Ice Fishing

January 2023 | nonfiction

The grey trout flops on the ice and stills, its blood clotted. Dave holds the rigid fish trophy-high, and I snap a photo to prove our lives are as full as the trout’s thick belly. The fish’s mouth gapes, its body wall-mounted stiff.

It’s late, this fishing. This casting into the dark maw of lake with spider-web lines that glisten in the lowering sun. I stamp the membrane of ice, knowing we forged a two-foot hole with the hand auger, yet wonder if it’s strong enough to hold us. My silhouette stretches across the surface, strange and taffy-pulled. I raise my shadow hand; I’m still here.

Frozen fish stuffed into our bag, we mount the snowmobile and fly past gnarled scrub brush teetering on the edge of the timberline. Cold bites my jutted kneecaps. I want to release my arms hooked around Dave’s waist and soar into the darkening expanse, but instead, I brace harder and close my eyes. I am a plane, a roller coaster, a train barrelling south.

The moon is a silver-scaled bowl, the sky brilliant black. Dave cuts the engine at the cabin, our silence heavier than the snow. Northern Lights peek around a ring of clouds and trawl across the sky in purple, green, and yellow tendrils.

Inside, the woodstove spears heat into each corner. Knife poised beneath a gill, he guts each fish and drops the rubbery heads into a bucket, a hollow sound, and I wonder if that’s the sound of falling out of love, not sharp and sudden, but quiet. Slow. The row of headless trout fans across layers of outdated Northern Times; warmed blood blurs the newsprint. I press my thumb to the warmth and edge the paper in a line of fading whorls, like roses, until they vanish.

Dawn Miller

Dawn Miller’s most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Typehouse, Jellyfish Review, Guernica Edition’s This Will Only Take a Minute anthology, and The Maine Review, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada. Connect at www.dawnmillerwriter.com and on Twitter @DawnFMiller1

Mary McGinnis

January 2023 | poetry

Things I Missed

I was never alone with an abalone;

I never swallowed a spoon whole.

My parents never made love in front of me-

I’m not sure if they ever made love at all.

I was a fruit not ripe yet,

but born anyway.

The allure of dogs was lost on me;

I never understood the beauty of lamps.

They took up so much space,

and I wanted to push them off tables.

I never had a brother who went to war.

There was a casualty from Viet Nam

whose shaving lotion nipped at my senses;

we ate white rice flavored with oregano

and listened to Janis Joplin a lot.

The night we saw a Genet play

was the only time I heard him cry.

My friend Sue was sleeping on a cot next to us at the time.

She rested lightly, curious and unruffled;

I didn’t say goodbye to him properly.

I demanded instead that he return my albums, which he did.

I don’t remember where he went after the hospital.

 

Letter To the Twenty-first Century

I’m yours, I guess.

You’re not polite.

You want me online all day,

thin and lonely.

You say, hush, pretend you’re not in chains.

You say, look up at the stars,

never look down.

The old me’s going to start running,

the old me is bending and breaking,

shaking and making a stand.

I tell my beloved

don’t be reborn yet-

you wouldn’t be happy here.

The snow starts melting

as soon as it falls.

Mary McGinnis

Mary McGinnis, blind since birth, has been writing and living in New Mexico since 1972 where life has inspired her with emptiness, desert, and mountains. Published in over 80 magazines and anthologies including Lummox IX, BombFireLit, and Fixed and Free Anthology, she has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and included in the Telepoetry series recordings. She has published three full length collections: Listening for Cactus (1996), October Again (2008), See with Your Whole Body (2016), and a chapbook, “Breath of Willow.”

Bernard Knudsen

January 2023 | visual art

Banyan

 

Banyan (landscape)

 

Bernard Knudsen

Bernard Knudsen is a scientist and photographer in Florida, specializing in portraiture and the Florida landscape. His work been published in Odet Journal and ranked as a finalist in a Matt Granger contest for photographers.

Kathy Kremins

January 2023 | visual art

Evening Edges

 

Kathy Kremins

Kathy Kremins (she/her) is a retired New Jersey public school teacher and coach, adjunct professor, poet, photographer, and author. Her poetry chapbook, “Undressing the World,” was published by Finishing Line Press (2022). Kathy’s poetry appears in Gallery Affero’s ongoing Poem Booth Project: Make Me Want to Holler, Drunk Monkeys, Digging Through the Fat, Limp Wrist Magazine, Platform Review, Paterson Literary Review, Soup Can Magazine, The Night Heron Barks, Stay Salty; Life in the Garden State Anthology, Stillwater Review, Lavender Review, Divine Feminist: An Anthology of Poetry & Art By Womxn and Non-Binary Folx, and other publications. 2022 art exhibits including her photography were “Revival: Post-Pandemic Visions” and “Say Gay: Art As Queer Activism” at the 1978 Maplewood Arts Center.

Arrested Development ~ 1786 Hunterian Museum, London

January 2023 | poetry

the Waddington quins

died on delivery ~

their shared placenta

burned by local custom ~

their bodies sent to Dr Hunter

as medical specimens

pallid     flaccid     ghostly

water-babies hang in a tank

suspended

in solution

skin ridged like hands

left too long in bath water

liquor-steeped foetuses

with sightless eyes mere hooded slits

ribs protruding   wraith limbs dangling

a chorus

of stringless

marionettes

wailing mouths gape

in soundless distress               waiting in vain to hear

their long-dead mother’s heartbeat

Clare Marsh

Clare Marsh, a Kent based international adoption social worker, was awarded M.A. Creative Writing from the University of Kent (2018) and was a Pushcart Prize nominee (2017). She won the 2020 Olga Sinclair Short Story Prize. Her work has been published in Lighthouse, Mslexia, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Acropolis, Places of Poetry, Pure Slush, Green Ink Poetry and Rebel Talk.