Stephen Curtis Wilson

July 2020 | visual art

Julian Hotel

Julian Hotel

 

Stephen Curtis Wilson

Wilson is a regionalist photographer documenting architectural structures and scenes throughout Illinois where he resides. His photographs have recently appeared in exhibitions at the Black Box Gallery, Portland, Oregon; Midwest Center for Photography, Wichita, Kansas; and PhotoSpiva 2020 National Photography Competition, Joplin, Missouri. Wilson was a medical/surgical and generalist photographer and writer in the health care field for 33 years. “I photograph the everyday, the familiar in unfamiliar places. ‘The mundane is given its beautiful due in that it is photographed at all,’ suggests photographer Anna Shustikova. Structures left behind, dated, discarded, or those I find a bit curious. Rural communities, along back-roads, and within once-thriving urban neighborhoods; these are my vistas. I am hopeful that my photographs are reminders of humanness, culture, and community.”

Meg Freer

July 2020 | visual art

Abandoned

Abandoned

Sinking In

Sinking In

 

Meg Freer

Meg Freer grew up in Missoula, Montana, where her father passed on to her his love of photography. She now lives in Kingston, Ontario where she teaches piano, writes poetry and enjoys the outdoors. Her photos and poems have been published in literary journals and have won awards both in North America and overseas.

Kiyoon Nam

July 2020 | visual art

Fish Currents

Fish Currents

 

Kiyoon Nam

Kiyoon Nam is a sixteen-year-old student who grew up in Seoul, Korea. He is attending St Paul Preparatory Seoul and developing his art and design careers in and outside of school.

NW Airlines Flight 705, Miami to Seattle

July 2020 | nonfiction

Some remembered the final crackle of radio transmission like campfire. Others, the explosion over the Everglades. The chrysanthemum of combustibles: orange and white and red at the edges of the clouds. The terrific noise that had no echo. Some insist to themselves the travelers died of oxygen deprivation, as in falling asleep as when their mother or father read that long bedtime story, never completing it, tucking them in as they drifted into sleep.

Some will remember the sound of riveted seams wrenched apart. Some might contemplate the ease at which falling metal crumbles in collision with an immoveable object, such as the earth.  Airplane parts folded like sodden origami underfoot.

Numbers that accompany the crash: the barometric pressure as a thunderstorm builds, the velocity of the aircraft in descent, the latitude and longitude of the crash site, the few ounces of fuel left in the helicopter when the wreckage is discovered.

What came to rest, charred and indiscernible––a precipitation of sorts: women’s embroidered handbags, men’s hats punctuated with guinea hen feathers: key limes, Miccosukee patchwork, contraband Cuban cigars. Within twisted luggage, clothes folded meticulously as a nun’s hands in prayer.

In years to come, remembered at the oddest moments: set in the nestlike hummock of sawgrass growing in brackish water, a perfectly filled and intact plastic bag with 50 shimmering tropical fish, some orange, some white, some red at the edges.

 

Catherine Sutthoff Slaton

Catherine Sutthoff Slaton is a West Coast writer graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in English/Creative Writing. In July 2017, she traded in her REI raincoat for a longer REI raincoat and her Doc Martens for a pair of ultrahigh Bogs and moved from Seattle to the small farming community of Chimacum on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula where in addition to writing she works her bee hives and raises dairy goats. Her poems have been published in Soundings Review (Pushcart nominee), Switched-On Gutenberg, Till, Hummingbird Press, Raven Chronicles, Tupelo, and King County Metro Transit’s Poetry on Buses Series. Her essays have been published in Inkwell, (February 2020), and WORK Literary Journal (Spring 2020). She will also be published in Rumpus, Fall 2020.

The lost tribes, part 4

July 2020 | poetry

We are lost

in Viagra’d beds,

in sticky, spilled orange sidewalk pop,

in black sidewalk gum,

in sidewalk blood,

in blood cough,

in closing time at McDonald’s.

 

We are lost

under the weight of breathing.

 

Our reality show is unwatched.

 

We are lost alone.

 

We are lost

under control of blank-heart marketers.

 

We are directionless, hopeless, homeless,

without peace, untouched, cross-nailed.

 

Tell me we aren’t.

 

We count down our two thousand million seconds.

We hear the raw prophesy in our blood pulse.

We know awful solitude.

 

Listen.

 

We are lost

far behind the pack,

in the sandstorm, on calmless seas, in ever-dark alleys,

forgotten in our time-out corner,

forgotten on our bassinette, strapped,

ignored in our unworthiness,

unworthy,

unworthy,

unworthy,

turned away from —

 

after the lights go off, on mean streets

and dream streets and yellow-brick streets,

unvoted for, unselected, unbirthed, untouched.

 

Enduring, on the road, in ravened embrace.

 

We are lost

as we hold blooded hands

and keel into the pounding falls.

 

Exhaling, exhaling, all is exhaling. Then, silence.

 

We are lost in our SUV, in our Humvee,

on our mountain bike, on foot, wheelchaired,

gurneyed into the operating room,

gurneyed to the basement coolers —

 

on the armied dark beach,

unable to climb bloody down from our fatal tree,

reaching across the chasm,

in grave and ash and scattered bones.

 

There is no lost paradise.

 

We are lost to decay, to rot, to corruption, to death —

from birth.

 

We are lost as we hold hands.

 

We are lost

behind the Oak Lawn house,

holding hands

on the bloody grass.

 

We are lost

as we hold hands

for the walk to the chamber.

 

We are lost

together

alone.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

Patrick T. Reardon, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, is the author of eight books, including the poetry collection Requiem for David and Faith Stripped to Its Essence, a literary-religious analysis of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence His poetry has appeared in Silver Birch Press, San Antonio Review, Eclectica, Esthetic Apostle, Ground Fresh Thursday, Literary Orphans, Rhino, Spank the Carp, Main Street Rag, The Write Launch, Meat for Tea, Tipton Poetry Journal, UCity Review, Under a Warm Green Linden and The Write City.