Harold Olejarz

July 2019 | visual art

Ardtornish Sheep

Sunflower

George Washington Bridge

Harold Olejarz

Harold Olejarz began his career as a sculptor. He worked mostly in wood and created wood sculptures ranging from waves to figural sculptures inspired by Greek sculpture. In the 1980’s he exhibited in and participated in managing the only Soho Cooperative gallery dedicated to sculpture. Later, he turned to Performance Art and created wearable sculptures. He installed himself, as a work of art, in museums and public spaces across the country. Articles about Olejarz’s performances appeared in many newspapers and were featured on TV news programs, including NJN and WOR in the New York area. He even made the cover of the NY Daily News. Olejarz’s art has been exhibited in numerous galleries and at the New Museum in New York and The Newark Museum, The Morris Museum and The Jersey City Museum in New Jersey. Olejarz was awarded a public art commission by NJ Transit. For this commission he created two etched glass block windscreens, that are installed at the Pavonia/Newport Light Rail Station in Jersey City. Image manipulation has fascinated Olejarz since 1990 when he first explored image manipulation with early digital tools like ColorIt! and early versions of Photoshop. Born raised and went to two colleges in Brooklyn, NY. Brooklyn College, BA, 1975; Pratt Institute, MFA 1977. He now lives in Tenafly, NJ

Linda Briskin

July 2019 | visual art

SkyOceanBirds ii

 

Linda Briskin

SkyOceanBirds is in the tradition of surrealism which appreciates idiosyncrasy, juxtaposition and contradiction. Surrealism challenges the boundaries between the normal and the fantastical, promotes the unexpected combining of found objects, and embraces dreamscapes and imagery emerging from the subconscious. Linda Briskin is a fine art photographer who lives in Toronto and Palm Springs (CA). She has ever-shifting photographic enthusiasms, what she calls photoglossia: the juxtaposition of objects and reflections; the ambiguities in what we choose to see; and the permeability between the remembered and the imagined. Photocollage constructs unique and painterly images layered with nuance and narrative which both embrace and displace the original images. Her focus is often on inventing images rather than capturing them, an approach that is fictive rather than representational. In 2018, Briskin was selected for The New Feminist Gaze at Simeon Den Gallery in California. Her photograph Motorcycle Women was published in Best of Photography 2018 by Photographers Forum. Three photographs from her series aqua botanica are forthcoming in Tiny Seed Literary Journal (2019). Recently in Toronto, she had a solo show at Helen & Hildegard Apothecary as part of the Junction Contact Festival and a window installation at Rapp Optical. She has also participated in several group shows including Spectra at Gallery 1313 during the 2019 Contact Photography Festival. Upcoming is Luminous, a group show of ten women photographers at the Heliconian Club in Toronto.

Janet Joyner

July 2019 | poetry

Swamp

 

is all about

quiet death

and the slow

cellular work

of decompostion

in a wet

dark place.

Say it. The word

itself, breaching

with that swishing

sucking, sibilant

swooping its

big wings

around an ample,

nasal-vowelled body

detonated by a plosive

 

that lifts

like a long-legged bird.

 

 

After the rape

 

of the three little

girls in the grass

by the Maoist

army, there was

no grass left.

 

Janet Joyner

Janet Joyner’s prize-winning poems have been honored in the 2011 Yearbook of the South Carolina Poetry Society, Bay Leaves of the North Carolina Poetry Council in 2010, 2011, Flying South in 2014, and in 2015, as well as anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology, volume vii, North Carolina, and Second Spring 2016, 2017, 2018. Her first collection of poems, Waterborne, is the winner of the Holland Prize and was published by Logan House in February, 2016. Her chapbook, “Yellow,” was published by Finishing Line Press in November, 2018. Wahee Neck, her third collection, will be published this summer by Hermit Feathers Press.

DS Maolalai

July 2019 | poetry

The explosion.

 

the earth bursts and curls

with february yellow. daffodils,

cruel colour

and abundant

in freshness and reds. we didn’t plant them –

the person who lived here

before us did – but still,

I’m glad

they’re there. drinking

from his coffee cup, summer

coming out of the ground

to surprise us,

tapping the windows

with a long thin hand;

the first spark

of a slow explosion,

set to expand

all year.

 

 

A sign of respect.

 

it’s a small cove,

and I stand at its center. wind crawls

the cliffsides,

cold as rivers

in high altitudes. and a river flows

at a low one

over to my left –

barely a stream, really,

though perhaps it was this

which cut the cove

at one time

out of rocks. I think

I think this way only

because today

I am in the company

of geologists. they climb over the cliff-face

and search for interesting seams. I

was mainly brought along

as a driver. me and aodhain,

showing them the countryside. but he

is a geologist also, and just as interested in rocks. I stand

with my shoes off

and watch the surf

as it grabs handfuls of sand

and collects crabs

like a commuter

bus-service. high on the dunes

a dolphin decomposes, dropped

in the last storm of autumn

and dragged up there – I guess as a sign

by someone

of respect.

it stinks salt

and dead seawater

and flies swarm the carpark. there were seagulls too,

flapping all over, until we pulled up and threw rocks at them.

 

 

DS Maolalai

DS Maolalai has been nominated for Best of the Web and twice for the Pushcart Prize. His first collection, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden”, was published in 2016 by the Encircle Press, with “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” forthcoming from Turas Press in 2019.

Pluck

July 2019 | nonfiction

The stink of scorched feathers and the bumpy, scaly chicken feet bombarded my senses as Dad thrust the bird at me. The body was warm, too warm. I didn’t care that he said the carcass was that way from being dunked in the scalding water. Loosened the feathers, easier to pluck, whatever.

The live chickens huddled and clucked and jumped at the far end of the coop, but only a few would escape Dad’s reaching arm. Squawks from the chosen victim grew loud—until the strike of the ax. Running like a chicken with your head cut off is true, but there’s also obscene gymnastics with shooting blood that gets gummy on the gravel in the summer sun.

Instead, Dad nailed the bony chicken feet to the fence post after he chopped off the heads, and the things bled out shuddering against the post. Dad said, “At least the meat won’t get bruised.”

I know Mom was there—she came in the kitchen later and scolded me and my sister for arguing about who had to clean all the butt pieces floating in the cool tap water—but my memory can’t place her at the scene. Maybe she snuck off for a Winston, thinking, no cursing that the damn chicken coop was what had sold them on the property. Nobody in the family would have admitted this place was supposed to be the cure for his drinking.

“Good country living and hard work,” my dad said.

Dad was sober this day—family day. I wonder now if he was trying to convince himself or the rest of us.

No time to think. There were chickens to pluck. LeAnn and I stood side by side. I watched her lead—she was the big sister. But, God it still felt like I was plucking a live chicken.

I pulled feathers one by one. At this rate, I might have one plucked by Christmas. Dad looked over and headed my way.

“Jesus Christ! It’s not gonna hurt you.” He grabbed my hands and rubbed them all over the chicken.

I threw the chicken into the air. I heard the thud as I ran toward the house, “AHHHHHHH!”

Similar chicken thuds and screaming came from my sister.

These were the good times.

 

Melissa Fast

Melissa Fast is a nonfiction writer from the Midwest with an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. During the day, she spins words as a public relations professional. In her free time, she slugs French-press coffee and plays with words in hopes of making sense of her surroundings. She was selected as one of the winners of the 2017 Carrie McCray Memorial Literary Awards from the South Carolina Writers Association, and her work has appeared in Minerva’s Rising, Bluestem Magazine, and Brevity blog. She is currently working on a memoir.