Among by Cynthia Hardy a half dozen poems: five about sky—darkening, flattening, dampered by cloud. Gray in all varieties now. The dark shadow of bark below fir branches, the pale trim of snow edging all. We dream of color, of tropical gardens, all red, yellow, purple, green. You say, Are you dreaming? I say, Not really, then tell all I remember: a sea, deep blue, the white collars of foam, the motion and relentless sweep towards brown sugar sand. The same water tosses a boat around as I wander from deck to deck, down dim corridors, leaning on tilting walls. I am looking for you, or someone like you, and ride the bounce and shift like a tilt-a-whirl. You drift there—in and out of focus—but I find you in every room. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue One of a series of poems I wrote during the Covid lockdown period in Zoom meetings with Hippies in the Attic, a group of writers based in Green Bay, WI included in Rude Weather (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, forthcoming). It’s partly a reflection on a recurring theme in my poems, including the weather and the sky, snow, and the porousness of the boundary between poetry and dreams. .................................................................................................................................................................................... CINDY HARDY writes from Chena Ridge, Fairbanks, Alaska. She has published poetry and fiction, with a new poetry collection, Rude Weather forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Next - Insomnia by Cynthia Hardy 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 FACING IT Shanan Ballam I’ve lost the ability to walk I can’t do stairs or go uphill or downhill I’ve lost my beautiful penmanship but I can let go of things with my right hand I used to grip so hard the handrail in rehab— I’ve relearned how to use chopsticks I can open pill bottles and La Croix cans I haven’t lost the ability to write poetry I made it up and down little mountain cascades of birdsong and then silence graceful arcs silver spray of sprinklers in the far field three sandhill cranes flying in unison three sandhill cranes dissolved into the mountain a skunk plumes its luxurious black and white tail a deer bounding a monarch butterfly up close for the first time flashing its wings opening and closing its wings perched on an elm leaf mesmerizing near the river perched on an elm leaf opening and closing its wings near the river opening and closing "facing it" appears in my chapbook first poems after the stroke . I survived a massive stroke in January 2022 that robbed me of the use of my entire right side. It also stole my language. It’s been three years since the stroke, and I still have trouble going up and down stairs and up and down hills, but I have regained the ability to write in cursive, which was one of my goals. This is a poem I wrote in the early stages of my recovery, and the breakthrough is that I wrote down all I had lost for the first time. Previous SHANAN BALLAM is the author of the poetry manuscripts The Red Riding Hood Papers (Finishing Line Press, 2010), Pretty Marrow (Negative Capability, 2013), Inside the Animal (Main Street Rag, 2019), and the chapbook first poems after the stroke (Finishing Line Press, 2024). shananballam.org Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue THE LONG HAUL Shanan Ballam The black ribbon of highway unfurls before us. It is well past midnight. The stroke and I are driving a semi on a three-year road trip. We are exhausted, sticky, smelly and stiff from the long, stale ride. We haven’t been out of the truck for hours and hours. We haven’t had a chance to stretch our legs. We are both wearing black plastic AFO’s that makes our right legs numb. Our bladders ache. We have no idea if or how it ends. We don’t know where we’re going. We just know we must drive. Because that’s all we know how to do. We must keep moving. But we don’t know why. The situation is so confusing. Every time I turn my head when I think I see the answer it dissipates like smoke. The stroke is driving. Bleary-eyed the stroke turns the wheel over to me. The seat is warm where the stroke sat. I take the sweaty wheel in my grip. We’re hauling precious cargo, dragging its heavy load behind us like a tail. In the trailer we carry all our grief. We can’t afford to lose this load. I drive carefully through the night. The stroke sleeps in the passenger seat. I drive until the white morning sun seeps through the cab windows. I glance at the stroke. She has brown hair and is wearing my red shirt. When she lifts her sleepy head I see she has my brown eyes— my nose and my mouth— she even has my four moles high up on her cheek, that look like the basin of the big dipper. She is me me me. She has been me all along. We know what we have to do: together we unhitch the heavy trailer of our grief. We leave it at a grimy truck stop in the middle of nowhere. The stroke says I’ll drive— but the words come from my mouth. I have written several poems about my stroke, comparing it to a horse that falls on my chest, a rat, my abusive stepfather, my drunk brother-in-law who molested me. The stroke is always an enemy. This poem was the first time I saw that the stroke was actually me—had always been me. This idea was a breakthrough, to see the stroke not as an adversary, but as myself. Previous SHANAN BALLAM is the author of the poetry manuscripts The Red Riding Hood Papers (Finishing Line Press, 2010), Pretty Marrow (Negative Capability, 2013), Inside the Animal (Main Street Rag, 2019), and the chapbook first poems after the stroke (Finishing Line Press, 2024). shananballam.org Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue AN AMICABLE CORRESPONDENCE Scott Abbott amicable : good-natured, harmonious, cordial, agreeable, good-humored, kind, polite No, none of those. I mean something with more bite, more room for spirited exchange. This amicable correspondence will be between amici , prijatelji , Freunde . amicable : between friends. In 1826, officials in Weimar decided to clean out an overstuffed mausoleum that housed the remains of various notables, including those of Friedrich Schiller, who had died twenty-one years earlier. When they could not identify Schiller’s bones in the chaotic crypt, a doctor named Schwabe gathered 23 skulls to examine at home. Schwabe had known Schiller, he had his death mask, but still he was unable to identify Schiller’s skull with any certainty. He finally chose a skull that distinguished itself by its large size and fine, regular form. Großherzog Karl August recommended that the skull eventually be housed under glass next to Leibniz’s skull in the Royal Library. In the meantime, Goethe borrowed the skull and in the night of September 25th wrote a poem in honor of his friend, exploring the shifting relationships between nature and spirit, between matter and mind. Wilhelm von Humboldt saw the skull in Goethe’s possession and wrote to his wife that Goethe was having a burial vault built in the hopes that he and Schiller could eventually lie there together. In the end, the friends never shared a grave. DNA analysis in 2008 proved that the skull in question belonged to someone other than Friedrich Schiller. I decide to translate Goethe's poem. The dense rhymes of terza rima and the rhythms of iambic pentameter are integral formal contributors to the content, but my attempts to reproduce them in English are a disaster. I opt for a more straightforward form. While Contemplating Schiller’s Skull It was in the somber ossuary that I saw skulls aligned with ordered skulls; old times, I thought, gone grey. They stand fixed in rows, once mutual foes, and stout bones that clashed to kill lie athwart, rest subdued. Dismembered shoulder blades! what they bore now lost, and fine and lively limbs, the hand, the foot, scattered, disjointed. In vain you lay down tired, they left you no peace in the grave, drove you again into daylight. No one can love the desiccated shell, whatever splendid noble germ it protected. Yet for me, the adept, were inscribed sacred meanings not revealed to all, as I, amidst that unblinking multitude sensed an image wondrous beyond imagination, and in the clammy hall’s constriction I was warmed, refreshed, as if life had sprung from death. How mysteriously the form ravished me! The divinely ordered trace, preserved! A glimpse that carried me off to that sea whence figures rise transmuted. Mysterious vessel! Orphic oracle, How am I worthy to hold you in my hand? Lifting you fervently, ultimate treasure, from corruption and into the open air to freely muse, turning myself, devoutly, to the sunlight. What more can one attain in a lifetime than that God-Nature reveals herself? How she lets what is firm pass away to spirit, How firmly she preserves what the spirit engenders. (to be continued) Translating the poem from German to English and from the distance of two centuries, I enjoy an opening of sorts. As opposed to my largely monolingual habitation in the American West where I was born and raised, my friends Žarko Radaković and Alex Caldiero live at linguistic junctures. Žarko, who emigrated from the former Yugoslavia and whose native language is Serbo-Croatian, lives in Cologne with his German wife Anne. An uncompromising novelist, he is also a devoted translator of works by Peter Handke. Alex, who emigrated from Sicily to Brooklyn at the age of nine, lives in Orem, Utah with his Russian / Turkish / American wife Setenay. His poetry performances are legendary and his translations from Sicilian include the delightful “Bawdy Riddles and Tongue Twisters of the Sicilian Folk:” Trasi tisa / E nesci modda — It goes in hard / And comes out soft. !Pasta). I have been the fortunate friend of these emigrant / immigrant / translator / artists for more than four decades. 8 December 2017 I show Alex my new hearing aids. He points out that because his right ear is still his worst one, the fact that I can now hear through my bad left ear won’t change the fact that I’ll need to walk on his right side if we’re walking and talking. He has some technical questions. And then he gets to the heart of the matter: What if this destroys our friendship? What do you mean? What if our friendship is based on miscommunication? What if we’re friends only because I’ve been hearing you poorly and you haven’t been hearing me correctly? While contemplating that possibility, I tell Alex about Goethe’s poem written while contemplating his friend Schiller’s skull. My mother, Alex responds, had a burning desire to see her father’s bones. We were in Licodea, Sicily, and she insisted that we go to the cemetery where the family crypt is. My grandfather’s casket is in the ground-level room of the crypt, directly under the altar. She asked a cemetery official if she could open the casket. You can do anything you want in your family’s crypt, he said. I did my best to dissuade her from opening the casket. You know how close to an emotional edge I live; imagine my mother 100 times closer to that edge. She finally acquiesced and we didn’t open the casket. When Schiller died, Goethe was 55 and Schiller 45. Goethe was 76 when he contemplated Schiller’s skull. Žarko, Alex, and I are 73, 69, and 69 respectively. None of us is likely to write a poem with the other’s skull on our desk. Schiller’s first letter to Goethe (first of more than a thousand letters subsequently passed between them), dated the 13thof June, 1794 and sent from Jena to the neighboring town of Weimar, addresses Goethe as High Wellborn Sir, Highly-to Be-Honored Privy Councilor . The letter is a request for contributions to Schiller’s proposed literary journal Die Horen (The Horae). Schiller mentions co-publishers—idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the linguist and eventual founder of the University of Berlin Wilhelm von Humboldt. He signs the letter Your High Wellborn, most obedient servant and most sincere admirer F. Schiller . Goethe responds on the 24th of June and then again on the 25th of July. He offers a token of friendship and assures Schiller that he is very much looking forward to a frequent and lively exchange of ideas: "I shall with pleasure and with all my heart be one of the party." Several letters follow and in September Goethe invites Schiller to visit him in Weimar. Schiller responds enthusiastically on September 7th, but with a caveat: that Goethe not rely on him to meet any domestic timetables. Cramps during the night disturb him so seriously, Schiller writes, that he finds it necessary to sleep the entire morning and cannot commit to anything at any given hour. "You will, then, allow me to be a complete stranger in your house . . . to isolate myself so that I can escape the embarrassment of having to depend on others. . . . Excuse these preliminaries. . . . I ask for the simple freedom of being allowed to be ill while being your guest." And with that the friendship that proved so valuable to both men was begun. Goethe later told Schiller that he had given him “a second youth and made me a poet again, which I had as good as ceased to be.” Schiller, thinking perhaps of his delicate health and uncertain future, wrote that, “I hope that we can walk together down as much of the road as may remain, and with all the more profit, since the last companions on a journey always have most to say to each other.” Years later, while Goethe was editing their correspondence for publication, he asked “what could be more amusing than to see our letters begin with the pompous announcement of the Horen . . . . And yet, if there hadn’t been that impulse and will to document the times, everything in German literature would now be very different.” If the Serb hadn’t invited the American to contribute to the literary journal Knjizevna kritika , if the Sicilian and the American hadn’t begun neighborly conversations about poetry, and if the Serb and the Sicilian hadn’t conversed one morning in the American’s house, everything in the field of Serbian-American-Sicilian literature would now be very different. This opening section of my half of the book We, On Friendship (Elik Press, 2022), co-written by Žarko Radaković and with contributions from Alex Caldiero, led to a surprising integration of Goethe’s and Schiller’s correspondence into the correspondence between the three of us. For more about the three books Žarko and I have published in both Serbian and English, see our website . Previous SCOTT ABBOTT completed a doctorate in German Studies at Princeton University and is a professor emeritus of Integrated Studies, Philosophy, and Humanities at Utah Valley University. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger. (Common Consent Press, 2022). He has translated works by Nobel Prize Awardee Peter Handke and botanist Gregor Mendel. scottabbottauthor.com Next

The Queen of Hell by Karin Anderson In 1773, George III’s architect, James Wyatt, was commissioned by Elizabeth, Countess of Home, to build a sophisticated ‘Pavilion’ designed purely for enjoyment and entertainment at No. 20 Portland Square. The Countess, aptly known as ‘The Queen of Hell’, was in her late 60’s, twice widowed, childless and rich. (Home House, “London’s Iconic Members Club” website) In her sixties and seventies, Elizabeth Gibbons, Countess of Home, was one of the most powerful and colorful characters of British high society. But finding authentic traces of her now— beyond the standing edifice on Portland Square—is tricky. I had to rummage. Contemporary references mostly bounce off internet repetitions, clones of each other. Original sources are sparse—in fact, I’m quoting most of them here. Historically, Countess Elizabeth is the “Queen of Hell” because William Beckford, an inconceivably wealthy brat young enough to be her grandson, bestowed the title in one of his many florid letters to his artsy who-alls. Not that he’d miss one of her parties. At least when he wasn’t about to be arrested. Beckford’s catty nickname for the Countess of Home (royal by calculated marriage) stuck to her like a meme, wafting down to us with little context. I’m not saying it’s not apt, but Elizabeth’s hellish queendom was not No. 20 Portland Square. Her hell simmered across the Atlantic, in the brutal slaveholding culture of Jamaica, richly funding the London party house. She was the only daughter and heir of William Gibbons of Vere in the island of Jamaica. Her first husband was James Lawes, son of the Governor of the island. After his death she married William, 8th Earl of Home on 25th December 1742. He was a Lt. General in the army and Governor of Gibraltar but he deserted her the year after the marriage. She had no children and died at Home House in Portland Square, London. (Westminster Abbey Website; Burial Commemorations) Elizabeth was born in 1703, maybe 1704—an only child, which likely means “only surviving child.” Her mother died in 1711, probably taken by one of the freewheeling diseases that jacked the death rate—for Black and white people alike—twice as high as the birth rate. Only slightly less probable causes of death: pirates. Maroons. Slave revolt. So many ways to die young in the Caribbean, even among the unimaginably wealthy and privileged. Elizabeth’s father William was a cane planter. He owned hundreds of sugar-producing acres stocked with hundreds of enslaved workers. At sixteen, Elizabeth married James Lawes. James’s father Nicholas, Governor of Jamaica, was even richer; he had a way of marrying (and surviving) widows of other rich men. Governor Lawes owned more land, enslaved more people, and was apparently more interested in distinguishing himself in public affairs than Elizabeth’s father. Maybe the only plantation family richer than the Gibbonses and Laweses: the neighboring Beckfords. Soon after marrying, Elizabeth commissioned a prestigious London sculptor to craft a memorial for her mother. I have never been there, but by all reports the plaque is still set in Halfway Tree Church near Kingston, in a parish they called Vere: Near this place lies intern’d with her parents, &c., the body of Mrs. Deborah Gibbons, wife to Willm. Gibbons, Esq., and daughter of John Favell, Esq., of ye county of York, who departed this life the 20th of July, 1711, in the 29th year of her age. To summ up her character in brief she was one of the best of women and a most pious Christian. She left only one daughter, who married the Honble. James Lawes, eldest son of Sir N. S. Lawes, Kt., Governor of this island, who in honour to the memory of so good a parent erected this monument to her. Here we see Elizabeth, the “Queen of Hell,” enshrining her mother’s pious Christianity. A trope? The sweetest phrase: “… one of the best of women …” but what did this mean to the daughter who had lost her too soon to know her? When James died, thirteen years after their wedding, Elizabeth imported another memorial—same sculptor, a prestige move—to the same church. The bust of James is puckish and lifelike. The inscription is in Latin, which I don’t read, but I’ve seen this translation: Nearby are placed the remains of the Honourable James Lawes: he was the first-born son of Sir Nicholas Lawes, the Governor of this Island, by his wife Susannah Temple: He married Elizabeth, the only daughter and heiress of William Gibbons, Esq; then in early manhood, when barely thirty-six years of age, he obtained almost the highest position of distinction among his countrymen, being appointed Lieutenant Governor by Royal warrant; but before he entered on his duties, in the prime of life—alas—he died on 4th January 1733. In him we lose an upright and honoured citizen, a faithful and industrious friend, and most affectionate husband, a man who was just and kind to all, and distinguished by the lustre of genuine religion. His wife, who survived him, had this monument erected to perpetuate the memory of a beloved husband. Alas. James Lawes, in life, was a pain in the butt among all and sundry—the entitled oldest son of one of Jamaica’s prominent planters, the governor’s obnoxious kid (we know his kind). James scooted to London after his father died, cleaned up his act enough to return with the crown’s appointment. Back on the island, however, he was no “upright and honoured citizen.” And by all-accounts-not-Elizabeth’s he was neither just nor kind. Genuine religious lustre: zero. But the last sentence of the epitaph may be accurate: his widowed, childless wife Elizabeth appears to have truly loved him—an obscure signal that she also harbored a trickster heart. Not yet thirty, Elizabeth Gibbons Lawes was now among the very wealthiest human beings in the western hemisphere. Heiress of her father’s Jamaican estates and her husband’s formidable holdings, she was richer—and better-landed—than many English royals. James, her dead husband, carried small-time noble blood through his mother’s line, thanks to his common father who had married the “relict” Susannah Temple. Elizabeth’s ancestry is obscure on both sides—the Gibbonses and Favells likely rose from the merchant/esquire class, or military, peppered with buccaneers. A New World pattern: upstart creole heirs entrusting vast properties (and the people enslaved on them) to ruthless hired managers. Raised rugged, isolated, accustomed to violent power and obscenely rich, the second generations believed they warranted royal prestige as they returned to the motherland. Third, fourth, fifth generations—or second, third, and fourth families—often slid back into rough poverty, inheriting only resentments. Elizabeth makes no mark on extant records for nine years after her young husband’s death. Did she hang around Vere, learning the sugar business and the enterprise of enslavement? Did she party in Kingston and Spanish Town, attended by human beings she called her property? Did she, like her Jamaican neighbors the Beckfords, bring Black “servants” to England to pad the shock of return? She appears in London at age thirtyeight, on record for her second marriage: Christmas day 1742, to the eighth Earl of Home. I am no Anglophile. I had to look this up: an earl is the British equivalent of a count. The Earl of Home was several years younger than Elizabeth, dissolute, and probably homosexual (which was not nearly as rare as my ancestor-searching Mormon relatives wish to acknowledge. Not nearly). Elizabeth bailed her prodigal earl out of some hefty bankruptcies, he abandoned her a year after the marriage, her wealth was barely dented, and now she was a countess. Deal. Aaaand she goes invisible again for thirty years, then blazes up in 1773 to contract James Wyatt, a trendy London architect, to design and build her party house on Portland Square. Reminder: Elizabeth was sixty-seven. Notoriously drunk, dirty, and sporadic, Wyatt erected the outer structure and a few ornate ceilings before Elizabeth got fed up and fired him, hiring his rival Robert Adam to redesign and finish. Adam’s takeover-makeover produced one of the most legendary and enduring interiors of the Georgian era; beyond its wide but unostentatious front façade, the entry opens into multiple stories of elaborate and spacious gathering rooms, bound by a central staircase spiraling under a glass dome. Skylight reaches nearly every chamber. A covered garden extends beyond the rear exit. Although there were sleeping quarters, the house was—and remains—a social hall, made to be lit, designed for music, drink (rum I guess), fine food, and rich party animals. For much of the twentieth century, the Home House served as the Courtauld Institute, displaying an offbeat but prestigious art collection. On my first (and probably last) visit to London, as a young wife married to an artist committed to the high truths of the European Enlightenment, I spent a full day in the Countess’s “Pavilion,” although I had no sense of its history or peculiarity. Now the building houses a prestigious private club, frequented by descendants of the original royal revelers. The parties were, by all reports, ragers. Booze. Drugs. Orgies. Costumes. Birthday suits. People came off the streets, out of the palaces, highborn and lowlife. Once, Elizabeth invited a couple of passing Black men in to show the orchestra how to kick up the beat, but they drank themselves to sleep in the kitchen instead. Parties went on for days, one event indistinguishable from the next. The woman was in her seventies. During Elizabeth’s residence, two life-sized, full-body portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland hung on either side of a grand fireplace. A ceiling-high mirror enhanced the grandeur. Thomas Gainsborough was the artist; if you’re not an art history type, orient by recalling that he also painted The Blue Boy and Pinkie . The Cumberland portraits now belong to the Royal Collection Trust and hang in Buckingham Palace—amusing because the couple in their time were notorious for (figuratively at least) farting in the general direction of the king and queen. * * * Henry Frederick, the portrait’s Duke of Cumberland, was King George III’s younger brother, bigly royal but outside the line for the throne. Think Harry, if you must. Anne Luttrell Horton, the portrait’s Duchess of Cumberland, was a widowed Jamaican plantation heiress, in fact James Lawes’ half-sister’s daughter, making her Elizabeth’s half-niece by (long-ago Jamaican) marriage. Elizabeth’s wayback Jamaican sister-in-law had married into the Luttrell family. The Luttrells were surly Irish nobles (also Jamaican planters) committed to social advancement through shameless seduction and/or election rigging and/or vicious personal violence. Hence Anne Luttrell, Elizabeth’s Irish/Jamaican creole niece, widow of some dude named Horton, sprang up at the right moment to become the Duchess of Cumberland. She took to batting her famous eyelashes, flashing her coyest-in-all England green eyes at dumb-as-dirt playboy Henry, the king’s brother. The Luttrells campaigned (blackmailed) for marriage. Hard. Sure, the old serial groom, Governor Lawes, had labored to give his descendants noble blood, but his granddaughter was out of her league. By royal reckoning, Duke Henry was succumbing to a rank commoner, a confoundingly rich creole hick. The creoles won. King George III was furious, inspiring the newlywed Duke and Duchess to take a long honeymoon on the continent. But they returned to their fine estate after long enough, mere walking distance from Buckingham Palace. They played cool uncle and aunt to the Prince of Wales, who liked sneaking over to party like only the Jamaicans could. After yet another brother married a commoner, King George decreed that no member of the royal family could marry without the monarch’s permission, and certainly could not marry a nonroyal. * * * William Beckford (the father of the WB who called Elizabeth the Queen of Hell), possibly the very richest of the Jamaican rich, had also relocated to London, holding various offices—including, over time, Sheriff of London and even Mayor. Despite the high functions, Daddy Beckford was a colorful guy, leaning with the “radicals” who liked to worry the legitimate gentry. Little William Thomas Beckford, next generation, sole heir of his father’s mad fortune, was about thirteen when Elizabeth launched her Portland Square project. This William, a gorgeous, flamboyant Peter Pan (Google his portrait), eventually left England for the continent, hiding out after a scandalous and super kinky (and criminal, even for him) affair with a seriously underaged and even prettier boy. In comfortable exile, young Beckford wrote a dense proto-romantic novel rife with artsy erotic adventures called Vathek, which no one ought to endure, not because it’s perverse (adorned with sensually compliant dwarves and a sexy “black eunuch” who manages Vathek’s harem of “females,” etc.) but because it’s a ponderous “gothick” fundamentally hostile to the twenty-first-century attention span. It’s worth grazing though: his depictions of exotic pleasure palaces seem to be inspired by Elizabeth’s Portland joint. And, possibly, Jamaican fantasies. Beckford made his own attempts at an architectural legacy with the “help” of the same James Wyatt Elizabeth fired. All of this may have spiraled down like Elizabeth’s skylit staircase to birth Coleridge’s In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / a stately pleasure dome decree … * * * Some sources report that the Cumberlands commissioned Gainsborough to paint the matching portraits, and then gave them as a remarkable (and self-aggrandizing) gift to Elizabeth, prompting her to build a stately pleasure dome to house them. Other sources say that Elizabeth commissioned the paintings to flatter the Cumberlands, strengthening her ambivalent and ornery link to established prestige. The portraits are stunning: Gainsborough’s high rococo style, feathery fabric strokes, matching mid-body ferric reds. The artist overcomes the duke’s buggy eyes and wigged pointy head by sussing Henry’s integral sex-money-titular swagger. He fingers royal gold hanging from his neck, reminding all that not even the king can deny the facts of true lineage. Gainsborough portrays Anne somewhere between distinguished lady and incorrigible coquette—drooping lashes over vivid eyes, an almost-smile offering and withholding. The Duchess, like all her family and apparently like the regulars who partied in the court of the Queen of Hell, cursed like a pirate: Lady Anne Fordyce is reported as saying that after hearing (the Countess) talk one ought to go home and wash one’s ears; Lady Louisa Stuart called her vulgar, noisy, indelicate, and intrepid but not, she adds, accused of gallantry. (Historian Lesley Lewis, 1967) * * * It’s appealing, cowgirl American that I believe I am, to root for these appalling white Jamaicans as the feisty underdogs, returned from the rough West to mimic and mock the arrogant royals. Guess I inherited a New World urge to poke self-important folks in the eye with a sharp stick. However. Back when it was legal to assign college students to read words that challenged their worldviews, I spent a week trying to guide my sophomore composition students through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations . A bright young woman— certainly the finest natural writer of the group—said, “Well, if I had any ancestors who owned slaves, I guess I’d feel kind of responsible. But I don’t, so don’t see how this is my problem.” I formulated some responses, but, really, she’d just excused the class. They were done, grateful that she’d stated the obvious. On the train home I admitted to myself that, for all my righteous attitudes about race and history, I too was happy that I had no slaveholding forbears. Not literally, anyway. * * * My down-home Idaho mother knows little of her own maternal ancestry because her mother died very young, at thirty-three. My mom is a sincere and unpretentious Latter-Day Saint, and, maybe due to this early loss, she’s always eager for her academic daughters to retrieve genealogical information about “who we are.” I bailed on my mother’s religion—any religion—long ago, but I like research and I do narrative, so I’m happy to help appease her passion for filling in names and dates on her family group sheets. I try to dig around, find context, pull up information to enrich the characters for her. So far, it’s felt reasonably safe. What even in my straight-from-Europe dirtpoor-immigrant ancestry could foist the brutalities of Jamaican and Barbadian slavery on us? So, tracking the (heavily obfuscated) generations of her Grandma Gibbons’s family was —I don’t know. Should it really be such a shock? Gibbonses proliferated on both islands; my theory now is that Elizabeth’s father had a second family on Barbados— possibly half-siblings she never discovered. But every guess is raw speculation: who even were they? Any of them? They’re no good for fiction; I can’t imagine them well enough to fabricate. Not like I have no evil in me, to help me “relate” to them. I have plenty. It’s just not a world I can conjure. My mom isn’t interested in following this family thread any further. This is not who we are. Maybe that tells me plenty. She’s eighty-eight. It’s not my call to badger her—and, anyway, whatever’s left of those people, they’re already in me as much as they’re in her. If her religion is as true as she hopes, she’ll have to chat those people up in the next life. I’ll leave it to them. * * * But here’s an eighteenth-century Barbadian plantation song, written down (with musical notations) by someone who thought it mattered enough to transcribe as he stood to listen to enslaved people “chanting” in the fields: Massa buy me he won’t killa me Massa buy me he won’t killa me Oh Massa buy me he won’t killa me O ‘for he killa me he ship me regulaw For I live with a bad man oh la for I live with a bad man Obudda bo For I live with a bad man oh la ‘for I would go to the Riverside Regulaw Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link “The Queen of Hell” is a recent foray into ancestral tracing, with problematic implications. Back Back to Current Issue .................................................................................................................................................................................... KARIN ANDERSON I s the author of the novels Before Us Like a Land of Dreams , What Falls Away , and Things I Didn’t Do (forthcoming in 2025), published by Torrey House Press. She hails from the Great Basin. karinandersonauthor.com Next - Ignatius by Karin Anderson Next

The Other Man is Always French by Richard Peabody The other woman can be a blonde or a redhead but the other man is always French. He dresses better than I ever will. He can picnic and stroll with a wineglass in one upraised hand. Munch pâté, drink espresso, and tempt with ashy kisses. He hangs out at Dupont Circle because the trees remind him of Paris. Did I mention sex? Face it— he’s had centuries of practice. I’m an American. What do I know? He drives a fast car, and can brood like nobody’s business, while I sit home watching ESPN. He’s tall and chats about art— I don’t even want to discuss that accent. He’s Mr. Attitude. My fantasy is to call the State Department and have him deported. Only he’ll probably convince you to marry him for a green card. No way I’m going to win— the other man is always more aggressive, always more attentive. The other man is just too French for words. From now on I’m going out with statuesque German women so next time we run into each other they can kick his butt for me. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This poem is my semi-recovery after a relationship ended owing to a classic French louche. At readings it gets a lot of laughs. But I was flabbergasted by how many people have confessed that they’ve been in that situation. My students assumed I’d written the poem after seeing Addicted to Love . Nope. Though after watching it, I get why they thought so. .................................................................................................................................................................................... RICHARD PEABODY lives in Arlington, Virginia. His most recent volume of poetry is Guinness on the Quay (Salmon Poetry, 2019). gargoylepaycock.wordpress.com Next - The Barking Dogs of Taos by Richard Peabody Next

Candy Chick-Nichols 'Feel Free to Fail' Candy Nichols builds underglazed and fired clay sculptures using slab and coil methods, and a fettling knife to achieve the woven textures. She finds inspiration in African art, particularly the Bolga basket weavers of northern Ghana . The basketweaver Dot-So-La-Lee (Louisa Keyser) also had a profound effect on Candy's aesthetic. Other artistic influences include Constantin Brâncuși , Henry Moore , and the painter J. M.W. Turner . Candy's pottery embodies a personal and feminist aesthetic of the yarn crafters in her family, and her work is a homage to their legacy. www.mudalchemy.com The best advice Candy ever received came from a fortune cookie: Do Not Fear Failure . "Perfectionism" is not a word in her vocabulary. Candy believes the clay should show the mark of hands. Mistakes add to the art if you welcome and play with them, recognizing happy accidents. Always feel free to fail. Many pieces are not fired and return to the bag of raw clay, but many more are finished. Making sculpture is an adventure full of surprises. Candy's husband, David, is a photographer who documents the inspiration behind these sculptures. On road trips together, he is kind enough to do all the driving so that Candy can focus on sketching land formations. The Cliffs Not just appearance of cliffs, it was shadows and light illuminating every crevice, changing each moment, new patterns of contrast forming in the rock and eternal dust.

Kayaking on Hebron Lake by Marjorie Maddox As when the astronaut, anonymous in his vast slate of space, stepped out from manmade vessel—beyond the printed map of fingers, skewed compass of eye, eco-skeleton of the self-guided— to glide on the dark surface of depth, beyond moment and hour, solar system and this singular body of shimmer shimmying outside each shore of season, tide and time, far beyond the mind of universe and wave. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Some of my poems tell stories; some capture a moment. This previously unpublished poem does the latter, showcasing the intersection of worlds, particularly in connection to nature, the imagination, and writing. “Kayaking on Hebron Lake” was written during my Monson Arts Artist Residency in Monson, Maine, in 2023. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MARJORIE MADDOX has published 17 collections of poetry, a story collection, and four children’s and YA books. She is a Professor Emerita of English at the Lock Haven Campus of Commonwealth University. marjoriemaddox.com Next - Ode to Everything by Marjorie Maddox Next

Insomnia by Cynthia Hardy The pillow has heard it all: the litany of undone things. The horses stamp the barn at night; each thump of hoof against board accuses. Not nearly enough hay, they tell me, and where’s all the green stuff? Snow fills their paddock to their knees. And what about my words to you? Should I have said íf instead of when; what then? The darkness spreads full and warm. Blankets tangle. The cat pats my cheek with her untrimmed paw. Should I change the litter box now? Call a long-lost friend? The horses set out across the land, looking for the barn they deserve, red paint and all. A stream flows year round, its banks curve, green plush, to the clear water. There are other horses, none with shaggy coats or dirt-packed hooves. The cat wants to be in the dream. She perches her wiry self on the black mare’s back and weaves, tail spiraling for balance as they gallop off. You rise, say, I’m going with them. Fine, I say. My eyes blink; blink propagates blink. I sweep the blankets across my shoulders like some Versace robe, a gown of sleep. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue From We Tempt Our Luck , finalist in the Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Chapbook Contest, 2009. This poem reflects some themes I often go back to—the horses, a cat or a dog, the impact of winter on the psyche, insomnia, and dreams. It was also a response to a set of prompts I set myself from bits of found language—in this case, the word “Versace.” The “you” in these two poems may or may not be a real person. .................................................................................................................................................................................... CINDY HARDY writes from Chena Ridge, Fairbanks, Alaska. She has published poetry and fiction, with a new poetry collection, Rude Weather forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Next - Mākara Beach by Michael McLane Next

A Love for Loneliness by Stacy Julin They were hours I’ve lost track of now. Those you glimpse in dreams but lose in light of morning. Long days on end in the bluish hue. Loneliness sat with me awhile, then laid with me in bed. I let him stay longer each visit, unafraid and even accustomed to the silence he brought as a gift. Like the cold that curled around me from my cracked window, he wrapped around my grief and lived beside me, until we both longed for days when blood was warm. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue "A Love for Loneliness" was published in my chapbook, Visiting Ghosts and Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2018). I am an only child. My parents were wonderful people, but I spent many hours alone. I would read and write, and I developed such a love for books and poetry. I came to treasure my time alone to write stories and poems. I lost my beloved parents as a young adult woman. At that point, writing really gave me peace and a way to express how I felt. This poem is about a complicated relationship with loneliness. .................................................................................................................................................................................... STACY JULIN'S work has been published in Oyster River Pages , Pirene’s Fountain , Sweet Tree Review , Southern Quill , and Word Fountain , and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, A Pebble Thrown in Water (Tiger’s Eye Press, 2010), Visiting Ghosts and Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and Things We Carry (Finishing Line Press, 2024). She lives with her family at the base of the beautiful Wasatch Mountains. Next - Michaelmas by Lisa Bickmore Next