Lofty Thoughts

April 2022 | poetry

Clear skies—who would’ve thought?
It’s not every day we get the chance to ride
in a hot air balloon.

High winds and clouds of grey
delay the hopeful balloonist;
just as overcast dreams and a
whirlwind of worries stall
the engines of the mind.

How easy it is to forget that
although we are grounded, we are not
overburdened. We are not
pinned.

All it takes is a gentle flame
under the skin for our wildest
dreams to take flight.

A sky of clear blue silence for our thoughts
to gently roam, raw and free.

Higher and higher, the balloons fly—
waves of cotton with quilted panels, a
sea of flames wandering in perfect sync.
They hover on the horizon like splatters
of paint on a canvas.

A gesso of milk and pallid paints
smear the heavens with hues of
sherbet and lavender. Drops of color rain

down to the emerald earth below,
while others cling

to the twinkling jewels of the dark beyond.

Waiting to be seen.

 

Azriel Cervantes

Azriel Cervantes is a writing and design professional with ASD living in the mountainous state of Colorado. He currently writes web content for dozens of law firms throughout the United States. Azriel’s poems have been featured in The Plentitudes Journal, SPLASH!, and Cathexis Northwest Press. His obsessions with nature, music, history, and psychology are what primarily influence his work. When not researching legal statutes, he spends his free time writing poetry, practicing various instruments, and taking care of his pepper garden.

Hear and Do

April 2022 | nonfiction

It was a wedding, my cousin’s wedding.  He was marrying a girl he knew for nine years.  He proposed in Disney World at Cinderella’s Castle.  The ring came to her in a glass slipper.  I was a bridesmaid.  All the bridesmaids had their makeup done like parrots.  I wore a magenta dress and orange eye shadow.  My brother was there, and his girlfriend Kay, and I watched him eat macaroni and cheese off an hors d’oeuvre spoon, his eyes closed, opened, closed again, then opened less wide than before.  Something was happening to him, and Kay grabbed a microphone and sang, “…they were young and they had each other, who could ask for more?” She threw her white curls back and gyrated.  I ate chocolate covered strawberries, one after another, and sucked the chocolate down and left the red berry dry.  I thought about God, how if he was real, why was he letting my brother live this way, still, anymore, at all?  I wanted answers but I wasn’t Jewish enough to conjure a parable, make use of a prayer and adapt meaning to my suffering.  Later, I would move to California, not once, but twice, and the second time I’d live out in Pasadena and hike the Bridge to Nowhere, part of the San Gabriel Mountains.  I’d hike alone, even though my mother begged me not to.  But it was then I learned how to pray, how to ask the earth for something, how to live off water.

Brittany Ackerman

Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and graduated from Florida Atlantic University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. She teaches General Education at AMDA College and Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Hollywood, CA. She was the 2017 Nonfiction Award Winner for Red Hen Press, as well as the AWP Intro Journals Project Award Nominee in 2015. Her work has been featured in Electric Literature, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, Entropy, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Hobart, Cosmonauts Ave, and more. Her first collection of essays entitled The Perpetual Motion Machine was published with Red Hen Press in 2018, and her debut novel The Brittanys is out now with Vintage.

Philatelist

January 2022 | poetry

While I was a girl waiting for life

to improve I did what I could, a ladybug

on her back kicking her feet in the air.

 

Dreaming of flight, I discovered

my mother’s hoarded stamps, unused

hodgepodge of American hope:

 

Skylab, Credos of the Founding Fathers,

Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Exploring the Moon,

Coral Reefs, Emily Dickinson, Collective Bargaining,

 

Energy Conservation, Robert Frost,

Indian Art, Osteopathic Medicine, Peace Corps,

Apollo-Soyuz, Save Our Water, Peter Max’s

 

Preserve the Environment, Robert Indiana’s

Love, which was all we needed, e pluribus unum

entreaties to the common good.

 

Doing what she never would, I organized

each intaglio prayer into an album, protected

by the verdigris majesty of our Lady of Liberty,

 

the infinite halftone dots within painting

a bigger picture to show me how

my pattern of spots might one day fit.

 

Broadening, I started to write the world,

sending scarce singles via post for stamps

on approval, something I could do while grounded.

 

Each month, the universe was delivered:

glassine envelopes opening like blurry windows to full-color

propaganda from the Soviet Bloc and African dictatorships,

 

perforated portraits of the unknown: Burundi.

Bulgaria, Equatorial Guinea, Fujeira.

The Maldive Islands. Tonga.

 

Some countries even marketed to the likes of me:

a 3-D moon landing from Ajman, scented flowers

from Bhutan, a peel-off diamond from Sierra Leone.

 

I could select scenes of the Montreal Olympics,

Japanese landscapes, cat breeds, Mickey Mouse,

gemstones, creatures of the African savannah.

 

Such power even a 10-year-old had

in her nascent geekery, to buy or reject,

the limited locus of my choices in those years.

 

I licked countless translucent hinges, fixing

them to sheets in my Ambassador Album,

“For Stamps of the World—Personally Designed by H.E. Harris.”

 

Providing brief colonialist histories for each country,

a world map on the plasticized back cover,

Mr. Harris taught me all I knew of the planet,

 

preparing me for when I would no longer be stranded.

He gave my curiosity structure while my mother slept

and shouted her nightmares.

 

Other children practiced scales or played Little League

for parents shaping their lives like sculptors. With my postage paid,

I carefully opened each colorful window and escaped

 

into the beguiling worlds then closed to me: page after page

of my meticulously ordered ambition, plans

for how I would right myself and fly away.

 

Lori Rottenberg

Lori Rottenberg is a poet who lives in Arlington, Virginia. She has published in such journals as The Dewdrop, Artemis, Potomac Review, and Poetica, and in anthologies by Paycock Press, Telling Our Stories Press, and Chuffed Buff Books. She has a series of six poems to be published by UCityReview in June 2022 and another poem to be published in December 2021 in The Moving Force Journal. One of her poems was picked for the 2021 Arlington Moving Words competition and appeared on county buses this spring. She has served as a visiting poet in the Arlington Public Schools Pick-a-Poet program since 2007, was an invited poet in the Joaquin Miller Cabin Reading Series in 2002, was a finalist in the 2006 Arlington Reads Poetry Competition, and was a recipient of Best Published Award in the March 2009 issue of Poetica. She is currently a writing instructor for international students at George Mason University and is in her second year of studies at the George Mason University MFA Poetry program.

You Learn

January 2022 | nonfiction

You learned, early in life, how to become a doll. You learned to show emotion in carefully measured doses, each tear equal to one pull of the string along your spine. Just enough to make your owner hold you closer, stroke your silky hair, pat that one tear dry.

You learned to be careful. Too much emotion, and your owner would wail that you were malfunctioning, that your glass eyes might burst. Your owner would peer at every inch of your porcelain limbs, searching for cracks they might need to patch up. They would squeeze your rigid wrists, clutching you tight, till their worry hurt more than any fear or loneliness of your own.

You learned that porcelain is beautiful for its fragility, for that moment it seems about to shatter, but somehow survives.

You learned how to sit on a shelf and wait and watch.

You learned to yearn for arms around you.

You learned that the wrong arms burned.

You learned that if you held all your thoughts and desires inside you, away from your owner’s prying eyes, your wishes would make their own kind of heat. Demanding and furious, just like a heart.

You learned to break yourself, to crack one porcelain finger, then two.

You learned that destruction is the closest thing to love.

You learned about masking tape, duct tape, Super Glue. You learned that people see what they want to see. They see what will keep them from breaking.

You learned that life as a doll is no life at all.

You learned that there is so little we choose. You learned that sometimes, we can’t get up and walk. Sometimes, there’s only one way off the shelf.

You learned there’s not so much difference between a fall and a jump.

 

Stephanie Parent

Stephanie Parent is a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing program at USC. Her poetry has been nominated for a Rhysling Award and Best of the Net.

Pete Madzelan

January 2022 | visual art

Winter Hibernation

 

Pete Madzelan

Pete Madzelan is an artist who lives with his wife in Las Cruces, New Mexico. His writings and photography have appeared in Oyster River Pages, Fleas on The Dog, The Courtship of Winds, Sky Island Journal, Bellingham Review, Cargo Literary Journal, Four Ties Lit Review, Foliate Oak, Gravel, New Mexico Magazine, Santa Fe Reporter, Off the Coast, Photography Exhibits and Art Shows in Albuquerque. Photography Center of Cape Cod, Poydras Review, San Pedro River Review, Switchback, and others.