Introduction by guest curator Cecilia Llompart

Verse:

Ansley Clark – “Szeged”

Aubrey Ryan – “The Way We Swear It,” “Best American Erotica,” “Lament of the Chinese Paddlefish,” and “Imbolc”

Chesley Weber-Smith – “Coins” and “dead lion”

Greg Solano – “Luna”

Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes – “What She Could Carry”

Jacob Victorine – “Dear Anne” (August 30, September 1, September 3)

39 x 39 inches, twigs, wire, red tape, 2013

14 chickens per square meter inside a ventilated shed is considered free range in Australia. The USDA only requires that the animal has access to the outdoors for an undetermined amount of time each day. That means a coop in America could contain 10 to thousands of chickens inside with a door to the outside the size of a doggy door that is only open for 5 minutes a day with most of the animals unaware the door is even there or open. Free range is not always so free.

You can call the egg company you purchase your animal products from to find out the conditions of the animals. You can get to know a farmer at a farmers market and ask her/him what the conditions are. Maybe even visit the farm.

*

Kim Guare is a fiber artist and environmental activist with a passion to share what she has learned about the unethical way our food is produced today. She graduated from the American Academy of Art in Chicago in 2011 with a BFA in watercolor. She is greatly inspired by the organic produce of the farmers market and her time spent working on organic farms.

Artist Statement:

There is a disconnection from the products we buy to eat and where they come from. My artwork demonstrates my concern with our lack of knowledge for the source of the foods we buy and celebrates the beauty of organic whole foods. The subjects often featured in my work are vegetables, fruits, and farm animals. I take my knowledge of food production, and share my ideas with the viewer so one may enjoy the beauty of our food and be challenged by the way our food is being produced.
I would like my work to trigger a desire in the viewer to be more connected to the origin of our food and the natural world.

“We were wanderers from the beginning…” chime the opening lines to Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Renowned astronomer Carl Sagan begins his book about exploring the cosmos with a hearkening back to the 99.9% of our time spent on this planet as nomads. It seems we are a species with tremendous potential, and tremendously humble beginnings. With—might I add—cooperative beginnings. A humbling thought.

 

Before our settling down. Before scarcity and squabbling. Before war tore through the very middle of us. Before all the boundaries—real and imagined—were laid out. There was only one thing to do—and that was to keep moving. “The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth, and the ocean, and the sky.” The astronomer muses on, in praise of wanderlust, or of that seemingly all too human trait… restlessness.

 

Our longing for bigger and brighter things, he reassures us, is the leftover imprint of when we had to keep moving in order to keep on living. Of when the lame among us, those that fell sick or fell behind, soon perished. Of when we could not make it alone. And it was the restless that led us to new lands, to new abundances. The very survival of our species, the astronomer claims, will always depend on the restless. On longing.

 

But how easy it is to leave the trail-blazing to someone else. To admire activism, when our own basic needs are easily met. To admire adventuring, from a vantage of varied comforts. To say, I am glad that someone is out there—doing that good thing, fighting that good fight—but I am also glad that it is not me. How easy it is to believe that those that pave the way are simply more equipped than us. More adventurous. More resilient.

 

We each juggle our personal allotments of anger, of fear, of grief, of loneliness. And in so juggling, what we might forget is that the trail-blazers among us are often the most weary, the most beaten down. The ones that have already lost the most. They blaze because they must. They press forward, because the way back has been barred for them. They have already lost a family, a language, a country. They may have lost an entire narrative for themselves—and have had no alternative but to construct a new one.

 

For this issue, we called for submissions concerning displacement and displaced peoples, and we defined a displaced person as someone “who has been forced to leave his or her native place.” In the end, what this issue really became is something by trail-blazers, for trail-blazers. And in a time when the headlines may make us feel like we have not come a very long way at all, we must look to those marginalized few—those with foresight.

 

In constructing new narratives for themselves, the writers featured here have constructed new narratives for entire countries, languages, peoples. They have taken what was lost and turned it into what is found. They are restless, yes. They are hungry. They are tired. They do not waver. They have embarked on a journey towards progress, and they will not turn back. Neither will they turn their backs on the difficult realities that progress entails.

 

Their voices have come to us from a long way away, and they have a long way yet to go.

They are those upon whom the very survival of our most human stories depend.

 

–Cecilia Llompart

After our parents we were
fffffffffffall mouth****a salt hunger.
Led our animals on ropes
jjjjjjjjjjjjthrough ashy streets
gathering water****I carried
mmmmyou****on my back
the weather****a procession
mmmmof floating burlap.
Piles of linens****unattended
nnnnnnaround the house where
once you entangled
nnnnnnyourself****and panicked
calling to me Help.****Unbearable
nnnnnntiny voice****lump of body
struggling for an opening in
nnnnnntwisted sheets.
I felt a sharp tug—
mmmmthe violent urge
to throw oneself
kkkkkkinto the deepest water.
I raised my foot
iiiiiiiiiiiand stepped on the part
that looked like a face
nnnnnas hard as I could.

*

Ansley Clark is a native of the Pacific Northwest and a traveling hermit-teacher.  She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder where she also teaches creative writing.  She has been previously published or has work forthcoming in Smoking Glue Gun, Mead, Denver Quarterly, The Volta, Spork, and The Legendary.

Bodily. By kelp
& wakame. By small,

oily fish. To save
an ocean, we

will leave it.
To save our ground,

we’re planting bluestem,
then burning. Being

woman, I know
to shed, to go

toward new
moon like underground

room. Come out
fetal & drumming.

I swallow herds. I
swallow the sun, & if

a child is female
she carries

all her thousand
eggs inside her

mother & the mother
carries double

all those oaths:
I will be razed

for you & then
you’ll burn me

to ground. You
are the ground &

I’m growing
giant & sunward.

*

Aubrey Ryan’s work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Ant-, Best New Poets, El Aleph, Phantom Limb, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Her poems have received awards from The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Consequence Magazine, Booth Journal, and Tupelo Press, and have been nominated for three Pushcart prizes. Aubrey is the Writer in Residence at the Midwest Writing Center in Iowa where she lives with her husband and small son.

Talk dirt to me. Tell how bluestem roots

near thirty feet. How echinacea saves the bees.

I ogle dandelions. Have I told you the things

they can do to a body?  Will you truss my

grain mill to my bike? Solar our home & I’ll

be hot to the touch. Just burning up.

Solve the riddle of the polar ice & I’ll spread

like a starfish, though the starfish

are dying in droves. They’re tearing

their arms off. Did you hear? I’ve no mind

for sonnets, no mind for making another

child when even the Mississippi

is gobbling its own plain. I don’t know

what my safe word is. The closest I can get

is native.   Maybe river.   Maybe rain.

*

Aubrey Ryan’s work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Ant-, Best New Poets, El Aleph, Phantom Limb, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Her poems have received awards from The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Consequence Magazine, Booth Journal, and Tupelo Press, and have been nominated for three Pushcart prizes. Aubrey is the Writer in Residence at the Midwest Writing Center in Iowa where she lives with her husband and small son.

One day, there will be no river. The things we think will kill us
don’t—not the red-eyed asteroid, not the red-dust waters, not

the ice age when I froze beneath the mirror of my sky and the slow,
slow silver of my air. There are other homes. Every river meets itself

again: a tongue curling back to lick the spine. There’s no other home:
my stretch; my valley plunge; my swallowed gorge where rock holds

long, low notes and ship is broken back to tree. I fed an emperor;
a bird-boned girl; a man in a haygrass hut. Now their blood runs:

Yangtze, Yangtze, and here is the only place I have to go: this
hundred days to hold the cells of all my thousand sons. Past river,

there is lake. There is a meeting place. I keep some many eons in me.
There is another of me, waiting. We will not find each other.

*

Aubrey Ryan’s work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Ant-, Best New Poets, El Aleph, Phantom Limb, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Her poems have received awards from The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Consequence Magazine, Booth Journal, and Tupelo Press, and have been nominated for three Pushcart prizes. Aubrey is the Writer in Residence at the Midwest Writing Center in Iowa where she lives with her husband and small son.

Even polar, we graft together.
I wrench my neck to sky.

What grey. These are my
articles of faith: the land

conceiving food to feed
our child. I’m a simple

nun to that. We’ve no memory
of thaw, but still we haul our scraps

outside, sure with all our might
of resurrection. I fear the empty

belly; the fashioned
seed; the kiwi flown in

from half a world away.
Sometimes my mind

needs a bed under snow. O
Love, tell me nothing but stories

of nothing. I’m so pretty
& there are eagles

at the river. There’s not
a thing like them, nothing.

*

Aubrey Ryan’s work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Ant-, Best New Poets, El Aleph, Phantom Limb, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Her poems have received awards from The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Consequence Magazine, Booth Journal, and Tupelo Press, and have been nominated for three Pushcart prizes. Aubrey is the Writer in Residence at the Midwest Writing Center in Iowa where she lives with her husband and small son.

I recognize myself least this week.
I don’t think about writing, don’t care for it,
I think about God is Love
and mint it on my copper-nickel
eyes where no great faces are minted,
no great women I loved, no mothers or fathers,
no one of any great history,
just you, Lawrence, sitting beside me,
on the precipice of drunk, not yet folding your face into itself
to cry about a wife who is either dead or long gone,
and we talk about faith. We talk about machines
that create machines smarter than themselves
and you say it’s either that life or the primitive one,
it’s either machine gods or sun ones,
and I can’t disagree. More and more I stare at the pyramids
on mars and think Donald Rumsfeld is the leader of the reptilian race.
More and more I am my father’s daughter, reading about the Illuminati,
Mayan prophecies, signs of the end of the world,
more and more his wife says I am the “well-balanced” him,
as if we can create beings smarter than ourselves. E pluribus unum.
Lawrence, you are an old drunk,
but so was I once, or something like that, stumbling everywhere,
into everything and into everyone. I can sit with you Lawrence, at night
in the park we are Occupying, around a fire that sits
on a grate, with Alan off his meds screaming that he wants
candy for his nephew. Alan’s eyes are wet pennies in which nothing is reflected,
not his nephew, skinny little child who stares up at him
and slides his cold little hand into mine. Alan is crying now,
and I pretend to know how to help someone,
touch the puff of his jacket, give him a slice of pizza.
I have cried like that because I am afraid of my own fear.
I bet you, reader, have cried that like too. I saw Lawrence do it,
I’ll see it again. The world is burning, they say, and I have
a distinct feeling that the final battle will be fought
by two people looking into each other’s eyes.

*

Chelsey Weber-Smith is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia’s MFA program in poetry. She also writes country music and travels the United States. She has written and self-published two chapbooks, a travel memoir, and two full-length folk/country albums. She currently lives in Seattle.

I had to take a good friend
home to his parents
he was manic
collecting garbage in a rented room
and arranging it
believing a secret door
to god would appear
if he got the room just right
if everything added up
he cried in my arms a lot
that summer and I realized
something was wrong
because he had never before mentioned god|
and now the word opened
out of his mouth
and grew to the size of the car
we were sitting in
like a bubble from a wand
that grows shivering
rainbows circling in it
until your whole hand is inside
he had never mentioned god
the word that is always clamped
between my teeth
and he said he knew things
he didn’t know before
that he was leaving clues
for everyone but they weren’t noticing
he said they would understand
when they saw it
he was leaving arrows
that pointed to other arrows
a popcorn kernel
on a kitchen table
but where I wasn’t sure

there are secret things
the women in my family know
like a cat that won’t stop following you
on some dark neighborhood street
it won’t let you touch it
even though you call it to you
put your fingers together with false promises
of food and say sweet things to it
in a voice that isn’t yours
it’s always there a little behind you
getting farther and farther from its home
and closer and closer to yours

I heard a sick man died in the house
my grandparents live in
I don’t know much about it
except that he slowly lost his mind
at midnight my grannie once
heard someone yelling
the numbers of each stroke of her
grandmother clock
ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE
all the way to twelve
of course there was no one there
when she made it down the hall
is there ever
no one in the long shadow of the clock

my grannie and my mom
have stood in the kitchen
and smelled something flowery and strong
like pushing your nose deep
into a belly of a rose
they could feel my great-grandmother
there in the kitchen
the perfume she wore
the unique way it felt to stand beside her
it happens so why say it doesn’t
my mom stood in a
circle of buttercups
and knew that someone dead was there
who died of an overdose
and was rolled into a ditch
someone who called her buttercup
when he loved her

people like to say that
nothing happens after you die
that it’s just nothing and you don’t even
know it’s nothing
they say it with so much authority
like it is a fact that has melted
so deeply into curriculum
that it’s been reduced to a name and a date
and no one really cares
when Steve died it was a while
before he came into a dream of mine
walking down a long sand hill
wearing surf shorts
looking young and strong
with long hippy hair
it’s okay to not be sure of anything
maybe when we die
like my grandpa says
we get to see everyone else who’s died
and we can go to different places in the world
fly around and see them
you don’t know
and neither do I
so why make fun of people
who dream of seeing their dead again
on hills made of sand
or walking on railroad tracks

sometimes I get embarrassed
because I say thank you to a barista
for giving me more hot water in my tea
I say it like he has just revealed to me
a grace I wasn’t aware of before
that will certainly golden my dull heart into shining
and he says no problem
like the world is so easy for all of us
like each motion is relaxed into
and then performed through us
by something grand and perfectly confident
and there is no problem for me
not really

my father used to dream demons
pulling him into the fireplace
and men in red robes and hoods
circling around him
it’s scary I know
because I dreamed those dreams
and once I was sleeping
in my grannie’s house
my girlfriend
another woman who knows secret things
could feel a man standing above her
staring at her
she said I was breathing heavily
whimpering in my sleep
and she said she could feel him there
then the sound of a car crashing
and the loud unnerving scrapes
of people coughing
and me whimpering and almost crying out
and I woke up with nothing in my head
but a dark sick warmth over everything

maybe there is darkness just like the stories tell us
maybe there is light just like the stories tell us
maybe there is no use in disbelief
you see it everyday
you see god everyday
and you see the devil
and you are the devil today
or you are god
thanking people that give you things
gratitude purring in your chest for hours|
or yelling at pretty things about your love
your love that fills the room with smoke
your love that pulls its own feathers out
or your love
that moves its hands through
the long hair of lions

some relative of a mean politician
hunted and killed a lion
and put a picture of it on facebook
the dead thing broke my heart
maybe because I am a leo
with a leo rising
and at my best I am a lion
and at my worst
my scorpion moon
clamps the lion’s tail
and they run around like that
like a cartoon
hurt and hurting
but now the lion is dead
and someone is proud of that death
the lion was lying there
in the picture
like a truly sad teenager
a teenager that has grown into knowing
for the first time the solid nervous
weight of the world
and just lets the weight push down
closes their eyes in a field at night
maybe high on their parents’ painkillers
that tumbled into their palms
like the smooth stones at a novelty shop
all that warm gravity pulling them down into despair
it’s okay to go down there
but please lion rise back up
like the stories say
let me see the muscles of your back
and all that golden fur
and those immaculate teeth
that I could kiss
and will

 

 

*

Chelsey Weber-Smith is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia’s MFA program in poetry. She also writes country music and travels the United States. She has written and self-published two chapbooks, a travel memoir, and two full-length folk/country albums. She currently lives in Seattle.