Crystals
North Dakota native, Zac Hall, has a passion for cattle ranching and capturing the naturally stunning beauty of the Northern Plains. His ranching background and passion for agriculture give him a unique perspective as he uses a camera lens to share this beauty with the world.
In the old wood burner at the back of the kitchen she did the baking. As across the tin roof the sky broke, she gutted the fridge of all the perishables — the milk and the eggs and the butter. By candlelight she rolled and cut the dough, and as the wind sandpapered away at the clapboard siding, fifteen perfect circles she pressed, with the heel and the palm of the hand, into each of the pie-tins, fifteen perfect circles, tin after tin down the length of the counter. The scent of the split pine stirred her. This was the moment she savored the most: the kindling. The slow burn of the oak, that was the secret to the baking, sure, the reason a stack of quarter-cut always climbed the brick beside the iron maw, but the kindling. That was the treat. The orangey whorl of the sap, the splinters of pitch that stick to the whorls at the tip of the fingers, and honey their way into the crack of the palm, as if the hands were the kindling, as if her own fingers were to suddenly ignite.
All through the night the cold wind scoured the porch, sledge-hammered the rafters, shook the floor to where the candles quivered and the wax in a zig-zag ran. She browned the shells — a blind bake — and as they cooled, she spatula-ed in the last of the peach and the apple preserves. She laid the ribbons of dough in a crosshatch to cover the fillings, sprinkled the quilted surface with a dusting of cinnamon and then, ever so gently (masterful is what it was, in the storm to so pilot the ark), she pressed, one two three four, into the damp crust at the center of every pie, the diamond that rode her fist. A fleur-de-lis. A signature.
And all the while, the skyline bristled. On the far side of the pasture, the crown of an oak wavered and snapped. Down the flank of the Econ a Frigidaire tumbled, clipped the fin of a derelict Harley, gurgled its way into the muddy. Off the coast of Jamaica a freighter capsized, a cloud of birds abandoned the peninsula, up yonder overhead the burst of a solar flare bumpered off the moon to – bullseye – smack the planet, the clouds, the squall, the sky, but all through the night she fed the oven, and the oven baked the pies, and the pies baked the kitchen, and the kitchen held the storm at bay. Majestic. Yes. Majestic. Come the dawn she filled the cavernous hold of her junkyard De Soto with a (years ago the backseat crow-barred away) stack of empty blueberry crates into which she slid the pies, two to a crate and swaddled in wax paper and muslin, and set out on the open road, all or nothing, a dollar a pie, highway robbery were the highway not already bulbous with broken oak and scuttles of canvas ripped from the shop awnings.
A teacher at Valencia College, Alan Sincic has been writing now for years poetry, prose, and experimental fiction that lives somewhere between the two. The short story The Deluge appeared in the New Ohio Review and The Hunting Of The Famous People won The Gateway Review 2019 Flash Fiction Contest. Last month A3 Press published a unique (fold-out map style) illustrated chapbook of My New Car. His novella The Babe won the 2014 Knickerbocker Prize from Big Fiction Magazine, the short story/performance piece Sugar aired on Seattle’s Hollow Earth Radio, the short story Random Sample is currently available online in the Prize Winner’s Issue of Hunger Mountain Journal (hungermtn.org), and the short story Sand appeared last year in The Greensboro Review. Alan Sincic earned an MFA at Western New England University and Columbia, served on the editorial board of the Columbia Review, and — back in the day — published a children’s chapter book, Edward Is Only A Fish (Henry Holt) that was reviewed in the New York Times, translated into German, and recently issued in a Kindle edition.
Sand is future glass, so get in the car,
fast-forward into the future, and stand
on the giant glass bridge of the beach.
We can listen to the waves while we stare
at the creatures frozen below, encapsulated—
there’s a crab mid-stride and there’s a plastic
cup. There will always be a band-aid, and we’re lucky—
the washed-up jellyfish is under glass—just
step right on it and laugh. Mostly there’s just rock, though,
and it’s too hard to sit on all day. Let’s take the car
to the diner and the past. Let’s stare out the window
and watch the fish bones and shells, glistening in the sun.
Danielle Hanson is the author of Fraying Edge of Sky (Codhill Press Poetry Prize, 2018) and Ambushing Water (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in over 70 journals, won the Vi Gale Award from Hubbub, was Finalist for 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Award and was nominated for several Pushcarts and Best of the Nets. She is Poetry Editor for Doubleback Books, and is on the staff of the Atlanta Review. Her poetry has been the basis for visual art included in the exhibit EVERLASTING BLOOM at the Hambidge Center Art Gallery, and Haunting the Wrong House, a puppet show at the Center for Puppetry Arts. More about her at daniellejhanson.com.
Ice
Warehouse
The artist lives in Durham, NC, and would rather be caught fishing. He drives a little red MG, throws darts on Tuesdays, reads and writes a lot, dabbles in photography and makes a pretty good gumbo.
I.
There’s a chance everything has been assumed incorrectly.
There’s a chance I’ve gotten it all wrong.
Misplaced the dangling modifiers.
Left decimals out of column.
Commas forgotten, and misfired chromosomes
flipping an entire species on its genealogical frontal lobe.
Prophets tried to warn.
Seers and shaman returned
carrying markers of indemnity, lived experience
suffered and survived, until now
becomes instinct, systemic acceptance
defining the limits of beauty and love.
II.
Compressing time compares
particle versus wave, proxy tunnels
navigating both like wormholes
linking process and form.
Conceptual technology owes its existence
to the human body, the internalized
network of firewalls, end-stops, cul-de-sacs
of private intentions needing protection
from fear of the anonymous hack.
Conjunction subordinates proper speech.
By all indications, pop stars leave the myth-
making to poets and teachers.
Take a straw poll of life’s greatest fears.
See how many answers feature
bridges and tunnels connecting us,
and all things.
III.
I carry weight around unknown,
height a cradle-fantasy of remembered baptism.
I am never smart enough to think like a foreigner,
an outsider accustomed to facing nature
in its raw nakedness, beauty balanced and awe.
Some tastes require jugular sweetness,
warm country tabernacles surrounded by thick night.
Preachers wed desire with a mother’s faith,
common metaphor saving its best for last days
of character-selling, shelter-space limited
to flesh and imagination.
IV.
Sanctuary splits me confused, me not smart enough
to skate across thin layers of meaning.
Not understanding but knowing the difference
between here and not here
simultaneously. Nowhere to be found
depicted in watercolors is too diluted
for aristocrats and the general
practitioners of the Sacred Arts,
the Primal Magic of self-doubt,
paranoia, and its shady base
of operations in poetry.
Patrons pay my expenses, photograph my receipts.
Desire allocates, critiques my inner algebra,
formulas setting parameter for stammer
too elastic to eliminate its brittle shell.
After questioning, beauty accepts
quiet comfort, knowing fear remains
the only modern ignorance left to eradicate.
Marc Meierkort is a writer and educator who has taught high school English for 19 years. He is a graduate of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (B.S.) and National-Louis University (M.A.T.), and he currently lives in Chicago’s suburbs. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he has recently had poems published by The Main Street Rag, Columbia College Literary Review, The Nassau Review, Inscape, and Spectrum.
