Suzanne K Miller

January 2020 | poetry

January

 

Tumblers in the night,

cat’s teeth clicking, tongues lapping,

unlocking light’s safe.

 

Death arrives sans words.

Red blood falls as silently

through the night as snow.

 

Morning makes the bed,

lofts light sheets and comforters

over still soft night.

 

Six crows face sunrise;

no wind bends the cottonwood.

What will be revealed?

 

Adversity or

light aligns direction in

perch, view, quill, spine, down.

 

Rapids of starlings,

whirlpools of gulls, tides of crows,

shipwrecks of eagles.

 

Black fishbone branches

hold up cirrus sky flaked flesh

above dispersed light.

 

I think a possum

lives in the trunk of this tree—

tail trails mark the snow.

 

Black branch treetops shine

orange gold before blue clouds.

Ducks float in shadow.

 

 

February

 

Steeping draws out life

in tea leaves dry as mummies.

Tender nights wake frogs.

 

Four robins blush for

I walk beneath them staring

up into bare trees.

 

From rest the train rolls;

the railroad bridge, its drum; tracks,

grounded cymbals brushed.

 

February geese

slipper shuffle on dry grass.

The ruffled duck grooms.

 

Flies like an arrow—

Ardea herodias—

sure to strike its mark.

 

Twisting stream of crows

under a silver contrail

follows the river.

 

Dark-eyed Juncos flit.

The train stops and starts again

on the river span.

 

Squirrel leaps over

snaking mound pocket gopher

raised, soars with his thoughts.

 

Squirrels run like scarves

pulled through some windy crevice.

Then Child Man runs by.

 

Without my glasses,

and maybe with, the moon a

sore that will not heal.

 

 

March

 

Starlings weigh nothing,

touch the ground as ritual

ghost fingers obsessed.

 

Goose rises on legs

capable of carrying

its stillness away.

 

Across the river,

blushes of orange and green

suddenly famous.

 

Rhythm of the goose

eating, like waves. Feathers lift.

Back against the wind.

 

Given the same life,

could I steer more expertly,

having gone before?

 

Ornamental pear

blossoms weigh down city streets.

The egrets return.

 

A storm plows away

sexual moist, fermented, rank

fallen petal drifts.

 

The kingfisher dives

from the branch mainly submerged

midstream, then returns.

 

Found a cat whisker

in the vacuum yesterday.

Certain things stick out.

 

 

Suzanne K Miller

 

Suzanne K. Miller lives in a house built in 1900 and works online. She earned an MFA from Wichita State University. Her work has appeared in Festival Quarterly, First Things, The Mennonite, Mikrokosmos, Plainsongs, Porcupine, and Women of the Plains: Kansas Poetry. Storage Issues, her first book of poems, was published by Cascadia Publishing House in 2010.

Meg Freer

January 2020 | visual art

Red Dog

Red Dog

Turquoise Umbrella

Turquoise Umbrella

 

Meg Freer

 

Meg Freer grew up in Missoula, Montana, where her father passed on to her his love of photography. She keeps visual images in her head for a long time and her inspiration for both poetry and photography often comes from intriguing juxtapositions and angles in the natural world, as well as the human world. She lives in Kingston, Ontario where she teaches piano, writes poetry and enjoys the outdoors. Her photos and poems have been published in literary journals and have won awards both in North America and overseas.

Mark Hurtubise

January 2020 | visual art

Frog

Frog

Homeless

Homeless

 

Mark Hurtubise

 

Mark Hurtubise. During the 1970s, numerous works were accepted for publication. Then family, teaching, two college presidencies and for 12 years president of an Inland Northwest community foundation. Recapturing the euphoria from the authors/artists he experienced decades ago, he is attempting to create again by balancing on a twig like a pregnant bird. Within the past two years, his pieces have appeared in Apricity Magazine (Texas), Adelaide Literary Magazine (New York), Bones Journal (Denmark), Modern Haiku (Rhode Island), Ink In Thirds (Alabama), Atlas Poetica (Maryland), The SpokesmanReview (Washington), Frogpond Journal (New York), Stanford Social Innovation Review and Alliance (London).

 

 

 

Karyna Aslanova

January 2020 | visual art

Wish You Were Here (selected work)

Wish You Were Here (selected work)

 

Karyna Aslanova

Karyna Aslanova is a Kyiv-born Ukrainian multimedia artist, director, and photographer. Karyna studied Theatre Directing at The National Academy of Government Managerial Staff of Culture and Arts, Kyiv, Ukraine and although photography is her principle medium, Karyna also uses video, painting and illustration, and poetry to further her exploration into a multitude of subjects. Karyna’s art photography projects often use other-worldly imagery to reflect modern social issues, with a vague but familiar base note perceptible through a haze of the strange and incongruous.

 

 

Who Needs Flowers When You’re Dead?

January 2020 | fiction

I never met my great-aunt Mary. She died in 1929 at the age of six when she caught a bad cold at her friend Rosie’s birthday party. They buried the girl in a blue dress beneath six feet of red clay dirt in hard winter. “Dig her up in 50 years and she’ll look the same as the day you put her in the ground,” the vault man Henry Rose told her parents as snowflakes bit their cheeks. My father dragged me to the graveyard when I was 16. I’d been to the graveyard plenty of times, but I just hung around by the fence and poked sticks in the dirt. He stuck some fake yellow tulips into the dry, cracked ground and said to me, “We wouldn’t be here if Mary lived, you know.” I looked around the graveyard with my hands jammed in my jean shorts, bored stiff. My phone buzzed, but I ignored it. Danny Kline kept texting me to hook up in his treehouse, but I told him no way. Jerk. He blew me off freshman year, now he just wanted a quickie because Rachel dumped him on Tuesday. I told him to go screw himself behind the dugout, and then call me back later. I didn’t pay any attention as my father kept talking, just spotted a little girl in a blue dress playing by an oak tree beside an unmarked stone. She lifted her head, brown curls dangling around her pretty face, and then disappeared. I stood there staring for a long time until my father told me we needed to get moving because the clouds looked like rain and the road turned to a sloppy mess. I spent the summer standing by the graveyard fence waiting for the little girl to come back. She never did.

 

Rebecca Buller

 

Rebecca Buller is a native Oklahoman and a lover of the written word. She’s been published in the quarterly issue 84 of Burningword Literary Journal, October 2017, Star 82 Review, A3 Review & Press, and is a three-time Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition award winner.