Tracey Dean Widelitz

January 2024 | visual art

Fairy Tales Do Come True

Tracey Dean Widelitz

Tracey Dean Widelitz is a published writer, poet and photographer. She is the author of the published children’s book A Heavenly World. Her personal experience of pet loss would later become her first children’s book A Heavenly World. Her poetry has been published in Wingless Dreamer’s Dreamstones of Summer, Dawn of the Day, Whispers of Pumpkin, My Cityline, Field of Black Roses, The Black Haven and My Sanskriti In Teal, and Rhapsodies of Rhyme Anthologies, and she was the Grand Winner of Wingless Dreamer’s Dreamstones of Summer Poetry Contest and one of the top finalists in Field of Black Roses Poetry Contest 2022. Her photographs appear in Months to Years Winter 2022 edition, Camas Winter 2021 edition literary magazines, Tiny Seed Literary Journal July 10th, 2022 and October 4th, 2022 Blog and print Anthology edition, Burningword Literary Journal April 2022 literary journal, Poet’s Choice “A Taste of Reality” Anthology, Wild Roof Journal Issue 20 May 2023, Las Laguna Art Gallery February show Captured (Photography) 2022-Online Edition, March 2022 Online Exhibition Landscapes or Seascapes, April 2022 Online Exhibition “Light & Shade” and April 2023 “2023-Women In Art” Online Exhibition. Visit her website at https://www.traceydeanwidelitz.com Twitter @tracey_author Instagram @traceydeanwidelitz.com and @aheavenlyworld

A Persistence of Cormorants

January 2024 | poetry

I live near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal,

a toxic and fetid tidal estuary from its salted

harbor mouth to its abrupt industrial end.

It is my pixel of wilderness in the city.

 

Tonight I heard the night heron quawk—

Thought it was a ghost. Flight is silence,

a glimpse of white on the wing, a memory

out of reach, the perfect shadow.

 

Cormorants hunt the same water by day

They do not perch. They paddle low

in the water, wings cupped to torso,

eyes up, sudden arch, minimal ripple.

 

Disappear into the murky green.

The plunging pursuit of prey propelled

by black webbed feet. What persistence

it must take to hunt in such dismal silt.

 

Poets know the tired metaphor of truths

that lie beneath the surface. Know the patient

wait to snatch a glimpse of glimmer. But

to swim, to hunt in our turbid psyches,

 

where madness lurks, or doubloons wait,

takes a persistence of cormorants.

 

Gerald Wagoner

Gerald Wagoner, author of When Nothing Wild Remains, (Broadstone Books, 2023), and A Month of Someday, (Indolent Books, 2023) says his childhood was divided between Eastern Oregon and Cut Bank, Montana, where he was raised under the doctrine of benign neglect. Gerald has lived in Brooklyn, NY since 1982. He exhibited widely and taught Art & English for the NYC Department of Education. 2018: Visiting Poet Residency Brooklyn Navy Yard. 2019, 2021-23: Curator/ host of A Persistence of Cormorants, an outdoors reading series by the Gowanus Canal. 2023 April, Poets Afloat Mini-Residency, Waterfront Barge Museum. Education: U of Montana, BA Creative Writing, 1970, SUNY Albany, MA & MFA Sculpture Selected Publications:  Beltway Quarterly, BigCityLit, Blue Mountain Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Night Heron Barks, Ocotillo Review, Right Hand Pointing, Maryland Literary Review.

Jeremiah A. Gilbert

January 2024 | visual art

Saksun, Faroe Islands II

Saksun, Faroe Islands III

Jeremiah A. Gilbert

Jeremiah Gilbert is an award-winning photographer and travel writer based out of Southern California. His travels have taken him to over a hundred countries and territories spread across six continents. His photography has been published internationally and exhibited worldwide. He is the author of three travel books, including Can’t Get Here from There: Fifty Tales of Travel and From Tibet to Egypt: Early Travels After a Late Start. His most recent, On to Plan C, documents his return to travel in a post-pandemic world and is the first to include his photography. He can be found on Instagram @jg_travels

Fabio Sassi

January 2024 | visual art

City cracks

Imaginary map

Rock & chain

Fabio Sassi

Fabio Sassi makes photos and acrylics using whatever is considered to have no worth by the mainstream. He often puts a quirky twist to his subjects or employs an unusual perspective that gives a new angle of view. Fabio lives in Bologna, Italy, and his work can be viewed at www.fabiosassi.foliohd.com

Rebecca Pyle

January 2024 | visual art

Door Knocker, Bordeaux, France

Rebecca Pyle

Rebecca Pyle is an artist whose work (drawings, photographs, oil paintings) appears as images in many art/literary journals, including MAYDAY, Watershed Review, TINT, The Moving Force Journal, New England Review, Gris-Gris, West Trestle Review and La Piccioletta Barca. Rebecca is also a writer of fiction and poetry and essays. American, she is living most of this year in Europe; find her in rebeccapyleartist.com.