It’s Ungodly Cold in Kahramanmaraş

January 2024 | Best of Net nominee, nonfiction

When I google Turkey earthquake photos, I find a man sitting amidst broken concrete slabs, holding the hand of his daughter, her body sandwiched between mattress and pancaked upper floors. Her hand is smooth and white, spared from the broken and slid. Her palm is open— an invitation. The pink sheet too spills off the bed, the way she’d slide off each morning, sleepy-eyed, following smells into the kitchen, her chair across from his. His other hand is in his pocket. Men dig around him with bare hands. His stare barely touches upon their movements, the sunsets and sunrises that will come and go.

I zoom into his vacant stare. And I am sixteen, with too many theater friends piled in my car. We sit at a red light in awe of the pink and orange sunset silhouetting the mall. In the next lane, a woman stares ahead, unsmiling, haggard. We bang on our windows and yell until she hears our muted cries through glass and turns, confused, awakened. We wildly point and shout Look. At. The. Sunset! until she understands. And when she sees it, she smiles. We pulse with victory, changing the world one soul-less adult at a time! All the empties that walk the earth— those who’ve forgotten to notice.

Caroline N. Simpson

Caroline N. Simpson’s chapbook, Choose Your Own Adventures and Other Poems, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. In 2020, Delaware Division of Arts awarded Caroline an Established Artist Fellowship in Poetry, and she has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize in both poetry and nonfiction. carolinensimpson.com

Tracey Dean Widelitz

January 2024 | visual art

Fairy Tales Do Come True

Tracey Dean Widelitz

Tracey Dean Widelitz is a published writer, poet and photographer. She is the author of the published children’s book A Heavenly World. Her personal experience of pet loss would later become her first children’s book A Heavenly World. Her poetry has been published in Wingless Dreamer’s Dreamstones of Summer, Dawn of the Day, Whispers of Pumpkin, My Cityline, Field of Black Roses, The Black Haven and My Sanskriti In Teal, and Rhapsodies of Rhyme Anthologies, and she was the Grand Winner of Wingless Dreamer’s Dreamstones of Summer Poetry Contest and one of the top finalists in Field of Black Roses Poetry Contest 2022. Her photographs appear in Months to Years Winter 2022 edition, Camas Winter 2021 edition literary magazines, Tiny Seed Literary Journal July 10th, 2022 and October 4th, 2022 Blog and print Anthology edition, Burningword Literary Journal April 2022 literary journal, Poet’s Choice “A Taste of Reality” Anthology, Wild Roof Journal Issue 20 May 2023, Las Laguna Art Gallery February show Captured (Photography) 2022-Online Edition, March 2022 Online Exhibition Landscapes or Seascapes, April 2022 Online Exhibition “Light & Shade” and April 2023 “2023-Women In Art” Online Exhibition. Visit her website at https://www.traceydeanwidelitz.com Twitter @tracey_author Instagram @traceydeanwidelitz.com and @aheavenlyworld

A Persistence of Cormorants

January 2024 | poetry

I live near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal,

a toxic and fetid tidal estuary from its salted

harbor mouth to its abrupt industrial end.

It is my pixel of wilderness in the city.

 

Tonight I heard the night heron quawk—

Thought it was a ghost. Flight is silence,

a glimpse of white on the wing, a memory

out of reach, the perfect shadow.

 

Cormorants hunt the same water by day

They do not perch. They paddle low

in the water, wings cupped to torso,

eyes up, sudden arch, minimal ripple.

 

Disappear into the murky green.

The plunging pursuit of prey propelled

by black webbed feet. What persistence

it must take to hunt in such dismal silt.

 

Poets know the tired metaphor of truths

that lie beneath the surface. Know the patient

wait to snatch a glimpse of glimmer. But

to swim, to hunt in our turbid psyches,

 

where madness lurks, or doubloons wait,

takes a persistence of cormorants.

 

Gerald Wagoner

Gerald Wagoner, author of When Nothing Wild Remains, (Broadstone Books, 2023), and A Month of Someday, (Indolent Books, 2023) says his childhood was divided between Eastern Oregon and Cut Bank, Montana, where he was raised under the doctrine of benign neglect. Gerald has lived in Brooklyn, NY since 1982. He exhibited widely and taught Art & English for the NYC Department of Education. 2018: Visiting Poet Residency Brooklyn Navy Yard. 2019, 2021-23: Curator/ host of A Persistence of Cormorants, an outdoors reading series by the Gowanus Canal. 2023 April, Poets Afloat Mini-Residency, Waterfront Barge Museum. Education: U of Montana, BA Creative Writing, 1970, SUNY Albany, MA & MFA Sculpture Selected Publications:  Beltway Quarterly, BigCityLit, Blue Mountain Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Night Heron Barks, Ocotillo Review, Right Hand Pointing, Maryland Literary Review.