< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Found Shari Zollinger I entered psychedelic space for the first time with a microdose. Alice, who once fell through, was offered a red pill or a blue one. Adriana offered me gray green on the morning of an eclipse. My body clearly and without hesitation chose which dose (a tiny bite of a tiny piece of filigree fibrous cap) and which environment (supine on a brown leather couch in the middle of the living room with the Moab red rock desert reflecting through). Time travel was/wasn’t possible? Eyes closed. What if we’ve left parts of ourselves out there, along the continuum? What if the cold-framed window in the Taipei, Taiwan, hospital waiting room still existed and she still waited there looking out at the night? What if, along that continuum, there were points where it was possible to make changes? Scroll back along the thread-gauzy timeline, web-filamented, to check for the nodes that need attention. In astrological terminology, eclipses were both omen and boon. We don’t know if this is true, yet it seems to hold across the timeline when we’re looking for possible wormholes, when we’re bending back toward where she sat waiting. Where she’d waited a long time. It was a surprise to see her there. Had it been 15 or 20 years since she’d gone to the Taipei hospital to seek assurance, wondering how fast and furious the body broke, how quickly the psyche could sit down like a cipher without the proper lexicon of meaning? It was a thing to recognize her. Wonder how she’d passed the time. How many names for the color of night she coined and counted out that window? Did she always know someone would return for her? Did she count time or build mnemonics or hear the distinct click of a metronome reminding her that she wasn’t exactly alone? And how did she know what to do? The first thing—to walk out into the sunlight which was there beyond the hospital night, because it could be there, because she was found in-continuum where narrative couldn’t demand length or cord or fibrous linearity, where the weather could change every second and day and night could click in time with the metronome. Sunlight came to her skin first as fire. And she said watch as her body burned down like an incense cone starting with her head, a thousand points of ash scrolling down her frame as she gave herself permission to translate into a substance that the wind could move. And finally, she moved. Each piece companion-ed to the unseen. And she said the thing I didn’t know was, it's okay to let a piece of me die. It was okay to blow away. She left a small diamond on the concrete sidewalk outside the hospital in Taipei, Taiwan. I took the carbon remnant in hand—returned to the brown leather couch, to Moab, the supine position, my own unmoving body making its way from closed eyes to open, where I saw red rocks outside the living room window obscured by night. "Found" was written after attending a lecture on the lyric essay, a medium I'd been curious about but hadn't spent much time with as a writer. I've enjoyed exploring the genre, defining and redefining its framework to fit the needs of my writing. It was a breakthrough to crossover into this form, and the piece itself was written at the crossroads between breakdown and breakthrough. Previous SHARI ZOLLINGER is a poet, essayist, and longtime bookseller, whose most recent bookstore sojourn was at Back of Beyond Books in Moab, Utah. Her work has appeared in Sugar House Review, Redactions Poetry & Poetics, and Ephemeral . She is currently a contributing editor and reader at Sugar House Review . sharizollinger.substack.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Summoning Shari Zollinger “I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.” –Jeanette Winterson What if we were born with an assumption, we tiny creatures without verbal webbing in our already-formed pulsing cortexes, and what if that assumption was simply that we belong to the world and the world belongs to us so long as our gooey little bodies spill out into gravity? Would we also have been born with the hope that this sense of belonging was stable, meaning for all time, forever and ever? And how do we reconcile the betrayal we feel when we learn that belonging never was the static act of our grand assumption? That we'll have to walk round its bend repeatedly and will get caught inside the crook of its elbow, and that we’ll get lost. How do we learn to walk the unmapped territory where we wander the in-between? I once tried a thing they called soul retrieval. A bandied term, thick with ambiguity. What kind of thing is this? And yet, what kind of a thing IS this, materialized as answer. What to do about this lostness that keeps returning, like a clock, to jolt and rock and tick. The practitioner lay by my side, hip to hip, after calling upon the four directions of the world. She took the responsibility for driving from me for just a moment, and I was grateful because this was usually mine to bear. Why was it such a relief to let her hold the space for this expedition, as I handed over my consent for her to act upon my body, just this once, not as renunciation but as investigation? To scry inside my webbing to see what I’d not seen. To lead me through a matrix of memory. After some time, when all I had to do was lie on a decorative rug next to her, she sat up with a story to tell. Was this what she meant by retrieval? That she was the gatherer of lost stories? Her story was about a rock. The rock was in the hand of a girl. The girl's hand was clenched around the rock. The rock and the girl were asleep deep underground. The girl was 8 years old. As the rush of the story came down inside our space, I thought, well, there was a time when I was 8 years old and we were exiled from the sprawling Mormon farm full of cousins and playmates and caretakers. And were given orders to leave. Reasons as messy as families are, the breaking fraught with financial mistakes, personality conflicts, scapegoats. And because I was 8, and I didn’t know that eventually I’d break with this tribe deliberately; I’d taken the orders as religious gospel. As once we might belong, so too shall we not. We became, in my 8-year-old head, the boxcar children looking for pine needle beds. And because we were used to caretakers in multitudes, how then would we survive, being reduced to two parents who’d possibly never considered that they’d have to bear the emotional weight of 9 children on their own? What if this story buried itself inside a rock in a small bird-claw-hand, deep under the earth because this girl simply didn’t want to leave this place? Perhaps at that point, she’d searched the farm, walking dusty paths by the cow corral, next to the silage pit, underneath the red-twined hay bales for a place to bury one little piece of her with a rock to keep her company, and she’d allow this separation because, although leaving was inevitable, perhaps it could be mitigated by letting one piece stay, one piece of rock like a little bird. How long do we stay in a place with our hands wrapped around stone? Then the practitioner excavated the metaphorical rock and, in shamanic diffusion, blew the rock back into MY belly, creating a crossroads of then and now, where something lost was found. Something buried, reclaimed. And in that act, she summoned belonging as the revolutionary remembering of something I was finally ready to take up and embrace. "Summoning" debuted alongside a film by Amanda Madden, A Spell for Queer Home , in 2023 in Moab, Utah. In this lyric essay, the summoner leads a seeker to revisit childhood traumas and achieve a breakthrough. Previous SHARI ZOLLINGER is a poet, essayist, and longtime bookseller, whose most recent bookstore sojourn was at Back of Beyond Books in Moab, Utah. Her work has appeared in Sugar House Review, Redactions Poetry & Poetics, and Ephemeral . She is currently a contributing editor and reader at Sugar House Review . sharizollinger.substack.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue This Horse is the Boss of Me Mike Wilson An opening in the ground in my chest opens a box that opens another world bigger clear, silver, and empty like Montana. # Steel spurs on my boots are for show: the barest motion sends the horse galloping through frictionless pixelation intimate as my retina. This mind-blind land is beyond my ken. I trust the horse to carry me where I should go. "This Horse is the Boss of Me" describes breaking through to the other side, as Jim Morrison put it, where desire carries us through a land we normally cannot see. Previous MIKE WILSON 'S work has appeared in many magazines and in his book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic (Rabbit House Press, 2020). Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue First Responder Mike Wilson There’s an active shooter on the end of the bar armed with cigarettes and Singapore Slings. If I step forward, she steps back falling into empty arms that do not catch. Help, she cries. She’s wearing a suicide vest packed with low self-esteem. Even if I pull the cord, she says, no one will hear me go bang . I put my hands over my ears. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse circle her skull like Indians around a covered wagon, shooting a barrage of arrows that make access impossible except by a SWAT team of angels. She hopes. The rocks cry out Who is accountable? The spider eyes of the universe look at me. I send her doves inside the breath of my breath. I pry her fingers from the gun. Hold still , I say, while I patch that broken heart. "First Responder" was published in Heroin Love Songs. In this poem, the narrator breaks through the defenses of a woman in a bar. Previous MIKE WILSON 'S work has appeared in many magazines and in his book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic (Rabbit House Press, 2020). Next

Nano Taggart < Back to Breakthroughs Issue On Selecting the Contents of Care Package Number Three Nano Taggart 00:00 / 01:12 On Selecting the Contents of Care Package Number Three Nano Taggart We can’t help and we can’t help but postpone grief with something. Our hero had given up but hope has again regained hold. Isn’t it strange that zero isn’t nothing? And so we learn you can buy time (once it's running out) with winter’s inversion bearing down so low we could lose the sun if we didn’t know where to look. It's strange to know that zero had to be invented as I notice Natalie’s row of unlit candles has collected a thin skin. What would you mail a twenty-five-year-old who's dying? Hand- written notes from all of us. Knick-knacks of short purpose? We feel as though we’ve cut a larger hole around a hole. It’s stranger still that zero was invented independently and all over. It’s not the same as nothing. We’re making a list. A short list. Originally published in The Shore , this poem addresses the helplessness that hollows us out once we hear the clock's awful ticking on a loved one; in this case, Clark Gunnel (d. June 15, 2012). It went through more drafts than I can count over the course of more than a decade. Previous NANO TAGGART is a founding editor of Sugar House Review , and would like to meet your dog. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Isinglass Austin Holmes made coffee then watched rain in blurred sheets cascade down the mountain fed the dog thin light easing through the window moments to be forsaken thoughts of what is to come increasingly shapeless every moment as frail and unpredictable as a panicked bird something looms above all of us at once illuminating and obscuring the path we find ourselves on like moonlight subdued by clouds each night I dream of loss and wake to recollect it as though staring through isinglass resinous and fragmented "Isinglass" is from a forthcoming manuscript titled Some Things Weren't Meant to Mend . The poem is about the thin barrier between waking consciousness and dream, and how, when our minds are full of worry for what is transpiring in the world, for our safety and the safety of our loved ones, and for what the future could hold, our dreams often become infiltrated by that worry. Much like the weak early light that struggles through the window in the opening lines, the lingering dread of these dreams permeates our day. We struggle to recollect details, but are met with shrouds. Light, like memory, is obscured, and I imagined it filtering through isinglass, something organic and translucent but also obstructing. Like a house of mirrors, it splinters light in the way dreams splinter our memory and worry, distorting it. Previous AUSTIN HOLMES lives in southern Utah, where he spends life with his beloved partner and their dog. He contemplates what he can and falls in love with the sky daily anew. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Spring Cleaning Terry Jude Miller In constant fear you’d become the hoarder your abusive father was, you toss everything that lacks immediate utility. You bring paint cans to the recycling center when you’ve used just a smidge of their subterfuge on a reclaimed nightstand or Mexican pottery planter. You discard me, finding no use for affection, for handholding in the movies, for anything more than a chicken peck of a kiss. Why keep something around that doesn’t work for you anymore? Your father’s backyard is full of motors with thrown rods and clothes dryers with defective doors. All go into the dumpster, where you place me beside the Texaco sign with burned-out bulbs and a length of chain missing its master link. "Spring Cleaning" was first published in Perennial , now Verdict Magazine. This poem describes a breakthrough by a companion that didn't turn out well for the poet. Previous TERRY JUDE MILLER works in academia in Houston, Texas. His poems have received multiple Pushcart nominations and have been published in Sontag Mag , Feed the Holy , Encore , Equinox , Trigger Warning Magazine , Exomorphosis , Ars Sententia , The Nature of Things , The Bayou Review , Boundless , the Poetry At Round Top Anthology , and forthcoming in Rattle . Miller is the former 1st Vice Chancellor of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. terryjudemiller.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Reaching Terry Jude Miller In artificial light, a claw-like motif is found on the Island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Its fingers turn back the clock of man’s first art to 68,000 years ago, 232,000 solar rotations as Homo sapiens before the painter filled his mouth with ochre, spread his fingers upon stone, and spat history upon his hand, halo of red, giving meaning to something beyond the reach of explanation, an inflection only the heart can find, struggles to perfect itself through language, religion, science, and stories recorded in a new medium, by torched vision, innate to man, but as puzzling as the stars above Indonesia, that never see this creature’s masterpiece, yet the artist emerges from the place beneath ground, awed and mesmerized by their dance of light. This poem was inspired by a BBC article on the world's oldest cave art. The poem investigates how art is the springboard to language, religion, and science. Every poem I write owes itself in some way to these first artists who possessed a thought and made art from it. Previous TERRY JUDE MILLER works in academia in Houston, Texas. His poems have received multiple Pushcart nominations and have been published in Sontag Mag , Feed the Holy , Encore , Equinox , Trigger Warning Magazine , Exomorphosis , Ars Sententia , The Nature of Things , The Bayou Review , Boundless , the Poetry At Round Top Anthology , and forthcoming in Rattle . Miller is the former 1st Vice Chancellor of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. terryjudemiller.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Watching Fog Austin Holmes beyond the rain-dampened fence past the highway the mesa invisible in the distance looming in its cloak like a red panther power lines hover like slender black hairs caught in the wind across the gray when we can no longer drink the water drops of rain fall like imitations this cold room is unlit still the morning has amounted to nothing why am I sitting here watching air obliterate air contemplating what I cannot see I can feel the arms that carry us all tremble with our weight their grip loosening a bit more each day I wrote this poem on a rainy morning, looking from my office window out to the road and landscape beyond. I found myself thinking about the slowness with which paradigms of life dissipate without us noticing, and how the fragility of all things can drag us into a new sense of ourselves, and where we fit in the world. This poem is about acknowledging that fragility and our powerlessness to change it. It’s about the transformative impact a slow realization like that can have, how it can change us for the worse by taking away our wonder for this world. I want my poems to convey the idea that although we can't alter the fragility of life, we have a responsibility to work in our small ways collectively to make the experience of life as good as we are able to, while we can, for all living things. Previous AUSTIN HOLMES lives in southern Utah, where he spends life with his beloved partner and their dog. He contemplates what he can and falls in love with the sky daily anew. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue George Running Poles Michael Shay Two teen boys walk along the asphalt bikeway in Riverton, Wyoming. George Jumping Bull pushes a shopping cart he found abandoned in the winter-brown grass. He’s wearing black sweatpants bunched over white running shoes and a red bandanna tied around his close-cropped hair. Jimmy Jones wears his black Oakland Raiders cap sideways, its bill pointing east. He milks a pint bottle of vodka as he walks. George reaches for it. “Not so fast,” Jimmy says. He slurs his words as he swats at George’s hand. “Let me try some, man,” George says. “We’re cousins.” “I’m older so I get more.” A smile creases Jimmy’s round face. A chip is missing from one of his upper front teeth, a souvenir from his father’s fist. “Where’d you get the bottle?” “Papa.” George laughs. “Sure, Uncle Luke just gave it to you.” “I didn’t say he gave it to me. I took it, and then I hitched a ride into town to share it with my favorite cuz.” “You’re in a shitload of trouble.” “No I’m not.” He pulls on the bottle. “Give me a sip.” Jimmy stops. “First you gotta run ten poles.” George looks at the line of weather-beaten wooden power poles that flank the bikeway. Beyond them, open fields merge into the half-finished houses of a new development. “I just ran ten poles.” He points behind him on the path. Jimmy shakes the bottle at his cousin. George is almost a head taller and a lot thinner. “Don’t argue with your coach.” “I already got a coach.” “Yeah, a city boy from back east,” Jimmy says. “Doing his good deed for the Indians.” “Coach Simmons is an O.K. guy. He runs with the team, keeping up most of the time.” “But I’m your cousin.” Jimmy takes another sip. “And I’m your elder, so you gotta listen.” “Ten months older.” “I was premature, born three months too soon. So I’m really more than a year older.” George stops and stares at his cousin. “That doesn’t make sense.” “Sure it does. I was born three months too early. If I was born when I was s’posed to, I’d really be thirteen months older than you.” George knows it’s pointless to argue. “Whatever you say.” They hear voices and turn to look. Two white women in sweat suits head their way. They wear dogged expressions, as if they’re the only two entrants in some fat-woman marathon. The taller of the two casts a wary eye at the boys. Jimmy quickly slips the bottle into his jacket pocket. George moves the cart off the path so the women can pass. He knows it looks odd, he and Jimmy out on the bikeway in the middle of a school day. But he could always say they were on their lunch break. The school allows you to leave for trips to fast-food joints. Most Indian kids stay put to eat the cafeteria’s free lunches. George always did. It gave him enough strength to make it through track practice. And he never knew if he’d get dinner, what with his mom either working nights or out with her new boyfriend. George and Jimmy stand quietly as the women pass by. The one closest to Jimmy cocks her head slightly, probably tempted to see what these Indian boys are up to, suspicious as all-get-out here in broad daylight. But the plump women walk on, picking up the pace. As they pull away, George focuses on their asses. But they wear shapeless, too-big sweat suits and there’s nothing to see. George speaks first. “Those two need to walk a lot of poles if they want to drop some pounds. Hundreds of poles. Thousands, maybe.” “Hop a lot of poles, you mean.” Jimmy guffaws, punches George on the arm. “Get it?” “I got it.” But he doesn’t want to imagine it. Instead, he thinks about the thousands of poles he has passed in his runs all over the county. Miles and miles of power poles. When George was younger, he spent a lot of weekends with Jimmy and his parents out on the Rez. George ran all of the reservation roads. Jimmy’s father tried to warn him away from the practice. “Some drunk’s gonna run you over,” Uncle Luke would say, usually in the evenings after getting toasted in Riverton and driving his sorry self home. Aunt Regina – his mom’s sister – would make a snide comment about Luke being the main drunk to watch out for. The fights would start and George would escape to run. Sometimes he dragged Jimmy along, just to get him out of the house. Jimmy would jog for a half-mile or so, and then slow to a walk. George would run ahead, marking his progress with power poles or cars or some other landmark, and then circle back to report to Jimmy: “five poles” or “twenty cars.” And Jimmy would say, “Do five more, do twenty more,” and George did. Mostly, George ran by himself. In the dark, he ran facing traffic and kept far over on the shoulder, sometimes running through the dry grass. In the summer and fall, when the sun had yet to set, he ran with traffic but still kept his distance from the road. To occupy his mind, George counted the litter in the fields. Soda cans and liquor bottles. Wind litter, too, hung up like ragged flags in the sage: newspapers and plastic trash bags and discarded school assignments from Wyoming Indian High. Jimmy slips the bottle from his pocket, unscrews the top, and drinks. He brings the pint down and hugs it to his chest. “I’m thinkin’ of dropping out, leaving town.” “You only have another year and a half of school.” “But I flunked eighth grade and got kept back. I should be graduating this year. I’m just gonna get a job in the gas fields. Know how much those guys are makin’? Bert Antelope got on before he graduated and he’s making twenty bucks an hour up near Pinedale.” “You’re not eighteen. How you going to get one of those jobs? And you don’t have a car.” “I’m strong,” Jimmy says. He makes a muscle with his bulky right arm. “Not as tall as you but plenty strong.” Jimmy pauses, seems to be contemplating his options. “I hate this place,” he says finally. “Stay in school, graduate, and the Marines will take you.” “Did a lot of good for my father – and yours.” “Join up and maybe they’ll send you to some nice place like Japan, or Italy.” Jimmy laughs. “Indians like me go to Iraq or Afghanistan to kill muj . Papa told me to steer clear of recruiters. Said they will promise you computers and then hand you a rifle. Said that’s what they did to him before they shipped him off to that first Iraq war.” He hesitates, and then says, “I’m not smart like you, cousin.” “I ain’t that smart if I’m skipping school with you and I can’t get anything to drink.” George reaches again for the bottle. Jimmy holds up his hand. “Uh uh,” he says. “First you gotta run those ten poles.” “Ten poles?” “Gotta keep my cousin in shape.” George shrugs. He pushes aside the shopping cart and looks north down the bikeway. The two women are at least three poles down the path. A tall guy on a racing bike is pedaling their way. The cyclist wears an orange helmet. A big gray mustache is pasted on his face. He nods at the boys as he passes. George asks: “Five poles up and five poles back?” “By my calculations, that’s ten poles up and ten poles back.” “That’s twenty poles!” “You can count.” Jimmy bares his chipped-tooth grin. “Screw you.” George takes off on a slow trot, warming up his legs. Ten poles or twenty, it doesn’t matter because I can run any distance any time. As he gains speed, he feels his heart kick into second gear and then third. He can imagine the blood’s path through his body. Like cars on a racetrack, corpuscles jostling to get ahead, to bring George Jumping Bull in ahead of the competition. He passes the third pole and he hasn’t broken a sweat. He detours into the grass to swerve around the walking women, and likes the sound his soles make as they again make contact with the bikeway pavement. The legs of his sweatpants rub together and make a swishing sound. Builds up a rhythm as he runs. Swish-swish, swish-swish, the beat like powwow drums. The sun’s behind him, but he can feel its warmth on his back. He could remove his jacket but then he’d have to carry it. Best just to sweat a little. He can run in shorts and t-shirt almost any day of the year, except those days when bitter Arctic winds howl down from Canada. He can see past the bikeway and the stacked hay bales on distant fields and trailers parked in a row off to his right. He can hear truck traffic over on Highway 26, and the whine of a commuter plane taking off from the town’s small airport. He counts seven poles and then eight. He passes an old woman walking her miniature dog. The dog barks. The woman says, “Hush, Petunia.” Petunia? Pole nine, and when George gets to the tenth pole he just keeps right on running. I’ll show my cousin. Fifteen poles up and fifteen poles back to make it an even thirty. Hell, I could run forty or fifty if I wanted . But he stops at fifteen and turns, again passing the dog lady (yapyapyap) and the walking women and the old guy with the mustache on his return trip. He sees Jimmy in the distance, leaning against the red shopping cart, red so store staff could find them along lonely Rez roads and weedy fields. About this time last year, George received a letter from his father. Letters were rare anyway, but a communication of any kind from his father was the rarest of things. Sidney Jumping Bull, a good grunt in Vietnam – or so they said – but not such a good father. George was only five when he and his mom fled Pine Ridge for Riverton. He had dim memories of his father looking fine as part of the honor guard for powwows and funerals. But after that always came the party, and his father was always in the middle of it, or leading the caravan bound for the liquor stores in Whiteclay (as his mom said, “white people go to hell, Indians go to Whiteclay”). In the letter, his father said he’d stopped drinking after attending a traditional sweat lodge ceremony with some other veterans. He apologized to George, writing that he wanted to make amends for the bad times. His mom – Sidney Jumping Bull’s third (and much younger) wife – received a letter too. She was skeptical, but the two of them planned a July trip to Pine Ridge. Two days before departure, they got a phone call. Sidney Jumping Bull was killed in a car accident on his way to Whiteclay. Sidney had been sober, but the other driver was not. So the trip to Pine Ridge was for a funeral, not reconciliation. When he got home, George donned his sweats and spent the next two weeks running the dirt roads and rugged trails of the Wind Rivers. He ate what he could find, even raided unlocked tourist cars and campground dumpsters. Slept under pine boughs and in caves. One day he ran all the way up Warbonnet Peak. He could see almost all the Rez from up there, and Riverton and the gray Owl Creek Mountains beyond. To the northwest were the pinnacles of the Absarokas. George saw mountains upon mountains marching off into the horizon. Could he run them all? If he did, would he find anything worthwhile on the far side? He watched an airplane, bound for the east, pass high overhead. Other planes, headed west and south, creased the sky. An eagle rode the thermals, turning gracefully in the warm summer air. The eagle screeched, and George heard his own name. He thought he might be in the midst of a vision, the kind the elders talked about. But later, as he looked back, he knew that it was probably more hunger than spirit, his body dropping weight faster than he could feed it. He sat up there for the longest time, until a thunderstorm had forced him off the high ground and he ran back down the mountain, with lightning chasing him the whole way. George pulls up a few feet short of his cousin. Hands on hips, breathing moderately hard, he walks loops around Jimmy. When his breathing returns to normal, he stops in front of Jimmy and says, “Thirty poles.” Jimmy grins. His eyes are unfocused, his face a puffy mask. “From this day forward, George Jumping Bull will be known as George Running Poles.” “Yes, oh wise elder.” Jimmy guffaws and holds up the bottle. Less than an inch of clear liquid sloshes around at the bottom. George grabs the bottle and unscrews the top. As he brings it up to his mouth, the vodka’s odor invades his nose. It burns his throat going down. He pushes the bottle back at his cousin. Jimmy snags the bottle. “What’s with you?” “Sorry,” George says, rubbing his nose. “It burns.” “We’ve been drinking before.” “Beer, though. Not vodka.” Jimmy tips the bottle and drains it. He tosses the empty into the weeds along the bikeway. “Whoa.” He wobbles, leans against the shopping cart to get his balance. “I think I need a ride.” Jimmy throws his right leg over the side of the cart. He grabs the sides and pushes but doesn’t get very far as his left hand slips its grip. “Whoa.” He pushes again, balances briefly with one leg in and one out, and the cart begins to fall. George grabs it and pushes it upright. “Thanks, cousin,” Jimmy says. He swings in the other leg and lurches backwards in the cart. George gets behind the cart. He looks down at Jimmy’s Raiders’ ballcap – its bill turned cockeyed, worn like big-city rappers. His older cousin looks like a little kid crouched in the shopping cart. They roll out of the grass and onto the path. He and Jimmy have nowhere to go for two hours until George’s mom goes to work and they can hang out at his place. “Let’s go get something to eat.” Jimmy waves a beat-up leather wallet. “You have money?” “Papa does – this is his wallet.” Jimmy laughs. “Damn, Jimmy, Uncle Luke will kick your ass.” “No he won’t,” he says. “He won’t do that ever again.” George stops. “What are you saying, Jimmy?” “You know what I’m saying.” Jimmy’s voice is stern, yet distant. “I just couldn’t take another punch. Know what I mean?” “What happened?” George asks. “An accident, right? A fight, right? You punched him and he fell and banged his head? Maybe you just knocked him out.” “Nah,” says Jimmy. “I cut him. He’d dead.” “Maybe he’s… “ “Ain’t no maybe, cousin.” Jimmy keeps his head lowered, talking into his jeans. “He was drunk, I was faster.” Jimmy pauses. “It was once too often, you know?" George knows. Uncle Luke has battered his way through his family, even hit George more than once, back when he was little and couldn’t run away. But now George can fly from danger, run back to the mountains and keep running. Jimmy isn’t equipped with the gift of speed. He can stand and fight – he was tough after all. But what good had it done? He was alive – a good thing – but his daddy wasn’t. “Push us down to the store for some food,” Jimmy says. He waves his father’s wallet again. “Watching you run made me hungry.” George turns the cart and pushes it down the bikeway toward the convenience store. He wants to run, just jump over the cart and head up to the hills. Tension builds in his legs, just as it does before a race. But he can’t run away from his cousin, not now. George pushes Jimmy down the path, taking one pole at a time, counting as he goes. This story was a breakthrough because it caught the attention of writers I admire and forced me to keep at it. I wrote it after getting stuck for two days by winter-closed roads surrounding Riverton, Wyoming. The bike path was cleared but surrounded by snow. I walked the path and came across two young Native American teens. One rested in a grocery store shopping cart. He hugged a liquor bottle. The other pushed him. I asked myself, What are those two guys doing on the bikepath on a school day? I wrote the story and submitted it, but no takers. I sent it for critiques at the Jackson Hole Writers’ Conference and got helpful comments from John Byrne Cook, Tim Sandlin, and Craig Johnson. Cooke liked it because it was about real people doing real things and not more self-absorbed fiction from MFA grads (I’m one). Cooke liked that I challenged myself to write about another culture, to imagine myself in their lives. He edited the story and urged me to submit it to The New Yorker . I did and got a quick rejection. After more rejections and rewrites, I submitted it to an anthology, Blood, Water, Wind and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers (Sastrugi Press, 2016), and it was accepted. Previous MICHAEL SHAY's shorter works have appeared in New Flash Fiction Review , Silver Birch Press , and In Short: A Norton anthology of Brief Creative Nonfiction . He is the author of a book of short stories, The Weight of a Body (Ghost Road Press, 2006), and a historical novel, Zeppelins over Denver , forthcoming from The Ridgeway Press. Mike is a Colorado native who spent 33 years in Wyoming and now lives in Florida. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Rev. T. Scott Kincannon Keeps Some Secrets from Her Flock Michael Shay 1. Trixie is her given name . She was named after her grandmother, Trixie Armstrong, who ministered to the lepers in post-war Japan. Some of her elementary school classmates thought she might be named for Trixie Belden in the mystery novels. T even looked like Trixie’s drawing on the book jackets. One sixth-grade afternoon, Mary Ann Smith announced that Trixie was “a hooker’s name.” Hookers were a rarity in small-town Wyoming but you know how pre-teen girls are, and Mary Ann was more popular than Trixie. In the summer before eighth grade, when the family moved from Riverton to Cheyenne, she changed her first name to T. “Just T?” asked her eighth-grade homeroom teacher. She told her classmates, “You can call me T.” Nobody called her T. 2. She had premarital intercourse five times. T (née Trixie) gave in to her boyfriend Jimmer Dean in the early morning hours following East High School’s senior prom. Next up was Telson, her steady beau in Divinity School, who had all the makings of a shepherd-to-be for some large and well-heeled flock. He talked T right out of her drawers on three occasions. He used colorful condoms! Their final frolic was followed the next morning by Robert’s revelations that he was seeing a sorority girl from the U whose father was a state legislator. The break-up hit her hard. She vowed to stay away from talkative men with funny names. 3. What about the fifth time? T’s D School female cohorts told her not to mess with the guys from Huskerville on the other side of town. Two weeks before graduation she went to a party in Huskerville. She met Kevin Michael Kincannon, the op-ed editor at the school paper. He wrote crazy things. He called President Reagan a sniveling old codger! And he wanted to save the planet. But she didn’t care. He had curly red hair and an almost mustache! Kevin invited her to an intramural softball game. Kevin jacked the ball over the left field fence and the first thing he did after crossing home plate was smile up at her and doff his cap. She smiled back. That’s all it took – that and two post-game beers. It’s true what they say – D School girls can’t hold their liquor! 4. She sometimes hated her forthright mother. On her one-month anniversary as assistant associate pastor in Sheridan, Wyoming, T phoned her mom with the somber news of a pre-marital pregnancy that, in most cases, only affected others. “Call him,” said her loving mother. “It’s his, isn’t it?” 5. Details of the marriage proposal. On her one-month-and-one-day anniversary as assistant associate pastor in Sheridan, she called Kevin Michael Kincannon. She laid it all out for him. Silence on the other end. She could hear a siren wailing in the background. Life as a big city reporter in Phoenix! She wondered why the window was open, why he didn’t have air conditioning in that hot city. He said this, “Will you marry me?” “Yes,” she said. 6. Secrets of not-so-immaculate conceptions. It’s possible that four of their five children were conceived on four different Sundays in four different churches throughout the Rocky Mountain region. This was due to (contended Kevin) the highly charged eroticism engendered by T’s sermons. The way her lips moved. The taut skin of her throat vibrated as she spoke. When ovulating, she always inserted “to know” into the sermon, an antiquated Biblical term for fornicating with the goal of procreation. She ended with “my door is always open.” After service, followed by the traditional doughnuts and coffee, she returned to her office to await her husband. The door opened and closed quietly. He whispered “you said your door is always open” as he unwound her sand-colored hair. She stood, grabbed the desk and leaned forward. He would have pulled down her undergarments but she never wore them on Ovulation Days. He kissed the back of her thighs and removed her shoes. He was a busy little bee under her dress. And then he stood and his hands were on her shoulders. He said “talk dirty to me” and she said “fuck me you big ape,” and he said “your blessed pussy calls my name.” She rocked forward with each thrust, watching the desktop work a groove into the eggshell-white wall. He called her Trix . Kev , she replied. They sometimes fucked face-to-face sitting up, which was tough on office chairs and couches. Many rugs came unraveled in the name of love. Even in its proper Biblical role, sexual congress can be tough on furnishings. 7. She had a wicked jealous streak . Kevin was in Indonesia for a month. He emailed photos of jungle and city. One of them showed him with his photographer, a dark-haired, thin Belgian in tank top and khaki shorts. Her name was Ava. Of course. He was with Ava in the jungle for a month and then he arrived home and then was busy with deadlines and then he flew off to D.C. and then to Belize. More jungle and Ava! Two weeks chasing anacondas run amok in the Everglades. She was juggling math homework and a church governing board that questioned her every move. When will she get anacondas and sweaty jungle sex? 8. She had an affair. She didn’t mean to. Kevin was always away. On Sundays, she waited for the unlocked office door to open behind her and one day it did and it wasn’t Kevin but she let the man in anyway. A board member, divorced, handsome with a streak of silver in his perfect black hair. They began with handshakes and a formal discussion of plans for the church addition. Then his hand was up her ministerial dress and her tongue was down his throat. “Not here,” she said, glancing at the desk. She went to his place, several times. She bought condoms for the first time to limit risk-taking. The affair is over before it started, or so she thought. She feared an incident of pokies during service, a wardrobe malfunction. She was ready to break it off when he announced he was moving to Salt Lake. Mercifully, it was over before Kevin arrived home from the jungle. He shared news that he had a new photographer, a scruffy guy from California named Jason. 9. She cared more about her marriage than her flock . She told Kevin about the affair. “Why?” he asked. “Ava,” she said. He shook his head. “Ava’s a lesbian.” So she was the one, the fallen woman, Eve consorting with a silver-streaked serpent? It would never be the same. In public, the couple acted as the oh-so-marrieds. The woman pastor and her loving spouse. Fine brood of kids. “That little one will pitch for the Lord,” announced the board chair, a Cubs fan, one Sunday at doughnut time. Behind the scenes, there was dust. This went on for years and several church postings. Kevin was away even when he was home. The kids had their own lives. Three in college all over creation and two were still in high school. Kevin spoke to them but not to her. Then one day, he returned from a trip to some jungle. He was very sick. The docs diagnosed malaria. He spent a month in the hospital. When he came home, he was skeletal and indifferent. Before he had just been indifferent. He was so sick and he needed her, really needed her touch and her chicken noodle soup. 10. Rev. T sweated blood over her sermons. The congregants thought of them as smooth and effortless. T tried to work the old magic. But not for the chubby old couple in the front row or the young people in the choir or any other congregant. She wanted to heal herself, mend the rift, make amends to her husband. If it engendered some highly charged eroticism in the process, so be it. 11. She is not just saying this: “I have faith beyond measure .” Every Sunday after service, following doughnuts and coffee, she is in her office awaiting the opening of the door. The door locks now. There is just the single key clearly labeled “office door” that hangs with other keys in the house. “I now lock my office door,” she announced to Kevin one Sunday morning. Was he listening? Will she again be known in the Biblical sense by her husband? There is no groove worn in this office wall caused by an erotic Reverend banging the desk against a wall as she is being known intimately by her husband. Not yet. She thinks she hears something. She awaits the key in the lock. A very short story about a woman minister with a story to tell. I am learning to listen to other voices. I hear them rising out of my strict religious background which I worked hard to escape, but now know there is no escape so why not have some fun with it. That’s a breakthrough. Previous MICHAEL SHAY's shorter works have appeared in New Flash Fiction Review , Silver Birch Press , and In Short: A Norton anthology of Brief Creative Nonfiction . He is the author of a book of short stories, The Weight of a Body (Ghost Road Press, 2006), and a historical novel, Zeppelins over Denver , forthcoming from The Ridgeway Press. Mike is a Colorado native who spent 33 years in Wyoming and now lives in Florida. Next

Sunday Morning Early by David Romtvedt My daughter and I paddle red kayaks across the lake. Pulling hard, we slip easily through the water. Far from either shore, it hits me that my daughter is a young woman and suddenly everything is a metaphor for how short a time we are granted: the red boats on the blue-black water, the russet and gold of late summer’s grasses, the empty sky. We stop and listen to the stillness. I say, “It’s Sunday, and here we are in the church of the out of doors,” then wish I’d kept quiet. That’s the trick in life— learning to leave well enough alone. Our boats drift to where the chirring of grasshoppers reaches us from the rocky hills. A clap of thunder. I want to say something truer than I love you. I want my daughter to know that, through her, I live a life that was closed to me. I paddle up, lean out, and touch her hand. I start to speak then stop. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “Sunday Morning Early” was published in The Sun magazine and in Dilemmas of the Angels (LSU Press, 2017), and was included in the Worthington, Ohio Public Library’s Garden Poetry Path public art project. I recently heard a prominent performance artist say that no great art has ever been produced from happiness. This statement made me feel deeply unhappy. I’ve spent many years working to write poems that will carry social meaning, offer pleasure, lead us to think more deeply, and explore those parts of our lives that give satisfaction, that is, happiness. I believe that great art can arise from happiness. As to whether or not the poem I’ve sent is great art I can’t say, but it is the result of happiness. .................................................................................................................................................................................... DAVID ROMTVEDT'S latest book of poetry is No Way: An American Tao Te Ching (LSU Press, 2021). He was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in southern Arizona. He graduated from Reed College, with a BA in American Studies and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a graduate fellow in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. After serving in the Peace Corps in Zaïre (currently Congo) and Rwanda and on a sister city construction project in Jalapa, Nicaragua, he worked as the folk arts program manager for the Centrum Foundation. He has worked as a carpenter, tree planter, truck driver, bookstore clerk, assembly line operative, letter carrier, blueberry picker, ranch hand, and college professor. A recipient of two NEA fellowships, The Pushcart Prize , and the Wyoming Governor's Arts Award, Romtvedt served as the poet laureate of the state of Wyoming from 2003 to 2011. davidromtvedt.com Next - Peach by Jennifer Tonge Next