brBLUE | RIVER

4.2Summer 2020

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Volume 4, Issue 2, Summer 2020

Omaha, Nebraska

brBLUE | RIVER

Managing Editors

Editors

Assistant Editors

Cover Photo

Katherine Tidwell

Aaron ScobieBryce DelineMalaz Ebrahim

Kristen BledsoeHannah Clark

by Adam Vincent

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

POETRY

Jessica Farquhar

James Hannon

Xiaoly Li

Geula Geurts

Gregory Wolff

Juanita Ray

Dylan Gibson

Dave Medd

Sarah Degner Riveros

Jack Rockwood

Patrick Erickson

Zebulon Huset

Lois Roma-Deeley

Maurya Kerr

Kimberly Glanzman

Richard Weaver

Daniel Edward Moore

Whitney Hansen

2 Poems

3 Poems

2 Poems

3 Poems

2 Poems

On Winter’s Night

Dream, 31 May

2 Poems

Praising Bull Terriers

Bus Stop

Wraith

2 Poems

Teach Me How I Should Forget to Think

from Three Summers

And/Or

Apologia

2 Poems

2 Poems

5

7

10

12

15

19

20

21

23

24

25

26

28

32

42

43

44

46

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROSE

Hannah Smart

Adam Vincent

Existential Crisis

8 Pieces

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34

48

ART

CONTRIBUTORS

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Jessica Farquhar

The Asteroid

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The Wood

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Today the wind is still.Seagulls and sandpipers tiptoethrough us and around usen pounce for a careless mistake.An old man turns in his chairto watch a pair of gulls and smilesto see them so close and so free.

Everyone on the beach exceptmy granddaughters is white.Should this wreck my day so itpiles like shivered timbers on the shore?The girls don’t seem to notice or care.

We breast the breakers but swimin water no deeper than our waistsbecause we swim with the sharks.Their flag is unfurled and delicious

seals swim a few yards beyond us,the size and shape of my girls.

The Cape waves are warmingand the tide is still coming in.The sharks are here to stay.We’re learning to live with them.

James Hannon

On Nauset Beach

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Gritty and graceful, you bloomwhere you’re not planted and provethat a tree can grow anywhere.Unabashed by your surroundings,never scandalized by your companionsand so well-adjusted to the smogand sooty view.

I find your virtue tiresome.

But like fireworks each of yourexplosions renews the wonder.How could a tree grow there --on dust, on asphalt, through a fence?Do other trees demand too much?

I could unearth you and toss youinto a rusty dumpster but you’donly take root and mock my ill humor.I would ignore you but you take meby surprise with my resistance loweredas I round a darkening corner and

catch you waving in the corner of my eye.

Ailanthus

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The towering beech is a shimmering oceanof purple and green where its limbsstretch high above the white-haired mansupine beneath its treetop crown.The ground beneath him humsas he measures the depths of the oceanreceding in that windblown tide.Sound muffles as his body lifts slowlyto part the waves that wash his face likethe cilia soothing the tide within him.

Rocking through the ocean toward the light,vertebrae loosened by the sea, he’s a merman,gliding and flipping on his pivot center,no longer up or down, east or west.Breathing more with gills than lungshe bobs atop the sea and rises slowly in aazure sky, diffusing like a cloud.

Time and space dive overeach other like dolphins.

In the slow silence of space he feels the faintbeating of blood and the tug of the spacewalkerwho recalls an old promise, hears againthe vibration of the faraway earthto which he turns again in time--tumbling, re-membering, surfacing.

Surfacing

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When cardinals moltto brilliancesourwood sloughs its leaves —fragrant fall.

Not my impatient hungerearthly crimson,not my stoic silence.

Raw grief dries upmy river of flame —

a frog in the wellcan only seea small slice of sky.

Leaves put on a bold face,orphaned lips that kissturn to dust —this is their feast.

Xiaoly Li

Red-Lip Leaves

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On trees peaches in red white faces

Burn crunchy sweet saturation

Two wasps rush over, pierce one

Black spots stain bonny skin

Cut to the center

A blushed worm squirms

Slice around

I chew,

Ah

Autumn Peach

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For my belly thrives like the pouch of a possum, you’ve turned my insides out,for you sniff my every corner.

For you glow like a bonethrough my hide, a hoof kicking up into my husk. For gestation

is a public bathroom & I am its janitor, wiping the latrine of me. For you push downmy bladder, urine-soaked pants,

for I’ve stopped changingafter each soil. For the earth is musty beneath my feet, for I can’t reach them anymore.

For bending wreaks havoc upon the leash of my vertebrae.For you are the spine binding me

to my frame. For palsy is my facedrooping down the center, for you hang at the whiskers

of my seams. For the animal you are& the animal you’ve made of me

Geula Geurts

The Animal

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Dear Pain,

The nurse asks me to scale you in numbers, from zero to ten. I apologize for this limitation.I apologize for sizing you up like a ration of dry bread allotted in a time of shortage. Knowthat there is no shortage, that zero is a fallacy. Know that when I say one it doesn’t meana little, or hardly felt. Know that five doesn’t mean the half of you. It means this hurtsbut I’m not sure what else is in store & presently I can bear you. Know that when I say bearI don’t mean birth. We aren’t there yet. We’ve just been induced & the road lies ahead.I say we because we are together & not alone. Don’t let the nurse & her numbers discourageyou. I know that ten is not your end. So far, the birthing ball has been bouncy & friendly.Thank you. But a rod of light has started prying through me, slices me down the middle.The crack of muscle cannot contain the elastic up & down. Relief changes accordingto the stages, the nurse says. Dear Pain, let’s leave the ball. I introduce you to the shower.The balm of water. Where before I said seven, now I say six. Like my cervix, you stretch& shrink. In the shower I’d like to introduce you to my mother. Her calloused palms.Her glinting eyes. It’s not just you & me in here. There is memory. I apologize my mothercouldn’t make it today. I know this makes your proportions escalate. Hold on tothe showerhead. The tap. Let me tell you something you already know: there is a beginningthat never ends. An umbilical cord connecting grandmother to mother to daughter. They allpull at my edges, tear the skin around my belly. Unsnappable twine. Let’s invoke her.Say mother. Mama. Into the sweltering stream. Let’s say eight. Nine. Call the nurse. Switchoff the tap. There is an end that never begins. She asks us to scale this.

Let’s say nothing.

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Because I didn’t see you, I conjure you up like a spirit, the history of a word. Placenta (n.)from Latin, “a flat cake,” the vanilla sponge my mother used to bake over the weekend.She gave simple directions: sift the flour, measure the sugar. How I’d peek through the oven

glass & watch it rise. When it gets too high, call me, she said. & I called my motherafterbirth—another word for placenta. From the Greek, plakoenta, “flat,” from plax, “flatland, level surface, plate,” the off-white dishes decorated with pink blossom, the ones

my grandmother gave my mother before she moved away. Because “to be flat” is “to spread”,from Proto-Indo-European, plak. To expand, which is what daughters do, they moveaway to other lands. & my mother called me after birth, & I heard her on the other end

of the intricate web of blood vessel extending between us. For a synonym of cake,see brick, the lump in her throat. A muffled sound. For what can a mother say when she hasmissed her daughter birth? I want to ask her, what did your placenta look like, mama?

Because it was mine, too. Did you eat it? Placentophagy, from Greek, phagein, “to eat,to have a share of food.” Because to eat is to share. I promise that vanilla sponge tasted likesweet air, it melted in my mouth as if it was never there.

Imaginary Placenta

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Gregory Wolff

The Day After

you were a ghost from the beginninga half-dream, created for the two of us

then you melted back into a subway crowdand all the world regained its mystery

The skyline sharpened, the city grewto its brutal size, yielding few soft places

I wandered the night, winter stars pouringfrom the dark, everything a rushing river,

a ruined seawall— an abandoned portDoves like lost souls deliriously searching

I sort through what remains, and pretendthat I’m still here, still somehow myself,

though I know that I’m already unmade—reimagined like weightless flecks of clay

spinning on an ocean bottom, graspingfor the falling tide, I watch the stoic people

passing through the skeletal streetslike glossy figurines and soldiers

How long until I rejoin their ranks,and disregard the void, the stark enormity

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of air, the ragged claw of unhealed memory?I lift my eyes again to the long-vacant moon

as the wind spills into my open mouthlike a howl of the wild beyond, singing

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Bluebird Boxes

I hang bluebird boxes in forgotten placeswhere I imagine songbirds wander

funny little cubes of pinkish cedar,one hole cut right through the center

like an empty fairy house— a native totemlike some lure for ghosts I want to believe

are out there in the skylight crashingthrough boughs of sugar maple and pine.

Why do we so often lose ourselvesin pursuit of the unrevealing,

and why’s the bluebird so much betterthan a starling or house sparrow, anyway?

I hang one box by a leaning tamarackanother beside the murmuring spring

enclosed by a ring of white cementwhere water, still and dark collects

An earthen eye. Looking— waiting,I return to clear the nests of squirrels

and field mice I’ve accidentally shelteredas every corner of swamp-water blue,

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every chicory blossom, shard of broken skyis a siren calling out the absence

of that one strange, enchanted indigoI saw here once before, so very long ago

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The city’s snowed in.The night’s sky is low and gray.My voice echoes on the window-panewith mist.

I live on the second floor.The glass reflects somethingof my face,something of the room behind.On a bitter night like this,what else can my surroundings dobut melt into my reflected gaze.

I keep up my spirit.Even what I believe to be my wisdom.And, with the heat down low,I still maintain my warmth enoughto celebrate the slow tottering of flakesto the dark earth beneath.

A couple of rooms.A telephone.And the weatherno more than a breath away.I may not have muchbut at least it’s close.

Juanita Rey

On Winter’s Night

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Bleary-eyed and eager I fumbled to catch the thing but the open window draftpulled it out, drawn away into the strong vacuum, and left me sittingwith a pale waxy husk. Have to keep the cicada shell secreted away anddreaming in the desk drawer, where it’ll glow a little each night when you look at it.

Back in this mountainside apartment I’m on a bony roof, bathingunder rafters while the frame sways, plates lilting in the earth down therewhile the whole building’s turning its skin inside out becausethe world is all in flames and all the stars are falling down.

They’re screaming streaking green and descending through the atmospherethey turn into tailspinning cherubim with holy gaunt El Greco faces sparse-feathered dove wings and bodies of lion cubs, just for a momentas they exit the firmament and slip through the ground like candle wax drip.

There’s no sun to rise now but the ghost light is coming up behindtreeless ash-white mountains and the buildings are all tilted

like a drunken forest, like rows behind rows of crooked teethinside the sleeping city’s slack-jawed open mouth.

Dylan Gibson

Dream, 31 May

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let me give you my sticks, my ebony character, alphabet twigs; give me your wet stone gathering;let me give you my leaf token ticket to neverwhere, my gold volt factory; give me your bone-game dice-cup;let me give you my leopard’s velvet, my dapple-claw-clamour, deep embrace; give me your taste of salt;let me give you my wormwood, summer-scent, deep verges, my meadowsweet marketing; give me your shape in a comic bubble;let me give you my blood, my unrefined, crude liquor, wine in a green glass; give me your breath;let me give you this voice, this lost-tongue, flesh-tone rhythm beating; give me your Word. Give me your threads and passages, your invisibility; I give you my rags.

Dave Medd

When I Ask You Nicely

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I bought you eleven red roses.You cut their stems,plunged them intocheap, clear glass.

Matchstick peopleleaning into each othercriss-cross,green peoplekissingbelow the meniscus.

Eleven Red Roses

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- for Oscar, Tofu, and Spike

Ribs showing, tail wagging, ears pointing,You jump in greeting and begin to pee.As soon as breakfast ends, you want more.No sooner do I sit in a chair than you’reIn my lap, wiggling your way to a hug.

When you see an animal, squirrel, cat, chicken,Your muscles tense, you pull until you shake.You are a trembling puddle of muscles and nerves,Excitement to the center of your solid core.

Your horse-nose face is scarred from bumpingIn and out through doors. You push your way in,Slither past, and stake your claim in the middleOf every bed, every room, every heart.The world is yours, you take up space, hunker down,To defend those you protect, as you beg for more love.

Sarah Degner Riveros

Praising Bull Terriers

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Music sounds better when you’re drivingOr taking the busTo work in the morning.

And morning lasts longer when a strangerGets off at the next stop, coming backFrom working the night shift, and theSunlight hits his sleeping door, guidingHis way home.

Because working at nightIs like watching hours passThrough a moving car window

And after clocking out during witching hours,The freeways become an empty theme parkAnd every song sounds like the laughter ofA secret crush.

But now I spend my nightsscrapbooking through sleepAnd as the bus lurches forward,I can see that this is my stop.

Jack Rockwood

Bus Stop

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Every little bitI bring forthI need

a lodestonea smattering of wealtha newfound energy store

Is there lightamong the leavesto take note ofI wonder

to take meinto its confidenceand confederacyand light my way

if I stand before youa whiskered presencewraith-like

prophetic of the mirrorin the puddle at your feet?

Patrick Erickson

Wraith

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The old well had been dry for decades before little Jameson’s rock surprised us all with a splashafter its five second freefall. The neighborhood kids tried to lower a bucket although the onlything close to long enough was a garden hose. But even when they tied it to all their jump ropestogether it was still too short. Eddy decided Jameson was lying about the splash and dropped hisown rock. Tommy thought Eddy was lying and dropped his own rock. Harold thought Tommywas lying and so forth until Jerry, whose rock dropped to the familiar clatter of rock on rock.Liars, he muttered once more.

Zebulon Huset

A Series of Slowly Softening Splashes

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It could’ve been balloons of paint exploding on a canvas.

The artist’s black brush stabbing through the hues.

The spray of a hooligan’s can-splash.

It could have been another nightor just another street over.

But it had to end with running.It had to end with adrenaline— with blood rushing.

Another Thursday Night Out

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holy lightfalling through the window,hushes along the floor, reaches for the dreaming bedwhere I lie like a restless childinside damp and tepid sheets. Red-faced sun,bursting now from the cloudless sky, do you know

how very hard it is to be a human being?To pick and choose one’s way among the manycrowded streets which leadto broken bodies hanging in the square?to sirens stopping at my door?

even as the day scrapes and bows,dropping to one knee like an actorstage whispering to the retreating dark,let me rest in your waiting arms and kiss the cheekof every misplaced hour—

were we not made for more and yet just for this?

Lois Roma-Deeley

Teach Me How I Should Forget to Think

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DURING THE SUMMER of his nineteenth year, he decided to become a nihilist, though calling it a “decision” would not be quite accurate. His nihilistic initiation could more aptly be described as a realization—a feeling that the universe was far too big and vast and cruel and unforgiving for him to have any meaningful place in it. He developed a habit of reading Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger and of listening to Marilyn Manson, Nirvana, and the Ramones, taking care not to enjoy them too much, reminding himself that every beautiful melody and eloquently-constructed sentence was just a random assortment of symbols and sounds, meaningless outside the construct of his brain. He felt numb to poor test grades and the risk of reckless endeavors. He figured that if he died doing something stupid—like drinking himself to death or cliff diving into a riv-er that was too shallow—it would make no difference in the grand scheme of things. That a life of nineteen years and a life of eighty years were both just insignificant, inconsequen-tial blips as far as the universe was concerned. That, in fact, the entire lifetime of humanity was only a blip and would only ever be a blip, and soon (cosmologically speaking), all traces of our existence as a species would be erased. What would it take to free him from this disease? How, after seeing the ultimate truth of the universe, could he ever go back?

#

He met her one foggy day in September, as he traipsed listlessly toward his dormitory. She had just made the most fascinating connection, she told him. She had been monotonously filling out Punnett squares for her biology class when she had realized that in order for her to be here, talking to him right now, every one of the thousands of people in her ancestral family tree needed to be healthy and fertile. “I mean, what are the chances of that?” She apologized for springing all that on him when she doesn’t even know him but explained that he was the only person in sight, and she just had to blurt it all out, to somebody, be-cause it was just so mind-blowing and absolutely awe-inspiring. She said that she figured he probably thought she was weird or just completely insane, and he finally looked up at her to see that her face was blushing red, and the sun was hitting her light brown, wavy

Hannah Smart

Existential Crisis

30

hair, its rays reflecting and bouncing in all sorts of directions, making her literally glisten, and he felt himself smile. He told her that, not to be a buzz kill or anything, the chances of all our ancestors being healthy and happy is exactly one hundred percent, because after all, we’re here now, talking about it, are we not? Unless nothing really exists at all, he added, which was a defi-nite possibility.

#

She told him she wanted to be a genetic scientist; he told her he used to want to be a theo-retical physicist before he realized that it doesn’t matter how we got here—it only matters that we one day won’t be here anymore.

#

The first time he took her into his dormitory, they tiptoed through scattered papers and vinyl records and empty beer bottles and thick books, opened and turned face down to mark their pages. She asked him why he didn’t just use the scrap papers as bookmarks. She said that his philosophy of marking pages was a bit like his philosophy toward life—all the materials necessary to find purpose and enjoyment were there, but they were such a mess that he just hadn’t figured out how to put them together yet. He told her he thought she was full of shit. And then they laughed, and for the first time in a long time, it felt real.

#

“Why do you even bother getting up in the morning?” she asked him one day. “What do you mean?” “I mean, if we’re all doomed to death and despair and all that, why do you keep going? Why do you drag yourself out of bed, albeit reluctantly, and often hopelessly hung-over and sleep-deprived and sometimes still wearing yesterday’s jeans, and sit through

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classes where some accomplished professor lectures you about a field that no longer interests you, if it’s all for naught?” He shrugged. “What else am I going to do?” “But that’s the point, isn’t it? Don’t we all just control the things we can and ignore the things we can’t? You might call yourself a nihilist in theory, but in practice, no one is. No one could stand to be.”

#

Then came the day she told him she loved him, softly, carefully, as they sat together on a rain-worn wooden bench, staring out at a vast field, its tall blades of grass all bending in unison with the gentle push of the wind. And could everything still mean something now that he knew deep in his heart it meant nothing? Could he still live out each day in all its vibrant, unpredict-able fullness while he and the entire galaxy hurled through space toward predictable, definite oblivion—to be intercepted by the Andromeda Galaxy and annihilated and reduced to stardust? Did he really have a choice? He would say it back, when he was ready—when he felt like love (or anything, for that matter) actually meant something. When he knew that the emptiness in his heart and his mind wouldn’t be echoed in his words. And when the words did come, they’d come as a whisper, barely audible over the whoosh of the autumn breeze, but he’d mean them. Until then he’d just sit there, peacefully, in silence.

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one

Ocmulgee River, Georgia — 1976

Summer afternoons we’d head to the old abandoned river bridgeat the edge of town, scrawny enough still to slip under gapsin the chain link fence. Scaling the mount with Barbies in towto arrive dirty and breathless, forever awed to be up so high.We overlook the world. The backs of our bared legs burnand scrape on crumbling black asphalt as we sit, sunfevers our eyes—no matter. We each pull out a Barbiesecured in both underwear and waistband—such bright fast joy to undress them and wringoff their heads. The slow intake of their smooth pale bodiesmakes us thirst and swallow hard. Puberty Barbie is the favorite:torque her left arm forward and her breasts perk and grow,backward and you’d have never known. Girl Scout knotsin action, we tie our girls hard under their armpits, drop them offthe edge—first the yank, then the swing back forth and backin long rhythmic arcs, our bodies pressed sweaty side by side, legsdangling, gravity dared. Eventually we tire and let them swayto still, dusk. So quiet here. The hushed patience of re-dressing them:mix-and-match swap of whichever clothes to whichevermilky body to whichever blue-eyed head. We stroke their hair,loving how smooth and cold it slithers in our fingers.

Maurya Kerr

from Three Summers

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I look in the mirror and don’t recognize my own body.I was expecting a body that belongs to you.

These are no one’s scars; they are little white lies.My heels higher than your eyes, a mouth

the size of a dime: surprise. Blood like starlightchasing sunrise, or settling, or burning, or –

A body is a cage, or a body is a vehicle, and my bodynow is just my body

though once, it was home.My cage & your vehicle, or vice versa. The inverse

of a body is not a hole. It is space. What’s the difference,my therapist asks. A hole is something missing,

and they want it full. Space is meant to be empty,a fundamental characteristic of its existence;

space expands to encompass the universe. A holeis emptied, filled. I am not allowed to be empty

unless I have been emptied.

Kimberly Glanzman

And/Or

43

Son goes off to war. Time passes. Son returns. His discharge papersfamously signed, stamped, certified. Crisp. No longer a number.Now without name, speaking a language no one understands.More animal than not. A grammar of the body. Disambiguated.At first, he prowls at night, never far from a small blacked-out roomwhere someone not him had sheltered in a mirrorless universe.

Son sees himself as sentinel, guarding the border between worlds.Nothing else matters. The Others who look at him, speak at him,saying they are Mother and Father, as if sound was an anchor,or created purpose and meaning. The Others are defenseless.Broken. Without shoreline or horizon. The pair are one someone.Always together. Hiding their glances as he secures the perimeter.

Son wonders why they are trapped here, why each shelters hereclearly fearful, small caged birds flittering, fretful, pained.If they have a mission it is unknowable to them. If a causeIt’s as unseen as the clear glass door a third bird has just thuddedagainst. Messengers of wind with deadly beaks and suicidal eyes.Even dead their eyes transmit. Compromise his position.Son’s vigilance honors all. Son’s allegiance is a promise unbroken.

Richard Weaver

Apologia

44

In the lesser realm of relationships lost to questions never asked,it’s not hide & seek I want you to play,

its Nick Cave’s piano crushing your legs with No More Shall We Part,its Murder Ballads waking me up to see if you’re still there.

Hearing your democratic breaths vote for a sad neurosis of dreams,the ones dying from an unlived life,

if only my fingers could pound your keys into minor submissioncould force your heart to risk something major

like marching your love, naked and helpless,off the bench of our creaking bed into the village of me.

Daniel Edward Moore

Night Song

45

Give me a little after midnight god, saxophone dangling from a mouth ordained

by how holy grief sounds at 2AM, a drastic monastic jazz disarray

melting soft floral prints off walls in a room believed to be stained by devotions last haunt,

believed to be blessed by luminol light revealing the red sea’s hunger for flesh,

a pre-Eucharistic snack one might say leading up to a last supper spread.

If there’s something else Lord you’d like to discuss meet me at the bar after last call.

I’m wearing blue smoke too.

Matins

46

When red death spills When boughs are broken When striations crumbleout of aspen trees into shards of sheer power into nothing

who will taste the blood pluck the dandelions growingthick with sap? through my degenerate once-was-ribcage?

who will find me here where the echoes rustle and sough their reedy lament, reachingneither kithnor kin,now tell me how did you forget me?

Whitney Hansen

untitled

47

I’ve learned the ballad of the cataclysmic, the all-ending melodythat can only be sung through grief-locked throats and gritted teeth.

I’ll sing myself to sleep on your side of the bedpuffed-up sheets cradling this impossible longing. Home

is a place that does not exist anymore, but I can still pretendthat you’ll come back someday with a story, that you’ll tell mewhat happens when we die.

You are minein a world that does not exist anymorein a world that will end in the morning

again again again

but I will still be hereand I cannot make this beautiful

no one in the world gets what they want

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Jessica Farquhar is the author of Dear Motorcycle Enthusiast, a chapbook published by The Magnificent Field. She holds an MFA from Purdue, where she was the assistant direc-tor of Creative Writing. You can find her poetry in recent or forthcoming issues of Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Western Humanities Review, and Bear Review.

James Hannon is a psychotherapist in Massachusetts where he accompanies adolescents and adults recovering from disappointments, deceptions, and addictions. He has worked in hospitals, outpatient programs, methadone clinics, and prisons. His poems have ap-peared in Blue Lake Review, Cold Mountain Review, Psaltery and Lyre, Soundings East, and other journals, and in Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets (Sundress, 2013). His collection, The Year I Learned the Backstroke, was published by Aldrich Press.

Xiaoly Li is a poet, photographer and computer engineer who lives in Massachusetts. Prior to writing poetry, she published stories in a selection of Chinese newspapers. Her photography, which has been shown and sold in galleries in Boston, often accompanies her poems. Her poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in PANK, Atlanta Review, Chautauqua, Rhino, Whale Road Review, Rockvale Review, Cold Mountain Review, J Journal and elsewhere. She has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and Pushcart Prize. Xiaoly received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Worcester Poly-technic Institute and Masters in computer science and engineering from Tsinghua Univer-sity in China.

Geula Geurts is a Dutch-born poet and essayist living in Jerusalem. She is a graduate of the Shaindy Rudolph Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University. Her ltric essay ‘The Beginnings of Fire’ was named a runner-up in CutBank’s 2019 chapbook contest and is forthcoming with CutBank Books. Her mini-chapbook Like Any Good Daughter was published by Platypus Press. She was a finalist in the 2018 Autumn House Chapbook Contest. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Blood Orange Review, Tinderbox Editions, New South, Counterclock and The Boiler. She works as a literary agent at the Deborah Harris Agency.

Gregory Wolff is an almost-PhD in philosophy turned organic farmer, writer of fiction, poetry and children’s literature, and very proud father of two enchanted and half-wild children. He lives with his family amidst the musical forests of the Saint Lawrence River Valley, just north of the Adirondack Range. Gregory’s poetry has appeared in Poets Read-ing the News, and is forthcoming in EVENT and Writers Resist.

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in this country five years. Her work has been published in Pennsylvania English, Opiate Journal, Petrichor Machine and Porter

CONTRIBUTORS

POETRY

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Gulch Review.

Dylan Gibson studied Philosophy and English Literature at Auburn University. He is pres-ently teaching English while learning Mandarin in Taiwan. Spends his downtime travel-ing, seeking out and making music, drinking coffee, and haunting stationery stores.

Dave Medd was born in Kingston upon Hull in 1951. In 1965, showing remarkable in-stinct and intuition, his dad introduced him to Dylan Thomas, on the strength of his son’s devotion to Bob Dylan. Since then, Dave has been writing poems. His work appeared in Hull Grammar School magazine and won local and regional poetry competitions be-fore he moved to the north-east for college. Over forty years he taught various subjects to young teenagers, for whom he wrote songs, short stories and musical dramas. He has completed drafts of two children’s novels. His work has been published in Poetry North East, Outposts Poetry Quarterly, Orbis, Dream Catcher and The Coffee House, and most recently in Obsessed With Pipework and on the I Am Not A Silent Poet website. He now lives and writes in Rothbury, in the heart of Northumberland, where he also plays the Northumbrian pipes. He has published a number of songs, as well as tunes composed for the pipes. He is a member of Cullerpoets, the National Poetry Society north-east stanza.

Sarah Degner Riveros was raised in Chicago and Texas; she studied at University of Illi-nois Urbana-Champaign, Universitat de Barcelona, and Columbia University in New York where she earned a Ph.D. in Spanish literature. She teaches Spanish through community engagement at Augsburg University where she is currently completing the MFA in poet-ry and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Bearings, Brain; Child, Mothering, New Beginnings, Willawaw, Murphy Square Quarterly, and she has poems forthcoming in Yes Poetry, Vassar Review, Porridge, Blue River Review, and Azahares. She is a single mother of five children and lives in St. Paul, MN, USA.

Jack Rockwood is an emerging author living in the Greater Los Angeles Area. His writing focuses on spaces and places, like the city and the countryside.

Patrick Theron Erickson, a resident of Garland, Texas, a Tree City, just south of Duck Creek, is a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself. His work has appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, and The Main Street Rag, among other publi-cations, and more recently in Torrid Literature Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, Arlington Literary Journal and Sheila-Na-Gig.

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer living in San Diego. His writing has recently appeared in Blue River, Meridian, The Southern Review, Louisville Review, Fence,

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Rosebud, Atlanta Review and Texas Review among others. He publishes a writing prompt blog Notebooking Daily and is the editor of the journal Coastal Shelf.Lois Roma-Deeley’s fourth poetry collection The Short List of Certainties won the Jaco-pone da Todi Book Prize (2017). Her previous collections are: Rules of Hunger (2004), northSight (2006) and High Notes (2010)--a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. Her work is featured in—or forthcoming from-- numerous anthologies and journals including, Slip-stream, Post Road, Bosque, Rock & Sling, Windhover, Quiddity, Zone 3, Spillway, Water~-Stone, Artemis, Juked (on line) and many more. Currently, Roma-Deeley is the Associate Editor of the international poetry journal Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry.

Maurya Kerr is a writer, educator, and artist living in Oakland. Her MFA from Hollins University focused on how systemic racism denies black and brown people access to wonderment. She has work published or forthcoming in Hole In The Head Review, River Heron Review, and Chestnut Review.

Kimberly Glanzman was a finalist for the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize and a 2020 Pushcart nominee. Her poetry and fiction have appeared or are forth-coming in Sleet Magazine, Stonecoast Review, Jet Fuel, Pretty Owl Poetry, South Dakota Review, Electric Lit, and Harpur Palate, among others. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Kentucky. She currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Richard Weaver lives in Baltimore where he volunteers with the Maryland Book Bank, CityLit, the Baltimore Book Festival, and is the poet-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Recent pubs: Off the course, Umbrella Factory, Mad Swirl, Atlas & ALice, Perspectives, and Dash. He is the author of The Stars undone (Duende Press, 1992), and provided the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars, 2005, performed 4 times to date.

Daniel Edward Moore poems are forthcoming in Weber Review, The Cape Rock, Kestrel, RipRap, The Timberline Review, River Heron Review, Passengers Journal, The Night Her-on Barks, Coachella Review, Ocotillo Review, Nebo Literary Journal and Main Street Rag. He is the author of the chapbook “Boys “(Duck Lake Books) and ‘Waxing the Dents,’ is full length collection is from Brick Road Poetry Press.

Whitney Hansen is currently pursuing her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry from The University of New Orleans. She is a poetry reader for Barren Magazine and her work has previously appeared in 13th Floor, Nightingale and Sparrow, and with Vine Leaves Press.

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Hannah Smart is a recent graduate of Middlebury College, and she writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her nonfiction has been published in Vocal’s affiliated magazines, and she has had her fiction published in The Corvus Review and Pif Magazine. She currently lives in the Boston area.

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