In this issue: Weeki Wachee, horses breathing, Duck à l’orange, daughters of salt, your mother’s original sin, a warning from a palm reader, Echo and Narcissus, everyone’s phone number, the only window in Miramontes, a shack tucked in the birches, Trick Dog, the soul’s architecture.
On our cover: Danielle Mckinney, Imagination, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 18 in. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen.
Nonfiction
Maia Elsner | Cat’s Cradle
Sophie Fetokaki | Essay on Islands
Angela Elizabeth Townsend | Inquiry Acknowledged
Brett Warnke | The Cul-de-Sac
Susan R. Weinstein | Scars
Fiction
Maeve Barry | Tank (A Triptych)
Jack Foraker | The Last of Us
Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo | Hand Day
T.G. Lan | The Only Window in Miramontes
Anna Mebel | Why Not Duck
Wendy Scheir | Complicated Eyes
Haleigh Yaspan | Blood Vessels
Poetry
Allison Adair | Identifying the Body
Miguel Barretto-Garcia | Sebastian
Zach Bartles | Give Rest | Five Lunar Metaphors
Elizabeth Brown | I Enter the World of the Children
James Lowell Brunton | Proof
Ian Cappelli | [Soilmass Haibun] | [Soilmass Haibun]
Leila Farjami | How Survival is Memorized | Haraam, حرام | Creation | Daughter of Salt: Sea | Grief Variations
YK Kim | Regard
Mia Ayumi Malhotra | Step into it you said we’re here waiting | Wave Organ II
Hera Naguib | | Ode to American Manna | What Father Never Mentions
Michael O’Ryan | Pacifica
Jacques J. Rancourt | Spring Quartet
Talin Tahajian | Lobotomy | Open-Source Psalm | The Pit | This Is the Patron Saint of New Haven
Blanca Varela, trans. Liana Kapelke-Dale | Villain’s Song | Curriculum Vitae
A.R. Zarif | The Introduction of Horses to North America
Visual Literature
Anna Lena Phillips Bell | Deposit Sanitary Napkins Here I, II, III
Nora Rose Tomas | She Gave Birth to Me It Was the Tipping Point | Everyone’s Phone Number
Editor’s Note
Imagination
Hyperfocused as we are on words, we lit mag editor types sometimes pay less attention than we should to the first thing that our readers experience: the cover art. I remember a conference panel discussion years ago in which a graphic designer begged lit mag editors to stop defaulting to “the tree cover.” No idea what to put on your cover? A photograph of a single tree, preferably in black and white, will convey artsiness while being unspecific enough to appear on a journal containing a wide range of literary work.
Look—guilty as charged. I love trees as much as anyone. But I agree that a cover can do more. How to find the right image, though? We don’t have a formal submission process, so we keep our eyes open in our everyday lives, whether at local galleries or in our internet wanderings. Sometimes a work of art just strikes us as literary in some way that’s hard to pin down: it evokes a story or a mood; it’s full of symbolism or ambiguity; it’s maybe beautiful or pleasing, but not only that.
We’ve followed the painter Danielle Mckinney for a while now, loving her portraits of solitary women reposing in film noirish domestic interiors. The details gain extra significance for being so spare, inviting the level of intense interpretation you’d devote to, say, each element of a Tarot card. Why the red fingernails? Why does the woman hide her mouth? Why, for heaven’s sake, is there a praying mantis?
Even better is when a cover image illustrates, not literally but in some rhyming way, what follows in the issue, and again the painting was a great fit. This issue features hands aplenty: a hand model, injured hands, hands capable of action, hands that refrain from action. There are women who speak, women who are silenced, and women who communicate nonverbally. And there’s even a praying mantis—well, okay, sort of: a yoga teacher demonstrates killer-praying-mantis pose.
Of course, being as various as they are, the works in this issue not only abide in interior spaces but also go out for walks, are forced into exile, swim in the ocean (or a mermaid’s-tank facsimile), road-trip, ride motorcycles—and nature often becomes a character, including, yes, even trees. But unlike the overly generic tree of “the tree cover,” the details here are intentional, complex, and reward deep attention. Even a minor character’s choice of a yoga pose speaks volumes.
Mckinney’s painting, by the way, is titled Imagination. It calls on you to use your own imagination to arrive at the meaning the work has for you. Each piece in this issue similarly captured us, enduring in our minds and discussions long after we looked away.
—Lynne Nugent
