by, a combination of dung and something vaguely metallic. In the yard adjacent to the rambling building were pens that once held lowing cattle and grunting pigs awaiting their turn on the killing floor.

There seemed to be a panicked tone to the sound the penned livestock made. One time I asked my father about it as we drove past, and he said the animals made that noise because they knew what was coming.

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

69

Literary Work Sometimes you’d go by and see the workers outside in their long leather aprons, taking a smoke break and not looking at one another.

I turned into the lot. The building was a two- and threestory affair with corrugated metal siding in some places and block construction in others. It had been painted white once, but now the paint was flaked and was missing in large uneven patches. There were massive sliding doors and rows of windows, many with broken panes. Thistles, coneflowers and Queen Anne’s lace poked through the concrete slabs adjoining the foundation and from the cinder parking lot itself. Everywhere were rusty pipes and conduit and portions of chain-link fence. Graffiti had been scrawled in places, very few words, mostly shapes and patterns, as if whoever put it there had abandoned language and, instead, communicated in primitive symbols.

Entering through a partially open man-door, I walked up a short flight of concrete steps leading to the main floor. Light filtered in from the windows above and pushed back the shadows. I tried to detect the metallic smell I remembered, though all I could sense now was a dry, earthy odor suggestive of a barnyard.

It was a large space. A network of concrete half-walls formed chutes to guide the doomed beasts. Gutters for blood and piss were etched into the floor. Overhead, sprawled girders and chain hoists and U-channel tracks fitted with roller carriages equipped with hooks and gambrels. There were numerous vats and tanks. Along one wall was a rack from which dangled the heavy aprons I recalled seeing the workers on break wearing. Three large hoppers positioned side by side were filled with bones.

It struck me how organized it was and how, in all the countless times I’d eaten meat, I’d never given any thought to what went into making it, the death and cruelty of converting living creatures into food, glue, hides, cosmetics and other products. Animals give us more than we know.

I continued my exploring and at one point was startled by a sudden banging, as though a metal door had been slammed shut somewhere deep within the building. I halted for a couple of minutes, listening and deliberating whether coming in here was a good idea. I called Buddy’s name. Doing so seemed to disturb the eerie quietude the way tossing a stone into a still pool unsettles its surface. I experienced an unnerving sensation of something hearing my voice that I would prefer not to hear it. I didn’t call out again.

Emerging from a short passageway, I entered a chamber with a high ceiling. There was a horned owl perched in the rafters. Seeing it made the hair prick up on the back of my neck. A horned owl is a huge bird to see so close and so suddenly. It swiveled its head and regarded me indifferently with its large amber eyes.

I wasn’t the first trespasser here. There were the remains of a small fire, as well as beer and liquor bottles, wadded panties, a pair of torn jeans, a solitary sandal, crusty condoms and other such trash. In the room housing

70

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

the plant’s boiler, I came upon an open pit about ten feet deep. At the bottom of it lay the dried up carcass of a deer.

It must have somehow fallen in. Gloomy as it was, it would be easy enough to do if you weren’t watching. It occurred to me to use the flashlight on my phone, then I realized I’d left it in the truck.

Eventually I reached the main office. There were about half a dozen oak desks covered in dust and what looked to be raccoon scat. Nearby lay toppled filing cabinets with papers and folders spilling out of them, as though the people who’d worked there had hurriedly evacuated.

Behind a door in a small adjoining office, was a large framed photograph that was so peculiar I could only stare.

It featured a naked young woman with a plain quality to her face and features that was alluring. Something in its overall composition hinted at unfulfilled desire. Had she worked here? She was standing amid hanging portions of freshly slaughtered meat. Two bloody slabs directly behind her appeared to be emerging from her back like angel wings.

By the time I exited the building, evening was coming on. The slaughterhouse cast a long shadow on the parking lot, and the slanting sunlight imparted an orange cast to the trees in the distant woods. I was about to climb into my pickup when I noticed a dog standing on the far edge of the lot near the tall grass covering former strip mine acreage.

It wasn’t Buddy. This was a huge gray beast that looked to be part mastiff. In the next moment, I saw another dog near that one. Peering even more closely, I picked out two more lying nearby. Then I counted six additional ones, the last being Buddy himself. He was standing among the others, although, given the golden color of his coat, he was difficult to see in the waning light.

The dogs were staring coolly at me, as if they’d been waiting. A couple of them glanced repeatedly toward the big gray, which I intuited was the leader. In the newspaper lately had been articles about a pack comprising strays, runaways and abandoned pets that roamed the hills and woods north of town. It had been making a nuisance of itself, raiding trash cans and killing deer and livestock. People had complained to the county commissioners and the dog warden about it. Several letters to the editor had appeared, expressing concern that it could pose a risk to people.

Moving around the truck, I took a few steps toward the dogs. “Come on, Bud!” I shouted in a friendly voice. I didn’t want to alarm him or the other dogs. He lifted his muzzle and canted his head. Certainly, he knew it was me. But that was his only response, which was odd because he typically came whenever I called. I tried again, this time slapping my hands enthusiastically against my thighs as an added inducement. He took a few steps toward me, then halted, as if he was responding out of habit, only to reconsider.

My calling for Buddy seemed to agitate the others.

A few of them began edging toward me in a predatory manner. Two dogs shifted outward in what appeared to be a flanking maneuver. The gray stayed anchored, regarding me

Fiction calculatingly with its ears pricked. A watery apprehension welled in me and I tried to quell it. Dogs can smell fear. I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled the same as I always did when Buddy and I went to the dog park and I wanted him to come, but my mouth was dry and all I managed was a muffled screech.

The gray took a few deliberate steps forward, shrinking the distance between us, and the two dogs that had posted themselves away from the others, the flankers, shifted again. One of them, a brindled boxer, seemed to be positioning itself so it could cut me off. The pickup was only six feet behind me and the closest dogs were sixty feet away. If I were to dash for it, the math was in my favor.

Then it occurred to me that I might have locked the door. I thought I’d left it open. Usually I do. Only maybe this time I hadn’t. Doubt wedged uncomfortably into my brain. I took some cautious steps back, trying to inject an air of calm into my posture.

The pack reacted nearly as one to my slow retreat. It members crept toward me. Only Buddy hung back. Having grown up in a rural area and having wandered country roads since I was a boy, I’d faced down a number of menacing dogs over the years and had never been bitten. With an individual dog, if you stand up to it, it will normally back off.

I’d never confronted a pack, though. The energy it projected seemed purposeful and unbound. Dangerous.

I inched backward until I reached the truck, then I edged along the grill and front bumper until at last the pickup was between me and the dogs. They hadn’t rushed me, as I’d feared they would, although they had continued to advance.

Fortunately the driver’s door was unlocked and I clambered inside. Finally safe, I let out a long, juddering breath. My hands were shaking. Several of the dogs were now milling around the truck, nosing the air, eyeing me sideways. In the side-view mirror, I saw a beagle hike its leg and piss on my back tire. The gray stood about ten feet away with its yellow eyes pinned on mine. I tried to read its mood. Smug? It was as though they’d exercised their dominance and were satisfied. Suddenly I felt a little foolish for having been alarmed.

I lowered the passenger window about six inches so I could call for Buddy. If he came, I would swing open the door and let him in, as we’d done any of number of times.

Buddy loved riding in the truck. He’d sit there like a person as we rode along. Sometimes he’d poke his head out the window the way you see dogs do all of the time.

I shouted for him and, once again, he advanced a few steps before checking himself. The gray looked back at him and then at me with its lower jaw hanging down and its tongue lolling. I didn’t get the idea that the gray or any of the other dogs would have prevented Buddy from coming to me. He wasn’t their prisoner. He was there voluntarily, which was a galling realization.

The gray turned and began trotting in the opposite direction toward the field and the woods beyond. The other dogs fanned out behind it in a loose formation.

Buddy lingered and gazed in my direction for a moment before following the rest of them. I watched until I couldn’t see him anymore. Then I sat there a while and drank the second beer I’d brought with me and thought things over.

Buddy had left us, Patty and I. His canine intuition had told him we weren’t going to make it, and as it turned out, he was right. He knew it before we did. He could foretell the impending collapse of our marriage with that uncanny prescience most dogs possess, and, in Buddy’s case, was especially fine-tuned. He didn’t want to choose between us, so he took up with his own kind, and I couldn’t fault him.

Living as a semi-wild dog would be difficult, I reasoned, but at least his life in the pack would provide something he could rely upon, unlike us.

When I finished the beer, I fired up the truck and slowly swung it around to leave. As I did my headlights swept the slaughterhouse. Maybe the dogs sensed what had once occurred inside. Perhaps that was what brought them here.

I got back on the road and drove by the trailer where the kids had been playing. The evening star was out and so were the fireflies. There was just enough light by which to make out the overgrown fields and the dark outline of the woods beyond. I was halfway home when my phone rang.

N.M. Leigh is a former print journalist, writing teacher, and advertising writer from the Midwest. His stories typically deal with characters who are attempting to deal with loss and estrangement. Nature typically features dominantly in his work.

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

71

Literary Work

72

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

Fiction

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

73

Literary Work

This was the year I learned to t terms of my career, my art and I am finding out where I belon

-J

74 74

||

NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

think bigger - in my mind. Slowly, ng.

Jaina Cipriano

Fiction when my partner and i moved into this house last year, a large portion of the backyard was taken up by a makeshift motorcycle shed, which we ignored for three seasons, too tired and too busy and not sufficiently motivated to remove it. then the pandemic came jangling in, bringing long, lonely stretches of time and anxieties about food security. we tore down the shed, excavated plastic shreds and broken wood from the earth, and put in two garden beds. we did not know whether either we or the soil were capable of growing anything. we tried anyways. my partner, who is an artist, put up some waterjet cut steel, the remnants of a gallery piece, next to the garden for adornment. the purple pole beans grew to it immediately. even now, mid-autumn, we harvest new beans from the artwork.

NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE NEW

||

75 75

Literary Work

Greg Aldana

Merry Chrstmas, Have A Great New Year!

Dave Barrett

Cheers!!!

I published my 12th book in 2020 and appeared on the Blood Time podcast with Pete Cimironi to talk about it. Note the masks around our necks.

Dr. Jan Cooper

Keith Manos Charles N. Smith 76 76

||

NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

Fiction

Mala Rai & Bill Arnott

“Always remember that YOU are love, loved, and lovable by your mere existence.”

Jeannine Burgdorf

and ough a mask Smiling thr ine a bit of sunsh y jo n e to g tr yin ’t If that doesn y. n o lc a b e on th l?

0, what wil sum up 202

NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

||

77 77

Literary Work Looking forward… (Our daughter Robin cycling on The Bog of Allen here in Kildare, Ireland. It was taken during the summer when we were all in lockdown. Our house backs onto the bog so we spent a lot of days just cycling about on it and had it pretty much all to ourselves. It was an amazing thing during a weird time.)

M ic k Le ig h' s vi ew I just want to escape. I’m also immensely frustrated by all the new rules and restrictions. I’m an Aquarius and can’t stand being told what to do

Tara Cronin 78 78

||

NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

mu ga bi by en k

Fiction

ky a NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

||

79 79

Literary Work

Keith H UMAN

a u tu m n a r o s e in e fe r ti le ea r th th m o g fr ee d s s p r in g in s a m id s t th e w b lo o m

fi n d i n g peace on o b sc u r e m u si c

New Cover!

Having fun with Christopher Soltis!!!

80

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

Fiction

CONQUEROR Greetings~ And thanks for the invite! This year has definitely been full of challenges - I’m sure for everyone, especially with all that is going on in the world during such turbulent times. I know I have certainly had my share of them and have had to really rise to the occasion and overcome quite a bit of adversity in order to achieve some of my biggest goals.

Through it all though, one of the words that comes to mind when I sum up my 2020 is CONQUEROR. And what it takes to be one. Especially when you run into so many obstacles that often prevent people from accomplishing their dreams and how we so often have to fight so hard in order to protect them. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart and where we often experience the most growth in our lives. Learning to overcome our challenges is a key component to building and developing character and integrity.

So, I thought of one of my favorite pieces in my art collection as a comparison to what 2020 has been like for me as a declaration of the strength it has taken for me to overcome some of the struggles I have faced this year..And Conquered. Albeit one Hard Earned Victory, to say the least. So the title or message for my selection in the above attachment is one simple word to sum up my 2020... CONQUEROR

Rita~

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

81

Glen Holland

study one from self explosion series

by Ira Meier

Soldier on by Bob Kinerk

Artist Composition by Raven Shamballa

82 82

||

NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

NRM News Feed Bruce Anderson Just Now

Welcoming in the New Year 2020 with my wife at a symphony concert and dance on stage immediately following. Tragedy upon tragedy has followed, but our interest and focus on the well being of others has expanded in unplanned, but creative ways. Small acts of kindness and personal touches have replaced the big celebrations.

Who would have guessed then how distant this now seems and yet how hopeful we can be if we take the steps now, every day for our personal and community health.

Jo Epley Just Now

I haven’t done much in 2020. Its a bummer year. Covid 19 keeps me close to home. I can’t attend the funerals of fallen friends. And watching the news raises my blood pressure. The only bright spot is Biden is leading in the polls.

Matias Travieso-Diaz Just Now

I was born in Cuba and migrated to the United States as a young man, escaping political persecution by the Castro regime. I became an engineer and lawyer and practiced for nearly fifty years. I retired, turned my attention to creative writing, and authored many short stories of various genres. As 2020 draws to a close, my stories have been published or accepted for publication in over thirty paying short story anthologies, magazines and podcasts, including NRM. A collection of some of my stories has also been accepted for publication under the title Times and Places.

Lazar Trubman Just Now

2020, well, most of it, had been tough for everyone, and, yes, writing was one of the few ways to survive the lockdowns, separations, losses (see photo), etc. I might consider myself lucky: still looking out the window, and 23 publications decided to have my modest pieces between their covers.

NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

||

83 83

Literary Work

84 84

||

NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

Fiction

NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

||

85 85

Literary Work

This is me now, A mushroom. Stuck in my room in dim lighting in a cold moist atmosphere. What is the outside? Also meet my plant roger. I talk to him but I’m sure I’m not going crazy because he doesn’t talk back

-Jodie Ferrer

86 86

||

NEW NEW READER READER MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

Fiction

To-Read-List New Reader Media, a creative marketing firm working in partnership with New Reader Magazine, takes on the challenge of bookmarking emerging voices in the indie publishing world. Presented in no particular order, here’s New Reader Media’s reading list for this quarter of 2020!

Gone Viking BILL ARNOTT From a bestselling author, poet, and musician comes a literary treat set to take its readers on a journey right on their reading chairs.

Filled with adventure, history, and unforced hilarity, this book is highly recommended for anyone craving for a good time.

By a Lake Near a Moon: Fishing with the Chinese Masters DEWITT CLINTON DeWitt Clinton blesses sentimental literary buffs with this compilation of original calming poems inspired by classic Chinese literature, retold from the viewpoint of a modern-day American poet and re-set in today’s Midwestern countryside. It is wistful, nostalgic, and warm, filling readers with a longing that can only be quelled by reading DeWitt’s dreamy poetry from start to end, and even then might make them crave for more.

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

87

Lyrics of Mature Hearts GORDON P. BOIS, BOB MCNEIL A beautiful collection about the bittersweet backdrop of one’s adult years. It houses subjects as familiar as they are personal, like fear, longing, and gratefulness, accompanied by stunningly apt illustrations

by George Juan Vivo. A touching read for all ages.

I’m Glad You Know Me PHYLLIS PITTMAN This memoir gives readers a glimpse into the life of a woman who survived life’s many challenges. Reading it will remind us the importance of Love, Fate,and Forgiveness in all of our lives.

The Eyedroids JAMES P. CIPOLLINA This children’s book is unlike any other... it’s out of this world! The Eyedroids centers on Octavia and Zachary, two young best friends who wish to do everything they can to protect their land, their galaxy, and their existence.

The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Mouse: Fishing Trip SARAH SUSOR Nature is filled with many, many fun things to do, but not everyone knows this! Join the Mouse family as they go on their fishing trip with Savannah and her family, and realize just how amazing our world can be.

88

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

Darwin Said I Could Be a Bird ELROSE M. JOHNSON This book is an explanation of how Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is questionable because God created everything. Told in a manner that a child would enjoy, this book is a great reminder that it’s never too early to strengthen one’s faith in God.

An Islamic Book of Shadows IMAM EDMONDEDISON MCINTOSH III Fascinating, eye-opening, refreshing: this is a book that offers a fresh perspective on certain Islam aspects. Reading this book will definitely pave the way for brand new discussions on Islam.

Feel Me: A Book of Poetry RHONDA FELDER A collection of heartfelt poetry pieces conveying comfort, healing, empowerment, inspiration, and hope to our hurting world. Keep a copy handy for any time you need reminding of life’s beauty amidst all the chaos.

100 Chakra System RAVEN SHAMBALLA This revolutionary expository work introduces the concept that humans have 100 chakras and offers a detailed explanation of them. It has a self-healing section that provides a self-study course for readers intending to start their own energy healing practice.

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

89

Pssst...Means I Love You PAMELA MOREY Love languages vary from person to person. This captivating children’s book puts the spotlight on sharing family traditions to express love and care for one another.

The Princess and the Enchanted Spoon BOBBI HARVEY Dress up your bedtime stories shelf with this tale that’ll surely be your child’s next favorite. An enchanting read filled with lessons of love and kindness.

I Cannot Be Silenced MALYUN ALI Brave and powerful, this book sheds light on the many struggles women are forced to hide as they fight for the freedom that is rightfully theirs.

90

|

NEW READER MAGAZINE

NEW READER MAGAZINE

|

91