Over the Rhone

. . . It is good to love many things
to an unraveling
of Van Gogh's heart beating on
Over the Rhône

“Well, that’s how it is, can you tell
what goes on within by looking at
what happens without? There may be
a great fire in your soul, but no one
ever comes to warm himself by it, all
that passers-by can see is a little
smoke coming out of the chimney and
they walk on.”
A note from the editor:
Art works like fire—through all of time,
people have and will sit around it,
finding comfort, company, thought,
hope. And like fire, art changes and
shifts—itself and the people around it.
Van Gogh’s stars show us this essence,
with long, glowing strokes illuminating
what a treasure it is to love the world
and to come near it, dare to see the
beauty of it.
This zine is a collection of art, a medium
to explore through collaboration and
expression the work
of Van Gogh, the artist from 19th century Netherlands that re-defined
art and its place within life, within humanity and nature; and how his
definitions are interpreted and carried in hearts over a century later.
Over the Rhône is a zine interspersed with my own writing alongside
brilliant submissions that I had the opportunity to read and see, spend
time with. I am nothing but grateful for all of the support and all of the
love I saw Van Gogh, his work and his life receive in each artist’s
unique way.
Now, the magnificence of the stars reflecting in waters of the Seine is
realised here as such wonderful art is so close to us again. It is a
pleasure to have you seated by the fire with us.
Yours truly,
Shereen

Poetry
Starry Night Over the Rhône
A night picture without any black in it.
Ari Ochoa Petzold
An Unusual Day
Mak Kram
At Eternity’s Gate
Cafe Terrace at Night
Memoria viva
Gloria Glau
Hope from a Scene
Shamik Banerjee
In and not after
Painting and Poems
Geetanjali Lachke
Insomnia, Four Voices
Jon Kelly
Tidal Hope
His Bedroom
Mona Mehas
The Night Carnival
R.S
I AM ALWAYS DOING WHAT I CAN'T DO
YET IN ORDER TO LEARN HOW TO DO IT
1
2
3
4
7
8
9
10-11
13
14
15
21
22
23

Fiction
View Over the Rooftops of Paris
Stella Aldrich
16-20
Art
Willow and Autumn
Irina Tall Novikova
Sketch: Loving Vincent
Gloria Glau
12
8
Photography
Three pieces
Megan Joubert
5-6

a
on hope.
Starry Night Over the Rhône
Starry Night Over the Rhone
I breathe a moon somewhere
over the Rhône, and it turns
into
stars (always
the stars)
and
the precision (or lack of it)
of it
dispersing
follows the lines
of my life, of my mouth
biting down
I lay my head
down,
flock of lantern-lights
fluttering
through the grass — in
my stomach.
My stomach,
a landscape of familiar voices putting its arms around a
child, dreaming.
I’ll
hold
out
for
my heart’s wishbone.
&the
clear,
dark
water,
the
rays
of light growing — on it
like
tears
down
your
cheek,
doing what
the
sun
does
for
that
plant
that
reminds you
of
distant
lights,
an
oath
to
laughter and brushstrokes
and
to
the
times you bent down to kiss your brother’s head.
In
the
dark,
I find stories. Stories that
have
the
touch
of
a cool night and tired hands, of a throat singing of
flowers
and blades of grass, green and blue,
a lot like the promises
you make to life, bending, twisting, through it all — growing. Pushing
open windows means practising love. Eyes, wood, glass
and
knees
likely to buckle
at the sight of the world pointing at the wet grass
and plants
on windowsills.
Awe and breathing in. Over the Rhône, the wind
carries my love like starlight.
1

A night picture without any black in it.
I shall never think of the night as black no more,
with the querosene lights of fluorescent yellow
overpowering that of the stars, no longer white.
Before this evening I never thought night-life
deserving of royal blue but instead
a secret we kept at night cafés of green and red.
The waiter is taking an order, in their white uniform shining
as Jesus.
A horse walks through the cobblestone -clac, clac, clactwo
people, a couple, dance while a boy watches dressed in canary.
You snap your fingers at the same time the horse neighs
and say “Aren’t you happy we went out?” I am, “I have
never seen green as the one of that tree,” I say, “Basil”.
I search for the ash on the cobblestones,
inding only blue and oranges strokes,
“There’s no longer black and white only technicolor”.
And as I say this you smile brighter than the lights,
mistaking my observations for a metaphor, thinking
that tomorrow I’ll get out of bed and see violet instead of gray.
Ari Ochoa Petzold
2

by Mak Kram
There is a melody in my ear and I
cannot get it out. It is a whisper I
cannot quite comprehend. Normally,
when I have Tinnitus, I cut off my ear,
but now I’ve got one left. So I go home,
Paint a landscape no-one’s ever seen.
When I go to shovel the snow, my back
breaks. I am old & tired. I am young & poor.
When I wake up I think about drinking
again until the shooting stars appear
again & I see a Halo around my father’s neck.
3

At Eternity’s Gate
by Shereen Rana
I try to hear myself,
to touch my own hand,
a pulse, maybe, a hint of it,
but the fire—
Oh, the fire. Burn, trace and turn me
over. It’s gone on longer
than I can close my eyes in the dark.
It knows about it. About the dead weight
buried under the snow—and how
the snow melts. Window latches,
empty handed
sadness.
4

“My Muse”
(2022)
Megan Joubert
“Victoria Beckham"
(2023)
5

Leggy Lady of Leisure
2023
Megan Joubert
6

by Shereen Rana
Light falls like swans turned yellow
by the sprained sun. Sprained
swan legs—elegy
to the river deepening between the heartbeats.
Is my disbelief at the world’s knuckles turning
into stars
just my belief in it, or its
rebirth?
The woman wonders
like she has about a million things
before. Enough times that skin right then
feels like a testament to having been here
at all.
Light catches—
hands around whispered words,
orange-lit faces turning and
a promise no one had to be told about.
In the corner-shop window a waiter’s reflection
laughs; unexpected, sprained, a muscle from an animal
born under the lamp, a pocket of the ages.
In the centre of the marketplace,
I think of screaming about love
resting on the cobblestones, but I think
I’ll let the stars talk about it
for a while. 7

Memoria Viva
my grandma calls me by her dead sibling’s name, and a few living ones, too.
people she’s lost, people she hasn’t seen since 1985, and some she misses
from last week.
on her walls, all the frames are clean and polished, the dusty place lying
inside the pictures.
still she insists she can make them shine bright and blinding as her
memories.
i can’t tell her otherwise, in a grief so big the elephant in the room is an ant
you almost crush,
the tangible proof of how one single person can love you on behalf of the
rest of world.
i imagine Vincent waking up one day saying Theo, this will sound mad, but i
dreamt so many people loved me that weren’t you.
Gloria Glau
8

Hope from a Scene
Shamik Banerjee
The Tit has nested on the scaffold's pane,
with bushes of the spruce tree and its bough.
Its roofing covers her hatchlings from rain
when o'er the straw it falls, making a sough.
The dense sky above is built in sapphire.
Small gobbets are disparpled on the ground;
fallen from my yesternight's drenched attire
in the rain which has sworn to hail around.
Yet, the azure sky seems not to turn grey,
and the Sun is glaring, glossy and fine;
despite the scudding rain sith yesterday--
so hope is biding still in heart of mine—
that the morning, a pleasant sky will earn;
as the heavens will call the rain to turn.
9

In and not after
Shereen Rana
Who am I looking at? My
body was tense canvas.
Vincent, he said. I looked in
my eyes in the painting and it
has been a long, long time
since I painted it. Three
hundred years, at least.
Maybe five, for the years that
struck like blunted madness.
Vincent? He asked me the
question. Did he? Or did I?
Then and there I laughed. I
had to. My name a worry, a
question, a boy cutting his
foot at the edge of the cave.
Self-Portrait with Bandaged
Ear, 1889
The idea that the sun, falling on us both, would take pity on me (my red
hands made in strokes going the wrong way) makes its way to live in me. In
and not after. I laughed and he looked at me the way a lot of people have—
the way that feels like a leg arching back in preparation for a kick. In and
not after. But his kick felt like it would pass right through me, not because
of me but him. In and not after, we stood there in the dark room cut by
sunlight and I saw us become a prism: me, my self/-portrait and him, a
ghost of me or everybody else—maybe that's why he was beautiful, warm,
glass-skinned. Boy with the glass touch. In and after. Rebirth with fever
and mosaic, heat. In and not after.
10

At nighttime I'd walked the length of the field and felt the star-light
turning to blood (I have to keep coming back to the light.)
The easels had stood there in the middle of the field, two of them together
like ears, turned to the world’s heartbeat. The birds had been circling
overhead then. I thought of time and if my blood on an easel would
someday mean romance. I put my hands around the top of the easel, bone
to bone, shook my head. No bird struck, no wind. I thought, breathing
heavy, that the wood breaking would mean the world would say something
to me. Then I was looking through the wreckage—the splinters and my
breath falling not like stars but dust trying to make sense. It wouldn’t last.
But I have to. When the paint and paper burns on the floor the easel stays.
Heavy, pointing not to god, but something cold as a crash site before it all
happens. After that it never stops happening, right by my ears. That’s
when the burning pulse made my ear shed blood through the bandage.
Running down my cheek, a new river. How do the rivers know they’re
going the right way? When blood fell on wood, it wasn’t beautiful or
divine, or fated or forsaken, or starlit. As I ran through field & street, it
was just painful, just heavy. How can I tell you this? How can I tell anyone
this?
11

Above: “Willow”
Media: chalk, wax
crayons, tinted paper
Size: 19x19 cm
Year: 2022
Left: “autumn”
Media: chalk, wax
crayons, tinted paper
Size: 19x19 cm
Year: 2022
Irina Tall
Novikova
12

Paintings and Poems
Geetanjali Lachke
Hold my hand darling It is cold out here
And walking under this starry night sky
These twinkling stars like snow might fall I fear
Don't let go, it's early to say goodbye
As the river holds the sky in her arms
I'll hold you in that eternal embrace
We'll wait for the clouds to exhaust their forms
We'll wait for the great unveiling of space
But if you are still unwilling to stay
If nothing I do is enough for you
I will surely let you walk your own way
Yet they say, "old love is better than new"
And I've given all my paintings to you,
Like you've given all your poems to me.
13

14

Tidal Hope
Shereen Rana
Bank of the
Seine, 1887
15

View Over the Rooftops of Paris
Stella Aldrich
Van Gogh, 1886
I sit by the window and try to count the chimneys, but fall into
cyclical failure. There are far too many chimneys and far too
much sky for my dubious endeavor.
The sky is the yellow of melted butter, the type I used to churn for
my mother on Saturdays and would spread on warm bread on
Sundays. I have not seen a sky this color since I left home, so
many months ago. When it was just the few of us, I collected the
sunsets and daybreaks thoughtlessly. I did not consider the finite
quantity of skies we would gather.
16

Before I left, we were five. It is not a particularly beautiful number:
a flat-capped, round-bellied frown, but my addition always came to
the same solution. A mother, a father, a brother, a sister, and I
equaled five. My mother taught me to count with dried kidney
beans that looked like the squirrel intestines littering my brother’s
bedroom floor. I knew that two plus two equals four, and would
equal four every time. I knew that four spare kidney beans would
make five when another one fell from my mother’s delicate fingers.
I would sit, my bare bum on the dusty floor, and line the beans in a
row, then scoot them close together so each kidney spooned the
other to create a continuous, bulbous being.
We should have been six: a natural number: a tadpole with its tail
curving round to beckon its head. Not far from my home – not far
from the grave – was a stream. Each Spring, I crouched on its bank
and reached one large palm into the cool water. The water didn’t
move fast, a lackadaisical excuse of a tributary. Some days, I
crouched until my knees creaked like a rusted automaton,
determined to catch the elusive tadpole. There were so many inky
tails I once thought that I was passing out, but their sheer
concentration was nothing more than a taunt. No matter their
number, no matter the hours I spent hunched under the weak, slim,
sun, every tadpole wriggled between my pinched fingers, and out of
my grasp. I never captured the six; I only poked the soft eggs before
they hatched and wondered how the instant between gestation and
existence could be so thin – how it could file away to nothingness.
We should have been six, not that they knew it then. The way my
mother told it, her belly was bigger, heavier, than it was with my
siblings, but too small to consider multiples. All of the time she
spent crooning to us and tapping coded messages into her naval,
she talked to one. Maybe I ate all of my mother’s words, gorging
myself and sucking the womb dry. Maybe I didn’t leave enough for
my sister, denying her anything beyond an instant of existence.
Willimein slipped out first. She escaped my mother’s cavernous
17

body with the ease of my escaping tadpoles. Then, for a moment,
they were five. My mother embraced Willimien’s cornflower being.
Her child, little more than a silken packet of bones, breathed her
first breath in my mother’s hands – her mother’s hands. The
cornflower blue of my sister’s face deepened to purple under the
red blood and white pus from my mother. The moment following
her first breath, the silence awaiting her scream, lengthened until I
was born – unexpectedly – in the shadow of my mother’s grief.
We were five once more, though we should have been six. My
family buried my sister as my mother left me inside, ignoring my
cries for milk – so quiet compared to her own. Willimein’s
headstone stands under the great oak in our yard, her name facing
the front door. After my sister was laid to rest, my mother named
me Willimein, so I could sit inside, look out the window, and see my
namesake. Every time I left the house, I was confronted with the
betrayal of my existence, but I could not resent my sister, nor her
death; hate for a life that small would bloat its meager corpse.
Now I am one, with a window full of chimneys and sloping roofs. I
sit in this room of my own, basking in the fading light and listening
to the jovial sounds of muffled diners, glasses clinking, and dogs
yapping at the liquid illusion of dusk. It has been months, but I still
haven’t grown accustomed to my solitary view and city nights.
I left as I entered: obscured by my mother’s grief. In recent years,
my father was repulsed by our home, by every one of our four brick
walls. He rose before the sun, citing scripture as his master. As
Abraham “rose early in the morning,” as Jesus left the house “while
it was still dark,” my father hiked the measly path from our house to
his house of God. I used to wake when he left, his footsteps enough
to disturb me from my vacuous dreams. Among the rumbling
snoring of my siblings, I watched through my window as my
father’s looming silhouette shrank to an inkblot, then nothingness –
just the empty space he occupied and the approaching gray dawn.
Eventually, I no longer watched my father leave, but passed him on
18

his way out. Some mornings he nodded at me, but most days he
quickened his pace, not daring to acknowledge my presence. I like
to think that his shame, his denial, was indicative of compassion,
that he was ashamed of his weakness, rather than our sins, but I
never heard our names cross his lips in worship. My father prayed
for our village, our neighbors, strangers, and friends. My father
prayed for humanity, but he could not spare his faith for his
children, if his well was not boundless, perhaps he would have met
my gaze, but instead he gazed at his palms and asked the Lord for
mercy.
Most nights, I wandered from bar to bar, there were only four
establishments that served alcohol in our village, so it wasn’t a
lengthy endeavor. Like a hen counting her chicks, I checked each,
again and again, until the bartenders yelled answers to my questions
before I could utter a word.
“He’s not here,” they would say.
On some nights, if I was lucky, they might cock their head or throw
a pointed glance, directing me to the hunched form of my brother –
Vincent. The drink made his lips red and puffy, like a pair of
squashed blisters oozing poison onto his sallow chin. It was easier if
he was already unconscious, but on the nights he wasn’t, I used a
hair ribbon to restrain his roaming hands.
On other nights, I found Vincent in ditches, fields, church pews, and
mangers. Once, he was sprawled like a cracked egg on the grocer’s
unassuming roof. I hooked Vincent’s arm with a dull pitchfork and
coaxed his unresponsive body down the shingles. Alas, it was not a
delicate labor; Vincent tumbled from his perch, catching his
oversized boot in the gutter, and swung there: a hung man, until the
gutter succumbed under his weight. Vincent slammed the ground
with enough force to wake the dead, but still, he did not stir. He
never walked the same again; his left leg dragged behind his right,
unable to keep up.
19

I did not ask Vincent to stop; he was eight years older; we did not
talk. Instead, I came to know the night: the silent sound of forming
dew and the sweet scents of unseen stars. I came to know my
brother in a mechanical sense, as an artist knows their model: a
spirit’s clumsy manifestation within the awkward specifications of
form.
Earlier this week, a bird flew in while I read my sister’s letter – a fat,
iridescent pigeon. There were only three stilted sentences on the
page. The pigeon shitted on the parchment as I consumed the final
line and flew out my open window, leaving my speckled fingers in
its wake; I have not moved since. The city is cold at night, so the
syrupy white feces have hardened to something resembling grout. I
do not know how many days have passed, but it is of little matter.
We should have been six. We were five. Now, we are a disparate
collection of beans, with little more than a graveyard in common.
Perhaps my sister is right, that my leaving was the root of our
dissolution, but she never wrung Vincent’s vomit from her hair. She
slept while my father closed the door on his way out. She did not
coexist with a grave bearing her own name. I cannot know her
reality any more than I can count the blurry chimneys interrupting
the horizon. All I know is her shit-stained pronouncement of
Vincent’s death.
He died under the sweeping stars he loved so much, the stars he
taught me to love in turn. Vincent once said that “the night is more
alive and more richly colored than the day,” but the sky is muted
with him gone. Where I once saw balls of flames, I now see dull
black with a dusting of white – no more remarkable than my
speckled fingers lost in a sea of tadpoles.
20

His Bedroom
Mona Mehas
21

The Night Carnival
R.S.
Inspired by the Van Gogh's quote, "I often think that the night is more
alive and more richly colored than the day."
As the stars fill up the sky
Chaperoned by the moon,
The birds are flocking to their nests
And larks no longer croon.
The night is falling slowly
Embracing all in sight;
With stealthy steps it walks
And tucks in all the light.
Some weary hearts are lulled to sleep
By the gentle wind that blows;
The embers burn, the crickets chirp
Whilst the fireflies flit and glow.
22

I AM ALWAYS DOING WHAT I CAN'T DO YET IN ORDER TO
LEARN HOW TO DO IT
Shereen Rana
The Potato
Eaters,
April 13,
1885
23

Ari Ochoa Petzold
(they/xe), is a writer in process that likes dancing to old music and history, one of
their goals in mind is to bring to the world stories about the human condition
told through the intersectionality of being queer and latine. Find more of xyr
work in the Sea Glass Magazine, Graveyard Zine, #Enbylife, Hooligan Mag and
at Instagram in @Ari_gibberish.
Mak Kram
is a poet in parenthesis. He's middle eastern, queer, and proud, and he hopes
you have a good day.
gloria glau
is italian. she lives in rome, where she is trying to learn art and words, and
perhaps even how to combine them.
Shamik Banerjee
is a poet and poetry reviewer from the North-Eastern belt of India. He loves
taking long strolls and spending time with his family. His deep affection with
Solitude and Poetry provides him happiness.
Irina Tall (Novikova)
is an artist, graphic artist, illustrator. She graduated from the State Academy of
Slavic Cultures with a degree in art, and also has a bachelor's degree in design.
The first personal exhibition "My soul is like a wild hawk" (2002) was held in the
museum of Maxim Bagdanovich. In her works, she raises themes of ecology, in
2005 she devoted a series of works to the Chernobyl disaster, draws on antiwar
topics. The first big series she drew was The Red Book, dedicated to rare
and endangered species of animals and birds. Writes fairy tales and poems,
illustrates short stories.

Geetanjali Lachke
is a writer and poet living in Pune, Maharashtra, India.
She has an avid interest in learning about various languages and cultures and
wishes to become a well known writer along with creating beautiful pieces of
poetry.
Mona Mehas
(she/her) writes about growing up poor, accumulating grief, and climate
change. A retired, disabled teacher in Indiana, USA, Mona previously used the
pseudonym Patience Young. She's published in journals, anthologies, and
museums. Mona is a Trekkie and enjoys watching Star Trek shows and movies
in chronological order. Follow on Twitter @Patienc77732097 and
linktr.ee/monaiv .
R.S.
is a denizen of Delhi, India who writes Poetry to find harmony in life. She had
fallen in love with versing during her days as a student of literature. She rises
early to feel inspired with the morning star and create new rhymes.