< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Review of EL REY OF GOLD TEETH by Reyes Ramirez Willy Palomo El Rey of Gold Teeth by Reyes Ramirez is a striking contribution to the poetry of the Central American diaspora. Ramirez writes in a form-forward style with a microscopic attention to language. His pen treks across an ambitious range of topics, including toxic masculinity, the climate crisis, as well as colonization and its hangovers. There is hardly a poem in this collection that doesn’t fit into his tightly woven thematic tapestry and the following four series: the “hijo please series,” where his mother provides him with sometimes toxic but always loving advice and admonitions; the “A Lesson …” series, where Ramirez unpacks the weight of colonization, migration, and (dis)possession, especially in gendered terms; “The Fabulous Wondrous Outfits of the Fabulous Wonder Twins” series, where Ramirez takes images of twinning from 80s and 90s music videos and spins them out to comment on the bifurcation of identity so frequently discussed by diasporic authors; and finally the “… is My America” series, where Ramirez takes moments of both joy and disaster to paint us the cultural landscape of his personal America. Such a tight grip on his pen gave me little space to doubt Ramirez’ intention, sequencing, or mastery of form, even when I may have wrestled against them. Take, for example, Ramirez’ use of codeswitching. The poet intentionally codeswitches in a staggering manner that pushes against the fluency of typical bilingualism. This excerpt from “A Broken red-eared Slider’s Shell” is case in point: house de flesh y hueso glides about un azure womb skyed con marbled membrane struck numb por prisms que shatter y skitter. The average bilingual reader will recognize that this is not how we generally codeswitch and likely will have difficulty saying this sentence aloud. For some, that will be a turn-off and valid criticism. It’s obvious to me at least that this move is intentional. The clash of languages in between articles and prepositions forces me to slow down to pronounce the language Ramirez conjures, which is beautiful even if I experience some pain in the difficulty of speaking it. Rather than flip the page in frustration, I marvel: what a clever way to corner his readers and force them to slow down and experience the violence of language. The trip of the tongue is a trip I experienced many times in my lifetime of losing and acquiring my Spanish. El Rey of Gold Teeth will routinely dazzle you with flashes of perfectly sketched moments and images Ramirez uses to transport people directly into his neighborhoods. In “La Pulga,” you will rummage through “a series of shirts,” where “Tweety is Chicana / Bart Simpson is Domincan” and “Vegeta is Salvadoreño now.” In “Finding Kittens After a Tropical Storm is My America,” Ramirez surveys his devastated city in an effortless contrapuntal, showing the reader “edgeless mouths struggling to speak” and how “raw pink paws thrash again / for nipples on rusted air conditioner.” In “A 4th Grade Dance Party in a Cafeteria at 1 P.M. is My America,” Ramirez shares the magic of watching children spontaneously dance “the milly rock, / the juju, running man. even ones before / their birth like the macarena, wobble, cha cha slide.” Ramirez displays such charm and mastery time and time again in poems about pupusas, pozole, Selena, and more. Ramirez writes from Houston, Texas, a city bursting at the seams with powerful Black and Latinx voices in a state that has banned more books than any other state as of 2023 and where diversity, equity, and inclusion has been outlawed in higher education. In El Rey of Gold Teeth, Ramirez follows the thread that stitches his Latinx communities, their significant leaders, their pop stars, and even their children, indelibly into the American empire. Their presence is frequently in resistance to colonization, surely. Other times, such as the poems “El Salvadoreño-Americano as Decolonizer, 1929-1936” and “The First Mexican American Astronaut Was Once,” I read Ramirez as a colonized intellectual a la Fanon, wrestling to provide meditative, compassionate portrayals that champion significant Latinx leaders whose jobs were ultimately intimately tied to American imperialism and settler colonization. I lay exhausted with my back to the mat in this wrestle with Ramirez, as we struggle to recuperate a history banned once again and attempt to forge a future where our people may still be nourished by their roots. The coming fascists will be willing to do more than ban us to stop us. It is our duty to survive. It is our duty to keep writing down our truths. Ramirez says of El Rey of Gold Teeth (Hub City Press, 2023): "Colonizing languages and subverting forms, rerouting histories, and finding the mundane made extraordinary, El Rey of Gold Teeth breaks open notions of destiny, in humorous and devastating ways, to reimagine the past and present a new future where lack transforms to abundance, where there will be many answers to every question." Previous WILLY PALOMO (he/they/she) is the author of Mercury in Reggaetón, winner of the Light Scatter Prize, and Wake the Others (Editorial Kalina/Glass Spider Publishing, 2023), a winner of a Foreword Prize in Poetry and an International Latino Book Award honorable mention in Bilingual Poetry. A veteran of the Salt Lake City poetry slam scene, his fiction, essays, poetry, translations, and songs can be found across print and web pages, including the Best New Poets 2018, Latino Rebels, The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, and more. He has taught classes on literature, rap, and creative writing in universities, juvenile detention centers, high schools, and community centers. He is the son of two refugees from El Salvador. www.palomopoemas.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue MAMA'S HANDS Willy Palomo scrub toilets until you can see your face as you piss, until her hugs smell only of rubber & bleach. Her knuckles are rougher than my father’s, tougher than anything behind a dumpster with Timberlands and a metal bat. At nine years old, the sound of her car leaving the garage would wake me up in the morning. Her shift ended at midnight, so at bedtime, I would take out all my toys and wait for her and play with dinosaurs on the couch. But the morning would come with the crank of her engine, again. I’m sorry, Mama , I’d blink, knotting myself deeper into my sheets, but I couldn’t breathe & keep my eyes open at the same time. I’m sorry , I’d stomp, crushing snails after school, I didn’t love you enough to stay awake . When night came again, I’d yawn, pull out my triceratops, and vow to see her before bed. I thought I would never make it. Then one night, the door broke open like a promise, the light behind her head darkening her face as she lifted me numb from the sofa. I twitched, maybe managed a smile, as her hand stroked the left side of my face—rough. Published in Crab Orchard Review , Vol. 23, No. 3. The literal breakthrough in the poem is a door opening and a pouring forth of light, one that also creates a chiaroscuro "darkening her face" in the frame of a promise broken open. Previous WILLY PALOMO (he/they/she) is the author of Mercury in Reggaetón , winner of the Light Scatter Prize, and Wake the Others (Editorial Kalina/Glass Spider Publishing, 2023), a winner of a Foreword Prize in Poetry and an International Latino Book Award honorable mention in Bilingual Poetry. A veteran of the Salt Lake City poetry slam scene, his fiction, essays, poetry, translations, and songs can be found across print and web pages, including the Best New Poets 2018, Latino Rebels, The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, and more. He has taught classes on literature, rap, and creative writing in universities, juvenile detention centers, high schools, and community centers. He is the son of two refugees from El Salvador. www.palomopoemas.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue VOCABULARY Robbie Gamble Well, there’s well-off, well-got, well-fixed, well-heeled, well-breeched, and well-to-do. There’s flushed, posh, loaded, upscale, affluent, prosperous, filthy stinkin’ rich. Try highbrow, high rent, high hat, high caste, high flyer, high roller, high stepper, living high, high falutin’, high on the hog and High Cockalorum. Or take on fat cat, fat cull, fat goose, even fatwad. Perchance a dilettante, muckety-muck, moneybags, boozhie, blueblood, or bigwig? Consider uppercrust, uptown, uppish, uppertendom. Possibly tip-top, top row, top shelf, top table, top-of-the-tree. Go for Rolling Joe, rolling in it, having it all, having it made, having money (known as:) cold cash, toadskin, green backs, gravy, lettuce, lucre, moolah, boodle, wampum, coinage, wherewithal, capital, mazuma, simoleons, bread and butter, gilt, and silver. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, born into the purple, born on third base, and of course to the manner born (as a:) trust fund baby, heir, issue, scion, Brahmin, beneficiary, trustafarian, aristocrat. We are moneyed, made of money, in the money, playing blithely with our house money since I didn’t have to work for it at all. An earlier version of “Vocabulary” was published in Lily Poetry Review . I’m a trust fund baby, and I’ve been trying to write about my experience of the injustice of privilege and how it can distort human relationships. This can be a rather stodgy subject for poetry, and “Vocabulary” was a bit of a breakthrough in that I found a way to lighten the discourse through wordplay. Previous ROBBIE GAMBLE is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). He is poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine . robbiegamble.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue THE BIRDWATCHER Stephen Wunderli Lydia turned her head to the window. The sky was pallid. The fire, only a few miles away, had moved on. Angry ember streams pulsing on the face of the Laramie mountains had subsided into slow exhales of gray smoke that shrouded the valley. The wind had roiled across the basin, laying smoke on the town of Casper, an unwelcome night that wouldn’t leave. “It’s the last thing you should do.” “Just to see what’s there if anything. I can’t sit anymore,” Ted said to his wife. “You mean with me.” “Don’t wait up.” The dark skin of Lydia’s Arapahoe body had been sponged quickly for ash and dabbed with iodine across blistered cheeks, the warpaint of the hospital. An oxygen tube fastened beneath her nostrils. She unlaced the leather tie of her ponytail with one hand and hummed hoarsely to herself; dragging her fingers through black hair too stiff for her young age. Out of the other forearm, bandaged tight like a horse’s shinbone, emerged the IV tube – saline for hydration and antibiotics against infection. This was the longest she had stayed in bed since they moved from town to the woods. Ten years of dawn to dusk chores. It’s the last thing you should do . The first words she had spoken since she came out of the burn unit and was propped up in the hospital bed in the hallway because the rooms were for deeper wounds, the kind that left scars like flagellated skin. Her lungs were branded. Her left hand was bandaged from punching through the flaming wall of the woodshed where the dog had somehow got when it ran off in a panic. “It’s my fault,” she had said, coughing, her hand blistered. “The dog wasn’t worth it,” he said back. It had not been a dramatic escape from the inferno a few days earlier. He had chopped a fire line around the house and thrown earth against the timber foundation until it raked down from the slats. But it wasn’t enough. The fire didn’t crawl along the ground, it dropped from the sky, from the deadfall that became airborne with the heat, coals raining down on shake shingles and bare porches. He beat at the flames with wool blankets, shoveled more dirt, but it wasn’t enough. He was the last one to climb in the truck, to cough through the smoke, the engine sputtering for clean air, the old Ford pushing into a traffic jam on the highway where a few firetrucks sprayed down the cars for embers and a water truck wet the shoulder while homes slowly collapsed in flames behind them. “What about James?” “I’ll take him with me. He should see.” “He shouldn’t go with you.” “I’m his father.” Lydia tried to call out to him when he turned, but Ted had already grabbed James by the arm and the two bumped their way through the train of beds parked in the hallway and the press of family beside them and the nurses in blue moving like ticket-takers between stops. “Your mother wants me to see if there is anything left,” he told the boy. James was nine-years old and had just learned to identify quail tracks by their faint scratches in the soft loam and the bowls they dug with their shuddering bodies hoping to draw out bugs. The week before he had crept carefully through the underbrush, uncovering a nest stacked with small eggs under the watch of the mother nearby. “Do you think the quail have got away?” “No. Nothing gets away.” Ted was accustomed to walking uneven ground. Striding across the parking lot made him uneasy, the flatness of it made him mistrust his own footsteps. He guided James to the truck with his thick hand pressing against the back of the boy’s thin shoulder blades. Ted had become more at ease with an axe handle in his hands than the tender arm of a young boy, more at home in the delicate sounds of the woods than the manufactured noises of the Barstow filling station where he grew up, surrounded by asphalt and combustion, the thud of a wrench against his back from his enraged father. Ted could not live with people he mistrusted, and that was most. “The boy doesn’t need fractures to learn lessons,” he told Lydia. “He needs the scuffs of living, not the punishment of some unknown sin.” James looked up at his father but didn’t ask questions. His father was taut as fence wire, his eyes clenched from ten years staring into the wind. “I would never hurt you,” he said to his boy. The boy nodded. The fires had come. It was their season, he expected that much, but the flames had blown past their usual boundaries and come upon the small town like Grendel in the night, torching this home and not that one, this barn but not that shed. Everyone refused to leave. It was home, if it was going to burn, they wanted to stay and fight, do what they could. It was no use; the flames drove them out anyway and clogged the highway with a wave of surrender. Ted had built the home himself, hoisting the beams alone, with a rig of pulleys and hemp rope. He set every post, painted every piece of siding. He would see it catch fire for himself before he finally gave up. Lydia threatened to leave before the fires. “You can have the house,” she’d said. She threw her bag of clothes onto the porch, scattering the quail that had ventured onto the boards where she had spilled cornmeal in her anger. “A boy needs school to learn things. He needs more than scat and velvet antlers to teach him. He needs a few books, Judas Ted! He could use more than your lectures on seed and whorling disease and alkaline soil, and God help us if he finds friends his own age!” The boy was watching the landscape as they moved away from the hospital. “The fire isn’t coming this way. It’s moved on.” “Why did it come after us?” “It’s just how fires are. Unpredictable.” They rolled out of town, crossed the North Platte River and followed a fire road toward the settlement that had become their home away from the sprinkler-piped developments with their food franchises and synthetic stucco. The settlement was a place people could live in solitude with no need for window shades because the space between neighbors was too great to see. And nobody cared about your business unless they had news about a mountain lion or the coming increase in the price of propane. Father and son idled past onlookers in yards set up in lawn chairs like they did on the fourth of July. Damned if anyone of them had ever swung a pick or dug their own well. Ted hated them for being the offspring of ease. He drove defiantly toward the veil of smoke hanging on the settlement. He was stopped on the highway by the fire crew from the next county over. “You can’t go this way.” “Here to run the water truck,” Ted lied, unfolding his volunteer Search and Rescue ID. The man in the clean uniform looked at them both. “Hell of a fire. Maybe tomorrow or the next day.” “I’ve seen worse.” “Not today you won’t. We got a missing smokejumper up there. Wouldn’t be good for the boy if you know what I mean.” “The boy is fine.” “Go back,” the man said. “Wait for the all clear . That’s not an ask, it’s an order.” Ted looked hard at the man. “Well. It’s not you that’s lost everything.” The rear wheels engaged and spun on the shoulder. The nose of the truck dipped down into the ditch, submerged behind a police cruiser and breached the haze beyond and skidded onto the road. “It’s home,” Ted said to James. “Nobody gonna take that away from us. Understand?” James nodded in the passenger seat while he watched the man in the clean uniform fan the dust from his eyes and talk on his radio. They reached the stone bridge that crossed a dry arroyo marking the beginning of the settlement. Everything was charred and still smoldering. This is as far as Lydia had gotten on her first run at leaving. She told him he was stubborn. He told her what’s right is right and everything else is weakness. She wept and stood there alone, eventually walking the gravel road back to the house. “I have nowhere to go,” she told her son. “I need you to love me. I never had a mother to love me. Can you do that for me?” James stared into her eyes. “Are we going?” “I don’t know for sure. I don’t know anything for sure anymore.” James held his mother’s arm and felt the pulse of her body as it held back the currents that wanted to break forth. “I only seen a few boys grow up like this, without schools, in the woods. It didn’t work out for them.” The two sat in the small room with hand stitched quilts draped across the bed posts saying nothing else until Ted stomped up the front porch stairs, kicked the bag she packed across the boards and banged open the front door. He’d been checking coyote traps, something that always satisfied him. “They just feed off the work of others,” he taught his son. “They need to be killed.” He dropped a bent trap on the floor and the chain jangled like shackles. He walked into the small bedroom and stared at the two. “My son needed me,” Lydia said. “He should have come with me to see why the traps were empty.” “The two of us should have left.” Ted took the boy by the arm and told him to go find the dog that had gone off again, rooting in the undergrowth for rodent carcasses. “It’s a waste of time, all these fights,” Ted said. “Up here is harsh enough,” Lydia said. “You don’t have to be harsh with me. I just see his education different than you.” “What else should the boy learn?” “He could learn to talk to other kids his age. It would do him good.” Ted walked out of the room and picked up the trap and made his way to the workshop. The air burned at Ted’s eyes. Only the foundation of the first house remained, blackened bricks and chimney that had fallen over and lay like a shipwreck in the living room. He idled the truck forward across the baked road. James was pale and wide-eyed and moved his head slowly, fixing on porches he used to cross on his honey route that were collapsed and yawing. “A hell of a fire,” the father said. The boy could say nothing. Ashes were making their way into the cab of the truck and swirling like gnats. He fanned them away from his face. Ted wiped the condensation off the inside of the windshield so he could see more clearly. “Love is the only thing that matters,” she had said to her son. “But it works both ways or it doesn’t work at all, so you have to keep looking.” Ted overheard this in the early night while she was sitting on the edge of the boy’s bed, the edge of leaving. He spent the night on the porch with his head on the bag, forming sentences that would bring it all back, like circling around the trap line and ending up home again. The fires were a safe distance then. He could start again. He could say things his own father had never said. But the winds changed and tore at his face. The red lights arrived soon after and the man in the uniform asked him if the bag was the only thing he was taking and if there was anyone else in the house. “I’m not leaving,” he’d said back, not mentioning that the bag was Lydia’s, not his. “It’s the smoke that will kill you,” the man said. “No one is leaving!” Ted yelled at the man. The brakes complained to a stop in front of their house. The timber frame had held, but nothing else. Walls and roof were gone. The sofa skeleton was all that remained inside. Everything else was a pile of smoldering firewood. “Let’s have a look,” he said to the boy, but James was slow to exit. He tested the ground with his boots as if they would explode into flames. The stone steps were still standing. The two kicked up ashen dust as they walked but dared not enter. James edged carefully along the side of the house where the quail had once made their run. Ted squatted on his haunches and surveyed the remains, trying to read the entrails of a sacrificed animal for some kind of sign, an omen that would guide the next thing he should do. “Everything panics in a fire,” Ted taught his son. “Run straight into the flames.” “Look,” the boy said. “Someone is there.” He was pointing to a hundred-foot lodge pole pine undressed by the fire and soot black. It was out seventy yards or so. Up high there was a body knocking against the trunk, stiff and lifeless, unveiled by the parting of smoke. A black shroud flapped behind it. The figure was also blackened and a tangle of rope around the neck and right arm strung around a branch above caused the head to cock to the right. The legs hung freely, swaying like a wind chime. “Who is it?” The boy asked. The father stood and looked. “A birdwatcher,” he answered. “Just a birdwatcher.” “Will he come down?” “Maybe. It’s been a hell of a fire.” “And he just watches?” “It’s all he can do. Watch. And wait for the birds to return.” "The Birdwatcher" was originally published in miracle monocle . Often it is the simple lives that have the most meaning, providing fertile ground for raw feelings to run their course. And alas, breakthroughs sometimes come too late. Previous STEPHEN WUNDERLI is a freelance writer for The Foundation for a Better Life. He is the recipient of the United Nations Time for Peace Award, the Bridport Prize in Literature and an EMMY. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue ANGEL'S DINER Stephen Wunderli It is the hitching season, or so the old timers used to call it. A time to hitch up all dogged-out farm equipment in the fields and drag it into the barn for repairs. Snow will fall and moving anything abused through the summer into the barn where it can be repaired is essential. Field work slows. Coffee flows. God waits somewhere above the names carved in stone over the mine entrance to comfort the sons of Greeks who died in the great tunnel collapse. They will return. SAM Sam called Darius and told him to be at Angel’s Diner a few minutes early. He had a favor to procure, and he didn’t want the rest of the boys to hear it. He pulled up under a rust-colored sky, shuffled through the slush, and slid into a booth with orange vinyl stretched painfully over benches. Darius was already there. It was six in the morning at a truck stop between two towns that serve petroleum trucks, umbilical gas lines pumping diesel into their bellies and entertaining locals with near disasters as the land whales shudder southbound tourists onto the shoulder of the highway when they pass. “Nicky is dying,” Sam told Darius, his winter-swollen hands folded in supplication around his coffee cup. “The doctors said some kind of cancer they have never seen around here.” “I’m sorry,” Darius said. “Can we pray?” Sam leaned his meaty face into Darius. “No need yet. Now about this favor. It’s complicated. can’t have Kelli hearing of it, not with the restraining order. She isn’t to come near either of us. If she gets wind, she could throw the gears off Nicky’s last days.” Darius sat back. His rounded shoulders, big as a steer, leaned forward, his black head mounted securely in the middle. “The kid is only nine years old. What does Kelli think?” “I don’t know,” Sam said with the kind of deep-seated contempt that puts up fences between neighbors. “She hasn’t been around since she had a go with you.” Sam paused and let his emotions die down, looking out at the diesel exhaust hanging in the air. He smelled of it. He always smelled of it. The three layers of flannel went the winter without a wash, the belly pulling his shoulders forward. “You know nothing happened,” Darius said, squinting into the hurt Sam was feeling. “It’s quite a thing to watch a life get away from you, isn’t it?” Sam asked. DARIUS An apparition was steaming on the window where Darius rested his forearm. His broad, black face flowed in folds down his neck, hiding the sinews that tightened when he talked, drawing his jaw back slightly into a nonthreatening position. He was a strong, good-looking man of good proportion except for the few extra pounds he carried about the middle. Trucks exiting the freeway threw waves of slush as they carved their way to the stop, miles of gray wash behind them and gray frags burrowed into fresh snow as if after an explosion. The dawn seemed stalled against the roiled fog; brackish and heavy, shouldering against the sun. Darius was rarely up for one of Sam’s favors. It seemed he was always the first to be asked and the last to get thanked. He pushed his hands out on the table in front of him in supplication. “You know that, right? That nothing happened between me and Kelli?” Sam looked away from Darius to watch Angel tabbing receipts, balancing plates of eggs and holstering the coffeepot in her apron tie. “Don’t matter one way or the other. I don’t want Kelli gobbing up the boy’s life now.” “She is the mother,” Darius said. “Don’t pick sides, big man. You know the woman can’t hold herself up, let alone steady the boy. What’s done is done, and what’s right is right.” Darius sat back, his big body taking up most of the bench built for men a hundred years ago who worked all day in the mines on a cup of coffee. He knew Sam was shaping the story about Kelli to his advantage, the way he always did. Pushing the truth of things. The bit of truth in a lie is what mattered to Sam. Darius had seen it before and he knew challenging Sam would only earn a smug “that’s your way of looking at it.” Silence. “Should I tell his baseball team,” Darius went on. “Do something special, make one of those blankets everybody can sign?” “No. He wants to see Bigfoot,” Sam said. “Judas, Bigfoot? That’s the boy’s dying wish?” “Let’s get to my favor before the other boys show up.” Darius leaned forward with the girth of his chest rested on the booth table. “Let’s have it then.” “Kelli can’t know about it,” Sam said, leaning over his coffee. “She’ll be digging at you looking for answers. Don’t pick up the phone.” Darius nodded. Kelli’s number had been scratched from his phone months earlier. They had been talking, way back when the war between Sam and Kelli began, with Darius as peacekeeper so Sam could stay on the road. It was a year after Nicky was born when Kelli unleashed her insides. Darius had witnessed the scrapes on Sam’s face the width of fingernails and the bashed-out headlights on his truck. More than once, he found Sam asleep in the café in the early morning. Kelli called Darius late at night with her long, breathless complaints when Sam tired of yelling into the torrents of Kelli’s accusations, but he never went over to comfort her in person, no matter how many dishes she broke on the floor for him to hear. SAM “It come on him in the hospital,” Sam started, his face sagging under the weight of the topic. His stubble was coarse enough to fray his flannel shirt. “He shows up for chemo once a week and has nothing to do but sit there and be quiet. So, he picked up a magazine that’s been in the waiting room for ten years and reads about some Bigfoot sighting. It was like a drug. It just got hold of him. It’s something you know a bit about, how you can’t control the next thing you’re gonna say or do.” Darius looked at Sam, his eyes tired, weakened by the weight of denial. He breathed out long. “And there’s a favor in this story?” “I’m coming to that. It takes some time. That’s why I asked you to come early.” Darius used his thick hand to prop up his face and give his neck a rest. Drops of moisture from snowflakes colliding with the big windowpane were spotting the outside gray and breaking up the fluorescent lights. “He spent a month in the library. He’s got newspapers laid out like treasure maps in his room,” Sam said, spreading his arms out wide like he was measuring a fish. “Course you can’t say nothing to a boy in that state, so I’m letting him piece it all out in his head.” “Sounds serious.” “Oh, it is.” Sam sat back and sucked in air like he was storing it for later. “It is.” The weight of losing his boy was suffocating him. It drained all reason and logic, pushing him into abstract unknowns he could not plumb or measure. A tanker pulled up to the side of the café, splattered with brown highway slush and wobbling to a stop. “There’s Jim,” Darius said. “Better get it out before he walks in here.” “Alright. So here it is. I need you to be Bigfoot.” Darius put his hands on the table like he was showing he had nothing to hide. “Me? Why not Jim?” Sam leaned forward. “Because you are a big Black man, and you owe me one.” “Judas, Sam.” “It’s the kid’s dying wish, Dee. God honest truth.” “You want me to be Bigfoot?” “You’re the best I got. Jim would blow the whole thing up, dance like a rodeo clown, or worse, holler something out in his real voice and my boy would be pulverized. Nicky is whip smart. He reads.” Jim eased in beside Darius and patted the middle of the table. Angel set a coffee cup down and filled it. “What’s got you fellas quiet this morning? School bus broke down again?” “No, not that,” Sam said. “Just a day like any other.” “Sam says I’m a big Black man,” Darius blurted out. Jim leaned back and eyed Darius. “Well, you don’t say. I never noticed until now. Damned if he ain’t right.” Darius chuckled and let the steam from the fresh coffee rise to his face. Sam tightened his lips until the wings of his mustache readied for takeoff. “He just wants a favor for his boy, that’s all,” Darius said. “How is Nicky?” Jim asked. “I know he’s sick.” “He’s dying,” said Sam. “But he still has some strength.” “Damn. I’m sorry about that. He up for a ride in the tanker? I could take him on a route?” “No,” Sam said. “He wants to see Bigfoot,” said Darius. “It’s his dying wish,” Sam added. “Don’t ask me why. I’m not good at this at all.” Jim looked at Darius, stared for a moment at the thick beard, the broad, dark face. “You know there’s no such thing as Bigfoot.” “There is now,” Darius offered resolutely. “There is now.” “You want to let the other boys in on it?” Jim asked. “No,” Sam answered. “A conspiracy ain’t a conspiracy if the whole town knows about it.” “Okay, let’s go then,” Jim said, standing up. “We can talk about it at the truck bay. I’ve got to wash the whale.” Darius raised his hands like he was calming a horse. “Nobody’s said yes to anything yet.” JIM Compressors sputtered on and off and mist hung in the air. The spray gun dripped. The sky was a cement gray. The boys leaned against the side of the sweating tanker, freshly sprayed down. Jim’s beard drained droplets onto the front of his T-shirt, into a void the flannel could not cross. “You’re right about the boy dying with a smile on his face. That would be my wish.” “Not here to talk about the dying part,” Sam said. He had not let himself go to that place where his boy lay in coffin sucking the life out of the world. Jim held up his hand to overrule the conversation. “Just saying that it’s hard to get a corpse to smile. Ask Winifred. She embalmed a hundred people in her life, and she’ll tell you it’s better if they come in with a natural smile.” “It’s why we’re here,” Sam said, not knowing where to put his hands. They were roughhewn and worn and he was trying to stow them somewhere without success. “The boy deserves the best sendoff I can give him. Something that keeps him smiling all the way to Heaven.” “You’d think seeing God would be enough,” Jim said. “No one asked you,” Sam snapped back. “The boy’s not even old enough to drink coffee but he’s old enough to know that Heaven is waiting for him.” “If I had a boy, I’d want to make sure he died happy and not be all tangled up in stuff that doesn’t matter.” “Like how?” Sam demanded. Jim stepped back from the tanker. Darius calmed the tension by offering to help. “Where do I fit in?” Sam tugged at his trucker jacket and drew a magazine page out of his pocket. He pressed it against the side of the tanker. “I stole this from his stash. This is what Bigfoot looks like.” Jim fished in his shirt pocket for his readers. The boys stared at the photo. “Where do we get the costume?” Jim asked. “No costume. It has to look real,” Sam insisted. “Nicky’s got a sharp eye. An ape suit won’t do it.” “You’re talking a Hollywood makeup job there,” Jim said. “The best this town has ever seen.” “The boy is worth it,” Darius said. “Damn cancer. We could get Debra over at the Kut and Kurl.” In the photo Bigfoot’s arms hung long, the hands flapping like a kid wearing his dad’s mittens. The head coned comically upward, and hair grew unnaturally over the kneecaps, something that would not happen in the wild to an animal who spent any time rooting around for grubs. “My hell, Sam. He’s way too clean. We can do better than this,” said Jim. “A beast in the wild would have briars and tagalongs on its fur.” “We have to make the best Bigfoot people have ever seen,” Sam said. “We can do the trick with horsehair from the groomer and some glue. We’ll send Darius out early to pick up a few thorns and thatch to look authentic.” “Hold on,” said Darius. “You got to give me a say in all this.” The three men stood at the edge of the concrete. Cheatgrass pocked the snowy field behind them, rising toward the foothills they could not see but knew were there. A scramble of sage and scuttled boulders were cloaked in the skirt of fog, buried under a blanket of snow draped on the mountains. A series of storms was moving in from the west where they would be pinched off by cold dropping down from the north. Spring was struggling to arrive on the earth tilting slowly toward the sun, changing temperature and time. The days would be getting longer. The milky tears of sleet ached to be spring rain. Beyond the fog was a place Bigfoot could live in the mountains; a place where a boy could find him. “We’ll do it,” Jim said. “Me and Sam will set it up so it’s believable. You’ll see.” NICKY The night light in Nicky’s room seemed to float the boy in the air in front of the window where he stood with head dark against the glass. “Can’t sleep?” He heard someone ask. When he turned around, he saw his father sitting in a chair in the hallway. “Can’t you?” The boy asked. He was thin, sixty-three pounds, and the knots of his knees stood out unnaturally because he was just beginning to grow when the cancer overran his immune system. “No,” Sam said. “If you can’t sleep, neither can I.” “I had that dream again,” Nicky said, walking to stand in front of his father, the man he had watched grab a mangy mare by the neck and wrench it to the ground so the vet could draw her foal out with a cable and jack. He climbed onto his father’s knees and let his pale legs dangle like that foal’s, his mop of blonde hair falling against the father’s barrel chest. “It seems like I can’t wake up when I’m having it, but then I open my eyes.” “Tell me about it again.” “There’s this boy in a cage and there’s all these other cages but they are empty. It’s like somebody forgot to let him out, the only one. That’s it. And I’m just watching him, and nothing happens. He doesn’t even ask me to let him out. He just stares at me, and I stare at him.” “Why does it scare you?” “I don’t know. It just does.” “I’ll leave the door open. You are not in a cage.” The boy stared at his father for a long time. His eyes purple underneath where they should have been sunburned from days in the fields chasing crows with a lasso like the other boys, trying to catch something they never would. His skin bleached rather than browned by the outdoors. “Will mom come back when I’m gone?” “Get back in bed, Sam said. “It’s not your fault she left.” SAM On Saturday, Jim rocked his fix-it van to a stop at the Kut and Kurl. He carried a bag of horsehair trimmings and wore his new Justins because his wife had come home with a new pair of pocket-stitched jeans and he was due. Sam and Darius had arrived in Sam’s truck and waited so the three of them could walk in together. Nicky was at the hospital and the doctors said he couldn’t leave until tomorrow. Sam had dropped him off before picking up Darius. The radio was still tuned to the gospel channel and a drawl voice commanded listeners to doubt not and thrust their hands inside of Jesus. Sam cut the engine. Snow was falling out of the air, thick as down when Sam cleaned geese and the wind kicked up. It made him think of the elements of nature, how two things can look the same but be so different. “I brought wader socks,” Darius said. “I put ball bearings up into the toes to make my footprints look less human.” Sam nodded. He was twisting the grip on his steering wheel like he was trying to change the shape of it before he levered the handle and shouldered the truck door open. Jim hauled the load of horsehair like a bird bag full of dead pheasants. He was proud of the bounty of mane he had secured from the vet. DEBRA Debra stood at the screen door. “Of course I will,” she said. “I love that boy.” “Everybody does,” Sam said as the boys walked in, somber and resolute. “But God loves him more and wants him back.” Debra trembled, holding back emotions was not easy for her and caused her insides to shudder. She spun the chair around and motioned for Darius to sit down. “Take everything off,” she said like a nurse. “Lock the door,” Darius said, tossing his flannel jacket onto a folding chair. He pulled off his boots and struggled to roll his socks off while standing. The Henley shirt came off next, wrestled over his head releasing his round, brown belly. He dropped his Carhart pants on the floor and Jim picked them up. “Judas,” Darius said. “Everything?” Debra nodded. “I don’t believe Bigfoot wears BVDs.” Darius dropped his underwear and tossed them onto the chair with the pile of his clothes that smelled like creosote. He stood there naked, dark skin pocked on his shoulders, and creased with stretchmarks just above the hips. Debra looked at him, sizing him up. Darius sat down on the chair, the vinyl squeaking beneath his bare skin. He took a deep breath. Sam dumped the horsehair out on a table and started sorting through it. Debra cut the tip off the craft glue bottle. Sam taped the magazine picture on the mirror next to a photo of a woman with short bangs and a long mullet in the back. Debra stared at Bigfoot for a moment. Then she sucked air through her teeth and studied the mound of brown human in front of her, the belly like a mare’s, the pebbles of black hair on the chest. She shuffled back and forth on swollen ankles, eyeing the blank canvas and seeing where the natural worn spots would be if he were Bigfoot, the valleys filled with thick hair, the creases where ticks could burrow. “It’s somethin’ seeing it from hoof to hide,” Debra said. Darius took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Just do your worst.” Jim and Sam drizzled craft glue in uneven streams across Darius’ chest. Debra worked carefully on his whole body, putting hair everywhere. She was careful about covering up the private area. When they were done with the front, Sam helped Darius pull on the wader socks with three ball bearings each and they covered those too. Then Darius got out of the chair and settled his elbows on the armrest while they put hair on his back and rump. Nobody talked. It felt as sacred as washing a corpse. “I’ll go get Nicky,” Sam said. “See you at Pearson’s Perch.” Darius nodded. “I’ll be there.” SAM Sam arrived at the hospital and slid a laundry basket out of his pickup truck. It was half-full of towels. He walked in through the back door and took the stairs up to the third floor, breathing heavy when he reached the top, his mind envisioning every step of his escape as he passed the children’s paintings of winged angels hung in the stairwell. He held the basket low as he passed the nurse’s desk and slid the glass door back and stood over Nicky. “There’s been a sighting,” Sam said. “A what?” Nicky sat up weakly, surprised but glad to see his dad. “Shhhhh,” Sam whispered. “There’s been a sighting out to Pearson’s Perch.” “But…” “Do you want to go?” Nicky was pale, his lips gray. “Bigfoot?” “Yes. We’ll only be gone an hour.” Sam tossed the towels onto the bed and set the basket on the floor. Nicky slid down and curled up in it, his eyes unnaturally wide. He folded himself like a baby bird in an egg. Sam covered his son with towels and unplugged the monitor from the wall. A faint beeping noise sounded. He hoisted the laundry basket onto his hip and ducked into the hallway while the attending nurse looked over her shoulder but continued her conversation with the other nurses. Sam lumbered down the stairs, wobbling with the boy in front of him. He shouldered Nicky at the bottom, hurried out the door and set his frail son on the front seat of his truck. “Stay down,” he said. Nicky giggled. It was the first happy sound he’d made in two months. They moved slowly out of the parking lot and Nicky poked his head up, perched in the basket and looking out the window at the snowflakes turning to water when they hit the glass. The cold made his face grayer than in the hospital. He shivered. Sam turned up the heat. They made new tracks in the snow on the highway. “I brought you some boots and coveralls.” Nicky rolled out of the basket and started getting dressed. “She,” Nicky said. “Bigfoot is a she . Everybody thinks otherwise, but it’s a mother. That’s why it’s so hard to get a look at her, mothers got a way of being invisible.” Even though Nicky was excited to reveal this bit of information, Sam began to weep. He didn’t want to hear about mothers and all their willful love. It reminded him of Kelli. He steered with one hand and pawed the moisture away. “Makes sense,” he said. They motored slowly off the highway and up a sheep road to a gravel turn-around, the snow falling in lager flakes, some the size of aspen leaves in the high altitude. “Down this slope in Negro Bill’s Canyon where they saw him last,” Sam said, when they were climbing out of the truck. “They don’t call it that anymore,” Nicky said. “I saw it on the news. Now they call it Shadow Canyon since it is so narrow and the sun only gets there part of the day.” “Old habits. Old ways,” Sam answered. “I don’t think Darius liked the old name.” Nicky said. “He might prefer Bill’s real name, William Grandstaff.” “You read too much. I don’t think he minds one way or the other.” Snow was falling on the trail and Sam inhaled snowflakes when he breathed in. The large flakes held their shape in the thin air, compressing under their feet, wafting before them as they hiked. Nicki walked forward awkwardly, bundled in the insulated coveralls, and work gloves. A towel around his neck for a scarf and oversized work boots. He looked into the cloud of snow. “Let me lead,” Sam said. The two worked their way down the rocky path that overlooked the choked canyon. The ground was slippery, and the dried Juniper branches damp and brittle, buried like steel game traps. They moved carefully, the father testing every step and the son placing his feet in his father’s footprints. Sam reached for a juniper branch to steady himself, but it gave way. His feet slid; his weight teetered. He put an arm out to break his fall, but the cross hatch of branches gave way, and he went down hard on his hip and a bank of snow followed him over the edge. Nicky could hear his father thrashing through the brush and scraping on the shale while a rivulet of high mountain detritus flowed down the furrow Sam left plowed. “Dad!” There was a long, dead silence. “I’m OK, Nicky,” Sam’s voice floated up from the bottom of the narrow ravine. “I’ve jacked up my ankle, son. Stay there. Stay right there!” “I can get help,” Nicky called out. “Stay there,” his father called back. “I’ll get up to you. Just give me a minute.” NICKY Nicky fanned the deepening snow around him and stomped a waiting place. All things in the cold were shrouded. He listened to his father grunting and turning and kicking loose rubble. He could hear the labored breaths, the air sucking through his father’s mouth into his lungs, the coughing. Nicky cocked his head and listened to a new sound, the shuffling of feet not far from him, a strange and soft sound. His boyhood years in the brush had taught him to see with sounds, gauging size and distance. He turned his head to the sound as it moved along the bottom, around a stand of oak brush until it was below the rise of the trail that dipped steeply. Through the veil of snow, he could see his father’s form on the shoulders of some beast he could not make out. A dark head appeared, covered in hair. A broad chest, bare in the snow, head facing down, a barrel body covered in hair tangled with briars, snow knots and mud. The beast moved awkwardly, the snow churning in a wake behind him. The beast did not look up. Nicki could not see its eyes. It opened the truck door and dropped his dad inside. Sam was passed out from the pain. His foot bent at a right angle at the shin bone. Nicky stood facing the beast. “Will he live?” “Yes,” said the beast, letting its eyes be seen. “You’re Bigfoot?” “Maybe.” “You could be Negro Bill.” “He died a long time ago,” Bigfoot said. “Maybe he didn’t die,” Nicky said. “Could be. I have heard of such things.” “His mother then,” Nicky said. “Mothers live forever.” “Yes. And they always come back.” “For sure?” Nicky asked. Bigfoot nodded. “Will you live forever?” Bigfoot looked out toward wilderness he could not see. The veil of snow hung thick in front of him. “I guess that depends on who you ask. Sometimes I’d like to die.” “Well, I am dying,” Nicky said. “And I’m afraid.” “There’s worse things.” “What’s worse?” Nicky asked, now waist deep in snow. The beast crouched on its haunches and tried to look out at the canyon, lonely and eternal. Thick hands of snow fell, pressing downward while small gaps of gray light drifted upward. “We should be going,” Bigfoot said. He collected the boy in his arms and set him in the laundry basket on the hood of the truck. Sam woke and moaned in pain, his lower leg now swelling. “I lost the key when I fell.” “I’ll go get help,” said Bigfoot. He hoisted the basket packed tight with boy and white towels onto his shoulder. With his free hand, he brushed the snow in front of him, clearing a trail in the waist-high drifts, the whiteness floating up and falling at the same time. ANGEL “I seen the creature come in off the foothills through the snow. It was white as steamed milk, couldn’t even see the mountains. He appeared, trudging like the creature he was, and it was clear that my place was his destination. “His head was down and his fur like a bison’s was covered in snow knots. On his shoulder was Nicky, wrapped up like the Christ child in a laundry basket. He opened the door and the glass fogged. He set the boy down like a doorstop where the warm air could rush over him and walked back on the same line he came in on, like he had some inner compass directing him back through the snow. I dropped the coffee right there; you can still see the stain of it on the floor. I slid the boy in, and he told me the whole story. God’s angels aren’t what you seen in Sunday school, feathered wings and white and floating. Some, I guess, are brown and hairy and strong enough to trudge eight miles through the snow to save a boy. Those such things happen here.” I write to discover those things that change us, the little breakthroughs that give birth to redemption at best, and a new way of seeing things at the least. The epiphany comes in the action of writing, muddling through sentences to try and discover an out to a dilemma. Previous STEPHEN WUNDERLI is a freelance writer for The Foundation for a Better Life. He is the recipient of the United Nations Time for Peace Award, the Bridport Prize in Literature and an EMMY. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue GAMBLE PATRILINEAGE Robbie Gamble B eginning with James, of Scotch-Irish stock, shipped out to America from Enniskillen at sixteen, following the magnetic call of Manifest Destiny, pulling up on the stockyard banks of Cincinnati. There he learned the soapmaking trade, and soon fell in with William Procter, candlemaker. They pooled funds, and in 1837 co-founded the Procter & Gamble company. Energetic, shrewd stockpilers of materials, they grew the business well, filled coffers in Civil War contracts on the Union side, shipping bar soap and candles downstream into the maw of the conflict. And when the armies stumbled home they expanded as the nation, reconstructing, flexed its wealth westward. D avid, son of James, born into wealth amidst the bright industrial flush of household goods, cradled high on the bow of flagship Ivory Soap, while America scoured itself clean, striving toward a fresh end to the century. David served P&G as company Secretary, retiring in 1893 to sail the world with sons, overseeing Presbyterian missions charged with Oriental evangelization. Disembarking, he shuttled between showcase mansions in Cincinnati and Pasadena, the latter now a national landmark, the Gamble House. C larence, son of David, unexpected youngest of three. Prodigal, self-possessed, he posted first in his class at Princeton, 1914, then second through Harvard Medical School. His generation unburdened by the reins of soap production, instead he got a trust fund, his first million at twenty-one. Clarence caught the bug of Eugenics, pseudo-science of race and class superiority, dreaded humanity being dragged down by bad genes. He never built a medical practice, instead became a population-manipulator of one, urging for more babies amongst the educated, testing new contraceptives for the poor, funding rogue clinical trials, advocating sterilization of the feeble-minded in the rural South, always striving to constrain human sprawl in worrisome backward societies around the globe. W alter, son of Clarence, third of five redheaded siblings, the quiet, studious one. He lived for scientific questing; like his father he studied medicine, and unlike him he kept at it, specializing in pediatric cardiology, designing new pacemaking devices in the 1960s to impose strict rhythms on sick kids’ faltering hearts. He kept a hand in the family’s Great Cause of world population control, sitting on their foundation board, rattled about in his research lab with a menagerie of subject rats and cows, rounded on patients, and biked in to work in all kinds of weather, for over thirty years. R obbie, son of Walter, first of three boys, came into unexpected millions at eighteen. He grew deep discomfort for his wealth, shifted from Harvard to the Bowery in 1982, to work among homeless folks, and with his first wife Martha gifted away a fortune. He became a nurse practitioner to better care for people scraping at the margins, raised three kids, lost a marriage and a brother, discovered Anna, an orchard, a shining reverence for words. If there’s a breakthrough in the unpublished poem “Gamble Patrilineage,” it’s in the influence of my first wife, Martha, who helped me to see through the constraints of the patriarchy and the trappings of wealth, and turn away from family convention to become a more authentic agent for change in the world. My family has an almost biblical sense of self-importance, and I find it useful to coopt that narrative with an over-the-top generational structure that shows the undue focus given to the men on the family tree. Previous ROBBIE GAMBLE is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). He is poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine . robbiegamble.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue WEST ON PICCADILLY Shauri Cherie Stop for a moment to feel the air grow colder, chilled by the rush of passersby milling on steps, on escalators, staying on the right to make way for those rushing for the platform. Take a step and listen to the sound of footfall and the grind of the train on the rail and the faint trill of Mind the gap over the speakers. Push between two teenagers stumbling out onto the platform for Russell Square. There’s little room on the Tube at this hour, but squeeze yourself into a corner, wrap your hand around the bar, and bear it as more and more people crowd around you. Some might have come from King’s Cross (they keep luggage tucked protectively between their knees as if anticipating the worst) or perhaps they’re on the journey home tonight (the woman next to you has mascara smudged beneath her eyelids and a seated old man is slumped forward onto his wrinkled palms). The doors will shut behind with a mechanical hiss. Sway with the lurch of the train as it departs, see a girl holding her mother’s hand shift her footing. The train twists and turns and tilts until brakes squeal to a stop at Holborn, Covent Garden, and, finally, Leicester Square. The doors open to a white-tiled wall, and here, the people move faster, faster, faster, so pause in this moment to watch the tide of bodies swell around you. Wait to watch a group of girls sway concert-drunk and tourists take selfies to post on Instagram, men hovering next to their wives, children swinging their feet in their seats while parents shush them and apologize to those seated beside. Wait here until the doors begin to hiss once more, then you, an American in a country that isn’t your own, step off the Tube and onto the platform, careful to mind the gap. "West on Piccadilly" was the first poem I wrote for my European travel lyric sequence as an undergrad. It was originally published in Outrageous Fortune , but this version has been edited in preparation for a chapbook. It's sensory-focused, meant to capture the barrage overwhelming the senses of someone from a rural Utah town in the heart of London. It was a breakthrough experience that boosted my confidence, and rereading it brings the Tube vividly back again. Previous SHAURI CHERIE is easily excited by travel, curry, and stingrays. Her work appears in Trace Fossils Review , Ghost Light Lit , and others. shauricherie.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue HUNTINGTON BEACH, MARCH 2 Shauri Cherie plovers scurry toward water only to shy from the kiss of waves against shore. A girl, small, uncoordinated on toddler legs, waddles after, feet imprinting into saturated sand, following pointed prints from the birds before they take to air. She stops near the tide and wiggles her toes, bending to pluck a shell with her thick fingers—you imagine it broken, sharp, and colored a dull red beneath its coat of sand, the grains wearing her skin where she clutches. Behind, a call of her name, and she turns, offering her free hand to her mother. The shell remains in her palm as they continue east, and you finally look away and walk west. Distantly, plovers land, resume their race toward shore. "huntington beach, march 2" is one of my oldest poems that has seen countless iterations, so finally publishing it is a breakthrough in its own right. Each iteration of this poem has been a breakthrough for me poetically, since I always come back to rewrite this aged memory with new techniques. Past versions remind me of how much my poetic voice has changed and grown, and it feels liminal to have this poem be both old and new. Previous SHAURI CHERIE is easily excited by travel, curry, and stingrays. Her work appears in Trace Fossils Review , Ghost Light Lit , and others. shauricherie.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue HOT TO TURN A HATE MARCH INTO A JUBILEE PROCESSION Dana Henry Martin after George Sherwood Hunter Remove torches. Add paper lanterns. Remove logo T-shirts and jeans. Add white Victorian dresses. Add leather shoes with buttons and tucked heels. Add bonnets and bonnets and more bonnets. Remove pavers, grass, black sky. Add cobble. Add a single-mast ship with no sail in the distance, other ships farther, their masts crisscrossed like toothpicks. Add water that looks painted and crackled. Add celadon sky that can’t be teased from water nor water teased from it. Remove screams and teeth and tonsils exposed to air. Add children and four men, one in a costume, one leaning over a railing, one in a floppy hat, one holding a basket full of sticks. Remove stiff arms raised in Sieg Heil salutes. Add gloved hands that clutch lantern poles, free arms hanging or perched like birds on a hip. Remove city. Add village. Remove hate masked as march. Add jubilee parading as jubilee. Remove anger looking for anchor. Add far-reaching gaze like a woman looking out over the wheat she’s grown in a place where nothing should grow. Add soft glow on cheeks. Add pointed toes. "How to Turn a Hate March into a Jubilee Procession" was first published in Sheila-Na-Gig. The question at the heart of this poem is how do we break through the vitriol many feel today and the hate speech and hate symbols associated with that vitriol? I saw Sherwood Hunter's Jubilee Procession in a Cornish Village, June 1897 one morning on social media. I was struck by the way elements of it both paralleled and stood in stark contrast to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. The breakthrough for me was being able to transmute the march into a jubilee. Previous DANA HENRY MARTIN is a poet, medical writer, and health- and mental-health advocate whose chapbooks include Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books, 2012), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2012), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press, 2009). Martin's work has appeared in The Adroit Journal , Barrow Street , Cider Press Review , FRiGG , Laurel Review , Mad in America , Meat for Tea , Muzzle , New Letters , Rogue Agent , Sheila-Na-Gig , SWWIM , Trampoline , and other literary journals. She weaves, birds, and hangs out with the cows who live next to the cemetery in Toquerville, Utah. danahenrymartin.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue RUDE WEATHER Cynthia Hardy 1. The weather changes and changes again— just when our skin has opened its pores to heat & tanned from wildfire smoke-- rain 2. Rain softens the profile of mountains, blurs the day so that everything’s as in a dream— birds flit through the overhang of eaves—delphiniums droop—the greenhouse drowses 3. In a drowse, I hear the news—some tragedy in a place where the air overheats and neighbors pass with rude stares. I nestle the cat. I do not call my neighbor to ask how her tomatoes grow 4. Tomatoes form a wall of green at the back of the greenhouse— the dark and jagged leaves hiding yellow blossoms, thumb- sized fruits. A dragon- fly beats against the translucent roof 5. A dragonfly lands on my knuckle—a skeleton of black chiton—wings iridescent paddles, mandibles moving, slowly chewing a yellow striped sweat bee 6. The bees are silent. The neighbor’s hive has swarmed—the gray sky and rain damps down their buzziness. I long for a finger full of fireweed honey—so light and clear and nectar-sweet. This poem was written as a response to a challenge I gave my poetry students: moving from one image to another, letting the poem drift. It was a poem I could have just tossed away, but didn’t. Perhaps that’s the breakthrough—or that, in its own loose way, this poem represents an attempt to add order to my usual unstructured process. Previous CINDY HARDY writes from Chena Ridge, Fairbanks, Alaska. She has published poetry and fiction, teaches occasionally, rides horses, and gardens all summer. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue BLUEBIRD ABECEDARIAN Pamela Uschuk for Laura-Gray Street Aegean blue etches frost air a deeper indigo than river-scrubbed lapis or blue hair dye or cadmium fresh from the tube onto canvas’s deep glacial lake. Blue catches me wandering dawn song ether, where no bombs blow off freezing feathers from wings, where no random gunshots thwack red birds with the snap of their terrible teeth. Hobbling, mothers drag kids through Gaza, from unsafe to unsafe in genocide’s firestorms of missile revenge. Just when I think this Virginia sky has birthed a kite of quietude with its upswung limbs of live oak, redbud, elm and maple’s sugar hope news intrudes its list of atrocities opening old wounds that never get a chance to heal. Peace? Ceasefire? These ancient questions are tacked to my sleeve like small roses of blood leaking from a child’s forehead pixilated on screen, laptop or smart TV in your own living room where you used to lounge with your lover or your cat, both valentines of hope, that elusive word again like a ghost whale or x-ray of a leg bone shattered by a grenade or an explosion of yellow feathers. Ground Zero is war’s footprint, unseen by bluebirds the size of a human heart. I wrote this Abecedarian as a model poem for an advanced undergraduate poetry class when I was the Pearl S. Buck Visiting Writer at Randolf College in Virginia. Besides Natalie Diaz’s wonderful “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation,” I couldn’t find an example that was quite right for this class. This poem tries to hold all the grief and outrage I feel by the ongoing assault on Gaza, a country that is has been almost bombed out of existence by Israel whose firepower is overwhelming. I incorporated a lot of bird imagery because birding is one of my greatest joys. I dedicated the poem to Laura-Gray Street who brought me to Randolf and who I had the great privilege of going birding with. The poem turned out to be an anti-war poem. The last line was one of those gifts that come out of the blue, a lucky line. This is another breakthrough poem for me. Previous PAMELA USCHUK is the author of eight books of poems and has received many awards including the American Book Award. She is a senior fellow and board member of Black Earth Institute, as well as Editor in Chief of Cutthroat , a Journal of the Arts. www.pamelauschuk.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue GHAZAL WITH COYOTES, GAZA AND HEALING HERBS Pamela Uschuk “My eyes went to heaven instead of me.” —five year old boy in Gaza, PBS NEWS , January 2025 Desert wind razors oleander leaves, scraping dawn’s yard. My pup attacks coyotes through chain-link fence to the East. Radio cries for children bombed each day in Gaza’s rubble. Love-starved, rain refuses to kiss wildfires to the East. What is chickpea flour to dead mothers wrapped in white sheets? My shoes catch fire. I would send rivers of milk to the East. On my sill, basil & healing herbs flex from East to West. Finches and mourning doves sing up sun to the East. A rabidcoyote bit three neighbor dogs across town. During chemo, my friend sent dates sweet dried from the East . Neighbor kids dribble, shoot baskets on asphalt, shoes laced to laughing feet, tap love notes to the East. Revenge rape is no quotient to solve torn burkas. Indentured slave, my migrant grandma prayed to the East. My ancestors were massacred by a tyrant’s troops. I am their contrail sending love poems to the East. For years I believed my alien name meant big ears. migrating to Belarus from Siberia far East. Uschuk means whale who spirals down to evade enemies. I’d curl in a blue whale’s singing brain to the East. Where is God when bodies are blown to bone confetti? What herb heals daughters & sons exploded in the East? When Ami Kaye, publisher of Glass Lyre Press, solicited poems for an anthology of Ghazals, I was determined to write one. Before this ghazal, published by Ami Kaye in Nur Melange Anthology of Ghazals , my earlier ghazals seemed wooden, forced. But, this ghazal was an axe that opened my heart broken by daily images of Israel’s incessant bombing of Gaza, by its genocide of Gazan citizens, especially its women and children. I wanted to write a ghazal to honor the dead civilians of this hideously beseiged nation. This was a breakthrough Ghazal for me. I haven’t yet mastered this elegant Persian form, but I am happy with this poem. Previous PAMELA USCHUK is the author of eight books of poems and has received many awards including the American Book Award. She is a senior fellow and board member of Black Earth Institute, as well as Editor in Chief of Cutthroat , a Journal of the Arts. www.pamelauschuk.com Next