Issue 33: Artist as Seer

ISSUE

POET RY I used to dream of warnings Emily Rose Cole NONF ICTIO N A triangle of kindred spirits Sophfronia Scott F ICTIO N Seeing the heart Jaren Watson VIS UAL A RT Seer Hilary White

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W I N T E R 2014-15

+ 2014 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize judged by Jeanne Murray Walker + 2014 Kalos Visual Art Prize judged by Mary McCleary

$

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WHY/ RUMINATE?

ru’mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse; to meditate; to think again; to ponder Ruminate is a quarterly magazine of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art that resonates with the complexity and truth of the Christian faith. Each issue is a forum for literature and art that speaks to the existence of our daily lives while nudging us toward a greater hope. Because of this, we strive to publish quality work that accounts for the grappling pleas, as well as the quiet assurances of an authentic faith. Ruminate was created for every person who has paused over a good word, a real story, a perfect brushstroke— longing for the significance they point us toward.

FRONT COVER Hilary White. Across (center detail). Wood, acrylic paint, oil paint, spray paint, plastic. 84 x 84 x 14 inches.

OPPOSITE PAGE Hilary White. Across. Wood, acrylic paint, oil paint, spray paint, plastic. 84 x 84 x 14 inches.

STAFF/ EXTRAORDINAIRE

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Brianna Van Dyke SENIOR EDITOR

Amy Lowe POETRY EDITORS

Stephanie Lovegrove Kristin George Bagdanov VISUAL ART EDITOR

Stefani Rossi REVIEW EDITOR

Ruminate Magazine (ISSN 1932-6130) is published quarterly on FSC-certified paper by: Ruminate Magazine, Inc., 1041 North Taft Hill Rd, Fort Collins, Colorado 80521.

SUBMISSIONS We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art submissions year-round. For information on Ruminate submission guidelines, Ruminate resources, and to submit your work, please visit our website at www.ruminatemagazine.org.

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LETTERS & INTERVIEW EDITOR

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FRIENDS OF RUMINATE This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous Fall 2014 financial support helped to make this issue of Ruminate possible. To become a friend, write us at editor@ruminatemagazine.org.

Benefactors Steve and Kim Franchini, Greyrock Realty, Kelly and Sara McCabe, Randy and Linda Randall, Dave and Kathy Schuurman, Ralph and Lisa Wegner, John Zeilstra and Janice Van Dyke-Zeilstra, Dr. Randall J. VanderMey

Patrons Dan and Kate Bolt, Grace Church, Imagined Design, Judith Dupree, Brad & Keira Havens, Ryan and Katie Jenkins, Tim and Katie Koblenz, Brian and Anne Pageau, Jeff Parkes, Cheryl Russell, Neal and Becky Stephens, Troy and Kelly Suto, Ben and Morgan Van Dyke, Brandon and Kelly Van Dyke, JJ and Amy Zeilstra

Sponsors Helen Allison, Dale and Linda Breshears, Doug and June Evenhouse, Manfred Kory, Rob Lee, Debbie McCarson, Chris and Barb Melby, Stephanie Visscher, Kathleen Woolner Copyright © 2014 Ruminate Magazine. All rights reserved.

CONTENTS / 33

REVIEW

NOTES Editor’s Readers’ Artist’s Contributor’s Last

4 5 76

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44

VISUAL ART Hilary White Across, detail Across Omega Point Eternal New, detail Eternal New Resurrectioner In Finite We Began The Endless One The Endless One, detail Pursuit Omega Point, detail Aaron Lee Benson New Gothic Tapestry For The God Of Love Extreme Unction Immortality

Lisa Discepoli Line Breath Receives Light Ephemerals: Yellow Trillium Today is Born Ephemerals: Virginia Bluebell

POETRY

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NONFICTION Sophfronia Scott Why I Must Dance Like Tony Manero

Kyli Sterling Larsen Review of The Apple Speaks

by Becca J. R. Lachman

16, 25, 56

FICTION Jaren Watson Bless the Latter

74

10 12

Emily Rose Cole Allegheny County, 1888: Ava Remembers Her Canaries Pharoah’s Wife Mourns Her Son

13 14

Charity Gingerich The Afterlife of Lepidopetra How to Say Creature Comforts in Winter

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J. Scott Brownlee Pasture Ode

39

Amy Woschek Schmidt Earthworms and Their Various Takes on Rain

40

Kim Garcia Corpse Pose

41

Berwyn Moore Rapture

42

Kathleen Markowitz Closing Shop

43

Carolyn Moore Of Zippers and the Nemesis Theory

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Carolyn Oxley Alpaca

65

James Dickson Mothers Day Plans

66

Kimberly Burwick Apace, Or the Sound of Good Grasses

67

Luke Hankins Adam

Front Cover

Inside Front Cover 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 Inside Back Cover Back Cover

17 18 19 20

21 22 23

69

Elizabeth Chao Fermata Aphasia

70

Kimberly Ann Priest The Sturgeon Under the Snow

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Jessica Thompson This God of My Waking

72

Abigail Carroll Genesis

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EDITOR’S / NOTE

Thank you for joining us for issue 33 of Ruminate!

For this issue, we were inspired by Hilary White’s body of artwork Seer. We wanted to offer our readers a vision of the artist as a kind of “seer,” a person who cultivates a certain quality of attention, who practices wonder and seeing and then tells us about it. We also hope to give you the fruit of this “seeing” through some great stories, poems, and visual art gathered in these pages.

A few thoughts before you dig in.

Calling an artist a “seer” is not meant to place them on a pedestal; it is simply meant to name one of their roles in our community. Poet and author John Leax writes: “My life is the life of the village storyteller. I tell the stories of the people I live among. I tell stories to the people I live among. That is my role. That is my calling.” Or, as Mary Oliver puts it: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

What does this mean for us, the viewers and readers? What is our role in this community? I think it is to show up, to ask questions, to listen, and to listen again. Author Kathleen Norris says: Art is a lonely calling, and yet paradoxically communal. . . . The work of my life is given to others; in fact, the reader completes it. I say the words I need to say, knowing that most people will ignore me, some will say, “You have no right,” and a few will tell me that I’ve expressed the things they’ve long desired to articulate but lacked the words to do so.

Here at Ruminate, we want to support this risky and costly work of making art. We want to connect the writer with the reader, the seer with the seen. Because we believe in stories and poems and images that help us remember truths we’d forgotten—making life a little brighter and a little less lonely.

With gratitude for the seers,

p.s. And a hearty congrats to our poetry prize and art prize winners. We’re thrilled to have the chance to share your fine work!

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READERS’/ NOTES THOUGHTS ON THE ARTIST AS SEER + SEEING ART FROM RUMINATE READERS

At fifteen

I’d had little experience with real poetry, still less any guidance in reading it.

Poetry was defined by the sing-song verses that infested old textbooks. When my high school English teacher assigned Whitman’s, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” I approached it that evening with bored resignation.

Something special happened as I made my way through those long lines. I got it. I felt in my body the stretched-out lines, the swinging rhythms that followed the curving waves, the liquid birdsong. The poem filled me with happiness.

I read it over and over, growing more ecstatic with each reading. Poems could do this? I was hooked.

Anna Chapman

AR LI NGTON, V ER M ONT

My whole life seemed stacked against my call to write. I knew how to write as a girl, but my mother was a silencing woman, saying over and over, “You talk too much.” My aunt said, “There are things you only tell God.” When my therapist helped me let go of these silencing voices, suddenly, words flew out from my fingers.

I didn’t publish right away, but my writing eventually led me to a peace that runs slow, steady, and thick, like a swollen river way down there, in my belly, and eventually led me to finishing and then publishing my book, The River Caught Sunlight.

Katie Andraski

K I NGSTON, I LLI NOI S

I will never forget my experience at The National Gallery. With no photography allowed, my journal became my camera. I wrote about The Virgin and Child with a Shoot of Olive, The Death of Eurydice, Anna and the Blind Tobit, and many others.

I remember a sign that told me I was about to enter the display of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings. Approaching the room, I was overcome with a sense of reverence, as if Van Gogh himself would be waiting for me. I was surprised to see a crowd of people huddled around Sunflowers—and everyone was drawing those yellow flowers. Sitting on a bench, I shook my head and thought, “Why? Why would you draw something that’s already a masterpiece?”

But, what did I have to lose? I gave it a go.

As I drew my version of Van Gogh’s priceless work of art, tears filled my eyes. With each stroke of my pen I understood the crowd around me. I felt united with them. Indeed, Van Gogh was not in the room but other artists were, and it felt like family.

Janet Mylin

BOA LS B U RG, P E N N SY LVA N IA

The first

time I walked into the Museum of Modern art in New York City and saw Dance (1) by Henri Matisse, I sat down on the bench across from it and cried. I had never in my life been so affected by a piece of music, writing, or art like this; and, have never since, for that matter. Even Matisse called it “the overpowering climax of luminosity,” and nothing could express more aptly what Dance represented to me that day. A small framed print of it hangs in my home as a reminder of that time.

Grace Curtis

WAY N ESVIL L E , O H IO

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READERS’/ NOTES THOUGHTS ON ARTIST AS SEER + SEEING ART FROM RUMINATE READERS

My grandfather,

editor of the Blairstown Record, a community weekly, worked under a green eyeshade in his living room news office; his dining room housed the press.

In a starched white shirt beneath a dark blue serge vest, he sat at his roll top desk marking galleys with an indelible pencil, a violet stain on his lips from absent-mindedly wetting the tip of his pencil.

The pigeonholes in the desk and the array of pencils, paper clips, and pen nibs enchanted me as a child. After visits, I spent my time scribbling on little scraps of paper at a box I fashioned into a desk.

One Christmas, my father had a friend build cubbies into an old phonograph cabinet with a door that let down to provide a place to write. I had my own newsroom then.

My grandmother set the type by hand at the type cases on the other side of my grandfather’s newsroom. The whole house smelled of printer’s ink. Even the mashed potatoes tasted of ink.

I loved walking with my grandfather down the hill, across the tracks, to wait for the train that would take his papers to unknown destinations.

I couldn’t have known then that a message was settling deep in my cerebral cortex: words and pencils, type and ink linked mind to mind and gave those who controlled them an identity they could never escape.

Rosanne Osborne

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P I NEV I LLE, LOU I S I ANA

ISSUE 33 Winter 201 4 -1 5

Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep (at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art) captures a spiritual moment in time that somehow enters into our time and space. One waits for the girl to awaken. The upholstery tacks on the back of a straight-back leather chair look familiar. The half-open door is protruding into our space.

How is this possible?

Dali’s The Persistence of Memory comes to mind as another powerful expression of the spiritual and physical. The image is strange yet has an overall feeling of I’ve seen this before, but I’m not sure where. Soft watches, ants, a branch, an elusive light to the time of day—all feel inexplicably familiar.

Like Vermeer and Dali, the seers are out there. Our culture is being asked to see; mostly we don’t. Some might pay attention and see it.

Fewer of these will go on the quest. The odds are so very long.

Craig Norton

ST. CH A RL ES, I L L IN O IS

We live in a swift and often superficial time.

We are continually trying to achieve, compete, and earn. Being a writer, I believe my calling is to re-enchant a disenchanted world, gently inviting minds to slow down, become enchanted again, and perhaps see God again.

R. F. Grant

D E N VE R, CO LO RA D O

Consider Frost’s

famous lines “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” (Which he famously repeated for emphasis.) Would anyone doubt that he inserted mystery into these simple words?

It is a statement not simply about facing his evening chores, but about the complicated state of living. He tells us, peripherally, that we have choices to make, that they are not frivolous, that we live by our steadfastness. He is rightfully our homespun prophet. This is the way of a poem.

A fine poem tells us, without preaching, something stark about who we are and why.

What life means. A timeless poem opens up into the history of humanity within its slight borders.

It sets a standard for telling us things large and small, in some old-new vernacular. It finds the fork in a road, and leaves us mute before the miles ahead, yearning for slumber.

Judith Deem Dupree

P I NE VALLEY, CALI FOR NI A

Joseph Conrad’s

Heart of Darkness was a pivotal read for me. Not only was I captivated by the beautiful prose, my capacity for understanding and empathy expanded. Heart of Darkness is a stunningly crafted world that is bleak, desolate, and violent. I had never experienced such a world in “real life,” but reading this story gave me compassion for those who had. I grew as a person after reading Heart of Darkness—I became less judgmental, more grace-giving.

Renea McKenzie

We half

tiptoed over tarpaulins, around scaffolding. We were pastors of international congregations, touring the Fraumünster church during a conference in Zürich.

The draw of that building is its Chagall windows. In the iconoclastic zeal of the Swiss Reformation, the church’s traditional stained glass was shattered, clear windows substituted.

Centuries later, in a less fervent era, the Fraumünster windows became the last stained glass project of Marc Chagall’s life.

Now shafts of colored light punctuate the Reformation starkness. Each window has one principal color (red, blue, yellow, green, orange), with fanciful images of Abraham and trees and altars and lambs, dancing and falling in bright backgrounds.

During our visit, scaffolding blocked the windows. Half-obscured, the windows were still visible enough for us to feel the power of colorfocused light, refracted biblical images.

I thought: this is how I experience vision, halfglimpsing, half-imagining beauty obscured by scaffolding. Shortly afterward, preaching on the situation of the disciples between Ascension and Pentecost, after Jesus had left but before the gift of the Spirit, I suggested that this side of glory our vision is always partial—blocked as by scaffolding, and our access always awkward, as though we were stumbling over tarps that obscure but do not disarm the dangers.

Elizabeth Huwiler

E L M G ROVE , WISCO N S I N

P LANO, T EXAS

SEND US YOUR NOTES FOR ISSUE 34. WE LOVE HEARING FROM YOU!

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RUMINATE PRIZES

2014-15

F I R ST P LAC E

S ECO N D P LAC E

Emily Rose Cole Allegheny County, 1888: Ava Remembers Her Canaries

Charity Gingerich The Afterlife of Lepidopterta

H O N O RA B L E M E N T I O N J. Scott Brownlee Pasture Ode

F I N A L I STS Kimberly Burwick Abigail Carroll Elizabeth Chao James Dickson Kim Garcia

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Jessica Glover Luke Hankins Kathleen Markowitz Berwyn Moore Carolyn Moore

Carolyn Oxley Kimberly Ann Priest Amy Woschek Schmidt Jessica Thompson

S P O N SO R

JUDGE

Steve and Kim Franchini

Jeanne Murray Walker

J EA N N E M U R RAY WA L K E R W R I T ES :

“Allegheny County, 1888: Ava Remembers Her Canaries” is a remarkably skilled narrative that compresses a whole vexed father/daughter relationship into a page. Ava’s love for her pet canaries conflicts with the reason her father breeds canaries: to work in his coal mine. So what kind of connection is possible between a hard-working, doomed coal-mining father and his daughter who adores those hatchlings? Ava is the one who gets to tell the story. She could denounce her father. Instead, she chooses self-scrutiny. Maybe her father wronged her. But she begins to understand that she has also failed to comprehend the life-and-death choices her father was forced to make. I honor this poem for documenting a remarkably complex moral situation, for avoiding easy answers. I honor it because it transports us back to 1888 with no lecturing about the details of history. Much of the power of this terrific piece arises from what it leaves out.

Jeanne Murray Walker is a writer and teacher who was born in Parkers Prairie, a village of a thousand people in Minnesota. She lectures and gives readings extensively in places ranging from The Library of Congress and Oxford University to Whidbey Island and Texas canyon country. Jeanne has written eight volumes of poetry, including her most recent volume Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poems. Her poetry and essays have appeared numerous journals, including Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, Christian Century, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Image, and Best American Poetry. The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage through Alzheimer’s, Jeanne’s memoir, tells the hair-raising, often funny details of the decade she and her sister cared for their mother. Jeanne is a professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she heads the creative writing concentration. She also serves as a mentor in the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts Program. An Atlantic Monthly fellow at Bread Loaf School of English, Jeanne has also been awarded a Pew Fellowship in The Arts, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, eight Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, and The Glenna Luschei-Prairie Schooner Prize. Jeanne lives with her husband outside Philadelphia. They are the parents of two children and the grandparents of three.

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Emily Rose Cole

Allegheny County, 1888: Ava Remembers Her Canaries I used to dream of feathers heavy with coal dust, notes plinking against blown-out walls, a song swallowed by a rush of methane, black shards burning in a churn of flame.

I christened them with words Papa used— Sentinel and Lookout and Firedamp.

Ten’s old enough for a job, he said, nestling eggs in a box of cotton and cedar chips.

Someone’s gotta breed ‘em.

Weeks later, the chicks burst into the world like dynamite. I offered them a flaking metal palace washed in sunlight, volunteered for outdoor chores to stay close. I taught them rhythm, yellow wingbeats timed to my washboard strokes.

When Papa locked Sentinel behind flimsy bars, my tiny heels dug into dirt: He has a family.

He kissed my forehead. So do the miners.

I used to dream of warnings beat in the pulse of pickaxes, charred bones splintered over cavern floors.

That night, I slipped from bed. Crickets chirred.

Lilac thickened the breeze. I crept to their castle and cradled each small body in cupped palms, stroked the wheat-gold down of their throats, launched them from the chapped heels of my hands, watched them rush to meet the moon.

The morning’s only music: rusted creaks, cage door beating like a broken wing.

What I have left of my father— on my back: five raised ridges from his belt buckle;

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in my breast pocket: a yellowed newspaper clipping, his face smudged in ink, and a headline seared on my lips each night before sleep: Mining Explosion Kills 17.

I used to dream that everything I ate hardened into coal, that if I sliced my stomach open, I could burn grief in that dark furnace.

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Emily Rose Cole

Pharaoh’s Wife Mourns Her Son There shall be a great cry throughout all Egypt —Exodus 11:6 I anoint his body with dust and locust wings.

The Nile spits grief like an open vein. Maggots writhe in the walls, in the bread, in the ears of cats.

Shriveled leaves flap like gaping mouths.

No fruit on the vine. No pearls of grain in the storehouse.

Mothers stack their children like cords of ash and cedar. The stench of burning baby fat thickens our tongues. We drop the cinders down our throats as if returning our sons to our bodies could make us birth them again.

Husband, hook open your eyes.

See where your crooked hand has led us.

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Charity Gingerich

The Afterlife of Lepidoptera The heart by definition is an agrarian tapestry with an upwelling brook at its center, hedges of forsythia, chickens, room for violets.

To believe otherwise is to bolt the fence in the pasture behind you where the moonlight ends and the farmer’s prize bull begins; the heart dies a little every day for lack of tending.

Let’s get back to the business of milkweed and thistle, joe-pye weed and clover; when have you last caught a Diana fritillary, Beloria bellona, black swallowtail or painted lady for the sheer joy of its wings, for the experience of learning how they work, the webs and scales of their flying jewel bodies in the meadows between two farms—when have you last stood in such a place, stood still, and not merely thought of standing there, paper doll with her paper moon on a backdrop of imaginary happiness.

Listen, the snow is falling. White roses filling the air. I believe this is a reminder— that when death comes it will be our longest moment of suspension. The air we swim through thick with the pieces of us, not as brokenness but as an invitation to finally stop; we’ll build a butterfly as if it were a house we could finally live in.

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Charity Gingerich

How to Say Creature Comforts in Winter after Mary Oliver Under an ice-blue sky lives a red-brick house laced all around in windows, like the decorated captain of winter long ago, demanding a good view. I walk by with a lady in my head: lady lady, what, all in black again. And the trees, long glittering shadows on the snow with only the calligraphy of claws and brittle nests to remember the birds by. The idea of song decadent, long ago, pain about good posture despite this stiffness between the shoulder blades.

Back home, Mom in the bath says she has a technique to keep warm and keeps the curtains in the house pulled back to avoid claustrophobia. And I think, of course February is a chattering symphony playing to awaken the fields of stars come spring, daffodils, our inside-out scars.

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J. Scott Brownlee

Pasture Ode after Sharon Olds You whose gospel is blood & rust, snarl & blossom. You spring’s first arbiter & best storyteller. You of drought & fragment.

You sin/salvation myth. You wheat/chaff of language. Come & be the bee brush Christ is cut & crowned with, you whisper.

Become me. You cicada-ringing. You time’s final silence of which I am a part as your sliced sun goes down. You of disappearance. You prophetic & sometimes terse—dense as Rilke in your thicket fortress.

You of eschatons similar to thunderclouds just before their raining. You my family horse, Escoba, who placed 2nd once in The Derby. You Gethsemane-red sweating blood injected back into yourself.

You resurrected lyric. You my wine & water. You my miraculous. You my animal form. Which is to say, when you enter a poem, I live in it— grazing beyond any weak synonym for patience. You my barbed wire fence —its deer-proof boundary—& what exists beyond the fence, which is my not-knowing.

You returning as Horse Lord if given the chance.

You in April so blue with new flowers’ blooming that in your gallop at first seeing them you blur: bodiless blueness then, blueness only into which your departure is infinite, effortless, blue already.

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ARTIST/ NOTE

AARON LEE BENSON: THE ACT OF MAKING What would be a viable reason in postmodernity to make what society labels “art”? On a planet where genocide is endured, collateral damage is accepted, abortions by the millions are legitimate, starvation and deprivation are okay, racism, sex trafficking, and suicides after the mass killing of elementary school children are common, what defense remains for art making as a legitimate vocation?

It often seems that art has no justification because our world is blind to our need for the arts. To make art would be like making light bulbs in a blind culture. It would make no difference.

However, art making does make a difference because the very act of making is a hopeful act; it is humans being optimistic. So, let’s suppose that we establish a set of criteria that art making had to accomplish.

1. Glorify Yahweh.

2. Accomplish #1 by its own existence. Meaning, the work had to be able to deliver its goods without the maker standing there explaining it.

3. Its “glorification” must be easily grasped by the novice and be sufficiently complex enough to be labeled art.

I believe this criteria would mercifully relieve the artist from the burden of defense and that it would foster and encourage the making of great work.

That is where I am currently . . . trying to satisfy those criteria.

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Aaron Lee Benson. New Gothic Tapestry. Every episode of The Waltons in video and crocheted into tapestry. 84 x 48 x 3 inches.

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Aaron Lee Benson. For The God Of Love. Pure sugar, 24k gold. 7 x 7 x 7 inches.

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Aaron Lee Benson. Extreme Unction. Aromatic cedar, pure white pigment, human ash, Afghan lapis lazuli, 24k gold, lamb’s blood, handmade glaze. 49 x 49 x 7 inches.

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Immortality. Detail.

Aaron Lee Benson. Immortality. 10,000 Q-tips with my DNA on each, embedded in amber, embedded in resin. 48 x 12 x 6 inches.

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Lisa Discepoli Line. Breath Receives Light. Oil on canvas. 60 x 40 inches.

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Lisa Discepoli Line. Ephemerals: Yellow Trillium. Oil on canvas. 30 x 40 inches.

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Lisa Discepoli Line. Today is Born. Oil on canvas. 40 x 30 inches.

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Lisa Discepoli Line. Ephemerals: Virginia Bluebell. Oil on canvas. 40 x 30 inches.

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ARTIST/ NOTE

LISA DISCEPOLI LINE: EPHEMERALS Possibly the word “salvation” is a bit worn out, and people of our time might be better able to relate to the idea of “rescue.” Isn’t the appearance of the ephemerals a story about the rescue of a new year, the green world, our world of life, out of the broken and decaying world of last year?

We can’t wait for lettuce, you know: we have to have our daily bread, we have to have something to eat. It’s an emergency! We need the gift of food, and if it didn’t renew every year, we would die. I feel this need, and I feel it being supplied, and it’s coming at us from every direction, and hardly anyone notices this at all.

Shouldn’t our culture have songs and poems and stories and huge statues about this? This is our Christ, who feeds the world.

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BLESS THE LATTER JAREN WATSON

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Ricter didn’t see the frog until it shifted its hind legs, nosing under the edge of the grass. He bent down and picked the frog up despite its stiffly jerking limbs.

The frog was a good size, filling up his palm, and he unfastened the button on the breast pocket of his white shirt. He slipped the frog in the pocket and fastened the button. With little to explore in that dark space, after a few tentative squirms, the frog settled down. Before long, Ricter forgot about it.

The day was hot, too hot for September. The autumnal equinox was just a week away, but it felt to Ricter like the sweltering days of middle summer. He couldn’t wait to get home and out of his church clothes. As he walked, he heard a car rolling up behind him. It was his mother, Lilian, who slowed the car and rolled down the passenger window. She wore a burgundy dress and had a floral scarf wrapped about her neck. “Ricter,” she said, “it’s fine for you to walk, but you need to let me know.”

“I would have, but Sister Jones let us out early, and yours wasn’t done yet.”

“What was the lesson?”

“Book of Job.” “That’s a tough one. Well. Stop by Jack’s and invite him for dinner, won’t you?”

“Okay.”

“Keep out of the pond.”

“I will.”

As she drove away, Lilian called out the window. “Dinner’s on at five.”

Only a few blocks remained before Ricter would be home. The old man, Jack, lived across the street. Jack’s wooden house, set back from the street, had been built by his long-deceased father, one of the town’s founders from before the turn of the previous century. On the lawn in front of the courthouse was a statue of Jack’s father, one arm raised, a finger pointing significantly at something unseen in the distance. Progress, perhaps. Destiny. Jack’s own reputation in town was decidedly less storied.

Ricter couldn’t imagine a time so distant. To him, the house and the man in it were the most ancient things in town, in anywhere. When Ricter was younger, he played regularly at the old man’s home, mostly in the back yard where Jack kept a small pond. Home to a host of aquatic wonders, the scum-surfaced pond busied Ricter for hours on summer afternoons. Sitting on two sawed and half-buried spruce stumps, Jack taught Ricter how to cast a fly rod. “Strictly for practice, you understand,” he said. “These fellows here are too haughty to take flies. We’ll get you on the river when you’re older.”

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Though they had never caught any fish in the pond, Ricter had seen the fish rise to ripple the surface on occasion. Rather than fish, his interest aligned closer to the things that creep upon the earth. The salamanders and frogs, the occasional box turtle, worms, beetles, and toads. He possessed a remarkable ability to love these little creatures the moment he held them. Most times the boy was content to do nothing but plunk rocks into the water. Rare was the day he didn’t bring home something living. A patient and understanding woman, his mother suffered silently the slithering lives that entered her home along with her son. She was less enthusiastic for the company of Jack, who, aside from the multiform critters, was

A PATIENT AND UNDERSTANDING WOMAN, HIS MOTHER SUFFERED SILENTLY THE SLITHERING LIVES THAT ENTERED HER HOME ALONG WITH HER SON. Ricter’s only real friend. In memory of her husband, who saw something admirable in the old man, she allowed this friendship. For her part, that glass remained dark.

No cars passed in the street, and no one walked along the sidewalk but Ricter, who paused from humming a song he’d heard on the radio. He thought of his Sunday School class. “I know it’s on the page,” Sister Jones in a peach dress had said. “But God doesn’t make deals with the devil.”

“Then how come all that stuff happened to him?” Ricter asked.

“God knew his heart already. That was to teach Job about Job,” Sister Jones replied.

Ricter didn’t think that’s how it was. Why would God let Satan do all those bad things to Job? He wondered what a man would look like covered in boils. He’d never heard of anyone he knew having boils. He tried to imagine his own body covered with those sores. He thought of the chicken pox he contracted while visiting relatives in Boise. Sister Jones said boils were much worse than chicken pox. He itched just thinking about it, and he scratched his forearms. Worse still, the loss of

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Job’s whole family. Richter didn’t know anything about having a wife and kids, but if losing them for Job was half as bad as Ricter losing his father, he didn’t care to find out the rest. “If I was Job, I’d have cursed God and died,” Ricter said.

“But he got all those things back, Ricter. And his family was even bigger than before. Like it says, the latter end was greater than the beginning,” Sister Jones said.

“Maybe. But anybody can see the new don’t take the place of what you had,” Ricter said.

Jack was sitting in his lawn chair in the shade of a willow tree. Ricter could see the old man watching him as he turned from the sidewalk and into the gravel driveway. He crossed over the grass to where Jack sat.

“Howdy do, Ricter.”

“Fine, my lord.”

“We better go back to Jack. Your mom come over the other day and said you two’d had a talk.”

“It doesn’t bother me none. I like pretending.”

“All the same, you need to mind what she tells you. If she says it’s no good, then that’s just what it is. Hot enough for you? Get that tie off, you’ll swelter to death, boy.”

Ricter reached for the knot at his neck, and when he did his wrist rubbed the pocket on his chest, and the frog within lurched, startling the boy. “Oh! He’s still there.”

“Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Ricter unbuttoned the pocket and retrieved the frightened occupant. “Just this old frog I found on the way home.”

“Looks like a nice one. Think he wandered off from my pond?”

“I bet he did.”

“What are you going to do with him? Back to the water, I suppose. There’s a saying about those that stray from home.”

“I better show him to Mom. I don’t know if I brought one this big before.” He put it back in the pocket.

Jack said, “It is a nice one.” But he eyed it suspiciously. “You thirsty? Let’s go inside for something cold. Oh, I remember. You haven’t seen that head you helped me with.” Jack began the long ascent out of the chair and, completing it, the two angled for the house.

Ricter remembered how he had held the skull by the antlers above the big iron kettle, the water boiling below, the gray film foaming on the surface. And, more than

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the rest—the awful stink of it. He left early, before Jack poked and mushed out the brains. “So you got it all peroxied?”

“Peroxide. Yes, it’s done. Turned out good, too. Whiter’n a baby’s teeth. Give me thirty days, and I can get him scored official. Should go better than one-fifty.”

“That’s real good,” Ricter said. “That’s good, right?”

“You got that right. Good for anybody this part of the state, specially an old cripple like me. Think, Mister Ricter, all those years I spent chasing ghosts up in the Lost Rivers, and the biggest buck of my life wanders directly in my own backyard. Boy, if I hadn’t let you build that tree house.”

“So you did shoot him from up there?”

“Not if anybody asks. You know why, don’t you?”

“Yes, my lord. I mean, Jack.”

“That’s a smart boy.”

Ricter pictured himself in the tree house. He could see them now—a line of enemy knights creeping over the field behind Jack’s house. Only one remained, one stood in their way, but they’d never see him up in the tree. He’s got the high ground, and he’s ready. Let them come.

In the kitchen, Jack and Ricter sat at the table drinking lemonade. Between them perched the bleached and fairly gleaming skull of Jack’s buck, its antlers sleek with unrubbed velvet. The two admired it in silence for several minutes. On the walls of the room, and in other rooms of the house, there hung the mounts of many animals, but none quite as fine as the one before them.

“Tell me what you learned today,” Jack said.

Ricter slurped the last of his drink too fast. Now his head froze up, aching. The story was gone now. “Oh, just some Old Testament story.”

Jack looked at the boy. He appeared to be about to say something other than what he said, which was, “Is that what you think it was? Some story?”

“I don’t know. Some of it’s hard to figure.”

“I suppose it is, at that.”

Ricter was loosening his frog from the pocket when it got away from him and onto the table. He reached after it. One meager hop landed the frog at the center of the table, beside the skull. The frog didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere else. It just sat there, looking at Ricter with its green eyes like little grape halves. “Jack, I forgot to tell you. Mom wants to know—for me to invite you for dinner at five o’clock.”

The man pressed together then smacked his lips in contemplation. “That’s mighty

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kindly. A bit of a different tune, I might add. I wonder what’s on the menu.”

“I think I smelled roast before we left for church. That’s what we have most Sundays. Shoot, what time is it?”

“Son, you know I don’t own a watch. But let’s do a little figgering—you get out of church when?”

“Four o’clock.”

“And we’ve been piddling around here what, half an hour? So we got another half.”

“I better run along then. She doesn’t like it when I’m late.”

“Your mother loves you and that is a fact. It’s been tough on her since your daddy died. You too, though I expect it’ll get harder before it gets easier. Don’t run off yet.

RICTER AND THE KNIFE WERE INSEPARABLE. HE WANTED TO BE PREPARED FOR ANYTHING, You and I can talk while I wash my face and run a comb through my hair.”

Jack stood up from his kitchen chair and walked into the adjacent bathroom, leaving the door open. He and the boy talked while he ran water in the sink, getting ready. “Ricter, you carrying that pocketknife I gave you last summer?”

Ricter and the knife were inseparable. If Ricter had pants on, the knife was in the pocket. He wanted to be prepared for anything, a habit instilled by his father. “Sure, why?”

“Well, don’t tell your mom, but I figured we’d play just one last time, if you don’t care.”

Ricter didn’t, not in the way Jack meant. He loved the idea of a different time, another life. It seemed to him he’d been born in the wrong time anyway, like wearing a suit of ill-fitting clothes. “No, my lord. I don’t care.”

“Good. Then unsheathe your weapon.”

He took the knife from his pocket and flicked open the blade. “Unsheathed, my lord.”

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“Is that frog still settin’ on the table?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“He’s an invader. What do we do with invaders?”

“We dispatch them, my lord.”

“See to it.”

“But Jack, I mean, my lord.” He didn’t want to kill the frog. He had grown accustomed to Jack’s giving him strange instructions, but this was something different.

OUT OF THE FROG’S BODY, THE HEART STILL BEAT, LIGHT AND RHYTHMIC. “DONE, MY LORD.” “Go ahead, boy.”

“I didn’t name it yet. Can I at least name it?”

Jack swatted the door jamb. “Do as you’re told.”

“But why?”

“A serf does not question a nobleman,” Jack said in his usual stern manner of delivering orders. “A serf maintains loyalty.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Dispatch it through the head. No need to get fussy about it, either. Little boys go crying, and you aren’t a little boy, are you?”

“No, my lord. I’m not a little boy.”

“Good. Tell me when you’re finished.”

The frog didn’t try to get away. It was a bit sickening for Ricter to insert the blade.

He recoiled at the slippery crunch. The arms and legs quivered as if the blade were charged with an electrical current. Little spurts of blood vaulted onto the table. Then nothing. “Finished, my lord.”

“Now flip it over.” Ricter’s movements in the kitchen corresponded with the orders from the bathroom. “Make a slit in the belly, deep enough to penetrate the skin, but don’t open the guts. I don’t want that stink in here. There, see the heart? I know it is.

That’s exactly the point. Don’t worry, it’s dead. Take it out. That flap at the bottom’s

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called the frenulum. Cut that, and it’ll come free. Good lad. Now hold it in your palm.”

Ricter held the small lump in his hand. It was warm and sticky, like chewed bubble gum. Out of the frog’s body, the heart still beat, light and rhythmic. “Done, my lord.”

“Good. Funny thing there. That’ll beat for half an hour. We’ve just got to be to your place before it quits. Okay, we’re done playing.”

Though he’d seen and handled plenty of dead things, it was strange for Ricter to hold the frog’s beating heart. Why did it beat? What was the frog now, the beating heart or the other part? But mostly, why did Jack have him kill it? So he asked.

The old man’s head emerged through the doorway. “Take a look at the frog and tell me what you see.”

Ricter studied the motionless frog on the table. It lay on its back, its flayed-open belly the color of buttermilk. Flipping the frog over, Ricter saw bursts of red, like bands of taste buds, blooming all along the insides of the legs. “You mean the legs?”

“That frog’s got red-leg. He’d be dead tomorrow. The next day, anyway. You notice he didn’t do much to get away from you, did he?”

“I guess not. I thought it’s ‘cause he’s so big.” Ricter felt relieved. He should have known Jack had a reason. Still, he would have felt better about it if he had known about the sickness before killing it.

“No, he was done, no two ways about it. I figgered we’d let him teach us something.”

“What? Its heart beating after it died?”

“Yes, that. Aside from that alone, I don’t know. Sometimes you have to take things for what they are. There is nothing else. Other times there is. The thing itself and the thing implied. There’s things and then there’s types. Shapes and shadows. You learn to discern the two, if you pay attention. Your daddy ever tell you about the time I taught him to shoot? You were barely born. Full grown, your old man, and never shot a rifle. Can you believe that? All the things he did. He saw half the dang world, but he never did a simple thing like shoot guns. Still, a better man than your father I never saw, nor plan to. God, I miss him fiercely.”

“Mom said Dad was your only friend in town. She said people said you were strange and they didn’t want a part of you.”

“The whole damn town is filthy with hypocrites. That generation of vipers can sink to hell. Don’t say those words, boy. But you show me the body that ain’t got

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a little strangeness. Anyway, it’s not true by a long shot. I’ve got you. And maybe another if this dinner goes well. That heart still beating? Then we’re not late.”

When the two arrived at Ricter’s house, Lilian instructed from the kitchen that they were to sit at the table in the dining room. On the table were four place settings. Ricter sat down at one side of the table. Jack pulled a chair out from one of the ends, and as he began to sit, Ricter said, “That’s Dad’s spot. You better sit here across from me.”

Jack slid the chair into its original position and took his seat across from Ricter. “I thought maybe someone else was joining us. Didn’t know your daddy was coming.”

“No, it’s just us. Mom still sets a plate out.”

It didn’t take long after Lilian entered the room bearing a platter of steaming meat and vegetables before she noticed Ricter’s hands. He had cleaned them in the hygiene of all boys, by rubbing them across his shirt. The considerable blood had dried and darkened on the fingers and backs of his hands, one of which lightly clutched the still beating heart.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“No.” “Then what’s that?”

Ricter wasn’t sure how to answer. He looked at Jack, who said, “Answer your mother.”

“I found a frog on the way home. But don’t worry. It was dying anyway.”

“What do you mean? What did you do, kill it?”

Again Ricter looked at Jack. Then he said, “Yes, ma’am.”

Lilian placed the platter of food on the table. “Why, was it in the road? Hurt or something?”

“Not hurt, exactly.”

“Then why’d you kill it?”

“Jack told me to.” Ricter set the heart on the table, its pumping diminished enough that it only slightly wobbled with each beat.

Lilian saw the heart and then turned to Jack. She stared at him for a moment, her face registering what Ricter took for disgust and fear. “Why on earth would you tell him to do something like that?”

“I thought it might be something the boy’d like to see. I had no meaning to upset anyone.”

“He’s a child, Jack.”

“By age maybe. But he’s had a whole lot of life in his years.”

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“You don’t see anything wrong with a grown man, an old one I might add, telling a little kid to kill a frog and cut its heart out?”

Jack leaned back in his chair, looking first at Lilian and then at Ricter. Then he laughed and his teeth showed. “When you put it that way it doesn’t sound too good.

It was not my intention to stir up trouble. I thought he could learn something.”

Ricter quickly added, “He’s right, Mom. He was just teaching me.”

“What could he learn that’s worth doing that?”

Jack’s smile disappeared. He looked uncomfortable. He fidgeted in his chair. He tapped his fingers on the table, as if plunking notes to some half-remembered tune.

THE CONSIDERABLE BLOOD HAD DRIED AND DARKENED ON THE FINGERS AND BACKS OF HIS HANDS, ONE OF WHICH LIGHTLY CLUTCHED THE STILL BEATING HEART. “For one thing, about your husband. For another—well, like he said, the frog was dying anyway. He did it a favor, if you want to know the truth.”

Ricter saw his mother instantly angry and he was scared. He knew she didn’t care for Jack and he feared her preventing them from seeing each other. He felt as if he stood on the edge of a blade, pulled in both directions. He should say something, but he didn’t know what.

Lilian said, “Jack, have you gone and lost your mind? What does this have to do with my husband?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Billie’s dead, ain’t he?”

Ricter sat uneasily in his chair. He suddenly needed to pee. Lilian always got red-faced when angry and now her cheeks and forehead were practically purple. She said, “The last thing I need, I swear to God, is for you to point that out to me.”

“My point is, he would have understood about a measly frog. It wouldn’t have bothered him.”

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“Well, I am sorry to say that I am not my husband.”

“We’re both sorry about that.”

Ricter didn’t understand how Jack and his mother had gotten so upset with each other so quickly. They were obviously both angry. It surprised Ricter to hear Jack say such terrible things. He’d never heard the old man say anything mean about his family. It hurt him in his belly to hear it. He was afraid he was going to lose control of his bladder. Jack on the one side and his mother on the other side. He didn’t want to be forced to choose between them. “Stop it,” he said.

Lilian reached out and placed her hand on Ricter’s. “You’re right, Ricter. You shouldn’t have to hear us arguing. Jack, please leave. I don’t want to see you around my son anymore.”

Jack was motionless for a moment. His gaze shifted from Lilian to Ricter, and back again. Then he nodded his head. “As you have spoken, my lady.”

Ricter heard his mother grunt in disgust. He knew she hated Jack’s whole business of knights and noblemen.

Jack stood up and executed a minor bow, and then he left the dining room. Ricter wanted to call out to him to stop. He wanted them to apologize to each other, but the

IT HURT HIM IN HIS BELLY TO HEAR IT. touch of his mother’s hand on his made him hesitate. So he said nothing. He heard the front door close.

Watching Jack leave, Ricter felt he had chosen wrong. He wasn’t sure, but he thought if he had said something, had convinced his mother somehow, that he could have defended Jack. Instead, he had said nothing, and by saying nothing, he abandoned the old man. Jack had no one else, and in Ricter’s chest rose the sting of disloyalty.

Lilian started dishing portions. Ricter watched as she sliced meat and spooned vegetables. First she dished the food onto his plate. Then she dished food onto her own. Much food remained. They ate in silence. The meal was uncomfortable. He was unsure of what to say. He wanted to cry, even scrunched his face, attempting to conjure tears, but they wouldn’t come. He tried to imagine what he would do now that he was not allowed to see Jack. A blank spot appeared in his mind, dark in the middle, blurry at the edges.

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When they finished eating, Lilian began dishing potatoes onto the plate where her husband used to sit. Then she spooned carrots and green beans. She sliced a large piece of roast and put it on the plate as well. From a sweating pitcher, she poured ice water until her husband’s glass was so full the water threatened to spill.

Ricter watched this and said nothing. Though she had always set a place for Ricter’s father, he’d never seen her dish food for him. He watched her take the full glass in two hands, carefully raise the glass to her mouth, and drain the liquid in gulp after gulp. She delicately returned the glass to the table, as if she were afraid she would break it. A rim of moisture was visible in her eyes. Ricter stared at her. She stared at the food at her husband’s place.

Ricter asked, “Why did Jack say that about Dad being dead?”

Lilian took a while to respond. When she did, she said, “He meant that even though your frog is dead, its heart is still beating. He meant that even though Billie’s gone, we can still feel him here. That he’s still with us.”

“That’s not what he said.”

“I know.”

“Then how do you know that’s what he meant?”

“I don’t.”

“If that’s what he meant, that’s not mean, is it?”

“No. No, it isn’t mean at all. Here.” She slid the steaming plate of food toward Ricter. “Take this to Jack.”

“Then you’re not mad anymore?”

“Of course I’m mad. Jack is a disturbing old man, and he’s got no business having you cut up frogs, no matter what lesson he thinks he’s teaching. But it probably wasn’t too neighborly to kick him out of the house. Even if it’s his own fault, that man is alone in the world. Everybody should have somebody. Come here.”

Ricter rose and went to his mother. She took him in her arms, pressing her cheek to his forehead. Her skin was warm against his. He felt the moisture at her eyes. She smelled like the meat and vegetables she had prepared, and something else too. A smell that was always there that he never smelled on anyone else.

“Ricter,” she said, “are we going to make it? Can you handle it being just us?”

“I think we can,” he said. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t know, love. Sometimes I really don’t know. I ask God every day to help us, every day to give us strength. But it seems he’s busy with other matters. Who are we, after all? Sometimes I think I’d be better off praying to your father. Well. Don’t listen to me. Just let me hold you.”

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They remained that way for some minutes, mother and son holding each other as fervently as one holds onto a lifebuoy in a swelling sea. In that room, the only present sound was the breath of each. After a while Lilian whispered, “Ricter.”

“What?” he asked, and when she didn’t answer, he said again, “What, Mom?” He could faintly feel her pulse throbbing lightly just above his eyebrow.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m just tired is all. Run along and take the food.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll take it and then I’ll be right back. I need to pee first.”

“Good boy,” she said. “What did I ever do to deserve such a good boy like you?”

She kissed him, pulled away and looked at him, and kissed him again. And then she kissed him a third time, and for a few seconds each was wholly fixed on the other and felt momentarily what for all the world appeared as undefiled happiness, neither of them noticing the frog’s heart on the table. It had long since stopped beating.

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Amy Woschek Schmidt

Earthworms and Their Various Takes on Rain When I was six, I loved standing in the rain, believed the worms did too—strange bodies spread all over the road where I lived, their tiny hearts, five pairs in each, humming with pleasure, a chamber choir singing.

But then there were mothers who died of cancer at 38, replaced by new ones who served soup and casserole with biting words and after that, the worms endured the rain simply to avoid a death by drowning when the underground began to fill.

When I was 22, I made a mistake. Cells and matter matted together in my stomach and soon, I found it hard to breath, which worms can do without a lung or mouth.

Some magic sifting of air in through skin and back again, their slick surface needing only moisture to pull the whole thing off.

When I was 31, I finally learned the truth and segments of setae and slime seized opportunities to change their scenery while the sky was being generous, the oxygen falling in torrents not unlike blood.

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Kim Garcia

Corpse Pose At shavasana my father crouched down at my shoulder and stroked my face with a touch so stripped of the toying I knew in life, of anything but tenderness and selfless grief that I‌what shall I say?

I don’t know this I who could accept that touch, who could trust it.

There was water somehow, a stream.

We were in a wood, in summer.

Water, tree shadow, evening light, the last bit of the day, dusk creeping up from the water sound, which never stopped.

I pressed the vision to stay. I wanted to see that face rinsed of all that ailed him, tortured him really.

He was there for me, this me, knew my troubles. He had come for me.

As though I were the dead one.

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Berwyn Moore

Rapture The way milkweed pods flurry on the limbs until rain intervenes.

The way contrails linger like cirrus, a sigh, a ribbon of breath. The way a zeppelin floats or a skateboarder kickflips above the rim. The way ants crawled out of the banana, still unpeeled, the oh and shine of your gasp, sweet herbaceous miracle, you said, then flung them over the balcony where they caught in the current, a momentary failure of gravity. That summer at the lake, you stood on the shore puffing your pipe, not quite oblivious, when your not-yet-threeyear-old girl vanished under the water, inflatable ring drifting. Glasses affixed, camera swinging from your neck, you plunged into the murky silence, water-logged shoes dragging you down, tobacco flakes rising.

When finally your fingers brushed her belly, you grabbed her, cradled her to the surface, hair matted with leaves, fingers clutching your tie, sweet mouth stealing the air.

The moment relinquished its grief and glistened, the air a bright cacophony of wings. The way, even now, as snow eclipses the trees, you recall it— and clutch the edge of doom like a wall that will keep you upright, the oh and shine of your gasp welling up, your lips quivering.

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Kathleen Markowitz

Closing Shop With steady ease my father manipulates twisted wires, oddly shaped tubes, grey and white, packed tight— hidden, in the cavity of television sets. His hands turn darkness into glowing screens.

Running used rags across the gunmetal shelf, we close shop.

I climb shotgun, sit up tall in the service van, my father’s name in loopy script along the outside door.

It smells of hard things. Tools clamor in open boxes. My body shakes with the winding of gears, cranking clutch.

I watch the yellow of Camel cigarettes burn between his fingers. Wrapped in a brown paper bag, he twists the cap of his whiskey—welcomes the burn to throat, to stomach. On the long ride home, I try not to watch when the bottle tilts, when he takes the turn, and the screen of his face goes blank.

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Carolyn Moore

Of Zippers and the Nemesis Theory On display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair . . . the world’s first zipper was ignored.

—Charles Panati, Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things The controversial Nemesis theory postulates that this so-far undetected companion star is in an orbit around the Sun. —Richard P. Brennan, Dictionary of Scientific Literacy We cannot find its melody of sszzzt! in sonic history, though side steps in jazz mimic the zipper’s tracks when split apart.

We ride one rail until its tune glides home, rejoins the chain and heals the rift with riff.

Two solitudes seam up, keep time as one.

Inventions vast as a new galaxy or humble as the zipper—all orbit trial and error, bolt and snag. In infancy, zippers routed buttons from boots, yet failed in wringer washers: teeth locking shut with rust.

The zipper learned to speak stainless in time to join in Jazz Age scat. Success at last for this tool that lacks an ancient counterpart, unless we count the human need to cleave and then rejoin what first we worked to split.

Discounting details (sliders, pull-tabs, stops, and interlocking teeth for tracks that go their separate ways until reunion looms), the zipper is the Nemesis theory forged in steel. Most stars of our Milky Way pair up.

On cloud-free nights we find the final light of long-dead stars ghosting the skies—perhaps they seek their twins adrift on single tracks?

Why not a cold companion for our sun?

Why not a death star on its solo rail?

The cosmic choice: reunion or solitude?

Each 30 million years, our death star tries to zip snug up to its sun. Instead, it snags on its single rail near Pluto, mistakes the riffs of the Oort Cloud for jazz, then tries to hum along, an impulse sending comets forth to slaughter solar hopes and dinosaurs.

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WHY I MUST DANCE LIKE TONY MANERO SOPHFRONIA SCOTT

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I’ve got the DVD of Saturday Night Fever playing in my writing studio—again.

I don’t mind putting on a beloved film or television show and letting it run over and over to keep the house from being too quiet when I’m working alone. It’s a habit that drives my husband crazy. “You watching this again?” he’ll ask when he comes home at the end of the day to find me throwing myself around the room in my freestyle interpretation of the tango hustle. But today I’m neither dancing nor ignoring the film. I’m really watching it. I am silent, engrossed. I have my tools around me: paper, pen, and, in my mind, a collection of thoughts and memories.

I’m trying to excavate or isolate something I’ve recently discovered in Saturday Night Fever. It’s there in words, yes, but it’s also a feeling or a kind of inspiration, and that makes it harder to grasp, hence this particular intense viewing. It’s something about the character of Tony Manero that tells me something about myself. I am trying to listen.

Usually when I watch this movie, I pay attention to the good parts only and of course, in Saturday Night Fever, those are the dance scenes. So, often I’m not watching as Tony, portrayed by the John Travolta I had a mad crush on when I was ten years old, does his famous strut through Brooklyn. I’m not looking when he orders the two slices of pizza, stacks them on top of each other, and shoves half of the mess in his mouth, getting sauce on his chiseled face. And when he and his friends walk around their neighborhood spouting their litanies of oversexed, racist, ignorant, misogynistic remarks I ignore them. I don’t want to hang out with those guys. One day, though, during the neighborhood scene with his friends, I happened to glance up from my computer and glimpsed a look on Tony’s face that seemed to agree with me: He didn’t want to hang out with these guys either. I’d never noticed it before.

I grabbed the remote and rewound the DVD. When I watched the scene again I heard a line that, in Tony’s own way, confirmed what I saw. “This is bullshit,” he says to his friends, but they have no idea what’s bugging him. He seems restless, frustrated, dissatisfied. I saw the inkling of something big—Tony was getting a sense that there was something very small about his way of life. I started the film from the beginning. I wanted to see if this look showed up anywhere else, and it does. I never realized how many times, in that first scene at the disco, Tony’s friends offer him drugs and he turns them down. “Can’t you guys get high enough from dancing?” All he seems to want is the time, money, and space to do the only thing that doesn’t disappoint him: dancing. And before I could ask myself why, I heard with new ears and new empathy his dialogue with Stephanie, the girl he wants for a dance partner, about how the only time he feels a real high is when he’s dancing.

“I would like to get that high someplace else in my life,” he says.

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“Like where?”

“I don’t know, some place, I don’t know. Dancing, it can’t last forever. It’s a shortlived kind of thing. But I’m gettin’ older, you know? I feel like, so what, I’m gettin’ older. Does that mean I can’t feel that way about nothin’ left in my life? Is that it?”

I’m watching Saturday Night Fever again because I know Tony’s yearning is the same as mine. The more Tony dances, the more alive he feels, and yet this awakened state makes him more dissatisfied with his lot. He knows there’s supposed to be more: more good energy, more good feeling, more life. “How come we never talk about how we feel when we’re dancing?” he asks. Good question.

I want to tell him, “Come hang out with me and Lucy. We can discuss it for days.”

Lucy is Lucy Honeychurch from another of my favorite movies, A Room With a View.

I first saw the film version of the E.M. Forster novel when I was in college, and while

PEEVISH? WHY PEEVISH? IT SEEMED A SILLY WORD MASKING SOMETHING MORE IMPORTANT– AND FAMILIAR–TO ME. I loved everything about it—the gorgeous scenery, the period costumes, the wildly romantic kiss George Emerson plants on Lucy in an Italian field—what stayed with me the most (in fact it drove me to read the book) was the scene in which Lucy, portrayed by Helena Bonham Carter, passionately plays the piano in the lobby of the pensione in Florence. Afterwards she is uncomfortable, restless—dissatisfied. This leads the vicar listening to her to comment on how he would make her a heroine in a novel.

“And I should write, ‘If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting, both for us and for her.’”

Lucy replies, “Mother doesn’t like me playing Beethoven. She says I’m always peevish afterwards.”

Peevish? Why peevish? It seemed a silly word masking something more important—and familiar—to me. When I reached the same section in the novel, I found myself whispering, “Yes. True, of course,” over and over again. Performing Beethoven so expands Lucy’s world, showing her the possibility of more life, that she is peevish and frustrated when the piece is over and her life, her world, is still as small as it ever was.

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“Lucy never knew her desires so clearly as after music,” Forster wrote. “. . . the gates of liberty seemed still unopened. She was conscious of her discontent; it was new to her to be conscious of it. ‘The world,’ she thought, ‘is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them.’ It was not surprising that Mrs. Honeychurch disapproved of music, declaring that it always left her daughter peevish, unpractical, and touchy.”

I have known this about Lucy for years, but Tony Manero has awakened me to her anew, making us a strange triangle of kindred spirits: a girl from Edwardian England, a boy from 1970s Brooklyn, and a modern-day Connecticut mom. I suppose I’ve recognized the pilgrim souls in all of us and I’m trying to chart my journey by their footprints. I think we’re connecting now because, having survived the semiconscious sensory overload of my twenties and thirties, I have grown quiet enough to notice the moments of energy that drive me. I know what it feels like to have the high Tony talks about. Now my question is the same as his: Where can I get that high? Or, and perhaps this is a better, more accessible query, how can I live a life that will allow me to encounter the “beautiful things” Lucy speaks of?

I sense the answer coming closer as I get older, only it’s not a singular, corpulent thing I can reach out and grasp like a piece of ripe fruit. It’s something like a deep swath of river I must step into, up to my neck if necessary, so I can feel how it lives and flows around me. I want to be so steeped in Tony’s kind of high that I don’t ever feel like I’m living life in miniature. I know it’s not possible to exist in this state constantly, but I’d like to think I can cultivate my days so I always have a chance to at least encounter the transcendent moments that take me beyond myself. Such an endeavor is ambitious, yes, but I’ve come to an age where I see how much it matters, how it may even be all that matters.

Where do I need to focus most when I consider this way of living? I’m putting aside for the time being my roles as wife and mother. Let’s say it’s a given I will always, if I remain as fortunate as I’ve been in these roles, receive a certain measure of love, energy, and emotional support on the domestic front. For now, I’m considering the rest of me, stripped to my essence and seeking to understand what feeds, inspires, and motivates me at my core. I think it comes down to my physical, artistic, and spiritual/emotional being.

What I believe about these three areas takes me beyond the usual considerations.

For instance, in terms of my physique, I do exercise and watch my weight, but not because I feel compelled to look as I did in college or run a marathon in the near future. I just want to be ready—ready for an opportunity to experience my physical being in different ways, like the time last spring when our pastor’s husband, Shep, posted on Facebook that his daughter could not accompany him for a big charity motorcycle ride. Did anyone wanted to replace her? I said yes without thinking. I’d

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never been on a motorcycle, yet there I was the next morning smushing a helmet the size of a small microwave oven onto my head. I wondered if it was possible to develop claustrophobia. The helmet featured a built-in microphone, and Shep showed me how to plug it into the motorcycle’s electrical system. He would do the same with his helmet so that we could talk to each other during the ride.

This turned out to be really important. We rode with 3,000 participants and the accompanying roar of their motorcycles. At times Shep would ask, “Are you all right back there?” but other times he would say, “I’m going to stand up for a moment” and pop right up out of his seat. If he had done that unannounced, I probably would have screamed loud enough to knock us both off the bike.

The route we followed is a favorite of mine: CT-34, a twisting road that meanders before crossing the Stevenson Dam, which corrals the Housatonic River to form Lake Zoar. I often drive it in the mornings, and I love how the road goes east, into the sun. The light bathes the water and the riverside homes in a beatific glow, and at times I see the Yale crew team, rowing archangels, working diligently toward home.

But it’s hard to watch the river and appreciate its curves while keeping my eyes on the road. On the back of the motorcycle I didn’t have to worry about steering, and I was so close to the road it felt like I was holding hands with the river and running, running along with it as it flowed through the land.

I wore a Canon SLR, its strap wrapped around my body. I quickly realized I didn’t have to hold on like I’d seen in movies, women on the backs of motorcycles, their arms welded in circles around the waists of men wearing sunglasses but not helmets. I took pictures, even daring to lean out and turn back and shoot behind us. I pretended I was a Tour de France photographer on the back of a motorbike zooming through quaint French streets and up into the Pyrenees. I found I was comfortable leaning into the turns, trusting the angle of the motorcycle and its momentum as we curved toward the earth before bearing up again. Throughout the ride I flipped up my visor more than I should have—I didn’t want the tinted plastic between me and the hopeful light green color of new leaves in the trees over our heads, no matter how windblown and dry my eyes became. We arrived at a mall in Trumbull about two hours later and I was so famished I sucked down a McDonald’s smoothie with a cheeseburger because that was our best option with all the riders swarming the food court, but I didn’t care. I felt strong and whole.

When I got home that evening, my first impulse was to lie on my back on my bedroom floor, as I would do at the end of a yoga class, so my body could settle and integrate the day’s energy. How do I describe such energy? I suppose it’s like, as Dylan Thomas describes it, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” It’s not just a burst of energy spent quickly—this is energy seeking to form, to create, to replicate. This energy is pushing me open as a bud blossoms.

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As a writer and reader I am seeking this energy in the form of what I’ll call the gorgeous risk. In the same way a dancer such as Mikhail Baryshnikov or even Tony Manero can make me rethink how a human body can move, the gorgeous risk is the way a work can inspire me to view beauty and truth in new and challenging ways. That may seem vague, but I know what that risk sounds like when I hear it.

Recently, I attended a reading where a writer presented a kind of experimental essay. I know the piece was successful, but I can’t tell you if it was because of its structure or the lyricism of its prose poem form. To be honest, I really can’t tell you what exactly happened in the writing because I was too caught up in trying to

IT WAS SO FULL OF RISK AND EMOTION AND SPLENDOR— THE ENERGY RANG THROUGH THE AIR AND FLOODED THE ROOM. absorb the massive energy of it. It was fantastic, this piece. It was so full of risk and emotion and splendor—the energy rang through the air and flooded the room.

I wanted to run. I wanted to stay. What the writer read was so beautiful and so true it hurt and the pain was exquisite. I wanted to put my hands over my ears and I wanted to stomp my foot and plead for him to stop. I was watching him going out on the high wire and I wanted to scream, “Oh my God, stop, stop! Someone is going to get hurt!” But at the same time I couldn’t stop watching and I couldn’t stop listening because that was exactly where the writer wanted to be—taking that risk, living that risk. He knew the only way to do it would be to go out on the wire because that’s the only way to get to the light at the other side. And that’s also why I couldn’t stop listening—because I want to go there too. I’m talking about risk, but I should point out what this writer read wasn’t any sort of graphic, spill-guts-on-the-page, tell-all prose. Yet it was filled with his simple, emotional truths such as a touching, one-sentence description of the way his wife laughed. He layered these truths, one upon the other, until suddenly he’d made this complex creation reminding me of something so easy to forget in everyday life—that the little loves do matter; the way we notice a laugh or a butterfly on a sprig of lilac makes us who we are as artists and differentiates what we have to bring to the page.

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After the reading I walked out of the building and nearly fell down the front steps. Every muscle in my legs trembled and as much as I wanted to seem calm and cool too, my body told me otherwise. Like Lucy Honeychurch, I could barely stand to hear anything else or listen to another writer read for the rest of the day. Hearing and feeling so much risk had made me hyperaware when the risk was absent. I was impatient and peevish. I knew I wasn’t giving other writers their fair due. They too were writing their own truths, on their own paths. But this is how I was that day.

The world felt too small.

This feeling, I think, is what Adam Zagajewski refers to in his book of essays Another Beauty, when he writes, “Anyone who’s ever been deeply engaged in works of the imagination will know what I have in mind: that moment when, after a long period of immersion, we suddenly bob to the surface and find ourselves stranded in a kind of no-man’s land. The friendly, ardent flames of imagination have abandoned us, but we don’t yet stand on the solid ground of everyday common sense. We’re

I AM, AS EMILY DICKINSON MIGHT PUT IT, A SOUL SEEKING MY SOCIETY. suspended for an instant between two spheres that probably converge at some point, but we have no idea where (not in us and not for us). It’s a treacherous moment; anyone who starts making lunch or dinner at such a time must take care not to precipitate a fire or even an earthquake.”

I am trying to define this no man’s land so I may pound in stakes and find the convergence; make a home here, if that’s at all possible.

I consider my spiritual and emotional beings connected because I think I have to be strong in spirit to love in the way I aspire to. There’s a Lakota prayer that says: Wakan Tanka, Great Mystery, teach me how to trust my heart, my mind, my intuition, my inner knowing, the senses of my body, the blessings of my spirit.

Teach me to trust these things so that I may enter my Sacred Space and love beyond my fear, and thus Walk in Balance with the passing of each glorious Sun.

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The prayer, as I found it printed in a bulletin at my church, came with an explanation that according to the Lakota, the Sacred Space is the space between exhalation and inhalation. To “Walk in Balance” is to keep Heaven (spirituality) and Earth (physicality) in harmony. I like the phrase “love beyond my fear” because I feel potential there— potential for the same kind of energy that comes from the dance floor or the motorcycle seat. When I speak of love, I’m referring to my friends, people I have no reason to love but do because they managed to capture some part of my heart for their own. The risk here is in leaving space for new connections to develop. I’m not interested in having thousands of Facebook friends, but I do want the right friends close to me. I am, as Emily Dickinson might put it, a soul seeking my society. This is perhaps the greatest risk I take because the potential for pain is always present. To have a heart so open is to, as Annie Dillard puts it, “Reel out love’s long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.”

The longing and the grief parts do give me pause because even if a friendship doesn’t work out, and I’ve experienced a few of these, I tend to still love the person. I don’t believe in hitting the delete button in my address book when a real affection exists, even if it’s one-sided. I feel the challenge to love this way is a worthy one.

In the Martin Scorsese documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, I was struck by the depth of emotion the ex-Beatle’s many friends displayed when speaking of him. By the time of the filming, Harrison had been dead seven or eight years and still these people—comedian Eric Idle, artist Klaus Voormann, and racecar driver Jackie Stewart among them—visibly mourned. Finally, an interviewer asked Idle, “What do you miss about him?” His answer: “I miss the way he loved me.” I had never heard a man describe a friend like that before. I wanted to cry because these friends weren’t talking about Harrison’s music, or his time with the Beatles, or the way he intervened for Bangladesh or helped Idle and his Monty Python troupe finance the film Life of Brian—they missed the way he cared about them, the way he sincerely wanted to know what was in their hearts. That is the way to live—and love, I thought.

I find the best way for me to love this way is to be as fearless as I can. I don’t tiptoe around with niceties hoping I don’t offend or scare anyone. If I love a friend, male or female, I will say so. As I grow in this, I’m more of the mind that it’s never a bad thing to hear someone loves you—for some of my friends I think it’s even a soul-soothing necessity. It does make a difference, and I do mean the most essential, gob-smacking, head-turning difference. When one of my friendships has blossomed into this kind of deep loyalty and intimacy, my friend and I can spend hours in each other’s company without realizing that much time has passed. I have wandered away many afternoons in Central Park with my friend Jy, discussed foreign films and books for hours with Maria, sat by a river all morning with Bee, taken long walks to talk writing with Peter. I just go with it, and that means right now, not making excuses each time a friend comes to

mind and I want to call or send an email. I’m learning to step over such thoughts like a fallen tree in my path. I send the email. I pick up the phone. I write the letter. I’m surprised by how exhilarated I feel after I connect with a loved one.

That seems to be what I’m learning here: whenever I make a move, whether it be trying a physical feat, writing a challenging new piece, or saying, “I love you,” the energy is always there. If I want to partake of it, I must trust, step out into the air, and wait for the miracle to make its move too. I’ve been reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, and at times I marveled at his ebullient praise of the saints and his complete embrace of the Holy Virgin Mary. Merton, who once considered himself an atheist, didn’t just convert. He jumped out there, fully in love, placing his heart into something he could barely understand, moving toward it mainly based on the belief that what he was feeling felt like life to him. Everything he did before that only reflected death back to him in the form of illness and oblivion. I know I want what feels like life to me—I’m seeking adventure in the lines of a poem, cooking for my family in my kitchen, warming my face in the laughter of a friend, even if that laughter comes because my friend has stumbled upon me dancing the tango hustle with Tony Manero.

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Carolyn Oxley

Alpaca Mother, I’ve been thinking of writing a poem about my birth.

The trouble is that the idea of birth leads to the idea of sex; the idea of sex leads to the idea of your dark triangle— and a mental return to the cabinet of your womb is an idea that frightens me.

I saw an alpaca give birth once in a field.

We spied her expelling a red balloon and pulled over to lean against the fence.

Grass was emerald, the alpaca burlap brown, the balloon an impressionistic ruby web inflating out of the alpaca’s hindquarters until it fell to the ground.

I still don’t remember the baby— only the way the webbing lay too raw and complicated against the silent grass.

I wish you had talked to me about sex.

In my mind, I am always sitting in the church we attended as children; Jesus is bleeding, I am bleeding.

Outside, the clouds are applying themselves to the earth like gauze against a gaping wound.

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RUMINATE PRIZES

2014

F I R ST P LAC E

S ECO N D P LAC E

Hilary White

Aaron Lee Benson

H O N O RA B L E M E N T I O N Lisa Discepoli Line

F I N A L I STS John Chang Eunice Choi John Fischer Gerardo GarduĂąo Erika Huddleston

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Susan Hart Adrian Johnston Zacheriah Kramer David Shannon-Lier Naoko Morisawa

Barry Motes Zahra Nazari Krista Steinke Gordon Wilson Lauren Yandell

S P O N SO R

JUDGE

The Kalos Foundation

Mary McCleary

M A RY M CC L EA RY W R I T ES :

After spending many days looking at the work of the eighteen finalists for the Kalos Visual Art Prize, I selected Hilary White as the prize winner. All the work submitted was excellent, but her work stood out because it was so visually challenging, complex, extreme, and ambitious in scale.

It displayed good craftsmanship, while being original and even a bit quirky. Thanks to all the artists who entered the Ruminate Magazine Art Competition. You honored me by giving me an opportunity to look at your fine work.

Mary McCleary is Regent’s Professor of Art Emeritus at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she taught from 1975 to 2005. Born in Houston, Texas in 1951, she received her B.F.A., cum laude in printmaking/ drawing at Texas Christian University and her MFA in graphics from the University of Oklahoma. Since 1970 she has participated in over 250 one-person and group exhibits in museums and galleries in 24 states, Mexico, and Russia. These venues include the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., MOBIA in New York City, the Grey Gallery at NYU, the Boston Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. She is also a recipient of a Mid-America Arts Alliance/National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. Her work has been regularly reviewed or featured in the Houston Post, Houston Chronicle, Austin American Statesman, Dallas Morning News, and other Texas newspapers, as well as in national publications: Art in America, Art News, Image, Art Papers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Art Week, Artspace, Texas Homes, New American Paintings, and Contemporanea International Arts Magazine. McCleary’s work is in many public collections including those of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, the El Paso Museum of Art, the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont.

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ARTIST/ NOTE

HILARY WHITE: SEER SEER is an exhibition of suspended disbelief. A moment to imagine the possible impossible, the eternal. An exploration of wonder using symbolism that explores biblical text, diagrams from scientific hypotheses, and visual psychedelia produced by an influx of cultural influence seemingly aimed at searching for the “unknown.”

A dazzling fog surrounds us.

This vaporous presence in constant flux is made of particles, waves, disturbances, all of which are very real, all of which make up reality itself. This may sound mystical, an army of ghosts at work in the universe, but instead, these are the basic principals of scientific fields. So here we are, experiencing life in an atmosphere that allows life and breath, unable to see the root of our existence but still able to have faith in its reality.

This brings me to the question of faith. What is it? What is this belief we put into practice? I need a starting point. I begin with my own faith. Hebrews 1:11: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” For some this is the point of departure. The mention of God, faith, and, more specifically, a Christian faith does not appeal to all. I take this into consideration.

The question of faith is a question of great magnitude posed on the vast planes of possibility—the seemingly volatile terrain between science and God. It affects us all. If I or any other individual even dares to consider moving forward in this thought, its effects are wondrous, consuming, and full of sacrifice. I may become a stranger to comfort; I may do away with the addiction of control and illusion of success. But it is here in the ruins where I find truth and a chance to see something new or renewed. I see forgiveness, hope, love, people, communities, the world, the universe—all unfolding infinitely, each layer more brilliant and complex. A living, growing fractal blossoming into an infinite garden.

And then I step out my front door and find myself seemingly lost in a jungle of cultural moods and fads. My mind jostled in argument between what I do and what I long to do. The beauty of God is taken out of context, manipulated, institutionalized, homogenized until all wonder for the spiritual is twisted and lost in the murky waters of “common sense.” But even here, even in my own wrestling and doubt there is hope.

The dazzling is all around us . . . waiting to be discovered . . . waiting to be seen.

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Hilary White. Omega Point. Wood, acrylic paint, oil paint, spray paint, resin, glitter, plastic, light source, mirror. 84 x 96 x 24 inches.

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Hilary White. Eternal New (center detail). Wood, oil paint, acrylic paint, spray paint, plastic, LED light source. 52 x 70 x 13 inches.

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Hilary White. Eternal New. Wood, oil paint, acrylic paint, spray paint, plastic, LED light source. 52 x 70 x 13 inches.

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Hilary White. Resurrectioner. Wood, oil paint, acrylic paint, plastic, glitter. 58 x 47 x 18 inches.

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Hilary White. In Finite. Wood, acrylic paint, oil paint, spray paint, plastic, resin, glitter. 60 x 30 x 10 inches.

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Hilary White. We Began. Wood, acrylic paint, oil paint, spray paint, glitter, resin, LED light source.

Triangle: 48 x 24 x 35 inches. Base: 48 x 24 inches.

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Hilary White. The Endless One. Wood, plastic, oil paint, acrylic paint, aerosol paint, glitter vinyl, glitter. 78 x 77 x 15 inches.

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Hilary White. The Endless One (center detail). Wood, plastic, oil paint, acrylic paint, aerosol paint, glitter vinyl, glitter. 78 x 77 x 15 inches.

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James Dickson

Mother’s Day Plans for Heather, after burying Rainer, age two Walk down to the riverbank. Kneel. Scoop as much of the damp earth as you can. Fling it.

Listen to the wet thud. Keep digging. When you hit clay, pull up a handful.

Stop for a second to watch the Mississippi limp past. Ignore the loud barges and Beale Street.

Breathe the mildewy air. Feel its thickness spread.

That clay in your hands? Shape it now. A bird.

A tiger. A bunny. Anything. But know this: there will be no miracle. When you set it down next to the water, it will not spring awake and dash away. Leave it.

Now go home. Do not wash yourself.

Make dinner. Chop parsley, toss it in vinegar; use your hands. Taste and note the river grit.

That clay beneath your fingernails will always be there.

The tiny statue you made won’t dissolve back into geology. It’s still here. Sunken, yes, but surrounded. Hugged by that warm brown muck of itself.

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Kimberly Burwick

Apace, Or the Sound of Good Grasses His morning, full of freed hawks and sketchpad birds, trailer park finch and varied thrush in the cheap tablet of dawn.

I go to the window and learn nothing but birdseed and mailbox.

Small is not the ghost whose name I forego, not the marketplace of great pasture grains for this flyover prairie gently wounded with wheat.

In the shotgun light we eat fresh berries and cheese like a wandering clan holding viburnum without bloom, already black, altogether common.

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Luke Hankins

Adam cf. Hebrew, adamah (“earth”; “ground”) We’re losing him. I sat him down for a picture yesterday, and he wouldn’t smile. All he’d say was My leaves are gone.

He sighed like the winter wind was in his lungs.

When we had the photo developed I saw a body of branches, a head of brush.

He wrote Son of Earth

on the reverse.

From somewhere deep inside him came a caw.

His teacher called me just last week to tell me what he’d done at recess—cornered a girl, touched her cheek, said Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone . . .

She recoiled as if she had been struck, and people say she’s starting to turn odd— the veins that once were tucked unseen beneath her skin

now look like thin branches, and she smells of sod.

I’m afraid he won’t last long.

He’s taken to standing on the lawn for hours at a time, swaying there, or lying silent in leaf piles. He doesn’t seem to mind what’s happening. He’s quiet, mostly, though he shakes with sighs and shivers now and then.

I just wish he’d touch me so I too could follow him.

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Elizabeth Chao

Fermata Finger and thumb pinched on the downbeat a soft tug of the Littman your breath suspended— as the chrome bell sounds low-pitched eddies inspire and hold— then expire I cue petechiae in full bloom encircle your pitted ankles fresh stubble on your quail egg skull your lips are frayed and peeling so I continue to wet them with foam-tipped swabs as pushed morphine gives way to staccato breaths three-two-one an immeasurable pause—

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Elizabeth Chao

Aphasia The clots in your brain glowed like Andromeda on the onyx screen. I was five when the sirens blew into the front lawn slivers of vermillion. From your lips no words emerged. You were neither here nor there, but somewhere trailblazing the parietal switchbacks without a compass or a map.

Your first words hobbled on crutches over shellacked syllables and I prattled along beside you, holding your hand the way you held my hand when I was learning to walk—teetering barefoot in the cicada shade of our pre-stroke home of apricot stucco and arched Spanish tiles chalked ecru with bird droppings.

You crooned This little light of mine and waited on tiptoe air— it was the last time I heard you sing. I hum to you idly now, drifting somewhere between when you were and before you are—and slowly somehow with song, your words find their way again through steamed peas and Harry Dixon Loes, just in time.

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Kimberly Ann Priest

The Sturgeon Under the Snow Restless in bed and sleepless through the night, I longed for my lover . . . Don’t excite love, don’t stir it up, until the time is ripe—and you’re ready.

—Song of Songs 3: 1, 5 Seep means to flow or leak slowly through something porous.

The river sucks on the rind of the earth in late November to remember its taste after winter has cauterized its language

of deprivation.

I lie belly up on a floor made of wood, freshly polished, my forearms tired from pushing the soap now sleeping under my body, steeping these planks in a lemon narcotic.

Snow needs. The riverbed receives its milk in early April, pooling and pouring, sponging a space.

My mother taught me to hold in my pores whatever was priceless. Some conversations are contained in a discourse known only to friends.

The more I am with you the less I want to hold you and force this river to drift backward until it finds its steady spring.

On my bed tonight, I pray.

I am sucking the rind. I refuse to forget the taste of your skin. You have needs and they are forming a pool inside of me where they will stay until the season signals change.

I have known a romance slow.

And when on the banks of the Sturgeon the last bits of frozen crust are slurped up by the surges, conversations in bitter cold are made known, having bled to a rag the riverbed under the snow.

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Jessica Thompson

This God of My Waking I still had my milk teeth when I saw him drop to his knees in the dark Appalachian dirt, the serpent severed in half.

Mother running, tearing at the strings of her apron, tendrils of hair escaping her bun, wild pink and white morning glories reaching for light.

She saved him with words she gave to the wind.

She saved him when she took fire into her mouth.

Three times she went there, three times she spat.

Only then did I dare believe he was mortal, this god of my waking days falling to earth.

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Abigail Carroll

Genesis

Before light was mine, and the air that sways the wheat fields

and clover filled

the O-sacs of my lungs, you plucked a harvest of stars

from the universe

of my mother’s womb—those shining, singing things called

cells—sewed them

into nodes and valves—follicles, ossicles, auricles, ducts;

hinged humerus

to radius, stitched iris to retina, cornea to macula, then

attached the palpebra;

you invented my appendix, my gallbladder, my epiglottis,

my spleen,

all manner of fascia and humor and gland, took pleasure

in the particular

placement of the atlas, the jaw-like pedestal of my cranium,

that membraned

chamber of ganglia and nerve, dark factory of thought:

and here

is where you signed your name, laid claim to this tight

constellation

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of salts, this breathing, ticking scaffold of dreams.

Not in terms

of lobule, lymph ligament, or vein did you leave your mark,

but rather, this:

an affinity for zinnias, for swallows and plums, questions

about the lives of ferns.

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REVIEW/ 33 THE APPLE SPEAKS

by Becca J. R. Lachman DreamSeeker Books, 2012

REVIEWED BY KYLI STERLING LARSON Last summer I harvested a wheat field. Never before had I witnessed the peculiar miracle of fruition; never had I paused to participate in the scandal of seed and soil producing grain.

The field could have been easily overlooked: the wheat had contracted a type of blight that turned the iconic golden tips a musky gray, and the crop sprouted up between chain-link fences.

Nonetheless, I felt something altogether new within that other world, something like hope for what might grow even in the most unlikely place. As I read through Becca J. R. Lachman’s The Apple Speaks, I couldn’t help but hear a slight breeze blow through wheat’s brittle stalks.

In this poetry collection, Lachman too listens for the movement of her life blowing through the Ohio fields of her youth. She cannot seem to leave them: The fields still take my breath away.

It isn’t like I forget them in the city or discover something better in cur-le-cuing sidewalks or the eager pull of skylines at night.

As the poem unfolds, she holds her memories bravely, allowing them to follow her, allowing herself to follow them: Here, the stars still speak at night. Once I step from behind the wheel, into the smell of living acres, there is nothing between me and skies holding snow that spill like paintbrush water towards the fields that raised me.

Lachman continues to vivify spaces in her collection, from church building to station wagon, Liberia’s streets to garden’s dirt. The sense of place that permeates her poems is profound, sensuous, and climactic—it moves her, and it moves her readers.

Lachman develops the personal and universal challenge of change and the interlaced fingers of childhood and adulthood, enlisting an eccentric cast of characters to show us just how this life of hers has looked. She consistently focuses her poetic lens on relationships—her grandfather who listens to Earth and its seasons, her husband who memorizes Mozart, her parents who follow their god to Africa. In “Uprising,” Lachman writes of her mother in Liberia: “For fourteen

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months, you have been this same voice: a repeated, / four-minute conversation, a soft silver / place I keep in my belly.” She waits: Mother, for fourteen months you have been picked from my bones.

And now, I must welcome you back from the earth. I must do this, knowing you will return to the thunderclouds and children and to streets holding war. Too soon, you will ask to be that thin silver place, and I must simply let you.

This is complexity given soil to take root. This is poetry ripe with flavor and taut between our teeth.

The poems in Lachman’s collection highlight a speaker who is searching for a voice and for courage in silence. In “3: And Yet, And Yet” she writes: We are taught, not by a spoken lesson or binding book, but by watching those before us.

How to breathe in private as if welcoming the world, as if taking it inside us . . . .

We remember places we’ve never known. Our mouths can shut; they can and still be beautiful.

This silence is a surrender to peace; it too can be powerful.

In “Talking Poetry With an Amish Bishop,” Lachman tills hard soil with her musings: “Can we really write out how this world aches, how the heart will / never stop planting its questions?

Why we are born into / stillness, spend the rest of our days filling it with any- / thing?” She stares deeply into the bravery of others and finds the reflection of cowardice in herself and in the selves of so many more. And yet she still asks: Have I changed my life after that day in your field, since running to dodge lightning, waving to your sons, then backing my car down the drive? Have I paused long enough to gather myself from the quiet in the land?

Her questions continue to courageously probe, particularly into the hazy angst of opportunity: “Now I do not know where to start my own building, when / to pound the first nails—onto what, onto whom?” These are the questions of a life examined—how to live in the valley of placelessness, the paralysis of opportunity, the wake of ancestors long gone. Like the fields, this too is “a quiet yoke.”

Lachman’s final section of The Apple Speaks introduces her audience to the phase in her life in which she plants her own garden, although it is “moveable-barely-greened” with “snap peas just beginning to curl.” She ends with a “New Marriage, A Barn Raising,” leaving her readers heavy with hardship, mindful of unresolved questions, but still seeded with hope. Her poetry moves forward to see, as her final poem heralds, what stands. Her hands, though “swallow-boned,” build to see what will hold, what will fall, and what will catch in the wind. These hands till soil, they sow seeds, and they do “not break.”

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CONTRIBUTORS / 33

Aaron Lee Benson has worked in the arts for thirty years, creating sculpture and public works around the globe. He brings a unique set of talents and skills that has allowed him to build a family business into a formidable sculpture enterprise, Benson Sculpture LLC. He works mainly in mixed media, stone, timber, wood, clay, and 24k gold, producing large-scale architectural forms as well as figurative, narrative monoliths. He has three degrees, including an MFA in Ceramics/Sculpture from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is married to his wife of thirty-one years, Betty, and they have four children, two of whom are now pursuing art degrees, one who is a 3-D art professor, and all of whom regularly help in the family business.

J. Scott Brownlee is a poet from rural Texas and founding member of The Localists, a literary collective that supports writing about the aesthetically marginalized working class.

His poems appear in The Kenyon Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Narrative, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere— and his chapbook, Highway or Belief, won the 2013 Button Poetry Prize. Although not a person of faith himself, Brownlee’s writing documents and meditates on the religiosity of rural America. He is particularly interested in spaces where physical and metaphysical landscapes intersect.

Kimberly Burwick is the author of Has No Kinsmen (Red Hen Press, 2006), Horses in the Cathedral, winner of the Robert Dana Prize (Anhinga Press, 2011) and Good Night Brother, winner of the Burnside Review Prize, (Burnside Review Press, 2014). She teaches creative writing at Washington State University and at UCLA Extension. Originally from New England, she now lives in Moscow, Idaho, with her husband and three-yearold son.

Abigail Carroll is author of Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal (Basic Books, 2013), which was a finalist for the Zocalo Public Square Book Award. Her prose has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and Boston Globe, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of print and online literary magazines, including The Midwest Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Spiritus, Terrain, and Ascent. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Boston University and lives and writes in Vermont.

Elizabeth Chao is a physician-in-training and lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where she recently completed her MD at Harvard Medical School. She began writing poetry from an early

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age, and put her writing on hold as she pursued her studies in science and medicine. Recently, her patients have inspired her to continue writing. “I believe that poetry makes me a better doctor,” she says, “because poetry, like medicine, is about deeply meaningful interactions with people.” Her poetry is forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, and she’s the recipient of multiple poetry awards, notably the Colt Trophy from the California Federation of Chaparral Poets, and third place in the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize.

Emily Rose Cole is a writer, folksinger, tea-lover, and MFA candidate in poetry at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her debut folk album, “I Wanna Know,” was released in May of 2012 and is available on iTunes and Amazon. Last spring, she was the grateful recipient of the Jabberwock Review’s Nancy D. Hargrove Editor’s Prize. Common themes in her work include fairytale retellings, emotional violence, and terrible things happening to birds. (Despite this, she really loves birds.) She is currently working on a collection of persona poems that retell The Wizard of Oz. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Day One, Weave Magazine, Neon, Word Riot, Many Mountains Moving, and other wonderful journals.

A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, James Dickson teaches English and Creative Writing at Germantown High School, just outside of Jackson, Mississippi. His poems have appeared in The Lousiania Review, Amoskeag, Spillway, Slant, and other publications. He owes his friend Heather a huge debt of gratitude (and a hug) for trusting him with this poem.

Kim Garcia, author of Madonna Magdalene, received the 2014 Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, and has appeared or will appear in Mississippi Review, Crazyhorse, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. Her first poem was written from the point of view of an inner tube.

Charity Gingerich is from Akron/Canton, Ohio, but considers Morgantown, West Virginia, her second home after teaching writing at WVU for the past six years. This summer found her singing with a Mennonite choral group in Poland for three weeks; choral music is her co-passion to poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Moon City Review, The Laurel Review, Arts & Letters, and Quiddity. Her chapbook, Girl Escaping with Sky, appeared this summer and is available through Dancing Girl Press.

Luke Hankins is perpetually looking for ways to spend the maximum number of his waking hours engaged in what he is most passionate about: literary pursuits and—wait for it— dancing. (Alas, bills must be paid!) A graduate of the Indiana University MFA in creative writing program, where he held the Yusef Komunyakaa Fellowship in Poetry, he is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions, and the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (both from Wipf & Stock). He recently founded Orison Books, a nonprofit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives (www.orisonbooks.com).

Lisa Discepoli Line is a native of the highly cultured town of Cincinnati, Ohio, where she learned to love Hans Memling, opera and Thomas Merton at an early age. She operates a studio for oil painting at her home in the Great Smoky Mountains area of East Tennessee. Her work uses scale, color, pattern, and texture to investigate the relationships between the timeless natural world and some of the manufactured constructs of the contemporary world. This led to the discovery of plastic playgrounds as powerful symbols of eternity. She teaches painting at The Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Her work in painting can be seen at lisadline.com, where she welcomes correspondence.

Kyli Sterling Larson is native to Seattle, Washington, and received her BA in English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. She now engages with the eccentric creativity of elementary students through California Poets in the Schools and writes poems inspired by the whimsy of her experiences.

Kyli also works for a small non-profit, Uffizi Order, in hopes of preventing the sex trafficking of minors in Santa Barbara County. She has a persistent admiration for poets, activists, and horse whisperers, and aspires to live out each of these vocations with an open spirit and her husband Tucker.

Kathleen Markowitz has new poetry in the forthcoming anthology Goodbye, Mexico. Her work has appeared in Crab Creek Review and Hawaii Pacific Review. She is the recipient of the Leslie Sheil Endowed Fellowship in Creative Writing established through the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Virginia, and the Paul and Eileen Mariani Fellowship for Poets. Her work received a first place award in the 2009 National Poetry Competition sponsored by the Poetry Society of Virginia.

Kathleen is a fine arts painter. www.kathleenmarkowitz.com.

Berwyn Moore has published two poetry collections, O Body Swayed and Dissolution of Ghosts, runner-up for the Lyre Prize, and edited the anthology Dwelling in Possibility: Voices of Erie County. She served as the Poet Laureate of Erie County, Pennsylvania, from 2009 to 2010. Her poems have won awards from Bellevue Literary Review, Pinch Literary Journal, Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, and Negative Capability

Press. She has poetry and prose published in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, Journal of the American Medical Association, Kansas Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Public Health Reports, and other journals. She teaches English at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Carolyn Moore’s four chapbooks won their respective competitions, as has her book, What Euclid’s Third Axiom Neglects To Mention about Circles, winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize (2013). That collection’s title poem appeared in an earlier Ruminate. Like that poem—and the one appearing in this issue—math and science make cameo appearances in Moore’s poetry. As a juvenile herpetologist, she discovered a rubber boa (Charina bottae) that still holds the record for length in its species. Moore taught literature, nature writing, and creative writing at Humboldt State University (Arcata, CA) until able to earn her way as a freelance writer and researcher, now working from the last vestige of the family farm in Tigard, Oregon.

Carolyn Oxley grew up in Pennsylvania and graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. with a BA in literature. She lives near Boulder, Colorado, with her husband and enjoys frequent road trips to visit their teenage daughter at her boarding high school on the western side of the Divide. Their cat, Posy, travels with them and never asks how much longer it will be until they get there. Carolyn loves Switzerland, horses, and the word furnace. She admires the poetry of Jonathan Wells and feels truly lucky to have studied poetry with Billy Collins and former Colorado Poet Laureate, David Mason at the Aspen Summer Words writing program. Carolyn’s blog, Poetry is My Weakness, can be found at carolynoxley.com.

Kimberly Ann Priest lives with her children and a small dog in a small house, in a small village, in the central Michigan area while pursuing an MA in Creative Writing/Poetry and teaching freshmen composition courses at Central Michigan University.

So far, her poetry has appeared in The Central Review and on Narrativality coffee bags. On a personal note, Kimberly adores black coffee, has started a hat collection to rival her shoe collection, and thinks graffiti makes the world an altogether more interesting place. She also loves to travel, preferably by train, so she can spend time reading about philosophy, ancient eastern civilization, and biblical poetry.

There is a place where snow is a given and sun is a gift, where trees outnumber the people (who are brilliant, earthy, and selfless) and stoplights don’t exist. Amy Woschek Schmidt lives in this place with her husband, daughter, and bloodhound. Together with their sparse but beloved neighbors, they ramble through life with a reminiscent ache for Home and a daily-refined appreciation for the present moment. Amy’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Florida Review, Hermeneutic Chaos Review, Camroc Press Review, and Calyx, among others.

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CONTRIBUTORS / 33 Sophfronia Scott hails from Lorain, Ohio, a hometown she shares with author Toni Morrison. She holds a BA in English from Harvard and an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She spent most of her career as a writer/editor for Time and People magazines, developing the ability to whittle tons of information into a single cohesive form. She’s author of the novel All I Need to Get By; her work has appeared in Saranac Review, Numéro Cinq, Barnstorm Literary Journal, Sleet Magazine, NewYorkTimes.com, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Sophfronia sleds with her family in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. She’s completed her second novel and is excited about soon traveling to Denver twice a year as a faculty mentor for Regis University’s Mile High MFA, a new low-residency writing program. She blogs at www.Sophfronia.com.

Jessica Thompson lives with her husband, Hugh, in New Harmony, Indiana, where each year they plant daffodil bulbs beneath the branches of old sugar maple trees. Her earliest childhood memory: standing inside a chicken coop flooded with golden sunlight—a zillion dazzling motes conspiring to carry her away. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, Bullets and Blank Bibles (Liquid Paper Press). Her work has recently appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Midwest Quarterly, and is forthcoming in the anthology: New Poetry from the

Midwest (New American Press, 2014). She is the grateful recipient of the Kudzu Poetry Prize (2014) and the James Baker Hall Memorial Prize in Poetry (New Southerner, 2013).

A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA in fiction, Jaren Watson lives in and writes about Idaho, where he was raised and now teaches. He is passionate about exploring his home and neighboring landscapes, and he does so through mountain climbing and backcountry skiing. Neither activity puts fear in his bones half so much as does writing, which, if he could muster an ounce of reason, he would abandon altogether.

Hilary White was raised in Gainesville, Florida, and later spent a large part of her artistic career in Philadelphia. She received a portfolio scholarship to attend the Savannah College of Art and Design and graduated magna cum laude of the painting department. She developed her love of woodworking and has incorporated it into her practice of creating three dimensional painted sculpture and installation. She has participated in art fairs including Select Fair during Miami Art Basel week and has been in over thirty-six exhibitions including nine solo exhibitions, and has shown her work locally and internationally in Berlin and Hong Kong.

Submit • R U M I N AT E . CO M / CO N T ESTS Prize • $ 1 5 0 0 + P U B L I CAT I O N I N R U M I N AT E Deadline • F E B R UA RY 1 5 , 2 01 5 Entry Fee • $ 2 0

LAST/ NOTE THOUGHTS ON ARTIST AS SEER FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

I believe in photographer Sally Mann’s conviction: art is everywhere. In the small clusters of milkweed that float toward our one maple tree. In the knots on branches my son uses as a hammer. It’s the melancholy of seeing a moment, fragment by fragment, in its passing.

Kimberly Burwick

P OET RY

A “Seer” in a biblical context is one who receives visions, dreams, images from God and is able to interpret what was received to a community for the enrichment of the people.

This concept crosses over into the realm of the creator or the artist striving to communicate something through symbols beyond one’s self. Creating begins the process of intervention, transforming the invisible meditation into the tangible realm of the visible, audible, and actional.

Creating is a humbling act of faith and risk. At the expense of one’s self, resources, time, and energy, an outpouring occurs to enrich our existence in hopes that the vision continues a shift from the paradigm of faith into the act of transformative thought and service.

Hilary White

VISUAL ART

I’ll walk out of the house with my son—he’s ten—and say, “Wow, look at those orange-pink clouds!” Or I’ll call him to the window to show him a super-bright moon. My work as an artist is this same act on a different scale. In every piece of writing I am essentially pointing out what I see in the world. Look! I see love. And over there—that’s courage. Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it amazing?

This practice of “pointing out” is important because I believe, as a community, we require art and beauty to feed our hope, to help us see what makes life worthy when we are too busy or too tired or too frustrated to see for ourselves.

I feel confident that when I mark what I see, and do it well, others are encouraged to see on their own, just as when my son says, as he did this morning, “Mama, look at those leaves! They’ve never been that red before.” My role then is to affirm and say, “Yes.”

Sophfronia Scott

NONFI CT I ON

There’s a

story about Odin, All-Father of Norse legend, which says he first gave an eye to gain wisdom, then hung in the tree at the center of the world for three days until he could see our first words spelled out in the fallen branches below. It might be a warning to artists that all true sight requires self-sacrifice, or it might be a reminder that we receive a gift from those who came before us, a human birthright, that we take up or pass by, unseeing.

Kim Garcia

P O ETRY

Making a

work of art is a difficult thing and almost foolish in its attempt, fraught with failure, discouragement, and more often than not, completely missing the mark. Why do I do it? I do not completely know.

But one thing I am coming to discover is that making art is one way in which I have found it possible to love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. My times with God, contemplating Him and meditating upon Him, bring me to one overwhelming truth: if I do not make art about Him and His truths there is no other subject in my consciousness worthy of consideration.

Aaron Lee Benson

VIS UA L A RT

In the

fifth grade, I collected bugs for a science project. I euthanized them in a jar with alcohol swabs overnight and began mounting them to a board the next day. I pulled the swallowtail, my favorite, from the jar and marveled at its intricate color and translucent wings. I pushed the pin through its abdomen and placed it in my palm as I walked the three steps to the board. Before I got there, I felt a quiver in my hand. I watched in horror as the butterfly—with the pin still stuck through its middle—flew away.

I did not complete the project. The trauma of that moment, simultaneously exquisite and excruciating, led me to poetry.

Berwyn Moore

POETRY 79

LAST/ NOTE THOUGHTS ON ARTIST AS SEER FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

When I was eighteen, I picked up a copy of Vanity Fair

It’s no wonder that, for thousands of years, inspiration

in a doctor’s waiting room. A story written through the voice of a thirteen-year-old captivated me. It was what the young girl perceived that was compelling. On the ride home I was convinced that the writer overshot the ability of a thirteen-year-old to have that kind of insight.

Years later, when I began writing and digging deeply at my own life story, I realized that I, too, was awake at a young age. I had to wait until adulthood to have words for the “seeing.”

has been linked to the divine. Although honing the knowledge of craft and technical skill is incredibly important, some pieces of art move through us like tongues of flame. This, I think, is why most of the artists I know are more spiritually aware than most people: more open to the possibility that, no matter what you call it, some force outside yourself is capable of possessing you and allowing you to see further than you could on your own.

Kathleen Markowitz

When I was young and daydreaming out the window

P OET RY

Our tests appear to show an artist is near. She was there all along, but we didn’t see her. Artist as seer, she says: Artist is sheer. Our tests assure that artists appear. (Our guess is here.) Art is austere, and our tests can’t steer us to a place where art will come clear. But the artist is always clear. That’s why we can’t see her. We are the seen—she the seer.

Luke Hankins

POET RY

This year,

at a local writing conference, I briefly spoke to poet Kimberly Johnson who asked me what sort of poetry I write. “Love poetry,” I replied and explained that I found this ironic since I had recently escaped fifteen years of marital abuse. “Poetry requires conflict,” she said. And she’s right.

Over the years, I have become increasingly aware of my own need for affection, not because I have known fulfilling relational intimacy, but because I have been starved for it. I think this sort of starvation often produces, in the artist, a beautiful tension and awareness of opposites that allows them to communicate not only what is but also what ought to be.

Kimberly Ann Priest

P OET RY

Emily Rose Cole

POETRY

during school lectures, I was getting ready for this job.

My job is to take the elements of the visual world very seriously, study them slowly, then arrange and present them so that they are helpful to the average person.

I try to respond to the gift of my workday like everyone else: to offer to the world something it needs. A painting can make more space in the world, more space for contemplation. We humans find peace when we perceive order: a painting, like a good loaf of bread, satisfies a hunger for a world in which there is unity, belonging, hope.

Lisa Discepoli Line

VI S UA L A RT

My greatest pleasure lies in observing and recording life’s mysteries. By mystery, I mean everything from the mercurial nature of human relationships to the reason why, when my grandmother died, I most wanted the prayer-inscribed napkin holder from her kitchen table as a remembrance of her. Every poem is an invitation to life’s mutual exploration. For me, a successful poem contains enough clarity to earn the reader’s trust but enough mystery to allow them to step into the poem themselves, trying it on to see how it feels against the body of their own life. It’s like trying on an indie-style dress. I’m using poetry to say, “This is how this experience fits me. How does it look on you?”

Carolyn Oxley POETRY

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Hilary White. Pursuit. Oil and acrylic paint, wood, plastic, gold, copper leaf. 84 x 60 x 10 inches.

Hilary White. Omega Point (center Scottdetail).

Laumann.

Wood, They acrylic and the paint, Faceoiland paint, Hands. spray Oilpaint, and acrylic resin, glitter, on canvas. plastic, 16 xlight 20 inches. source, mirror. 84 x 96 x 24 inches.