Cindy Wheeler, Featured Author

January 2026 | poetry

The Desire to Sink

It was, for the first twenty-four an anvil. No, a dozen anvils pressing me into the hotel bed. I was glad for them, hoping they might press me into nothingness, where I thought you might be. In my dream I decorated them with flowers and snot. When I woke up, they began to float up and away. I wanted to scream don’t leave me, but a sock had been stuffed into my mouth while I slept. I got out of the bed. I discovered one sad anvil attached to my ankle with a rattling death chain. I had to stay in my pajamas because I couldn’t get my pants off.  I got on the elevator, went down to the breakfast buffet. I worried the clanking of the chain would disturb the hotel guests. I worried no one but me could hear the clanking. I ate bacon straight from the steam table vat. The grits made me too sad. I worried that I might begin to wail and the men in their zip up fleece PGA Master’s tournament vests would call security. I was vibrated back to a sort of reality when the hospital called to say your body was on the move across Charleston. The next hour I entered the memory maze, where I will be lost for years, counting the seconds between your last breaths. Walking in circles around the hotel pool- eighty-six thousand four hundred one, eight-six thousand four hundred two. The anvil and chain made a slow dragging rhythm. When I looked up, I saw you brother, looking down from the roof top bar, lingering angel drinking a vodka on the rocks. Your new ghost liver works just fine. You shouted CAREFUL! Watching me teeter around the edge, knowing well the dangers of the deep end and the desire to sink.

Cindy Wheeler

Cindy Wheeler spent 25 years working as a songwriter and touring rock musician, founding the critically acclaimed bands Pee Shy and The Caulfield Sisters, and releasing three studio albums, multiple EPs, and singles with Mercury Records and American Laundromat Recordings.  A recording of her poem “Things You Do on Your Knees” appeared on the album “LIP-The CD With a Big Mouth” alongside poets Eileen Myles, Anne Waldman, and Exene Cervenka. And a recording of her poem “Knee Jerk” appeared on spoken word compilation- “What’s the Word” -alongside the work of musician/songwriters Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys) and Alan Vega (Suicide). Most recently, her haiku “Covid-Ku” appeared in the “The Best Haiku of 2022 International Anthology” (Haiku Crush).  New poems will appear in SoFloPoJo (South Florida Poetry Journal) later this year.  For the last 8 years, she has studied at The Writers Studio in New York, working with the founder, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz, and was part of his Master Class for 3 terms. She is currently working on a manuscript. She is co-owner of the beloved New York City vintage clothing institution Beacon’s Closet and considers herself a modern-day ragpicker. She lives happily in Brooklyn, New York, with what some might say are far too many cats.

Holly Redell Witte

January 2026 | fiction

Phoebe Sneezed and Smelled Bacon

Phoebe sneezed and smelled bacon.  “What is this?” Nobody else was home and hadn’t been for four days so it couldn’t be a lingering smell.  It was distinct.  Bacon.

“I’m gonna look this up,” she said aloud to herself.  It should be understood that Phoebe talked a lot to herself. You might say it was a function of being older and living alone, but that wouldn’t be true.  She had always talked to herself, rather enjoying the conversations.

Funny, because when she sat down to write, she didn’t transcribe the words in her brain. Instead, she saw a picture and just wrote down what was happening.  Sometimes it was a still.  Sometimes, an actual movie.  Even her dreams, back in the day when she had them every night and remembered them.  She was pretty sure she still had them, just that trauma made her unable to recall more than a dozen over the past twenty years.

But smelling bacon.  This was new.  She had always had a great nose and would often detect things that people around her said they didn’t smell.  She had always thought she was catching a whiff of something on a draft of air blowing in from somewhere.  Sometimes she would speculate from where and write a little story.

But that was when she lived in the midst of a family and there were the usual comings and goings of busy people.  Now, Phoebe recognized the responses of a solitary older person, and a certain tendency toward hypochondria.  As soon as she had a twinge or a twist that was even the slightest tad unusual, she was sure she had something.

The sneeze smell.  She went to Google, surprised to find answers to her exact query What does it mean when you sneeze and then smell bacon?  “This is too easy,” her skeptical self verbalized.  The dog was in the room so she looked over toward the sweet creature.  “How could it be a thing that people might smell bacon when they sneeze?  This has to be a tailored AI response.”

Still, she kept reading and discovered a condition called phantosmia where people do become aware of scents after a sneeze.  “Ooh, I love the word.”  The dog paid little attention.

Faithful Google went on to tell her that it was probably meaningless, a chance triggering of some olfactory nerves.  “How do they come together to smell like bacon?” she asked the screen.  Scrolling informed her it could be a symptom of a seizure if it didn’t go away in a couple of days.

“Hmmm,” Phoebe said.  “Do I have some sort of precondition for a seizure?  Okay, I know what I’m doing, I’m speculating about all the things that happen to old people and assuming I am minutes away from something catastrophic.  Well, maybe not minutes, but soon enough.”

“If I have a stroke, it better be the kind that kills me right away.”

The bacon smell disappeared.  “Too bad,” she said. “I like bacon.”

 

Holly Redell Witte

Holly Redell Witte has been writing and publishing in newspapers and magazines for years. Turning to fiction in the last five years, she has been published in Blood+Honey, Screamin Mamas, Sudden Flash, the Red Wheelbarrow Anthology, An Unsuspected Place, and a forthcoming anthology benefiting victims of the LA fires. She workshopped her short fiction and a novel at the Yale Writers’ Workshop, 2023 and ’24.

Holly Willis

January 2026 | visual art

Desert Senna November 1 - Holly Willis

Desert Senna November 1

Desert Brittlebrush - Holly Willis

Desert Brittlebrush

Holly Willis

Holly Willis is a writer and photographer who moves between Maine and California, exploring landscape, color, movement, and material, using both old, analog technologies as well as new digital tools. Her writing includes poetry and lyric essays, and her photographs explore the relationship between the earth’s elements and imagery.