July 2024 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
Elect
Toast with choice wine the elect.
Toast the vampires, bad boys, hyenas,
stone-cold demons and assholes
strolling the halls of heaven,
side by saintly side with hermits and virgins,
stumbled apostles, unwed social justice mothers,
preachers-to-the-animals,
preacher dragged to the fire,
girl soldier dragged to the fire,
mothers, fathers, babies unbaptized,
founders of monastic communities,
fallen archbishops, Juan Diego,
the poor and unsightly, the troubled rich
— which is to say, every one of wealth —
robbers who love their father,
lost tribes of angels,
archdeacons who don’t get along with each other,
holy men wrestling with Satan,
the innocent old, Job, the inside traders,
the cashing-in and the cashiered,
holy men wrestling with an angel
or a Deity maybe,
break the rib, dislocate the hip.
Collect the elect
— the hell-raisers and hell-preachers,
the abject, reject, object,
subject to pride,
subject to anxiousness, empty echoed terror.
Toast with Diet Coke the McDonald’s regulars,
the cathedral regulars,
the Mozarts, the Manets, bankrupt Vermeer,
the pulsing maters, the buttermilk cups,
open arms, open legs,
the bell ringers and the rung bells,
the sleek-bodied, the weighted,
the glide and slide and blithe,
the large and loud and meek.
Round up the elect for the trains.
Lift the incense.
Light the tall candles,
the Easter candle before the tabernacle.
The mystery of faith.
Lift the morning sun through the rose window
and the saints with green halos
and the virgin with blue halo
and the baby with the halo of red.
Gather in the plaza the elect
for goats-and-sheep time,
each then by a different path to the same pasture.
Hymn the bricks and marble,
the dark basement, the ceiling, cracks,
the space like another cosmos.
Whither shall I go?
Count sins. Record errors and malignancies.
Keep track humanity.
Serve the chalice of soup-kitchen soup.
Break day-old bread, a leg unwell knit.
Mark each word.
Dog in the sanctuary.
Armor at the church door.
Turnips growing in rows under the pews.
Much barking at the altar.
Wake up, baby!
Open your eyes to the morning snow,
sunlight on the white city, a joyful demand,
on the streets and sidewalks,
factories and tattoo shops,
police cars and hearses.
Climb the column.
Sit on top and pray alone
for a novena of novenas,
eighty times eight.
The aroused, the aloud, the bowed
and unbowed, the cowed, the aground,
the bound and unbound.
Soon and very soon.
Let the barrio close you in awkward embrace
— smell the rot, touch the frail wood,
feel the play of texture in the ugly wood,
listen to the wind across the wood face.
Let us as elect wash the feet.
Let us chop up pews for firewood.
Let us recalibrate the statues
and the paintings and the hymnals.
Let us go out each morning as elect,
each noon, at night.
Let us go out and among
and in and with.
Toast with strong coffee
out and among and in and with,
sacred prepositions.
Holy grammar. Holy word.
Holy embrace, elect.
Patrick T. Reardon
Patrick T. Reardon, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, is the author of six poetry collections, including Salt of the Earth: Doubts and Faith and Puddin’: The Autobiography of a Baby, A Memoir in Prose Poems. His poetry has been featured in numerous journals such as America, Rhino, After Hours, Heart of Flesh, Autumn Sky, Silver Birch, Burningword Literary Journal, The Write Launch, Poetry East, The Galway Review, and Under a Warm Green Linden. In addition to his poetry, he has also written a history book titled The Loop: The ‘L’ Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago, which was published in 2020 by Southern Illinois University Press.
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.
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.
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
