Jim Ross

July 2021 | visual art

Never Apart

 

Jim Ross

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in six years he’s published nonfiction, poetry, and photography in over 150 journals and anthologies on four continents. Publications include 580 Split, Bombay Gin, Burningword, Columbia Journal, Hippocampus, Ilanot Review, Lunch Ticket, The Atlantic, The Manchester Review, and Typehouse. Recent photo essays include Barren, Kestrel, Litro, New World Writing, So It Goes, and Wordpeace. A nonfiction piece led to a role in a documentary limited series. Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals on the front line and grandparents of five preschoolers—split their time between city and mountains.

Jean Wolff

July 2021 | visual art

BluePenwithYellowDwg3

 

Jean Wolff

Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally. In addition, she has published 111 works in 77 issues of 52 different magazines. Born in Detroit, Michigan, she studied fine arts at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, receiving a BFA in studio arts. She then attended Hunter College, CUNY in New York, graduating with an MFA in painting and printmaking. She is now part of the artistic community of Westbeth in Manhattan.

Tell Me Who I Am

July 2021 | poetry

Some days I don’t recognize myself—when

I step from the shower and catch a glimpse

of my face clouded with steam

 

and all I have from all of my yesterdays is

a smudge on an old polaroid—as if a pair of bees

could remember themselves out of honeycomb,

 

having fallen to the ground—I don’t know

who I am, not just the story of who I am—

the secrets I need answers to are watching

 

from the cedar-limbs by a pair of blackbirds

hidden in snow.  Even the cupboards could hold

a gentle sheen or a soft glow, as if

 

a chain of memories could be mended, once

broken, when the moonlight pierces the reeds

and paints the sea the muddled green of grief.

 

If I chose to tread through this endlessness,

I’d start to imagine waves crashing and then

slowly molding a long white beach—

 

How do we hold ourselves against the abyss?

 

 

Eric Stiefel

Eric Stiefel is a Cuban-American Ph.D. candidate at Ohio University, though he received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where he also served as the 2017-2018 Junior Poetry Fellow. Eric was named the winner of the 2018 Sequestrum New Writer Awards and a finalist in the 2018 Penn Review Poetry Prize and the 2020 Third Coast Poetry Contest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Apple Valley Review, Prism Review, The Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere.

Dormant

July 2021 | nonfiction, Pushcart nominee

I circumambulate Mt. Rainier, tallest of the Cascade volcanoes. My friends come and go for different legs of the journey. They take away my dirty socks and supply the next days’ food. Everything is calculated— 93 miles in 9 days, the weight of my gear, the calories of my food. It is summer and I am between teaching. I won the lottery. You can only circle this volcano if you’ve won. I’ve been given a gift— being able to skirt danger at rest. I walk clockwise, its summit in view over my right shoulder. For days, I put one foot in front of the other, one thought spilling into the next.

I am 16, driving for night-hours in my white mini-van on country roads truncated by suburbia. My friends and I sing Dylan, Joplin, and The Doors. We belt “White Rabbit” until catharsis strips our vocal chords and empties us of everything that was misunderstood by day.

Beside the volcano, I catch up with each of these friends in my head—I haven’t seen them in years—before dropping them off one by one. I pull up to my house and kill the engine, abruptly putting an end to Dylan’s raspy drawl. I look up at my house looming still and dark as if my newfound hollowness conjured up the dreams that cradle my brother’s schizophrenia and the sleep that holds my parents’ silence.

Who knew then that someday I’d be 36, circling a volcano, thinking of the smoke rising from my childhood chimney and oak leaves backlit by streetlamps? Of the way my house appeared at the top of a hill, like a fortress, on those late nights?

The crater steams from vents that lead deep into the earth. The hot air sculpts ice on its way to the surface. I never asked when the last eruption was, or when the next might be. I imagine phantom rumblings in my solar plexus.

I cross bridges over icy rivers. I look into heads of glaciers slithering down valleys, ancient snakes so cold against the warm emptiness below. I walk among the purple larkspur and yellow lilies blooming atop the volcano’s fingers. I am at home beside a mountain that can gut itself at any moment.

 

Caroline N. Simpson

Caroline N. Simpson was a 2020 Delaware Division of Arts Established Artist Fellow in Poetry. Her chapbook, Choose Your Own Adventures and Other Poems, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. She has thrice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, both in poetry and nonfiction, and in 2013, a collection of her poetry won Honorable Mention in Hot Street’s Emerging Writers Contest. She teaches high school English at the Tatnall School in Wilmington, DE, and has taught at international high schools in Turkey and Spain. You can follow her at carolinensimpson.com.

On Frairy Street

July 2021 | poetry

She peels gum from the sidewalk,

pops it in her mouth, ignores the grit.

There is some sweetness left.

 

Skip and chew, skip and chew,

she gloats to herself—sure that none

of her siblings had gum today.

 

She once heard her mother say—

Don’t ever swallow gum or it’ll stay

in your stomach for seven years.

 

Seven plus seven—I’ll be fourteen then.

 

* * *

 

Tonight for dinner, again they pick

dandelions in the backyard, catch

crayfish from the brook.

 

She eats the bitter salad. Refuses the meat.

For dessert—she retrieves her gum

from beneath the table.

 

The sweetness is gone.

She thinks of another place to stick it—

on a park bench, the apple tree trunk,

 

the tar-coated telephone pole—

because she can’t swallow it.

She just can’t.

 

Seven years is a long time.

 

Lisa J. Sullivan

Lisa J. Sullivan holds an MFA in Poetry from the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program at Pine Manor College, where she was a Kurt Brown Memorial Fellow. Her work has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Comstock Review, Puckerbrush Review, and elsewhere. Her ekphrastic piece “To the Bog of Allen” was selected as the United States Winner of the 2013 Ireland Poetry Project contest in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets. She is an associate editor for Lily Poetry Review Books and a poetry editor for Pink Panther Magazine.