Wes Civilz

October 2025 | poetry

Self-Portrait as Carefully-Written Poem

Each line a soft and velvet shelf upon

Which every syllable’s a gem. A notch

For each to sit in, snug … ten gleaming swans

Perched rung-like on the water’s plane. Now watch

How, necklace-like, each gem will sound in turn

Its note, a melody of light, when pain

Arrives, the steady visitor. You’ll burn

Your eyes. Don’t look too long. Inside the flames

Of facets, crown to girdle, there lurk rays

Of information that perhaps you should wait

To learn, or never learn at all, or play

Dumb about if you do. Or you could place

The gems inside a case, inside a safe,

Inside a mine outside of time and space.

 

Wes Civilz

Wes Civilz lives next to a dusty cactus in Tucson, Arizona. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The Threepenny Review, The North American Review, and New Ohio Review. He posts writing-oriented videos on Instagram under the handle @wes_civilz.

Paula Burke

October 2025 | nonfiction

What I Could Have Said Instead

“Selfish!” he spat towards me as I stood to leave.

“Huh, I wonder where I learned that?”

Holy crap, I think to myself. Where did that come from?

I mean, it’s true. Dad was selfish and self-centered.

Now, his dementia puts him into a separate category of selfish and self-centered. He can only think of himself—just like a toddler. His hunger, his needs, his wants.

I am just finishing spending a week at his house to help with his care, closely inspecting anything found in the fridge—even the condiments—before ingesting it, throwing away black-market Viagra, snooping through his papers to see what his financial situation is, staying in the damp dark guest room making sure to always keep the door closed so his cats don’t pee on my suitcase. I have taken time off work, been away from my kids, my husband, and my cat who doesn’t pee where she’s not supposed to. And now that my sister has arrived to relieve me, I’m going to go home.

It’s my 47th birthday, which he has not acknowledged at any point throughout the day.

He just told me he wants to die and I am thinking about how I could help him even though I decide that I am not going to help him die on my own birthday. Of course, he doesn’t know any of this.

Selfish! I could have ignored it and said: “I love you, Dad. I’ll see you next week.”

Selfish! I could have bent to whisper in his ear: “Get your affairs in order, I’ll be back to help you.”

Selfish! I could have brushed it off: “Sure, Dad, whatever you say!” or “Oh, Dad, don’t be so dramatic!”

But what I really say: “I wonder where I learned that?”

 

Paula Burke

Paula Burke lives and writes along the Salish Sea. She is revising a memoir that is variously about old cars, family lingo, bad birthdays, and her father’s seven-year descent into dementia. Her work has been published in the Seattle Review of Books, Booth, and Hippocampus. Paula will always look at the dessert menu.

Benjamin Erlandson, Featured Artist

October 2025 | visual art

Below The Shoals

Helene Flooding

 

Benjamin Erlandson

Dr. Benjamin Erlandson is the founder of an ecological educational nonprofit fostering bioregionalism, ecological literacy, and stewardship across the biosphere, an outsider scholar following dynamic inquiry to defy disciplines, practicing systems wisdom. Trained in narrative, photography, filmmaking, and new media production at UNC-Asheville (BA) and Emerson College (MA), he captures multimodal narrative traces in defiance of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. He was an NSF IGERT Fellow in Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University. Recent juried exhibitions of his work include Spanish Peaks Arts Council, Photocentric Gallery, R Gallery, Valdosta State University, Spiva Center for the Arts, Hilliard Gallery, San Fernando Valley Arts & Cultural Center, Yeiser Art Center, Wilson Arts Center, Turchin Center, and Roger Tory Peterson Institute. In 2025, he was a multidisciplinary artist-scholar in residence at Pine Meadow Ranch in Sisters, Oregon. He is a volunteer photographer for the National Park Service on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Eileen Vorbach Collins

October 2025 | nonfiction

Chasing Lasers

The cat will sit on my desk and help me write stories about love. About loss. About a cat who will claw up the furniture, but I won’t give a damn because she will make biscuits on my poofy belly and never suggest I work on strengthening my core. I know her, this orange kitten, the one I dream about. I belong to her as she belongs to me. It feels like love, but the kitten isn’t real. It’s been a few months since our old dog, Sugar, died. The kitten will purr away the ringing in my ears. The kitten will love me back.

The vet said Sugar crossed the Rainbow Bridge. Do humans cross there too? Do we remain who we were, with the same endearing traits? The same annoying habits? Become stardust? Do we know we’re dead? Wish we weren’t? Glad we are?

It’s 25 years since my daughter died. Will she see the kitten and be glad for me? Will the kitten know we’re being watched as we make our biscuits?

The kitten isn’t real. But how can I live without a kitten? How can I live without my daughter? Nine lives wouldn’t have been enough. Clawed up furniture won’t kill me or even make me cry.

Here kitty. Come, let’s make some biscuits. Let’s dig our claws into the soft nubby wool of the sofa. Shred it. Now try the linen on this chair. See how good it feels. Rip it. Bite it. Flex your little claws and grab another thread. Here, I’ll help you. Watch it all unravel.

We’ll grow old together. Cover the sofa with blankets. Haul the chair to the curb. What will any of that matter? Where will you go, I wonder, when you leave this earth. Fur heaven? Chasing lasers across the galaxy? Will you remember me? Will you make biscuits for another grieving mother or a sad child, a lonely dog longing for a companion? A dog who will love the feel of your tiny claws raking his fur? You don’t want to be an indoor cat. You have always been free. Claw the furniture, darling, but you must leave the birds alone.

My daughter wanted to be free.  Of rules and curfews. Of her own relentless expectations. Of me. I dreamed that she was alive. I lifted the veil and found her living nearby. All those years in the same town. I begged her to come home. She refused and closed the door.

We used to bake bread together. Six braid challahs with an egg wash. Always a piece separated. Tossed into the back of the oven, a nod to tradition not our own. An offering to sanctify the bread.  How do I sanctify her?

What will I offer the kitten? A screened porch from which to watch the birds. Will she love me back? Or want to be free. Of rules and curfews. Of relentless expectations. Of me.

 

Eileen Vorbach Collins

Eileen Vorbach Collins writes true stories she wishes were fiction and fairy tales she wishes were true. Her essays have received the Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, The Gabriele Rico Challenge Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her essay collection, Love in the Archives, a Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss, published in 2023, was a Foreword Indies Finalist and received a Pencraft Award for Literary Excellence and the Sarton Women’s Book Award for memoir.

J.M. Emery

July 2025 | poetry

Ode to T-Pain

Like an octopus crowning itself with mollusks

you took pains to hide your beauty.

Auto-tuned a voice that needed no tuning,

that sounds clear and honest as winter

on the nape of the neck. Often, if not always,

we ask angels to play the kazoo. To suffice.

I like to think most of us is unexplored

potential, songs and poems floating in vials,

embryonic kisses, and the apologies

we should have worn, hanging motheaten.

I wish Grandma, who never raised her voice,

would have. Its sound in the untested register

of rage, woe, glory. And what might she have

to unhide of her plainspoken love?

 

They glitter and reek,

the wines casked within us.

 

J.M. Emery

J.M. Emery is a Chicago-based poet. During the day he works for the government, most recently on initiatives around maternal and infant health.