Cut Your Own

January 2022 | nonfiction

We almost feel sorry for them: twisted spines, uneven limbs, dwarf stature, and either bulbous bellies or anorexic torsos. But we finally decide on one that will do. Although not perfect—too short and portly—it’s ours once we saw its trunk and haul it to the car. We can put it on the card table where I grade papers. Once strung with lights, hung with ornaments, and topped with Father Christmas in his fur-lined red robe and bulging pack of presents, we won’t feel sorry for it, won’t notice its deformities.

We have the day off because both parochial schools where we teach celebrate the Holy Spirit’s visit to Mary (Mother of God). Not being Catholic, we learned from attending required monthly Mass about the Immaculate Conception which, to us, seems quite a stretch.

I prefer the Emersonian church—trees, sky, and a path to follow—or not.

Before hiking up and down rows of balsam fir, Scotch pine, and blue spruce, we stopped our Taurus station wagon at a shack looking like a single-seater outhouse. A man came out and I handed him my Christmas bonus, a green piece of stationery that declared its bearer worthy of one cut-your-own Christmas tree.

I’d seen Father B. before, but rarely, only at all-school Masses where all the abbey monks participate. And last year, here, because Father B. planted and tended to the trees. He had a cowboy face, tanned, lined, and leathered. He wore jeans, a school sweatshirt, and blue knit cap. He saw the letter and, perhaps vaguely remembering me, his smile broadened.

“Father,” I asked after the usual “Good to see you again” back and forth, “how’d you wind up in charge of the tree farm?”

He leaned down so he could look across me and take you in as well. “My name means ‘little farmer’ in German, so I thought it fit right that I take care of the nursery. Or, as I prefer to call it, the forest.”

When the abbot discussed with Father B. his role in the abbey, “I convinced him that taking care of the forest was my calling. I got the job.” He preferred taking care of trees over taking care of classrooms. “The trees don’t talk back to you, like kids do.”

You said you didn’t like cutting down live trees.

“For every one that’s cut,” Father B. said, “I’ll plant five more.”

Four days later, my brother and mother help decorate the tree. I’m 32-years-old, and up until tonight, the tradition has been to put up our widowed mother’s tree in her Chicago apartment.

“Things change,” my brother, a psychiatrist, reminds us.

Next morning, I write in my journal about not wanting to relive those nights decorating the family tree, when told what to do and pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Nothing back then compares to life now, setting goals, and setting out to find them.

Now, I find, is five times better.

 

Richard Holinger

Richard Holinger’s books include Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences (Dreaming Big), a collection of humorous essays about surviving life in suburbia, and North of Crivitz (Kelsay Books), poetry focusing on the Upper Midwest, available at richardholinger.net. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in The Southern Review, Witness, Boulevard, and have garnered four Pushcart Prize nominations. Degrees include a Ph.D. from The University of Illinois at Chicago in Creative Writing. Holinger lives an hour west of Chicago in the Fox River Valley. He has been a teacher, security guard, stock boy, busboy, workshop facilitator, and columnist.

Pictographs

January 2022 | poetry

In the desert men

left their red hand prints

in high caves

We climbed to see them

In the arid map-drawn panhandle

men found shadowed crevices

to scratch out figures

of their prey

then self symbols

some magic to catch them?

We trudge and climb

to find them

Our thirsty days lead us

to dry lands

and hidden places  searching

for the reasons that flicker

in the dark recesses of our minds

whisper welcome

to what we seek

even in the heavy silences

of these humid-breathed

and drowsy afternoons.

 

Carol Hamilton

Carol Hamilton has retired from teaching 2nd grade through graduate school in Connecticut, Indiana, and Oklahoma, from storytelling and volunteer medical translating. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has published 17 books: children’s novels, legends and poetry and has been nominated nine times for a Pushcart Prize. She has won a Southwest Book Award, Oklahoma Book Award, David Ray Poetry Prize, Byline Magazine literary awards in both short story and poetry, Warren Keith Poetry Award, Pegasus Award and a Chiron Review Chapbook Award.

Luciana Francis, Featured Author

January 2022 | fiction, nonfiction

Home

nonfiction

As I walk home, I see the back of a picture frame by one of the windows on the second floor. I imagine a lifetime kept in a couple of drawers, someone’s slippers carefully placed under the bed, the folded duvet — I can’t think of the colour. We never know how far far is until we are there. I walk home carrying my backpack and a shopping bag. I have just popped into the supermarket after dropping my son at school. Inside this backpack which I carry with me everywhere, I keep my wallet, the house keys, a pocket kite, and an emergency umbrella.

Most days I’ll buy a treat on my way to pick him up — you know the way children are always ravenous after school. This week it will be a gingerbread man. I am walking home, and this small town has become my ‘hometown’ now, no matter how far it feels. The years, the ocean, it all contributes to this inconclusive equation. It’s my own private epic, this invisible saga where all I have is what’s in me, not what I carry. And what I hold in my arms and tend to on a daily basis is an extension of my seeking; it’s the reward for not staying. It is a strange set up to be born to leave, but that’s how I see it now, our birth being the first departure.

When I was younger I often though of Laika. But it was only when I finally moved to this country at the age of twenty-two that I felt an even deeper connection to her journey; the bewildering clash between innocence and adventure. It became some sort of amusing allegory during my early days as a foreigner, back when I was unfazed by the distance.

I am home now writing this. There’s a pile of laundry on top of the drying rack, waiting. This morning there were doves by the empty bird feeder, waiting. And then some time after that, my son stood by the door with his raincoat on, holding his water bottle and book bag, waiting. We rushed past the puddles born out of the rain that fell overnight, and he ran towards the falling leaves, trying to catch them.

On the way back as I walked past the nursing home. I noticed the picture frame with its back to the road, and next to it, a glass vase with artificial flowers.

 

Feather

fiction

He was sat on a bench as she clutched her bag. They were strangers then. She asked him if he knew the time, he said it did not matter, “this is where we are now”. His name is John and her name is Mary. Years later, a week or so before their daughter’s wedding, John finally tells Mary that that was a lie, that it does matter. Mary does not understand what he means, and so she hugs him, thinking this is about their little girl being all grown up now; about the young couple’s big move abroad.

Mary offers John a coffee but he says nothing. He stands by the window, looking into the distance. “What is there?”, Mary jokes as she hands him the coffee anyway, the steam rising from the cup like a lone feather. And John says, “all these years and I never wanted to think of this, of how this time would come, and how we would find ourselves alone again, almost like strangers.” Mary immediately stops in her tracks as she handed out the cup which John did not see. She begrudges the sign: no one could ever cling to a feather. For a moment Mary considers telling John about the broken pane, and how that particular window is long overdue to be replaced. And the tree which they both can see from where they stand should have been trimmed last autumn, and so they’ll have to wait until November, after the first hard frost. Yes, deadheading and pruning should take place every year after the first frost.

She gathers enough strength to ask him, “how do you mean, ‘almost strangers’?”. John says he wants to book a ticket, he does not know where to; and that he would like to travel and see how far he could go before he came back again. Back again. Mary grabs hold of his words almost the same way she had clutched her handbag all those years ago, when she first laid eyes on him, and asked him the time. She brings the cup to her lips and takes a sip of John’s sugarless coffee, fallen leaves look a lot like feathers, she thought.

 

Luciana Francis

Luciana Francis is a Brazilian-born, UK-based writer of poetry and fiction. She holds a BA (Hons) degree in Anthropology and Media from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work appears in various publications in Brazil, the UK, and the US, including Popshot Magazine, Literary Mama, Minerva Rising, amongst others; her poetry is forthcoming in two anthologies as well as in the print issue of Confingo Magazine. More recently her micro-fiction has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best Short Fiction Awards.

Jeremiah Gilbert

January 2022 | visual art

Luminaria I

 

Jeremiah Gilbert

Jeremiah Gilbert is an award-winning photographer and travel writer based out of Southern California. He likes to travel light and shoot handheld. His travels have taken him to nearly a hundred countries and territories around the globe. His photography has been published internationally, in both digital and print publications, and has been exhibited worldwide, including in Leica’s LFI Gallery. His hope is to inspire those who see his work to look more carefully at the world around them in order to discover beauty in unusual and unexpected places. He is the author of the collection Can’t Get Here from There: Fifty Tales of Travel and the forthcoming From Tibet to Egypt: Early Travels After a Late Start. He can be found on Instagram @jg_travels

Toward a New Era

January 2022 | poetry

The old era smelled rotten

like rancid motor oil. On the horizon,

machinations of gods

 

rumbled like impending darkness,

releasing missing letters

and links upon the world

 

to spell the message:

The world is collapsing.

What are you looking for?

 

In response we extracted

warped notes from musicals

like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 

 

injecting them into mirrors

so we could watch them transform

into red, malignant storms.

 

We were always singing ballads

of stolen adulthood

and curtailed childhood

 

until we learned how to make

enchantments from broken strands

and release songs of judgment

 

and decay, wearing necklaces

the wind did not finish. Underground,

skeletons of horses and dogs

 

pulsed like phosphorescent ghosts.

We danced with them in the basement,

tuning in to radio static that crackled

 

under a dangling bulb, mercury everywhere.

Strings of little lights burned all night,

coating our tongues bright gold.

 

Susan Michele Coronel

Susan Michele Coronel is a New York City-based poet and educator. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including Spillway 29,The Inflectionist Review, Gyroscope Review, The Night Heron Barks, Prometheus Dreaming, One Art, Funicular, TAB Journal, Ekphrastic Review, and Passengers Journal. In 2020, she received a Parent Poet Fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. This year, she received a Pushcart nomination and was a first runner-up for the Beacon Street Prize. She recently completed a manuscript of her first book.