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.
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.
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.
