The following selections are from our 2016 printed journal.

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Editors:
JT Adkins/ Julie Burns/ Jenessa Gayheart/ Tari Gunstone/ Kyrsten Hochanadel/ Julia Laxer/ Samuel Miller/ Abigail Poulson/ Zac Russi/
Gustavo Salcido/ Daniel Thompson

Advisor(s):
Wendy Bourgeois

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in print CONTENTS:

• Forest of Forgets….. Strider Marcus Jones
• Validation….. Gustavo Salcido
• GhostWriter….. Frank de Canio
• Everywhere but the Sky….. Tari Gunstone
• New to White Privilege Mid-Flight….. Julie Burns
• Four Women in Search of Literary Reading Encounter a Warp in the Spacetime Continuum….. Jan Underwood
• The Box….. Holly Day
• Down….. Abigail Poulson
• Six Impossible Things….. Abigail Poulson
• Memorial….. Julia Laxer
• Aftermath….. Vinati Bhola
• Sorry for the Wait….. Zac Russi
• Peter….. Janessa Gayheart
• Snowflakes….. Justin Rigamonti
• The Hand of a Friend….. Samuel Miller
• Seventeen Flights of Stairs….. Jenna Gallemore
• Grieving the Bone 2….. Ross Robbins
• Leaving Paradise….. Daniel Thompson
• Mower….. Harry Goldkamp
• Anorexia….. Kyrsten Hochanadel
• Night Out….. JT Adkins
• Succor….. Alex Vigue
• Proceed Until Apprehended….. Cynthia Kimball
• Confrontation With Landscape….. Wendy Bourgeois
• I the Poet….. Benjamin Johnson
• All Ways Are My Way….. Abigail Poulson

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Selections

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Everywhere but the Sky
by Tari Gunston (excerpt)

The monastic property consisted of two guest houses, St. Joseph and St. Scholastica, a preserving room for cooking, storing butchered meat, and preserving produce and herbs, a dairy room to chill raw milk and process cheese, a chicken coop affectionately titled Chicken Heaven by Mother Caterina, a pig pen, a sheep house, and a large barn housing the two Jersey dairy cows, Claire and Luccina. A large sliding door opened up at the end of the barn, perfectly framing a bucolic scene of grazing Scottish Highland cattle, Cotswold sheep, llamas and alpacas on a wide pastureland backdropped by a dense forest green. Tucked into the landscape were three gardens, a small koi fish pond surrounded by ornamental shrubs and vines that Mother Mary Grace nurtured, Mother Felicita’s artistically laid out herb garden (which she still tends at her 82 years of age), and the large vegetable and flower garden that was Mother Dilecta’s pride and joy. Extending beyond these terrains was the pastureland fenced in by forest with the Monastic chapel and enclosure sitting on a rocky hill overlooking it all.

The nuns’ sleeping quarters were off limits to anyone outside of the religious community, but occasionally they opened the doors to me if they had computer problems…

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Down
by Abigail Poulson

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Memorial for Angie
by Julie Laxer

Lost pictures of parties:
closed eyelids,
smug close-ups of blurry
smiling laughing lips,
mouths out-of-focus
and teeth like a white sky.
I never
learned why.

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Succor
by Alex Vigue (excerpt)

I drink a liter of Coke Zero before bed. I lay horizontally with my laptop in my face, the screen a little too bright even though I installed a dimmer program. I stare at pictures of naked men adorned with body shapes that I find pleasing. My heart flutters at their faces. My heart flutters at their abdomens. My heart flutters at their asses. My heart flutters because the caffeine is stuck inside it. I drank the Coke Zero because it was there.

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Confrontation with Landscape
by Wendy Bourgeois

What have you ever done for me? Make cows?
The mechanism wobbles; spaces in the ground
open up. Though I like looking at you, pretty
lady. You contain all the pretty ladies that ever are.

Darling, the butter of your dirt breast is trees,
the honey of your lava, boring Hawaii. Eat eat
around the mush spot then sleep forever. It isn’t
personal the way you love me, and vice versa

like cephalopods starving near their egg sacs,
not because we want to. You are more ferocious,
fatter than anything. Gorgeous but. Let me look
inside the wet slop of my own brain for a change.

Your fruit and floral megaphone gives me a migraine.
I met a bible last week, a building, a theorem.
They say harrumph to you and claim to originate
from outer space. I wish I was and you were new to me.