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WEST TEXAS
Literary
Review
Issue 6, June 2018

West Texas Literary Review
Issue 6, June 2018
ISSN 2573-7821
© 2018 West Texas Literary Review

Board of Editors
Brandon Beck
Editor-in-Chief
Matt Stefon
Poetry Editor
Jennifer Beck
Essay Editor
Joel Page
Fiction Editor
Readers
Helen Liggett
Chhunny Chhean

Table of Contents
POETRY
Lisa Bellamy
God is an Old Pear ............................................................... 3
Ace Boggess
More Thoughts after Visiting the Closed-Down
West Virginia Penitentiary at Moundsville ......................... 4
Eric Chiles
Calendar ............................................................................... 5
Darren Demaree
Poem for Katie, Queen of Ohio #47 ................................... 6
William Doreski
Empire Diner ........................................................................ 7
Andrew Dugan
Lightboat ............................................................................... 8
Robert Eastwood
United Artists Theatre, L.A. ................................................ 9
Kelsi Folsom
Waiting Tables .................................................................... 10
Chad Foret
Boil ...................................................................................... 11
Manda Frederick
Hunter’s Daughter ............................................................. 12
Leonore Hildebrandt
Blood Moon ....................................................................... 13
Jack Kristiansen
Painting with Bosch in Mind ............................................. 14

Lavinia Kumar
Carrigaline Cemetery ......................................................... 16
Mercedes Lawry
The Fall of Rose ................................................................. 17
Mitchell Nobis
Air Show ............................................................................. 18
James Owens
Scythe ................................................................................. 19
Kate Peper
Cut Offs ............................................................................. 20
Kenneth Pobo
I See Her Today ................................................................. 21
Ronald Stottlemyer
Nightfall ............................................................................. 22
Colette Tennant
Like a Married Couple Lapsed into Bickering .................. 23
S.A. Volz
Butterfly Nets and Whiffle Ball Bats ................................. 24
Peter Waldor
Last Suppers ....................................................................... 25
Brian Whalen
Est. 1929............................................................................. 26
Beth Williams
Eating Laurices ................................................................... 27
Erin Wilson
Ecology ............................................................................... 28

SHORT FICTION
Rick Krizman
Spring Melons .................................................................... 31
Irene Meklin
The Dress ............................................................................ 33
Kemal Onor
The Fire Dancer ................................................................. 34
Chloe Williamson
Haunted House .................................................................. 36
ESSAYS
Grant Ingram
West .................................................................................... 41
Tanyo Ravicz
Sea Lion .............................................................................. 44
Harvey Silverman
Eulogy ................................................................................. 51
PHOTOGRAPHY
Dallas Crow
Zumwalt Barn ..................................................................... 29
Dom Fonce
This Woman ....................................................................... 55
Amy Kotthaus
Sorrel .............................................................................. cover
Erin Schalk
Strongroom ........................................................................... 1
Ristas ................................................................................... 39
AUTHOR PROFILES ............................................................. 57

God is an Old Pear
LISA BELLAMY
At midnight, I wander barefoot
into the cold kitchen.
My beloved sleeps, but I
stop myself from waking him.
I know I will not rest tonight—
I have been awful. Dawn
to dusk, I had a stone in me,
instead of heart and lungs.
Opening the fridge, I see
a greenish-brown pear.
Cupping it in my hand,
curious if it is still
soft, I kiss its mottled skin.
-3-

More Thoughts after Visiting the Closed-Down
West Virginia Penitentiary at Moundsville
ACE BOGGESS
Ghosts the guide discusses like memories—
who’s to say what’s psychic photograph,
what paranormal, spirit orb, ectoplasm, rust?
The dead remember the dead.
The dead hum dirges for themselves,
chant litanies, adding their names to the list.
The state’s impenetrable warehouse
now a shrine to retribution—is it haunted
from more than nine hundred murders,
or what claustrophobia we, free guests,
smuggle into ominous lines of cells?
When the façade of brown so Gothic & vast
comes into view, we focus, fail to notice
the looming Native burial mound
across the street—the one for which this town
was named, why no cartographer instead
inked Prisonton, Consburg, or Murderville
on a map along the Highway of Lost Souls.
-4-

Calendar
ERIC CHILES
The foreman’s office occupied
the front end of the equipment
trailer, wooden steps leading
to a scavenged door - inside
blueprints on a sawhorse table,
a couple folding chairs, always
a girlie calendar on the wall.
Billy gleamed when he showed
her off. Wouldn’t ya want
a piece of that, he’d ask, patting
her legs, the name Coleman’s
Lumber across the top of June’s
thirty days in the year 1966.
Don’t the stain give her a nice tan?
Outside, the frame of the bible
church rose from the mud, stacks
of two by fours and plywood golden
in the morning sun. It was 9 a.m.
coffee break, and we gathered
to break bread and praise Billy’s
handiwork in silent disbelief.
-5-

Poem for Katie, Queen of Ohio #47
DARREN DEMAREE
I have filled your nursery
with blooming flowers,
so that when you’re born
in March they will have left
only the scent of once
beautiful, of once attached
to roots that fed that beauty.
It will be unpleasant
at first. We’ll remove all
of the dead flowers
once you’re born. These rituals
are important to me.
-6-

Empire Diner
WILLIAM DORESKI
In the gloss of stainless steel
we fondle menus and consider
what color wine will flatter
your grape-colored eyes. Neither
red nor white but something tawny,
richer than plonk, riper than brandy,
something to meld the classic
architecture of the diner
with your post-industrial gaze.
The diner’s too chic to last.
In ten years it’ll disappear,
scorching another raw spot
into Manhattan, which suffers
its open wounds in silence.
But now the menus flutter
like fledglings; and the wine list,
although it doesn’t name you,
consigns itself to the memory
of your Art Deco expression,
flattering to self and other.
-7-

Lightboat
ANDREW DUGAN
I’ll hold this place
for you while we
wait out the squall.
I’ll be here
as the waves
become needles
rising over the gunwale
that inject cold
and salt and alone.
I want you warm
while I keep the growing
swells at bay. I’ll wait
for some wandering bark
to pass by and listen
for news of you, for I have
lost the use of my eyes.
I burn dimly through
mist and hold the ocean
floor with huge arms
anchored by long fingers.
A hermit crab has taken
up residence in the scar
near my elbow from ages
ago when I could still
bend it. Do you notice
as you pass? Do you see
these arms when you dive
down? Do you know
where I am when
the sun returns?
-8-

United Artists Theatre, L.A.
ROBERT EASTWOOD
We stood in a line, curled from the theatre
around the corner of Olympic,
stretched into smoggy gloam of a summer evening.
“King Kong” on the marquee—lighting promise
as lights would dazzle from a rescuing ship.
My friend James had been here before,
had seen “Gone With The Wind” & “Rear Window,”
& now we waited in line for an old ’33 movie.
Inside’s ornate as an old castle in Spain, he said,
naked boobs in the corners. Across the street faint
paint on bricks up fifty feet advertised cigars.
“Best on Eternity Street.” That’s what Broadway was
long ago, James said, because it led to a cemetery.
I had then another awareness—which joined
a string of similars that suddenly dawned on me
at sixteen—that nothing lasts forever.
Nothing is eternity. Where that Packard sits at the curb
was once dirt, & before that, a river,
or bed of an ocean, & cigars by the millions have been
turned at the end of a hand into smoke.
-9-

Waiting Tables
KELSI FOLSOM
I watch as beans from Ka’anapali
crumble into coarse sand.
4 Tablespoons are leveled off,
saturated with water just shy of boiling.
Honeywheat bloom sends me smiling towards my guests.
“Give it about 4 minutes
then press the plunger.
Enjoy your coffee.”
I walk away proud
of my confidence,
proud of my skill
to present and instruct.
I straighten my name
printed on plastic
and re-tuck the denim
slipping out
of black cotton.
“Order up!”
pulls my ear to the kitchen,
but I pause
as his stare finds a way
to un-tuck
what I’ve just done.
I fetch the slimy scramble
and the sweet, steaming pancakes,
Careful not to burn my fingertips
or linger at the counter.
-10-

Boil
CHAD FORET
Uncle opens shoebox,
empties two mantises
onto a rusted tailgate.
We prop ourselves
against the scrap,
watch them try
to eat each other,
sweating in the shade.
Celery, lemon & onion
nod & disappear.
A crawfish escaped
& navigates blades
of Bermuda grass.
Circling, insects
sound like eyes
being wiped
in the dark.
-11-

Hunter’s Daughter
MANDA FREDERICK
Child, pay attention
because one day you will need to know:
if open thighs were snares,
pale twists of hollow milkweed noosed
from hip to heel, you may just
catch him (in the act), because
even a naked snare will choke the air
around whatever lays too close.
But thighs are not snares
and at the heart of every trap is this:
a depressed trigger,
a masked human scent,
a treacherous space that closes faster
than a hand over a mouth.
-12-

Blood Moon
LEONORE HILDEBRANDT
tonight the moon is bandaged
burned by degrees
I step out of my house
to see
under the same moon
tonight your town is weeping
the slender tower shatters and falls
market stalls are closed tonight
the plaza’s lanterns die
one by one
the woman with the flowers
the milk boy
all gone
tonight your house
rips open
the sofa stares dumbly into the street
you walk away
you carry a sleeping child
a darker air tonight sweeps
over rivers and highways
tonight you walk
you follow a map of limb and shadow
this way, you say
it’s here
I step out of my house tonight
to see
-13-

Painting with Bosch in Mind
JACK KRISTIANSEN
after Pieter Bruegel’s Triumph of Death
“Pieter, what do people need?”
Bosch hovers beside you,
commenting on you work,
agreeing people need to see
the omnipresence of death:
This morning two hounds
running down a naked man;
this afternoon you’ve finished
an emaciated dog
licking the neck of a baby
who may or may not be dead;
the mother, one arm
still circling the child,
lies face down in the dirt.
“Perfect—” Bosch observes,
“that faceless woman,
the ribcage of that cur.
Isn’t it intriguing
how a lingering focus
on the down-to-earth
does as well as the nightmare
of hardworking skeletons
in bringing hell to sight?”
Your day’s work done,
you clean your brushes,
hoping to leave the spirit
of Bosch in your studio
-14-

and, oblivious to dying,
pass the winter evening
in the company of your wife,
whom you sometimes need.
Tomorrow the precise work
of an everyday shovel
atop a wagonful of skulls.
-15-

Carrigaline Cemetery, near Kinsale
LAVINIA KUMAR
It was in the cemetery
on the way to Cork
up the hill filled with weeds,
I tripped over brambles,
was stung by nettles.
Beyond the cemetery, the museum,
the shoes of Patrick Cotter O’Brien –
eight foot Kinsale man,
borne by fourteen strong men,
to his grave in lead coffin
(to deter body-snatchers;
who broke it by and by).
Below, the harbor, the great stones
framed what my mother loved –
water in still allure, the blue, brown
dories shaping the slow shadows
she drew and painted for us.
-16-

The Fall of Rose
MERCEDES LAWRY
Rose fell apart last night
while I slept. Petals dropped
in clumps, I expect, not singly.
Rose was done, fed up,
tired of having me admire her pretty face
while stuck in a canning jar
on the table of disarray, which
might have been interesting if Rose
was a reading sort of flower.
Not to mention ideal TV viewing.
I admit Rose has the right
to call it quits, and perhaps preferred
to shed her glory without my eyes
widening in dismay, as if I’d loved her,
truly loved her, which I did.
I think so, I tried at least. Oh,
Rose, I’m not ready to part, your petals
still here, in the small blue bowl,
pink and blushing. Do not fear.
I won’t banish you to potpourri,
but rather sift you with coffee grounds,
spent bluebells, and shards of eggshell,
to return to the earth and feed another rose
I may not love so wildly, though roses
can be so beguiling.
-17-

Air Show
MITCHELL NOBIS
Outside the window
maybe 20 feet away at most
two birds
starlings I think
flew right at each other I mean
right at each other
and at the last second
like ½ oz. Blue Angels both
turned 90 degrees on a center axis
in an instant
and zipped by each other
their bellies not an inch apart.
Not even one inch.
On they flew, unflappable, into the dim fireworks of
the light grey rain
And I inhaled, checked my watch, and leaned back farther,
balancing now oh so precariously
on the chair’s two rear legs,
living.
-18-

Scythe
JAMES OWENS
My father fought incursions of pigweed, bindweed,
and purple loosestrife. As the blades of lesser tools
thinned and snapped from use, he repaired hoes
and hatchets and spades and released them to any hand,
but the scythe was his alone, a man’s deadly implement
that, swung stupidly, would open a leg to the wet bone.
It glowered from its pegs on the shed wall,
shaft crooked to ease the work, cracked from weather,
handles polished as pleasurable as skin with the oils
of labor. The dark crescent of steel glinted
along its edge in the dimness, attractive but forbidden
for boys prone to stumble in their ignorant gravity.
I remember plain work done as it should be done,
the hand’s or eye’s love for the angle tapped true,
the clean hole dug square, the measured cut.
He sat cross-legged at the base of a slope too steep
and rock-bound for machines and plied a file in curt
strokes that raised a new sharpness on the blade.
Then up, leaning into his own spun center, a wide-elbowed,
flow-hipped rhythm that snicked stems an inch
above the soil, the scythe seemingly as without effort
as light bending through water, he laid thistles and briers
in long swathes, to be raked in mounds and to dry
for the sweet smoke of fires that marked the cleared ground.
-19-

Cut Offs
KATE PEPER
A grease spot and a puff of feathers
where a bird had hit the window.
All that’s left is a leg and claw
curved into an ampersand
that once linked bird to tree and nest.
It lies in my hand unfastened
to anything.
I bury it.
Finally! I was ready to let them go,
she laughs as she tells me
why they cut off her legs.
Black Things. Useless.
Now she sits in her wheeled throne,
smiling, a nurse plumping her pillow.
I imagine her shoes swept
into a garbage can.
Her legs burning to ash.
She will never again feel her weight
on this earth.
On her birthday, she danced
in a tiered skirt—a fan flaring
under string lights.
I remember her voice pitched
above the music, I’m traveling!
Where?, we asked.
Anywhere there’s a beach
to walk on!
I cut her jeans to shorts,
wishing I could scissor every loss.
-20-

I See Her Today
KENNETH POBO
Leaden since Tuesday, the sky
waits for the sun to push
fire-hairy arms through
a budding pussy willow. Clouds
give way to a blue spreading
across our brown yard,
a trellis with dead morning
glories pressed to it. Before
mom died she asked for
pussy willows. They arrived a week
too late. I see her today,
in a babushka, walking out
to the bush, the tallest branches
ten feet above her head,
spring still seven weeks away,
her steps lost to snow
and bitter winds.
-21-

Nightfall
RON STOTTLEMYER
So dark now, this time,
weighing us down—peonies drooping
along the shaded sidewalk.
Over there in the city park,
a couple is swinging under the streetlight,
breath floating out, then plunging down,
ground springing back up again.
Farther north, thunder breaks free
as the blue ice cracks open the horizon.
In the slow sundown, no one hears
anything. The swing is still.
The couple walks off into the night.
Unseen, each galaxy spins emptiness
around its tilted clock face. Unimaginable,
the speeds, the light swept away.
-22-

Like a Married Couple Lapsed into Bickering
COLETTE TENNANT
the two crows in the cottonwood out back
just squawk to squawk some days
or sit on the wire running parallel to the road,
one facing north, one facing south.
If they were writers,
one would be left-handed
just to spite the right hander.
But there was that one day
the gray hawk flew in solemn circles
that narrowed toward their nest.
They were soldiers then,
pledged to an allegiance
only they could love,
their wings, their black rage outrageous
toward talons dark with hunger
deep as nameless night.
-23-

Butterfly Nets and Whiffle Ball Bats
S.A. VOLZ
Shoes streaked with the smear of dandelion,
the boys dart through the yard with butterfly nets
and whiffle ball bats—neighborhood sons not my own,
though I stand at the window and watch.
I think of seasons past—the sun-drenched sky
sinking into a haze of coming twilight
and honeysuckle slithering along the wooden fence,
the vines a tapestry of red and orange and white.
Oh, it was simple enough: Pluck a blossom,
pinch the green end, and pull the stamen.
Let the stem slide across your tongue
as it serves its single drop of sweetness.
The blossoms piled at my feet until the picking
became a problem in the swallowing dark.
Spring turns to summer. The dandelion wrinkles
into a globe of white, wispy filaments
that can be torn by a breeze, a childish breath.
The day is night now, and the boys are shadows—
forms merging, reflected in the window pane.
-24-

Last Suppers
PETER WALDOR
Once when even your mother’s breasts
would not console you, crying, screaming,
I took pity on the others at the old hotel
and in the middle of the night carried you off
into the forest. In a bog we heard a bull frog,
its voice deeper than the deepest baritone’s deepest hum.
After three or four blasts you stopped crying and slept.
And now a few years later, with scalpel
you slice the white belly of a dead frog, pull out
the dark stomach and slice it as well,
and pull out a baby crawdad claw. You hold it up
and test its still good mechanical actions
and poke its tip on your fingertip, in your mind
the image of a rocky shore and the moment
before the last terrible moment and the last
terrible moment and then a man whose face
you cannot see wading in with hip waders,
sweeping the frog up in his net just as it was enjoying
its last supper. He calculates another 75 cents
added to the great but not great enough collection;
and still holding up the claw in the light,
neither of us with any ideas about what happened
to the great spirit that once inhabited it
as it tried to grip everything edible in its path.
Even with your perfect memory you cannot
remember that bull frog five years ago…
he must be big as a wheelbarrow by now and his
bull horn must have knocked down every tree
in a wide circle around him. Now he wakes
everything, except, of course for those deepest
of sleepers after their last suppers.
-25-

Est. 1929
BRIAN PHILLIP WHALEN
we walk down main street estimating
population based on store fronts
old man rope man tree man
I have tried to climb since birth
my father points to a stone engraving
tells me “bad year to start a bank”
-26-

Eating Laurices
BETH WILLIAMS
Pope Gregory said it was okay
to eat fetal rabbits during Lent
because their watery wombs
made them fish, not meat
the most delicate food cut
from an unharmed mother
never baptized at birth
like babies in church
I must be a Pisces, as well my sister
who never stopped swimming
she was killed by a doctor’s
rod and reel
strangers say I’ve a smudge
on my forehead
not knowing the ash
is dust from a breeding doe.
-27-

Ecology
ERIN WILSON
I don’t want to suggest anything outside the image
as it presented itself and so I will try to keep quiet,
except to mention certain facts. It was more than twenty-below
with a harsh north wind, and it was only the beginning of winter.
I had walked out of town on country roads, trying to move beyond
my own personal debris, head down, eyes squinting,
leaking with the wind, until I was arrested.
The black alders, which aren’t black at all but a most
unassuming brown-grey, had pushed out bushels of the ripest
winterberries I’d ever seen, so dazzling against the banks
of snow, I was overcome.
Winterberry, winterberry, winterberry,
my eyes followed the burning bursts of colour
neither hot nor cold (which caused me to inexplicably ache)
left to right, and then rested upon the image in question.
Settled in the crux of a tree—
a pregnant burst of feathers, as brindled brown as
the branches themselves. This entity, let’s refer to it
as ground zero, plucked winterberry after winterberry
from the branches, and swallowed.
Had I not stopped due to the intensity of red
I’d never have noticed the grouse.
Instead, what appeared to be happening
was that the alder bushes,
which had sent forth their red sons and daughters,
were consuming themselves, disappearing their own fruits,
a complete circuit against a white screen.
-28-

Spring Melons
RICK KRIZMAN
“Got your buckets?” Mom asks and of course we do. Of
course we have our buckets, and catchers mitts, and a helmet for
Bitsy because of how she got her noggin popped last time.
She’s too little, I’d said then, but Marcy’d said You used to
be too little, but I said That was before.
We never go anywhere together, the five of us girls and Mom,
at least not since Dad’s gone. But it was him told us about the
spectacular sight, and of course he was right. Like how he’d
showed us the Mystery House where water runs uphill and if you
stood in one place I could be as tall as Janey, even though she’d
shot up two inches last year. Or when he took us to that hole in
the desert where the Big Bear threw down the giant snowball
from way out at the North Star, which Dad said was a pinhole
and the Universe was leaking out, but it’d be fine for now, we’d
all be dead anyway, which made Bitsy cry but she didn’t know
what for. Sometimes he’d hold his hand up in the sky and act
like he was moving a cloud across the sun, but I’m older and
knew it was a trick, that it was the sun doing the moving. But I
didn’t say, because of Cassie, who of course believed everything.
“Okay, hop in,” Mom says, sounding tired, like she doesn’t
want to do this. Of course she’s always tired, since Dad. Maybe
you just get tired eventually. I’m never tired and sometimes I
think whether the tiredness has been spread fairly.
We drive a long ways to the farm and Bitsy cries four whole
times, which Dad would say was a New World Record, which
always happened when he was around. Look, he’d say, three
rainbows, a New World Record, just for example. Or having the
hiccups for so long. Or eating the most ice cream.
We get to the melon field and pile out with our buckets and
baseball gloves, and look across the big heart-shaped leaves with
the tan cantaloupes peeking out under. Dad always said Get
-31-

close, real quiet, and don’t startle them. We tiptoe down the
rows, I’ve got my bucket ready, then Bitsy giggles and we shush
her but too late, and a cantaloupe springs up in the air. Marcy
can’t get it, but she trips in the dirt and another melon flies off
and I chase it with my bucket, but it’s too far, and of course I fall
down too, but then I see cantaloupes flying everywhere,
springing out of the heart-shaped leaves, and we’re all chasing
them and I get one in my bucket, look over at Mom and wave.
But she doesn’t see me, leaning against the car and smoking a
cigarette, looking off at something else.
-32-

The Dress
IRENE MEKLIN
She twirls around in front of the mirror, laughing as the
colors blend into a colorful blur. Her hair is cut short, too short
to move when she twirls, but in her mind’s eye it is a long silky
wave that swings around with every step she takes. She stops
twirling for a moment and gazes at herself in the mirror, feeling
the happiest she’s felt in a long time. She goes over to her
mother’s nightstand and opens it, gazing in wonder at the
treasure inside: makeup. She gently tugs a tube of scarlet red
lipstick out of the drawer, making sure to make no sound. She
wonders how she’d look with it on, and struts over to the mirror,
lipstick clutched in her chubby fingers. She unscrews the cap and
paints some of it onto her lips, her smile so wide that the lipstick
stains her teeth red. She wonders if she should go try some
mascara when her mother storms in, in all her glory, and begins
to yell.
“What are you doing here?” She screams at the cowering girl.
“And what is it that you have on—my dress? My lipstick?” She
stalks over to her and rips off the oversized dress that does not
seem so colorful anymore, instead turning gray and sad as the girl
begins to cry. “No son of mine would…” The girl flinches at the
dreaded word, and the mother’s tone softens. “Go put on some
clothes, Ray.” The girl scurries out of the room, sobbing to
herself. The mother soon follows, casting a last look at the havoc
within, sighs, and closes the door behind her.
The once-beautiful dress sits on the floor, torn, forlorn,
dreaming of some day.
-33-

The Fire Dancer
KEMAL ONOR
Several years ago, I spent the summer working for a carnival.
My position was not so coveted as the clowns with their prat falls
and late-night drunken conversations about life before becoming
a clown. It was also not nearly as impressive as the sword
swallowers or the fire eaters.
That summer, it was my job to put out any fires that were
started by the fire dancer. A woman, whom at the time, I thought
older than me. Her act was mesmerizing. Her tall, thin frame
would spin and jump. The rings on her arms jingling to her
movement. She would spin so fast that the earth-color of her skin
would flash with the fire in her hands. As she spun faster, her
body would create a flower of fire and it would bloom in a
brilliant display, like a silent firework. She would become one
with the glow. Like a wick completed consumed by flame.
It was my job, that should something go wrong, I was to run
out and douse any wayward flame with my fire extinguisher. Most
of the time there was no need for me, and I was able to slip into
a daze. I would ooh and awe with every night’s audience feeling
the incredible thrill of this woman in her deadly dance. After her
act, I would go to my cot and sleep a sweet-dream filled sleep.
Night after night, through the season she continued to draw large
crowds. I became more relaxed in my job.
Then one night, it happened. During the fire toss. The
burning torch did not return to the dancer’s hand. Instead it
rolled down the front of her dress. There was a blaze of fire. The
hiss of a sparkler. She cried out in her Eastern European
language. I almost called for help, forgetting my job entirely for a
precious moment. Then the fire was out. Her dress had a hole in
the spot where the torch had burned it, the edges curled like
burned book paper.
I stayed with her as she was carted from the ring. I sat with
her in the medical tent. The shock had frightened me worse than
-34-

it did her. It seemed odd, finally being so close to this woman.
Without the bright lights on her, she looked no older than a
child. I watched as the doctor took a look at her. She rolled up
her dress, and pointed to the spot where the fire had touched
her. It became apparent that this was not the first time she had
been burned. Soft, pink, charred skin marked her body all over.
She turned her head and there was a mark over her eye that her
hair covered and could not been seen at a distance. I waited with
her. She gave grimaces at the doctor’s touch.
By the time we left the tent, she was in high spirits. We
wandered the carnival together. Most of the big attractions were
over, and clowns were about collecting trash in barrels. It was a
bright night in July. The sky full of stars. We went slowly through
the paths.
“You must be tired,” she said.
“I’m alright. I don’t mind staying up,” I said. That night she
brought me back to her cot. She let me touch her. My hands
running over her skin. Noting each scar and burn through the
years. We slept together that night. The whirr of crickets playing
in the fields coming in through the window. She had a sweet
smell like wild flowers and smoke. Lying with our eyes closed, my
skin pressed against hers. She felt warm, like a fire burned under
her skin.
“I hate fire,” she said.
“Do you?”
“Yes. It does nothing but burn and scar.”
-35-

Haunted House
CHLOE WILLIAMSON
To claim that the house was haunted may have been
something of an exaggeration, but that did not stop Clifford
from putting up the signs. He began with one, along the highway,
a simple hand-painted arrow with plain black lettering. Without
a closer look, one might have assumed that it was an
advertisement for pick-your-own strawberries.
It was October and the pressing heat of the Texas hill
country had begun to let up slightly. In the evenings, he watched
the sun set from the porch. It melted lazily across the horizon.
He stirred sweet tea in his mother’s inherited crystal glasses with
a long-handled spoon but, despite his best efforts, the sugar fell
to the bottom.
The first time it happened, he was surprised by the
physicality of it. As he lay in bed, drifting to sleep, he felt
something sit next to him, depressing the mattress. He turned,
but saw nothing. He did not reach out towards the empty space
for fear of disrupting whatever had joined him.
Next was the newspaper, which he found rifled through on
the kitchen table, the obituary page left conspicuously on top.
There were only two entries: an elderly man and a community
college student, both injured irreparably in the same car crash.
In the mornings when he made coffee it went cold as soon as he
poured it, or stayed hot far too long. He sat on the porch with it
anyway, watching the gradual movement of the shadows cast by
the orange trees in his front yard.
He began to move through his own home hesitantly, leaving
room for the presence that had moved in. He vacuumed the
carpet more frequently. He set the table with the china his
grandmother had brought to Texas from Alabama, stored
painstakingly in the back of her covered wagon. When he
dropped a plate while washing it he cursed, and then apologized,
imagining for a moment his grandmother watching him, steel
-36-

gray hair wrapped tightly against her skull, a look of resolved
disappointment on her face.
He imagined it next as his wife, dead for almost nine years,
and he dug through storage boxes in the closet until he found
the last set of sheets she had picked out for their bed. They were
soft and white, with small botanical diagrams scattered evenly.
He found her perfume, the bottle he had hidden in the bottom
drawer of their dresser, and sprayed it above the bed. The fine
mist settled on his forehead and arms. It reminded him of
magnolias, and the tree-lined streets of his childhood home. That
night though, his bed was empty.
The first group to visit was a couple with two young children.
He offered them water or sweet tea, but the harried father
declined on the part of his family. They seemed relieved when he
assured them that there was no need to pay. The children
tumbled around the house, spooking themselves with the
creaking floorboards. After a few moments, they returned and
tugged at their father’s pants, asking where the ghosts were.
Without an answer, they began to whine. The father looked at
Clifford, equal parts disappointment and apologetic
embarrassment.
The young woman, whose sweat had made dark half-moons
in the yellow fabric under her armpits, pulled him aside. I thought
I heard a baby crying.
There aren’t any babies here that I know of.
It’s just, she looked down, shifting her weight from one foot
to another, I just lost a baby. And then I heard one crying, and her
husband called her and she smoothed her hair, produced a snack
from her bag for the younger of the two children. They were gone
as quickly as they had arrived.
There was the older woman who came alone and said her
husband had made their rocking chair creak in the exact same
way. Then the young man who ran out sobbing after investigating
a tapping sound in the hall closet. They came in uneven spurts,
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sometimes a few at once, strangers following each other’s dusty
rental cars off the highway.
It was more company than he had had in years. Few took
them up on his offers of food and drinks, but he started making
pecan bars anyway. A few months after the visitors began
trickling in, whoever or whatever had been visiting him stopped
doing so. He tried to tempt it back, leaving books open to be
paged through, lighting candles and turning his back on them.
He unzipped the protective bag around his wife’s wedding dress
and ran his fingers gently down the satin-covered buttons. A week
later, he found moths nesting in the lace, chewing uneven holes
in the fabric.
His lack of personal haunting did not seem to deter
whatever it was the visitors found. When they asked him how he
had discovered the house’s miraculous properties he told them,
but with each repetition the story shrank. A thin jealousy began
to creep across the length of his ribs and into his throat as he
watched them.
Winter came and went, and spring arrived. The trees in
nearby pecan orchards grew their drooping green flowers. He
stopped chopping wood for the fireplace. Still, they came: stickyfingered
children and hair-sprayed Dallas realtors and, only once,
another man his age, who sat sadly at the dining table for almost
ten minutes before leaving. He imagined his own ghosts hiding
from the crowds. His grandmother watching primly from the
armchair as a family’s dog relieved itself on the living room
carpet. His wife excusing herself quietly when a trucker began to
talk about bitches.
The people visiting were little more than ghosts to him
either. He listened to their phantom steps through the house
from the kitchen, not wanting to intrude. If they spoke to him,
it was very superficial or very personal: the weather or family
secrets.
-38-

West
GRANT INGRAM
The West. To be sure there are spots around this country
that take the breath away with their beauty. Thoreau on his
Walden Pond wrote about the beauty that he encountered there;
the rawness of the land captured something in him that aroused
his inner spirit to the heights of pureness. Byron poeticized the
Lake District where Ambleside sits on the edge of heaven. Bede
Griffiths claims salvation in an English sunset. I wonder what
these men would have said having had lived their lives in the
West. This place has a penchant for toughness over beauty. The
mesquite and cactus scrub lands of West Texas, the high New
Mexican desert, the high country of the Rockies, the endless
plains of Wyoming and Montana. To the aesthetic, there is some
congruity in these landscapes—each inhospitable in its own way.
Far from the gentleness of Connecticut or Virginia, the land
imposes itself upon those that choose to live west, and in that
resides its beauty. A pioneer spirit still walks out here—the
frontier’s disappearance a fresh lament. At least in this kitchen.
I find that I don’t have many compadres with respect to my
views here. My grandfather raised sheep in Nolan County, Texas
his whole life. I remember his grungy hat of yellow mesh and
denim with a patch on the front reading “CAT diesel power.” I
remember him slapping that damn hat on his thigh yelling
“Hyaw!” while kicking rocks at those poor sheep.
As a kid it seemed like that’s all ranching was—kicking rocks
at sheep and cutting the occasional puss pocket out of a cow that
had gotten too far into a prickly pear. Looking back it’s startling
to me that my granddad may well be the last man I’ll know who
lived a life utterly connected to the land. He was a philosopher
in his own way: the way a lot of the old timers were. That’s going
away now, as are the traditions they kept. But he was prescient in
one respect. Sheep don’t do the business they once did.
Cattle, mythical as they are to the West, were always an
-41-

English bred animal destined to anguish and kill profits in the
summer heat and bitter winters.
Domesticating buffalo would have been a much better idea.
Regardless of the history of it all, kicking rocks may be all that
remains for the ranchers of future generations. Still, the western
wear shops are doing good business, prices for ranch land are
going up and up, people are buying and buying, and it seems that
one of the greatest icons of Americana, the cowboy boot, has
found a home in the hipster kids scene today.
I don’t know exactly why I feel a sense of loss, though I do.
I grew up in a mid-sized city, spent some summers at the ranch
(only for fishing and shooting bottles with the .22—leisure time),
but I still feel a profound sense that something major has cracked
in our society that we, I, don’t have a strong connection with the
land.
“All cattlemen, herdsmen, drovers, men who follow grazing
animals over the land, seeking the grass that nourishes them—
such men, pantheistic by nature, resolutely reject anything that
smacks of the modern world: its politics, its art, its technology.
What they accept, at a profound level, is the cycle of nature, in
which men and animals alike are born, grow old, and die, to be
succeeded by new generations of men and animals. Recycling of
this natural sort does not bother men who live on the land; some
even resent the fact that modern burial practices retard the
process. The notion that they will soon become part of the food
chain doesn’t bother them at all.”
I read this passage tonight in a wonderful book by Larry
McMurtry called Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen:
Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. Maybe he’s got it right. Perhaps
the great schism that I feel is that I’ve become insulated from
being part of that food chain. No longer in today’s society do I
have to worry about food, shelter, basics—no, I’ve been to college,
have a job teaching school, and live in an apartment near
downtown. I’m not, in a very real sense, subject to nature’s
whims. Provided another Katrina doesn’t hit San Angelo, I’ll
-42-

emain much more subject to things like economic instability.
Though I’ve inherited that quality to care very little for today’s
politics, art, and technology, I am much more connected to these
things than I find comfortable. It is the sense of a loss of
something that I never had that runs deep in me. The land under
the western sky leaves me with a sense that I belong to it, though
I’ve never quite figured out how. I do know that I miss the stars
when I’m in the big city. I miss the sunsets over the cotton fields.
I miss the smell of a storm a hundred miles away and watching it
roll across the flat plains.
There’s a rhythm to it all—a feeling that it is as it should be.
Maybe, here in this kitchen, it is that feeling that I miss most of
all.
-43-

Sea Lion
TANYO RAVICZ
Lonny K was already on probation for a felony when he was
photographed shooting at a sea lion. What had begun as a verbal
turf war between him and his neighbors, commercial fishermen
on Kodiak Island’s west coast, had escalated into violence when
Lonny rammed the neighbors’ fishing skiff with his own, a 23-
foot aluminum skiff driven by a 150-horsepower outboard
engine. That’s where the felony comes in, because in the eyes of
the law a moving boat is a lethal weapon.
As a felon Lonny shouldn’t have been anywhere near a
firearm, but there he was shooting his rifle at a sea lion that was
robbing the salmon from his net and tearing holes in the mesh.
Lonny’s setnet, anchored in place and stretching perpendicular
to the beach, was completely vulnerable to the sea lion, but
shooting at a sea lion is a federal crime, and the neighbors, the
ones Lonny had feuded with, snuck over and photographed him
doing it. That’s how Lonny K came to spend the next part of his
life behind bars.
It’s hard to say where a life pivots, where a fateful course of
events is set in motion. Character is one thing, circumstance is
another, and if the one looks inescapable, the other may look
freakish or unfair. People who knew Lonny, friends and family,
thought it was a mistake to have accepted a five-year felony
probation in the first place. “Five years! That’s a long time to stay
out of trouble.” “You better not even have a bullet, Lonny. You’re
a felon. Don’t take your gun to fish camp. They’re watching you.
They’re laying for you.”
All this turned out to be true. “In one ear and out the other,”
his mother Audrey said. Sometimes Lonny drank too much, and
it wasn’t for nothing that he had a reputation for hot-headedness.
Even after the photographs emerged, the ones that showed him
shooting at a sea lion, the Alaskan prosecutors would have
dropped the probation violation if Lonny had been willing to sell
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his commercial fishing rights. They didn’t want him going back
there and stirring up trouble with the neighbors. But the federal
authorities had a different agenda. Lonny’s crime was shooting
at a Steller sea lion, and the feds weren’t interested in doing
anything but making an example of Lonny K. Lonny’s friends
saw the federal government as a massive golden sea lion lunging
out of the water and shaking a salmon in its jaws.
At the Cook Inlet Pretrial Facility in downtown Anchorage,
Lonny and the other arrivals waited in a hot windowless cell, a
foul-smelling hellhole of a cell. To Lonny the place stank worse
than a pack of sea lions. The sweat rolled down his sides and he
was left there to stew for a long time. His ordeal had begun.
His mother Audrey visited him there and she later
remembered the indignities with a bitter shudder. She thought
she would rather die than be locked up like that. Audrey felt sorry
for her son, but he had been given many chances to straighten
out. She was old school in this regard, a law-and-order, takeresponsibility
woman. Lonny had always been a jock, humored
and indulged, and the pattern of indulgence had finally caught
up with him.
Privately Audrey believed that a tendency to alcohol abuse
ran in the genes, on her late husband’s side. But this was no
excuse. Lonny was thirty-four years old. He had time to change
his ways. Pink-faced, square-jawed, handsome, Swedish and
German by blood, and with winning blue eyes, Lonny had looks
that worked magic on certain women, often women who had a
fire-breathing streak of their own. One of these was his girlfriend
Florence, a twenty-two-year-old from one of the island villages.
Privately Audrey had doubts about Florence, who liked to “party
hearty” and who might not be the best influence on her son. But
Audrey didn’t want to hex Lonny by giving up on his judgment.
If he would leave off drinking, if he would wed Florence or
another woman and find room in his heart for God, Lonny could
turn his life around.
For his part Lonny had a single great fear: that his
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grandmother would learn that he was in jail. He was extremely
fond of his grandmother and he begged his mother not to tell
the old woman what had happened.
It was January when Lonny began serving time at the Cook
Inlet Facility, and until his sentencing he was locked up for
twenty-four hours a day except for commissary trips and twice
weekly gym exercise. He was eventually moved to a minimum
security wing where his cellmate was a smalltime drug offender.
In February his sentencing made Kodiak’s newspaper, the Daily
Mirror. The townspeople who didn’t already know Lonny’s story
now read it in the newspaper. Fortunately his grandmother lived
out of state and his secret was safe from her.
For taking potshots at a sea lion Lonny was sentenced to
eighteen months in prison. He had already served two months;
fifty-four days were suspended; leaving him with fourteen
months to serve on the federal charges.
In March Lonny was transferred to a federal prison outside
of Alaska. This happened abruptly and without any notice to his
family. His sister Janice had sent him a letter with an enclosed
religious pamphlet and a picture of Jesus, and the packet was
returned to her undelivered with a note informing her that the
material she had sent was “contraband.” His family worried
about him until they learned that they could write to him at the
Federal Detention Center in Seattle. “Be sure to use the correct
inmate number,” they were told, “or he won’t get the mail.”
Because the move to Seattle happened so abruptly, only a
day after his girlfriend Florence visited him, Lonny suspected
that the authorities relocated him to deprive him of this last
happiness of receiving visits from his girl. He was alone now to
ponder his transgressions. But not really alone. At the Federal
Detention Center in Seattle, Lonny was surrounded by illegal
immigrants and petty drug users. He wasn’t sure how to interpret
this. Did it say something about the relative gravity of his offense?
Did it speak to the efficiency and appetite of the criminal justice
system? “There are so many innocent people here,” he wrote
-46-

home in a letter. And indeed it shocked Lonny that ordinary
people served long sentences for a simple drug possession or a
border violation. Most of them were good people, and he
sometimes thought of them as his roommates, not his cellmates.
By June Lonny was working six days a week for six hours a
day in the prison bakery. The job relieved the tedium of
incarceration, and in his spare time he studied the Bible for selfimprovement.
Fishing was the work he loved most, and this was
the first summer in memory that Lonny didn’t fish. He normally
setnetted for salmon in the summertime, and in the winter he
crabbed for king crab in the Bering Sea. Lonny had always said
that crabbing was a young man’s work and he would quit it after
he turned thirty years old, but he was too fond of living on the
edge—it’s a lucrative thrill, catching crab in the Bering Sea—and
after he turned thirty he kept heading west to the crabbing
grounds. Now in federal custody he fished for nothing.
Back in Kodiak many of Lonny’s colleagues, dismayed by the
bullying tactics of the government, spoke freely on the subject:
“If the people who made the laws were turned out and had
to earn their living fishing, things would come around different.”
“You got that right.”
“Sea lions yank a salmon right out of my hands. They’ll rip
out the stomach and leave the rest. Roll around in the net and
take what they want and leave the fish heads.”
“They get us seine fishermen, too. Swim right into the seine
before we close it. They’ll toss out thirty or forty salmon and go
get ’em. You look in your net and the sea lion got more fish than
you did.”
Kodiak’s fishermen were distinctly unimpressed by the
government’s heavy-handedness in punishing Lonny.
Lonny fished for a couple of seasons after his release from
custody in the spring of the following year. He repaired the bear
damage at his neglected fish camp, and during salmon season he
-47-

deployed a hundred fifty fathoms of moneymaking gillnet. In the
winter he crewed a crab boat in the Bering Sea, as in the past,
but the catch of king crab wasn’t what it used to be. The crabbing
season was shorter than ever, and when he factored in the
required weeks of preparation and cleanup, his paycheck, just
under ten thousand dollars, was a disappointment.
Florence had gotten pregnant in the fall, and their baby
would be due in June when the next commercial salmon season
opened. Ordinarily Florence would have her baby at the Native
hospital in Anchorage, but she decided to stay in Kodiak so that
Lonny would not have to choose between the baby’s birth and
the start of salmon season. If it ever came to a choice, though,
she wondered what choice Lonny would make, and she asked
him. Lonny pondered the question and decided it was a tossup.
He played cool about the prospect of becoming a thirty-sevenyear-old
father, but Flo wanted the baby a lot, and this made him
happy.
Lonny’s sentence included three years of state probation and
six years of federal probation, and as an ex-convict he needed to
pay attention to every rule. Even a fuel seep from his engine filter
could land him in trouble, and Lonny couldn’t afford trouble.
“I’ve got friends where I’m going,” he would say, speaking of his
nemeses on the fishing grounds. Lonny’s supporters, gauging
how his experiences had changed him, noticed that he used the
word “seem” a lot, as if he didn’t quite trust in appearances
anymore. “Seems like it’ll be a nice day today,” he said. Or, “He
seems like a nice guy.”
Not to be caught in a trivial infraction, Lonny used buoy
paint to stencil his boat registration number on the bow of his
fishing skiff. Enforcement of the boat registration rules was
passing from the Coast Guard to the Alaska State Troopers and
a crackdown was expected. As for the sea lions, Lonny refrained
from actively repelling them, but it vexed him that people didn’t
understand the scope of the problem. It wasn’t one or two sea
lions inconveniencing him, it was twenty of them violating his
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net. They were predators. He thought about poisoning them, but
a bevy of dead sea lions washing up on his beach would look very
bad indeed.
Although Lonny was pleased that he hadn’t buckled to the
government’s pressure and sold his fishing rights, the truth was
that Lonny had wearied of fishing. And this was something he
had never believed would happen. The fishing was less
productive than it used to be, and he wasn’t getting younger. He
had long ago dreamed of becoming a high school wrestling
coach, but this dream was impossible for a felon. With a baby on
the way he thought about finding work in the North Slope oil
fields, and he contemplated an apprenticeship in the trade of
heating and air conditioning, but these possibilities lay in the
future. Lonny still had a difficult choice to make before the way
ahead became clear to him.
The commercial salmon season was set to open on the ninth
of June, and in early June Lonny left Kodiak town and headed to
his fish camp to prepare his equipment. Florence, knowing that
the baby was close, broke into tears when Lonny told her he was
leaving. She begged him to stay in town with her, but Lonny’s
fishing instinct was so strong at this time of year that he really
had no choice. He had to go. It was not an easy decision to make,
but he made it.
At three-thirty on the morning after he left, Florence went
into labor. From the hospital she called Lonny on the satellite
telephone, and Lonny got the news and tried to return to town
to be with her, but the weather had changed since he left, with
gale winds blowing and dangerous seas, and Lonny couldn’t get
closer to Kodiak town than the village of Port Lions. Stranded
there during the storm, Lonny missed everything, both the baby’s
delivery and the start of salmon fishing.
“He’ll hear about that one for the rest of his life,” the old
salts in Kodiak say, and they tell Lonny’s story with a laughter
born of a lifetime’s learning. “He made his decision and it was
the wrong decision.”
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This turned out to be the last season of commercial fishing
for Lonny K. Today Lonny lives with Flo and their children in
the Pacific Northwest, far from the fishing grounds of Kodiak,
Alaska.
-50-

Eulogy
HARVEY SILVERMAN
“Optimistic.”
The rabbi’s eulogy was boilerplate. The subject’s name was
inserted but otherwise the comments were recited by rote with a
delivery that lacked any sense of kindness, sympathy, or caring.
Well, the departed had not been a member of the synagogue,
the only one in the small city in which he had lived for nearly
half a century. He may never have met the rabbi. What the rabbi
knew of the late gentleman for whom the eulogy was being given
had come from a conversation with the deceased’s older brother
who similarly was not a member of the synagogue. Perhaps
boilerplate was all that one could expect.
The small sanctuary was filled. The seats were occupied by
family, friends, acquaintances, customers. All sat quietly as the
rabbi continued a description that applied to any generic dead
person. When he described the departed as optimistic I could
not help but figuratively shake my head and think to myself, “No,
you asshole, David was a lot of things but he was not optimistic.”
I was disappointed. But understandable, I supposed. Here
the rabbi had to go through the required steps for somebody he
did not know, somebody who had never supported his
congregation or his synagogue. The rabbi was human. Perhaps
he was resentful. Perhaps one could not expect even feigned
compassion.
David’s brother followed with his own eulogy, then a cousin,
finally a nephew. Each was dull, a mere recitation of facts,
humorless, hardly a celebration of the man’s life. Later that day
his brother told me that had he been certain I would attend (I
had flown 1500 miles to get there) he would have asked me to
speak.
I wish that he had.
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I would have celebrated both David’s life and our friendship.
I would have told of a friendship that began in grammar school’s
first grade and lasted the 65 years until his death. I would have
recalled that so many years earlier, before social media and
internet and cellphones, most friends went different ways after
high school’s end and gradually lost touch but David and I found
our bond worth the effort to maintain it.
I smoked my first cigarette with him, got drunk for the first
time with him, smoked my first joint with him. When I married
he was my Best Man.
David loved to tell stories and to tell them again many, many
times. My sons could recite some verbatim. He and I laughed
together at the old stories no matter how many times they were
told.
I wonder which stories I might have told in a eulogy. How
would I have chosen from so many?
Perhaps I would have described his frantic efforts to
convince me to get out of the car when we arrived my wedding;
he could not know I was just fooling around. Maybe I would have
recounted the scene a decade later when, grumbling and
mumbling, one morning he entered the warm kitchen of our
ancient uninsulated New Hampshire farmhouse after a winter’s
night in our extra bedroom, his wool cap pulled down to his
eyebrows, his heavy coat zipped to its highest reach, his hands
gloved, his shoulders hunched. His complaint of the cold room
was met with a tongue-in-cheek reference to a lack of manhood,
only later recanted when I found the heat to his room had been
inadvertently closed off, my friend left to suffer the near zero
temperature. Or I might have recalled an episode a number of
years after that when he and I beat my two sons in touch football
after which, standing there naked and helpless, he needed my
wife to physically help him into a hot bath.
I certainly would have described his great concern for all of
his many friends, his worry when things were difficult for them,
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his joy and vicarious pleasure when things went well for them.
And I would have described his wonderful talent playing his
banjo and singing, his self-taught skill, his natural ability to draw
in his audience of friends and hold them tightly. I would have
told how one of the great pleasures in life was to sit with friends
some evenings listening to him play and sing. I probably would
have described one night in a secluded beachfront cottage, the
lack of electricity overcome with a few candles, when I heard him
sing for the first time “Sweet Baby James” and found myself
speechless when he finished.
Doubtless I would have mentioned in closing that
oftentimes when the night grew late and he was ready to stop
playing he would sing one final song, The Highwayman, a poem
by Alfred Noyes that had been put to music by Phil Ochs. He
invariably performed it beautifully and we knew then that we
were done.
And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding—
Riding—riding—
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.
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-54-

Author Profiles
Lisa Bellamy studies poetry and teaches at The Writers Studio.
Her chapbook, Nectar, won The Aurorean chapbook prize. Her
work has appeared in TriQuarterly, New Ohio Review, The Southern
Review, Hotel Amerika, Massachusetts Review, Cimarron Review,
Southampton Review, Chautauqua and PANK, among other publications.
Ms. Bellamy has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention
and a Fugue poetry prize. She lives in Brooklyn and the Adirondacks.
Ace Boggess is author of three books of poetry, most recently
Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017), and the novel
A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016). His
fourth poetry collection, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, is
forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. His writing has appeared in
Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, RATTLE, River Styx, North
Dakota Quarterly and many other journals. He lives in Charleston,
West Virginia.
Eric Chiles is an adjunct professor of Journalism and English at
a number of colleges and universities in eastern Pennsylvania
and was a prize-winning print journalist for more than 30 years.
His poetry appears in Allegro, American Journal of Poetry, Chiron
Review, Gravel, Plainsongs, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Third Wednesday
and other journals. His poem “The orchid garnish” won the
2015 Cape Cod Writers Center Poetry Contest. In 2014, he
completed a 10-year section hike of the Appalachian Trail.
Dallas Crow’s photos have appeared on the cover of Midwestern
Gothic and the Greek editions of two American works of fiction,
Bill Beverly’s Dodgers and Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning
Women.
Darren C. Demaree’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines/journals,
including Diode, Meridian, New Letters, Diagram,
and The Colorado Review. He is the author of eight poetry collections,
most recently Two Towns Over (March 2018), which was
selected as the winner of the Louise Bogan Award by Trio House
Press. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology
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and Ovenbird Poetry. Mr. Demaree currently lives and writes in
Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
A.R. Dugan has an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College.
His poetry can be seen or is forthcoming in a number of
literary magazines and reviews, most recently Salamander. He
taught high school English in southeastern Massachusetts for
nine years. He reads poetry for Ploughshares and currently teaches
literature and writing at Emerson College and Wheaton College.
Kelsi Folsom is an emerging writer from San Antonio, contributing
regularly to Red Tent Living Magazine and Women Who Live
On Rocks. Her work has also been published by Knocked Up
Abroad. She has three children and currently lives in the Dutch
Caribbean working as a musician and blogging at www.shamelessbeauty.org,
while her husband attends medical school.
Manda Frederick has previously published poetry in the Sierra
Nevada Review, Stirring, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Monarch Review,
Muse & Stone, The Way North: Upper Peninsula Collected New
Works, Vine Leaves Literary Magazine, the 2011 Press 53 Open
Awards Anthology, The Cancer Poetry Project Anthology, Love Notes:
An Anthology of Romantic Poetry, MOTIF Anthology: Water, and the
Delmara Review. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the
Inland Northwest Center for Writers and an MA in literary theory
from Western Washington University. Manda currently resides
in Philadelphia PA, where she serves as the Managing Editor
for a book-publishing company in the tech industry.
Brad Garber has degrees in biology, chemistry and law. He
writes, paints, draws, photographs, hunts for mushrooms and
snakes, and runs around naked in the Great Northwest. Since
1991, he has published poetry, essays and weird stuff in such
publications as Edge Literary Journal, Pure Slush, On the Rusk Literary
Journal, Sugar Mule, Third Wednesday, Barrow Street, Black Fox
Literary Magazine, Barzakh Magazine, Five:2:One, Ginosko Journal,
Vine Leaves Press, Riverfeet Press, Smoky Blue Literary Magazine,
Aji Magazine and other quality publications. He is a 2013 & 2018
Pushcart Prize nominee.
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Grant Ingram was born in San Angelo. By day he is a behavior
analyst who works with children and adults diagnosed with ASD
and other developmental disabilities, and by night and weekend
Grant builds heirloom quality furniture and woodcrafts using
antique hand tools and a seventeenth-century sensibility. Grant
is an entrepreneur, a climber, a guitarist, a dreamer, and one of
the few generation X-ers who still uses a flip phone. From his
home in Orlando, Florida, Grant often thinks on and dearly
misses his native West Texas.
Amy Kotthaus is a writer and photographer. Her written work
has been published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Yellow Chair Review,
Occulum, and others. Her photography has been published
in Storm Cellar, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Moonchild Magazine,
Crab Fat Magazine, and others. She currently lives in Maine with
her husband and children.
Jack Kristiansen exists in the composition books and computer
files of William Aarnes. Kristiansen’s poems have appeared in
such places as FIELD, The Literary Review, Stone’s Throw Magazine,
Main Street Rag, and The Ekphrastic Review.
Rick Krizman writes music, stories, and poems and holds an
MFA in Writing from Pacific University. His work has appeared
in The Wising Up Press, Sediment, Flash Fiction Magazine, Star 82
Review, Medusa’s Laugh Press, Driftwood, Switchback, 45th Parallel,
The Big Smoke, and elsewhere. He also hosts and produces the
ACME Writing Academy podcast, a weekly writerly gabfest. Rick
is the father of two grown daughters and lives with his wife and
other animals in Santa Monica, CA.
Lavinia Kumar’s books are The Celtic Fisherman’s Wife: A Druid
Life (2017), and The Skin and Under (Word Tech, 2015). Chapbooks
are Let There be Color (Lives You Touch Publications,
2016) and Rivers of Saris (Main Street Rag, 2013). Her poetry has
appeared in several US and UK publications such as Atlanta Review,
Colere, Dark Matter, Edison Literary Review, Exit 13, Flaneur,
Kelsey Review, Lablit, New Verse News, Orbis, Peacock Journal, Pedestal,
Pemmican, Poetry 24, Symmetry Pebbles, Lives You Touch, and
US1 Worksheets. Her website is laviniakumar.org.
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Mercedes Lawry’s work has previously appeared in such journals
as Poetry, Natural Bridge, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. She has
published two chapbooks (There are Crows in My Blood and Happy
Darkness), short fiction, and stories and poems for children. A
finalist for the 2017 Airlie Press Prize and the 2017 Wheelbarrow
Book Prize, Ms. Lawry is the recipient of the Vachel Lindsay
Poetry Prize from Twelve Winters Press and her manuscript,
Small Measures, will be published in 2018. She has received
honors from the Seattle Arts Commission, Jack Straw
Foundation, Artist Trust and Richard Hugo House, been a threetime
Pushcart Prize nominee and held a residency at
Hedgebrook.
Irene Meklin lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her short story
“Rubber Lizards of Concord” was published in The SmokeLong
Quarterly in 2017 and her flash fiction piece “I Guess We Are
Too” in Fictional Pairings. The Ravsak Hebrew Poetry Contest
winner (2016), she is fluent in Russian, English, Italian and Hebrew
but prefers writing poems and short stories in English.
Mitchell Nobis is a teacher and writer in Metro Detroit where
he lives with his wife and young sons. Recently, his manuscript
was a semi-finalist for the Philip Levine Prize. His poems appear
in the English Journal and Language Arts Journal of Michigan with
poems forthcoming in Rockvale Review and STAND Magazine.
Mr. Nobis participated in the June 2017 cohort of the Tupelo
Press 30/30 Project. His co-authored professional text for teachers,
Real Writing: Modernizing the Old School Essay, was published
in 2016.
Kemal Onor has an MFA in Writing from The Solstice MFA in
Writing Program at Pine Manor College. His work has been featured
in Fictive Dream, 365 Tomorrows, West Texas Literary Review,
The Chronicle, and Pamplemousse. His work is also forthcoming in
The Tishman Review. He has twice won the JSC/VSC Fellowship.
He lives in Michigan.
James Owens’s most recent collection of poems is Mortalia (FutureCycle
Press, 2015). His poems, stories, and translations appear
widely in literary journals, including publications in The
Fourth River, Kestrel, Adirondack Review, Tule Review, Poetry Ireland
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Review, and Southword. He earned an MFA at the University of
Alabama and lives in Indiana and northern Ontario.
Kate Peper’s chapbook, Dipped In Black Water, won the New
Women’s Voices Award from Finishing Line Press, 2016. Her
poems have been nominated five times for a Pushcart and have
appeared in The Baltimore Review, Cimarron Review, Gargoyle, Rattle,
Tar River Review and others. She lives just north of San Francisco
with her husband and semi-feral dog, Hannah.
Kenneth Pobo had a book out in 2017 from Circling Rivers
called Loplop in a Red City. In addition to West Texas Literary Review,
his work has appeared in: Mudfish, Colorado Review, Nimrod,
Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.
Tanyo Ravicz lived for many years in Alaska, where much of his
writing is set. His indie book Alaskans: Stories is a selection of his
short fiction from literary magazines. His novel A Man of His Village
relates the odyssey of a migrant farm worker from Mexico to
Alaska. He is currently at work on companion books, fiction and
nonfiction, that emerge from his years on Alaska’s Kodiak Island.
Erin Schalk is a visual artist and emerging poet. She has published
poetry and non-fiction, as well as exhibited art throughout
the United States and Japan. More work may be found at
www.erinschalk.com.
Harvey Silverman is a retired physician and writes primarily for
his own enjoyment.
Ron Stottlemyer lives in Helena, Montana. After a career of
teaching/scholarship in college and universities across the country,
he is returning to his life-long love of writing poetry. Along
with writing, he has a passion for amateur astronomy, Mid-Eastern
cooking, and for living with the moment. He believes that
real poetry has its sole origin in corner-of-the-eye surprise, lives
only in metaphor, and has graceful syntax, the stone of its
memory. After starting to send poems this past spring, he has
recently published in The Alabama Literary Review, The Sow’s Ear,
Streetlight, and The American Journal of Poetry.
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Colette Tennant is the author of two poetry collections: Commotion
of Wings (2010), and Eden and After (2015). Her poems have
appeared in various journals, including Southern Poetry Review,
Dos Passos Review, Christianity and Literature, and the most recent
issue of Prairie Schooner. Her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart
Prize in 2015.
S.A. Volz lives in Evansville, Indiana. His writing has appeared
or is forthcoming in the Red Earth Review, the Foliate Oak Literary
Magazine, The Offbeat, and Sand Hills Literary Magazine.
Peter Waldor is the author of Door to a Noisy Room (Alice James
Books), The Wilderness Poetry of Wu Xing (Pinyon Publishing),
Who Touches Everything (Settlement House), which won the National
Jewish Book Award, The Unattended Harp (Settlement
House), State of the Union (Kelsay Books) and Gate Posts with No
Gate (Shanti Arts). Waldor was the Poet Laureate of San Miguel
County, Colorado from 2014 to 2015. His work has appeared in
many journals, including the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares,
The Iowa Review, The Colorado Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and
Mothering Magazine. Waldor lives in Telluride, Colorado.
Brian Phillip Whalen’s writing appears in The Southern Review,
Spillway, Mid-American Review, North American Review, Cherry Tree,
Fiction International, Poets.org, and elsewhere. Brian received his
PhD from SUNY Albany and is a lecturer in the English Department.
He was a finalist in this year’s River Styx Microfiction Contest
and his forthcoming micro-essay “To Shoot Straight in a
Gunfight” was awarded second runner-up for the Chautauqua
Editors Prize. Brian lives with his wife and daughter in upstate
New York where in his spare time he teaches creative writing
workshops in public libraries (this year with a grant from Poets &
Writers).
Beth Oast Williams is a student with the Muse Writers Center
in Norfolk, Virginia. Her poetry has appeared recently in Lou Lit.
A former librarian, she spends most of her time still trying to
make order out of chaos.
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Chloe Williamson was raised on a cattle ranch in rural Eastern
New Mexico, only a few miles from the homestead her grandfather’s
family established as pioneers. She is a graduate of Wellesley
College where she wrote a creative writing thesis exploring
themes of identity, place, and memory in the rural Southwest.
Her fiction and poetry has previously appeared in The Wellesley
Review, El Portal, The Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, and The
Rising Phoenix Review. She tweets @c_m_williamson.
Erin Wilson has contributed poems to San Pedro River Review, Up
the Staircase Quarterly, New Madrid, and Peacock Journal, among
others. She lives in a small town in northern Ontario.
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