Dew On The Sea
Dew On the Sea by Claire Wahmanholm Star/savior is an infirm rhyme, but here:even the smallest music box will chimeif you place it all the way inside your ear.It’s like unfocusing your eyes to seethe nest snug within the burning wood;it’s like when the weather map pulses greenafter you look away from all that red;it’s like an artless belief in mercy(who is smarter and happier than youpermit yourself to be); it’s a near-dream.It all exists, but we may need to softenour bones to be born into it. Think dewon the sea, think hammered gold, think zygote.We may have to be both borne and boat. Poetry Home Art by Sean Riley
Mickey Haist
Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Mickey Haist Haist came to visual arts in his mid-thirties, originally creating abstracts in pursuit of the therapeutic aspects of the process. Having worked through all his feelings, he has transitioned to representational pieces. He is now working on a new series organized around the idea of nostalgic objectification of the midcentury. He works as a teacher. Website: www.mickeyhaistjrart.com. Instagram: @mickeyhaistjrpaintings Second Cold Night
Morgan Auten-Smith
Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Morgan Auten-Smith Morgan Auten is an abstract painter and elementary art teacher from northeast Georgia. She is an art educator with 12 years experience under her belt. Art education is not just a means to an end for Morgan, but also a passion. She loves teaching creativity to kids and showing them all that they are capable of. Morgan’s work is bold, calming, thoughtful, filled with intention, and beauty. Through her own joyful take on color and shape, she explores the intersections between individuality and womanhood, and power and patriarchy. Currently, Morgan resides in Gainesville, Ga with her partner Joshua and twin children. Artist Statement: My work expresses the sacrifices made when struggling between the artistic self and the self that exists outside of the studio. As a woman, wife, teacher, I am reduced to fit into certain molds and must cull elements of myself. There are parts of my life that I sacrifice in order to create. Similarly sacrifices occur to complete artwork, layers sacrificed to find compositional conclusion, colors offered up and covered over in the name of balance. The sacrifices that are made in my work bring forth a language of light, color, edges, weight and shape. All of these come together to create a dialog that is arresting to the viewer. These sacrifices result in color fields of expressive geometric abstraction that are both powerful and delicate.There is always something under the surface in my paintings, something that makes the viewer pause over the subtleties and consider what has been sacrificed. Website: morganautensmith.com Instagram: _morgan_auten_ The Furies The Blue Train Devil Details
Keegan Baatz
Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Keegan Baatz Keegan Baatz is a photographer living in Pullman, Washington. He is currently working towards his MFA (Master of Fine Art) at Washington State University. He received his BFA from Black Hills State University in May of 2023. His work consists of portraiture, fine art, and some landscape. Within his personal work, he is exploring digital manipulation and constructed environments, with a focus on spaces of transition and the hinterland. Website: keeganbaatz.com Instagram: keegan.baatz Point 28-15 Point 25-2 Point 21-47 Point 8-3 Point 30-9
nothing is more sad than a waning moon
nothing is more sad than a waning moon by Sirka Elspass (transl. Anne-Sophie Balzer) nothing is more sad than a waning moon in dwindling candle light you write this to have a body means tremendous responsibility and no one is born knowing how it works but someone has hung a flyer on the crescent people are being sought after cats went missing if the apple is the embrace i am the worm eating it away Poetry Home Art by Mickey Haist Jr.
The Cabinda spouses
The Cabinda spouses by Landa wo O mbé – dé 1 returned to life!O kuet – dé 2 who will protect us from lightning!If the bottom of the sea is luminous.Why does your dark eye not reflect a light of love? 1 The night hunter that kills the game for Cabinda villagers but is killed each morning by his last prey.2 The wife – widow of Mbé – dé, interred every morning and disinterred every evening before the hunt. Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz
Fears, Explained
Fears, Explained by Kayla Jessop After A. Papatya Bucak’s “I Cannot Explain My Fear” I have a fear of spiders, snakes, and bees. At my favorite brunch spot downtown, a bee kept flying around my head even after I wished it away. It landed in my mimosa moments later and drowned in the sweet nectar of orange juice and champagne. The waitress brought me another. I have a fear of red ant piles. Once, my grandfather accidentally stepped in one while mowing his yard. When the little bites didn’t heal on their own after weeks, he went to the doctor, and they found cancer in his bloodstream. I’m afraid of swimming in the pool alone, swimming in the ocean without people close by, and floating on an inflatable in the river. I saw a movie as a kid where an alligator came up from under the water with its mouth wide open and swallowed the relaxing woman in one go. Their death roll scares me, too. I have a fear of thunderstorms. The thunder causing the house to shake makes me think of a picture falling off the wall and giving me brain damage. Motorcycles and scooters scare me. Two tires don’t create enough balance to protect my lack of it. I’m scared of restroom door handles, gas pumps, and restaurant silverware. I have a fear of Russia. I didn’t sleep for two days when there was talk of going to war with them. I live in a major city– we would be an easy target. Asteroids, meteors, and falling satellites make me scared. I have a fear of dragonflies after they were used as a way for the dead wife to communicate with Kevin Costner in the movie Dragonfly. Ghosts, ouija boards, and the dark scare me, too. When I visit my mother’s grave, I’m afraid each step I take near a headstone to get to hers is going to make a ghost angry and follow me home to punish me. I’m more afraid my mother’s ghost won’t visit me. I have a fear of scales, carbs, and calorie trackers. Shopping for jeans and little black dresses gives me goosebumps. I’m afraid of fireworks because of a Fourth of July celebration that ended with everyone fleeing from the outdoor venue because of a possible active shooter. I’m afraid of ditches because it was hard for me to climb out of the one we hid in once the police arrived to secure the area. I’m scared of Easy-Bake Ovens because I don’t know how they work. I cannot explain my fear of scarecrows. I’m scared of AIs, my Amazon Alexa, and the camera on my laptop because they’re probably spying on me. I’m worried I made my sister afraid of deer because I make her look out for them when I drive in the dark, terrified of hitting one. When I was a kid, I was afraid of dogs because they were loud and liked to jump. My family still makes fun of how I used to be now that we have a dog. I have a fear that the gum I swallowed when I was seven is still in my stomach. I’m even more scared of the idea that my stomach won’t hold life in it after being on birth control for ten years. Relationships and love scare me. I’m afraid of marriage because my mother was miserable during hers. I’m more afraid of divorce because she was too heartbroken after her marriage to love again. Airplanes, cars, and buses scare me, too. I’m afraid of the words “no” and “yes” but prefer to say “yes.” I’m afraid of Costa Rica because my boyfriend wants to propose to me there. Sharks, iguanas, and rogue monkeys live there, too. Nonfiction Home Art by Keegan Baatz
In Eternal
In Eternal by Lauren O’Donoghue Mary stands by the window, her fingers making cat’s cradles in the air. It is a winter afternoon, and the light is pale. It rimes the floral-patterned bedlinen, the hem of her long camel coat. There are water spots on the mirror. She would like to give the place a good going-over, to scrub the dust from the skirting boards and brush the cobwebs from the light fixture. Not that the room is dirty—not really. Only cheap. Only a little grubby at the edges. The hotel is a nondescript new-build on the outskirts of the city, near to the train station. Mary walked quickly through the lobby when she arrived, fearing questions, but the girl behind the reception desk didn’t even look up from the magazine she was reading. Perhaps this sort of thing is common here. The man Mary has come here to meet is in the en-suite bathroom. She can hear running water through the walls. Making himself ready. Her pulse chatters in her throat, rapid as a baby bird’s. She should take her coat off, she thinks. It seems like the thing to do. But every time her hands move to her lapels they flutter away again, coming back to rest in a spot just above her navel. Her stomach turns, the lurching of it somehow not unpleasant. Under her coat she is wearing a dress of green rayon, the one with the rosette at the collar, and underneath a plain slip that is fraying at the seams. Below that she has on a peach-coloured brassiere and knickers of a similar colour, the closest thing she has to a matching set. Her nylons are new, purchased that morning with money she took from Bridget’s piggy bank. Mary hopes their perfect sheen will distract him; from the weight of her breasts, the soft flesh of her thighs, the lightning tracery of stretch marks across her hips and belly. He has already told her that she is beautiful, but she fears he will shrink from the fullness of her. The pipes give a sudden, high shriek as a tap is turned off. Three heartbeats of silence pass, and then the door to the en-suite bathroom opens. The man Mary is here to see is not particularly handsome. His hair is thinning at the crown, and there are dark spots on the backs of his hands. But he smiles when he sees her, a broad and honest smile that deepens the creases around his eyes, and after years of not being seen at all, that is more than enough. Where and how they met is immaterial. She is here now. Mary removes her long camel coat, folds it over her right arm, and lays it neatly on the chair by the window. The coat had been John’s gift to her a week after she first stepped foot on English soil. Her good tweed overcoat, inherited from her mother, was ruined on the crossing from Dublin to Liverpool. A summer squall had bruised the sky not long after the ferry came out of port, and the vessel was bobbing queasily on the choppy water. Christopher had picked that inauspicious moment to make himself known, two weeks ahead of schedule. Mary’s waters broke as she was clinging to the guardrail on the ferry’s top deck and were sluiced away by the rain within moments. A woman called Agnes, a navvy’s widow from Kildare, acted as midwife. She’d six children of her own and knew the workings of it. It was her who folded up the tweed overcoat and propped it, businesslike, under Mary’s hips, to be spoiled beyond salvation in a rush of amniotic fluid. Mary’s screams, she was told later, had the lads in the engine room crossing themselves. Later she would hardly remember screaming at all. Only Agnes placing the squirming, wailing infant in her arms, his body red and wet as a skinned rabbit, and the way she couldn’t keep herself from laughing. She called him Christopher, the name she and John had agreed when he left to work the beet harvest. One of the crewmen opened a bottle of sherry to wet the baby’s head. By the time the ferry came into port an hour later, Christopher was asleep at Mary’s breast, and the sky was so cloudless you’d never know it had rained at all. Her fourth child will be born in a hospital room, a modern phenomenon that her mother would never have approved of. Mary will be brought in on the advice of her doctor because of the high levels of protein in her urine, and she will be grateful for it. It will not feel right, somehow, to birth this child at home, in the same bed where Declan and Bridget filled their tiny lungs for the first time. Mrs McKee will mind the children when Mary is admitted, albeit reluctantly. She will have heard the backyard gossip, same as everyone else. Mary will not require Mrs McKee’s approval. All Mrs McKee needs to do is keep the children fed until Mary returns home and to keep her cat’s arse of a mouth closed while they’re in earshot. It will be a difficult birth. There will be moments where Mary will be certain that she will die in that room, with its bare lightbulb and walls so white it hurts to look at them. She will tell the doctor that she needs her rites, and he will pretend not to hear her. The maternity unit will have opened its doors for the first time less than a month before. It will smell like paint and antiseptic. Mary will be sick into a metal dish that a nurse will hold beneath her chin, again and again until there is nothing to bring up but bile. When it is over, the midwife will ask Mary if she wants to hold the child, and Mary will say no. She will ask
Kaddish 9
Kaddish 9 by Daniela Naomi Molnar below the quick ] [ surface currents of the mind muscular water moves ] [ undiluted sentience sole and fluid flow ] [ through everyone your tongue and your own wet breath ] [ already knows the nameless so it’s ok to disown the dead ] [ multiplication and to disregard the sad arithmetic ] [ of the bad and tired plan it’s ok, do not call the failure any name ] [ let your voice calve an inoculant omission ] [ of the self a home that’s all hinge ] [ let that zero loll ] [ open be muttered or sung ] [muttered or sung by the nameless one ] [ a sound thick as no mirror ] [ and dense as love’s ] [ black hole Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz
Kaddish 2
Please View this Poem on a Desktop Kaddish 2 by Daniela Naomi Molnar Let the rhyming, dying dream carve a tunnel in your trachea for breath then name Let the name be lush Let the name be rangy roaming past time to the source of language : a huddle of clean ash — the only promise time makes is to be ongoing an inconclusive light that cannot dim forming pink organs and petals green fuses and rot the metastasizing muscle the prison, the cell, the organelle the eight dollar cup of coffee the animal with no teeth in the hungry street the person with no love left in the desiccated valley the quake the rubble the flood the bone-dense shadows the traps sprung on sinew in inconclusive light god a fermata