Ambiguity
White Flower
Yeobin Park is a junior at BC Collegiate. She is the founder of Point of View Productions, her school’s first film club. She has had her films nominated and screened in numerous film festivals, including the All-American High School Film Festival. She plans to continue making films about genuine human connections.
There were orchards here once
and creeks that ran all the way to July.
In those days, we could cross one on foot
and up the embankment on the other side,
just below the walnut grove, long gone,
as well as deer who lay in the tall grass
and flew at our scent.
We walked then on land
not usually used for grazing,
the windy side of a knoll,
where fog settled into folds and stayed
under the spreading of an oak or laurel.
In outcroppings of granite, slid
between hard shapes
and stood in the silence,
pondering the unspoken questions, listening
for their stony answers.
Jerome Gagnon
Jerome Gagnon is the author of the recent collection Refuge for Cranes: Praise Poems from the Anthropocene and Rumors of Wisdom. His poetry has appeared in a variety of publications, including Spiritus, Poet Lore, and Modern Haiku. A former teacher and tutor, he lives in California in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.jeromegagnonblog.wordpress.com
Buckeye East
Wilson is a designer and photographer. Central Illinois has been his frame of reference for a lifetime. His well-seen perspective provides him with an intimate, unique notion of the artfulness of this region, quintessentially Midwestern. He was a medical and generalist photographer and writer in the healthcare and library science fields for 36 years. He received a BA from the University of Illinois and is an Illinois Artisan for Photography. You may view more of his work at stephencurtiswilson.com
(an early Halloween)
Mildred has a gash on her forehead where
the hatchet from her boyfriend split the bone.
Nearby, there is a skeleton hanging by its left
foot from a small maple-oak across the way.
The rail fence is shattered where the van
with thirty-two immigrants went through it
and they got over the earth in a hurry, never
coming back. Above, the blue moon not
the slightest color of blue is more brilliant
than a neon planet made of platinum, brighter
than anything I’ve ever seen on an August night.
Which reminds me, once at 1:30 in the morning
when I was seventeen at Mt. Gretna, out in
the middle of the woods, near a picnic area
drinking stolen beer with other/college kids:
ghostly through the trees…
and a lone, rich baritone voice from Broadway
sang a love song to his lady for the night…
(he’d been Li’l Abner, they said)
no music, the most beautifully romantic thing
I’ve ever heard  —  fifty years later in jail
thinking about it. In the meantime, they put
my bed on the porch roof to be funny… oh, it’s nice
to be the butt of jokes, and the one everyone
hates… seems like, as if to have been born was
to wear some kind of putrid curse around your
face like a necktie for people to piss on, that’s
what it is to be bullied from six to seventeen—
when it stopped, and I pulled the trigger of the
shotgun 14 times where they sat.
[true incident in pieces, but I never shot anybody;
no matter how much I might’ve sometimes wanted to]
Richard Atwood
Born in Baltimore, Rick has lived in Denver and Los Angeles, currently in Wichita, Kansas. He has published three books of poetry, and been published in several literary journals: Karamu, Oberon, Avalon Literary Review, Mochila Review, borrowed solace, Penumbra, ArLiJo, The Raven’s Perch, and Iconoclast among others. He has also authored 3 screenplays, 2 large stage plays; plus an m/m erotic-romantic fantasy, with a GOT ambiance… no supernatural jazz, and a strong moral thread woven throughout (Chronicles of the Mighty and the Fallen, under the name of Richard McHenry).
Blue Morning in Bar Harbor
After forty years in finance, Linda K. Allison is having the time of her life writing, photographing, and exploring this amazing world. Her writing has appeared in The Milk House, Moon Park Review, and The Bluebird Word, among others. Her photography has appeared in The Sunlight Journal, Persimmon Tree, Burningword Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She lives with the love of her life among the trees in the aptly named The Woodlands, Texas.
