Featured Artist: Michael Hower

July 2021 | visual art

The Instrumentalists

The Muckers

The Precisionists

 

Michael Hower

Michael Hower is an artist and photographer from Central Pennsylvania. His work focuses on historical themes. He photographs historical and abandoned places, depicting human objects and structures in modified environments now devoid of human activity. For him, the artwork is always more than the photograph. It is also about the research, the place-seeking journey and the telling of forgotten stories after the capture is made. His artwork has been displayed in galleries, museums, and publications around the country.

Lana Eileen

July 2021 | visual art

The Language of Water IV

 

Lana Eileen

Lana Eileen is a musician and visual artist currently based on the island of Tasmania, Australia. As a musician, Eileen has traveled extensively, touring and recording internationally in the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom, before expanding her focus to include visual art, with a particular emphasis on photography. In 2019, she undertook an artist residency in remote Iceland. Previously based in New Zealand, Eileen currently resides in Tasmania, where she attends the School of Creative Arts and Media.

mer fidei

July 2021 | poetry

you go bats

in bone dry

dry flood

of night light

 

night night

 

there’s no need

now now

to be so shy

come and feed

 

the banquet

in the tower

 

the table set

w/ black flowers

(the pollen

is rust)

 

& great eggs

cracked open

a silver plate

and bowls of blood

 

raise the ghosts

from holes

i cut in the floor

 

holes i cut

with a sword

 

more more

 

 

Steven Turrill

Steven Turrill is the author of five books of poetry and the editor of Pine Peak Press. He lives in Los Angeles, CA. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter @turrillsteven.

Haiku Dream

July 2021 | fiction

Noriko sits on her knees in a gold and black kimono, wide sleeves holding fragile arms, palms on her lap, thumbs hidden. With white hair pulled back, cheekbones rise under eyes deep in memory of Manzanar. In Block 25, she lived with her mother and father next to an ancient apple orchard he pruned and tended, picking yellow fruit and storing baskets in a cellar the other men built for the skin to turn red and sweet. Being the oldest Issei man, younger than his daughter is today, he was given no work, left to himself while his wife made rounds as a dietician, using rations to plan menus for those suffering illness, and Noriko learned how to diagram English sentences, sticking words on limbs. The Sierras ten thousand feet above, her father hiked the creeks, no one believing an old man could escape the wire. He brought home branches of myrtle. Noriko would watch him sit for hours, carving boughs into lamps and table legs. Once a night heron emerged from his hands, short neck and short legs. Her father placed him at the edge of the steps. Alone to wait for the rising moon.

Chella Courington

Chella Courington (she/they) is a writer and teacher whose poetry and fiction appear in numerous anthologies and journals including SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y Magazine, and New World Writing. With three chapbooks of flash fiction and six of poetry, she recently published a novella-in-flash, Adele and Tom: The Portrait of a Marriage (Breaking Rules Publishing), featured at Vancouver Flash Fiction. A Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net Nominee, Courington now lives in California.

Perspective

July 2021 | poetry

In the interest of time mothers move

 

stepwise and as for her a lingering in Mexico City

we lost touch some time ago, my mother reflects moodily. it is a

 

Monday afternoon and my world’s gone positively Popsicular

 

the grass was this euphoric entanglement of judgment

as I a king sat in the soft grass

 

And someone brought me watermelon sliced into precise little cubes

 

and everything felt round.

well that’s one version of it she says evenly

 

In some panhandle cabin the moon but a rakish visitor

 

stopping by for cookies. Her mother commanded her at the sink,

stop howling but she hunting for interpretive freedom

 

Splintered the task. Brought old light to new deeds in calling

 

attention to the weariness of form, a realization

which frankly undid me. And her taking a ticket to

 

The reeds of some unknown city where love was.

 

Caroline Fernelius

Caroline Fernelius is a writer from Texas. Her work has appeared in Storyscape Journal, The Decadent Review, Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Poetry Prize. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, where she is a doctoral candidate in English.