On the Fourth of July

July 2024 | poetry

the fireworks are cracking open the air

and I’ve had just about enough of America

after serving people hot

dogs all day and watching

people eat them on TV so I march

into the woods into the mud into

the pond into my salamander

skin. I bury myself in the clag

until everything is wet,

hushed and warm.

I did this once before

ten years ago or so

when life had gotten noisy

I staggered through California’s redwoods

crawled under a fern, became

a newt, tried to swallow a banana

slug but got in way over

my head and had to stop speaking

for a while, digesting

its girth billowing

from my mouth.

When it was finished

I grew my human legs back

then belly, arms and the rest

and walked back into my life

working at the coffee shop

and having a girlfriend,

a brother and a best friend

like a woman can do.

It was alright for all those years

but now in the mud again

I don’t know how long I’ll be here

but I suspect if I sing Amazing Grace

into the gurgling water the frogs

will chime in then the birds

and rodents and cicadas

until it all sounds

like one sound.

Maybe then it will be time

to slide from the cooing muck

my body and go home.

 

Elise Ball

Elise Ball is an artist and writer from the San Francisco Bay Area, currently living in Southern Appalachia. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in publications such as TulipTree Review, Flyway, and Arc Poetry.

 

Featured Artist, Philip Arnold

July 2024 | visual art

Walden

 

Philip Arnold

Using black & white 120 film, Philip Arnold’s photographs explore lo-fidelity atmospheres often suggestive of memory and daydreams. His subjects are static and fluid and seek to capture the dynamic energy of street environments within the geometries and textures of their built environment. He employs optical conditions, primarily through the use of a plastic lens, to add resonance to historical cityscapes and urban topographies—and to amplify the singular among the common. Arnold’s photography has appeared in Humana Obscura, Black & White magazine, Atticus Review, Fugue, Compose, Apeiron Review, and Gravel Magazine, and has exhibited at the Soho Photo Gallery (NYC), A Smith Gallery (Texas), Nave Gallery (Mass), and Santa Clara University (CA).

The Mothers

July 2024 | nonfiction

I notice the mothers as my four-year-old son and I harvest garlic. The plants are almost as tall as he is, topped by slender, green leaves that are just beginning to yellow at their tips. I grasp the base of a stalk and heave upward. The earth muffles the pop of breaking roots, and then the bulb emerges, soil clinging to its skin. I toss the plant into the pile behind me and reach for the next.

That’s when I see a brown spider skittering between stalks on long, tapered legs.

“Look,” I tell my son. “A wolf spider.”

He kneels to get a closer view. The spider is large—about the size of a plum, with bristly hairs on her abdomen and legs.

“See that white ball attached to the back of her?” I ask him. “She’s carrying her egg sack.”

Gardens are good places for wolf spiders. And wolf spiders—with their appetites for aphids, beetles, and wasps—are good for gardens.

This mother spider is not the first we see that day. There are others too. They duck into the shade of the mint, disappear into the shadows beneath the broad leaves of burdock. In their spinnerets, they carry sacks spun from silk—the work of motherhood. They are able to use their bodies in this way because wolf spiders are not web weavers. They are hunters who lie in wait and ambush their prey.

Days later, I return to the garden to finish the garlic harvest. I sit on a log at the end of a row of upturned earth. My one-year-old daughter rests in my lap, my left nipple in her mouth. With gloved hands, I trim the roots and peel away the outermost layer of each head of garlic. A stack of clean, white bulbs topped by wilted leaves grows next to me—ready to be braided and hung to dry from the beams of our back porch.

I think of the mothers all around me. Soon, when the time is right, each one will use her mouthparts to puncture the sack she’s been carrying. A hundred or more spiderlings will crawl out and scale her body. For a week, maybe two, she will carry them all. She will wear a mantle of seed-sized spiders, their translucent legs clutching her frame. Eight hundred eyes will watch as she hunts and hides. And in this way, she will teach her young to be garden spiders.

Sometimes, the work is hard. All that climbing and clinging. The tired limbs and aching joints. Rarely getting through a meal without having my lap occupied by at least one child. And while a fierce love accompanies this attachment—so does a longing for freedom.

But here, in the garden, I am in good company. And I am glad to have it.

If all of us get our way, then maybe our young will be good company to each other. Garden spiders and garden children. Allies. Companions. Kin.

 

Lucy Bryan

Lucy Bryan is a writer, adventurer, mother, teacher, and seeker. She lives on a wooded ridge above the Tuscarawas River in Coshocton County, Ohio. Her award-winning essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and listed as ‘notable’ in Best American Essays. Her place-based nonfiction has appeared in Earth Island Journal, Terrain.org, The Fourth River, and Quarterly West, among others. Her essay collection, In Between Places: A Memoir in Essays (Homebound Publications, June 2022), won a silver Nautilus Award.

 

The Dao of Collage

April 2024 | poetry

after Joy Harjo

 

Clear a space for yourself.  This includes time.

No thinking, no ideas, no answers, no logic, no reasons.

Stand against productivity.

Don’t be afraid to put the needs of others out of your mind.

The light, predawn or evening, works its private magic.  This counts.

Collect materials.  Watch sidewalks for doll parts or rusted washers.
Go to flea markets.  Buy dusty, moldy, chipped, beaten, time-worn pieces.

All junk has potential.

Don’t forget the odd family scraps; you don’t even know how you ended up with them.  (A banknote from Venezuela for Dos Mil Bolivares or a moldy photograph with “Turku, Finland” penned on the back?)   Let their hidden stories prance on without you.

Indulge in setting up.  Admire your tools: Scissors. Paper. Water. Glue.

You can love simple things here.

Do not tamp down your excitement.

Your paint brushes are a group, a chorus. All different heights and haircuts, they applaud you.

Here there is no shame.  You do not have to know anything.

Your hands and eyes know everything.

Begin.

When you don’t have a plan, the options are infinite and equal.
Glinda’s sparkling wand or Lana Turner’s head?  Make your choice.

Glue it down. Bam!

You have created a point in the universe.

As you peruse your materials looking for that pterodactyl, you will often find something else. The perfect blue circle. Let it in.

There are no mistakes. Things just turn out different.

You are free to crack yourself up.

Respect the messiness: the gluey edges, the crooked cut.

Become lost. Nothing matches.

 

Kim Farrar is a writer and collagist. Her poetry collection, The Impossible Physics of the Hummingbird, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in 2025. Her chapbooks, The Familiar and The Brief Clear are available from Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, and other literary journals. Her essays and creative non-fiction have been published in Midwest Review, Illness & Grace, Voices of Autism, and Reflections. She was a semi-finalist in the Grayson Books Poetry Contest in 2022 and 2021. Her chapbook of poems and collages was a semi-finalist in the 2022 New Women’s Voices contest. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

 

Kim Farrar

Omphalos; or, Inside the Circuit Board

April 2024 | poetry

Humming like a subterranean network sized computer is a fear

that if I ever meet my creator, They will not resemble me –

 

only appear as an abstract painting, less resolution than myself

and I will look at Them, and They, unthinkingly will stare through me

 

and, I will find myself to be the one more alive. Our virtual creations

won’t make me question if their bytes are analogous to my experiences.

 

Those perfect, idealized pixels will remain dead. Then,

I will have to keep living, having extravagant celebrations,

 

quadruple tiered wedding cakes, bouquets of tulips,

chocolate rabbits. Which is all to say, great tragedies can be a moment.

 

Elias Diakolios holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University where he served as Poetry Editor for Columbia Journal 59. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in New Notes Poetry, Pidgeonholes, Epiphany Magazine, Bookends Review, Juked, and others. Currently, he teaches in the Writing Department at Montclair State University and works on linocuts in his spare time.

 

Elias Diakolios