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The Worrier by Nancy Takacs Now that you are her, what will you do? I’ll walk across the swinging bridge and light a clove cigarette. How will you roam? I’ll drive a Packard convertible, my man in a long dark coat beside me. In the countryside, where will you land, and what will you eat? We’ll find a bar in northern Wisconsin. We won’t eat. What are you wearing, and what do you look like? An indigo dress, a little black cloche. I’ve outlined my lips to look like a sweet maroon bow. What songs will you sing? “Heart of My Heart” And “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard.” Who will know you better than anyone? My silk chemise. What undergarments do you wear? None. What tree do you wear instead? The plum. Why? Because it’s a palm full of dusk. What word will you use? Flagrant. It’s time for this. Where does the word go? It rises from under my bare feet when I leave the beach. What is strange about you now? There is nothing strange. What is common? I have loved the first light. Where does the light go? It goes under the letters in captions of what I say. Where does the scent go? It goes into my eyes, my mouth, the way I turn my head so that you will imagine lilacs. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue Initially printed in The Tampa Review and The Worrier: Poems (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). I guess this poem is a favorite of mine, as it’s the first Worrier poem I wrote, and it called me back to write more Worriers, that became a book. I like the film star because she is strong, even though she is, in a sense, voiceless. However, in the poem, she has a voice. She takes charge of where she is going, is confident about her choices, and plays with the reader a bit. .................................................................................................................................................................................... NANCY TAKACS is an avid boater, hiker, and mushroom forager. She lives near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in northern Wisconsin, and in the high-desert town of Wellington, Utah. Her latest book of poems is Dearest Water . nancytakacs.org Next - Junk Email by Nancy Takacs Next

Predictions of the Past by Alison Moore Maybe I need an excuse to come here. The dog needs a walk, and during the day nothing is half as haunted as night. There’s evidence— the dead have been reading, not nineteenth century novels not personal letters or sweepstakes rules, but the Northwest Arkansas Times. The pages are all over the graves. Not the section called “Living,” not the horoscopes, certainly not the future which no longer concerns them, but the wants ads, all those vacancies: rooms with views, sublets, yard sales, must-sees and have-to-sells. Possibilities of one sort or another. Are they planning on coming back? Or simply curious about the places that have opened up now that they are gone? I wonder— is there such a thing as the Reincarnation Times , a deity writing the personals: Middle-aged couple in Des Moines looking for eleventh-hour child, orphans a plus all expenses paid. Lonely heart takes a beating, apply within. My dog runs among the papers, spooked by the way they ride the wind, rustle and snag on the tilting wire stands that once held ribbons and wreaths. She flushes a cardinal and it lands in a nearby cedar, a red gash in the wood, watching. There are families here, but none of mine. My father, who art in Virginia, a drifter reduced to ash. I threw him to the wind five years ago, from a rusted bridge over the Rappahannock. He’s drifting, still. He won’t stay put, certainly not beneath the stone that bears his name in Orlean, in the family plot next to his sister, the one he didn’t mean to kill. He was nine, lifting his father’s shotgun. She was seven, and simply walking up the stairs when the bullet met her, one step below the landing. And so—is this why I’m here— to summon my father, former journalist, to a cemetery in Arkansas to read the paper? He won’t look for a job; he never did. For once he’s not going to comment on the headlines, give a lecture about the whims of the gods, the cost of hubris, or the Real Reasons for the War Between the States. He will concern himself, finally, with what he might need, beginning with minutiae, the useless and marvelous he can now afford: Hermes Typewriter (letter X sticks, otherwise excellent condition ). Printing press (needs work, runs good ). Trunk of Confederate Bonds (like new! ) And best of all, a 1912 Remington rifle (never fired). He can barely bring himself to lift it. It’s heavy and I have to help. It’s all right , I say, I’m right behind you. He closes his eyes, squeezes the trigger. The sound that should have been thunder is no more than a harmless click, the most beautiful of vacancies, the empty chamber. No child will fall. The bird watches from the tree, a red ribbon with wings, ready to disappear. It won’t. It stirs; it stays, sings. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “Predictions of the Past,” was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Patterson Review for the Allen Ginsberg Prize. The title came from a billboard in North Carolina advertising a palm reader who offered “Predictions of the Future and the Past.” It struck me as ironic and perfect. We think we can predict the past with some certainty, but what if we could revise it? This poem is ultimately about a family tragedy. My father, as a boy, accidentally killed his younger sister with a double-barrel shotgun. He never spoke of it. So I did. .................................................................................................................................................................................... ALISON MOORE is s a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and a former Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in fiction, and tours with the multi-media humanities program, "Riders on the Orphan Train" which she co-created with the musician Phil Lancaster. ridersontheorphantrain.org Next - The Queen of Hell by Karin Anderson Next

The Concrete Poet by Jim LaVilla-Havelin I. this is the first trans mission of the con crete poet report on exhibit at co-op gallery no press release no postcard no crackers no brie II. the alter native paper critic who is sometimes too smart for words but still uses them found her way there wrote: “_______ has found an alphabet of disaster.” III. somewhere between the calligraphic epics of Cy Twombly the incised mud-silica of Dubuffet the Rosetta Stone and J.G. Ballard’s CRASH IV. was this my fifteen minutes of fame? hiding in the basement while the police streamed through the sleek gallery asking everyone my name, my des cription, my whereabouts V. the art critic for the daily who also reviews restaurants, books, and covers the auto show describes them as “a grammar of happenstance or perhaps mishappenstance” VI. I don’t know when I first began to see them as messages scraped by metal onto barriers stories in stone VII. out with the truck with the pneumatic lift cones, flashers the jackhammer and the blow torch it comes to me we’re not in art school any more more dangerous than pastels VIII. it is the opposite of graffiti I remove de-construct re-contextualize present an outlaw aesthetic that makes art-speak go tongue-tied IX. I am so tired of the language meta phor I went to the wall to escape words I hacked out these sections of barrier to see silence as much as any markings deaths or near scrapes with it may have left I’m not telling stories I’m hammering away at walls Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue THE CONCRETE POET is the third volume of a five-book sequence. Though this section was written in 2010, the book is just now (2024) reaching its conclusion. This was the first section I wrote. It’s a favorite because it lays out some of the extent of what the long poem will include. A road map? A first shot of a voice? A catalogue of possibilities. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JIM LAVILLA-HAVELIN is the author of eight books of poetry, including two forthcoming in 2025, Mesquites Teach Us to Bend (Lamar University Press, 2025) and A Thoreau Book (Alabrava Press, 2025). He is the co-editor of the Houston University Press, Unsung Masters volume on Rosemary Catacalos (2025) and as Literary Executor for Catacalos’ estate, he is assembling her unpublished work for a volume Sing! . An educator, editor, and community arts activist for over 50 years, LaVilla-Havelin coordinates National Poetry Month activities in San Antonio. Awarded the City of San Antonio’s Distinction in the Arts for Literary Art, he teaches at The Cyndi Taylor Krier Juvenile Correctional Treatment Center for Gemini Ink’s Partners Program, teaches senior citizens in the Go Arts Program through Bihl Haus Cultural Arts, and high school students as Poet in Residence at the Young Women’s Leadership Academy. Next - Bruce by J. Diego Frey Next

we've been out dancing by Gabriela Halas Throb of blood flows like sweet sap to rhythms both old, and unorthodox. Could the pluck of grass be set to measure? The pull of water from an upturned palm be set to song? Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Currrent Issue Sometimes the beauty of poetry is in its simplicity—the ability to convey a lot w ith so little, in tangible, literal words. Nothing shrouded, nothing obscure or abstract. The word 'simplicity' is not often used in a positive way with poetry but I feel like that can be such a strength. The poem "we've been out dancing" is just that, a way to celebrate movement in our bodies that feels both ancien and like we are experiencing it for the first time. .................................................................................................................................................................................... GABRIELA HALAS immigrated to Canada during the early 1980s, grew up in Alberta, lived in Alaska for seven years, and currently resides in British Columbia. She has published poetry in a variety of literary journals including The Antigonish Review , Cider Press Review , About Place Journal , Prairie Fire , december magazine , and The Hopper , among others; fiction in Room Magazine , Ruminate , The Hopper , and subTerrain, among others; and nonfiction in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Whitefish Review , Grain , Pilgrimage , and High Country News . She won first prize for her poetry chapbook Bloodwater Tint from Backbone Press (forthcoming). She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and lives and writes on Ktunaxa Nation land. gabrielahalas.org Next - northern climate II by Gabriela Halas Next

The Little House: Crystal City, Texas by Jeff Talmadge By the time my parents arrived at the prison after the War and with their first son, the 10-foot barbed wire fence was down, the towers and corner spotlights gone. The rifle-carrying guards who, around the clock, circled the perimeter on horseback, had returned to their old day jobs in that desolate place, not quite Mexico, not quite America, thirty-five miles from the border. When the Alien Enemy Detention Facility closed in the War’s shadow, the school district got most of it, opening the houses to others like that young couple and their toddler, who arrived from central Texas on a teacher’s pay, probably surprised that he, my father, was alive—and grateful, having come from nothing, to be living in what they called The Little House. If I could wish someone well who is in the past, I would wish it for them—that at least for that moment, they know some happiness in this life, believing, as they must have, inside someone else’s prison, that the worst was over, and they survived. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue After World War II, my family lived in what had been part of an internment camp for people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent in Crystal City, Texas. This was before I was born, but my brother remembers it well, and always referred to it as “the little house.” It must have seemed like a miracle for my father to have returned alive. Here they were, having come from nothing, with a young child, starting a new life in that dry and distant place. I have few memories of them being happy and like to imagine that this was a happy time for them. Some of my description is indebted to Jan Jarboe Russell’s book, The Train to Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II (Scribner, 2015) and her related article in Texas Monthly . .................................................................................................................................................................................... Next - The Dream by Shanan Ballam Next JEFF TALMADGE was born in Uvalde, Texas, about 70 miles from the Mexican border and grew up in small towns like Crystal City, Wharton, Boling and Big Spring. At Duke University, he won the Academy of American Poets Award, and his poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines. He was a civil trial attorney in Austin before becoming a full-time musician. Jeff has received numerous awards for his songwriting. His most recent record is Sparrow . jefftalmadge.com

Pissing Toward the Sky by Jerry VanIeperen We’re watching the eclipse though we don’t know our astronomy. And it’s not warm enough to try kissing even in breezy May. I cannot sit bladder full of movie soda. Step out, look down ridge, unzip, without car lights or street lamps. Just our stillborn shadow on the moon above. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue Published in Black Rock & Sage, Idaho State University’s creative writing journal. It has since become an ISU-enrolled student publication, but 1000 years ago, it was open to anybody. A few months before this poem was accepted, I had won the undergrad creative writing contest for poetry at Utah State University, and it felt like I was on a roll and it was a special time, which I didn’t appreciate until the benefit of hindsight. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JERRY VANIEPEREN lives heartily in Utah with two children, two dogs, and one wife. He earned an MFA from the University of Nebraska and was a founding editor of the poetry journal Sugar House Review. Next - Application for the Alien Exchange Program by Naomi Ulsted Next

Still Life with Mormons in My Living Room by Paul Fericano I can plainly see they are grateful and relieved to be inside off the streets where most of the neighbors are cautious suspicious troubled by their persistence their appearance their door-to-door politeness these two young gentlemen barely adult dressed in handsome dark blue suits slightly larger than their almost grown-man bodies clear sweet-voiced messengers who sit close to one another on my sofa enjoying the cookies I just baked the familiar aroma hanging in the air drifting into conversation like a memorable prayer in truth they can’t quite believe their good fortune their luck in finding me someone who really wants to hear what they have to say in this cozy container a refuge from the cold biblical ambiguities of this day thrilled actually to share their knowledge of God’s chosen plan for his people and so I bring it up I serve it up like holy communion: I want to know about men who marry other men I want to understand exactly what it is what it really means when we choose to be with one another without complaint I want to hear from these eager young missionaries I want to know what the question is but first I coax them to try the oatmeal raisin foolishly boasting that I use only the best ingredients just the right amount of sugar no coconut pointing out that when it comes to oatmeal cookies or anything else for that matter using coconut is the real sin here and I smile and I give them a wink and suddenly they both stand as if on cue startled these two sweet melodic declarations of truth on fire rapidly turning the pages of ancient texts in their heads searching for cautious pronouncements that arrive without warning these visiting angels who now ask in unison: Are you gay? Of course this is hardly the question I was expecting to hear and equally surprised I also stand now wiping my hands on my flowered apron and reply: Aren’t you? Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue This favorite unpublished poem of mine was written way back in 1980. Since it’s always been a lot of fun to perform, I’ve particularly enjoyed sharing it at a number of public readings over the years. For some reason I never felt compelled to submit it for publication anywhere (until now). It was initially written a few days after an unexpected visit to my apartment by the two young missionaries mentioned in the poem. It wasn’t until much later that I happened to learn that they had apparently tracked me down after following up on a tip from an old girlfriend of mine. .................................................................................................................................................................................... PAUL FERICANO is the author of Things That Go Trump in the Night: Poems of Treason and Resistance (Poems-For-All Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Bulitzer Prize. yunews.com Next - Sinatra, Sinatra by Paul Fericano Next

The Organization of Bones by Joel Long Let’s rearrange the bones by size while the goat looks on. Let’s line them up to cardinal points so shadow tells the time. The double doors may open for me to look over your brown shoulder, your dark hair that covers your skull where the rivers are falling and the trees are green with birds. Start with the bones of the ear, small sand, then move to the tarsals, these glyphs made for waving the hand, the hinge in the dark circuit of the blood, but here they are soldiers at May Day, such precision, such a proud song. The goat begins to hum and nibbles the threshold, fur bristling like vellum before the monk takes out the blade. The warmth of your body is so quaint against the arrangement you’ve made, a relic of what you are, the past so filled with warm bodies and singing goats, a thousand setting suns indifferent to the coming night. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue I was moved by Salgado's photo, Children Playing with Animal Bones, Brazil, 1983 , the three children in their own bodies rearranging the bones into symmetrical lines, making sense of the bones in some way. Of course, the light in the photograph is beautiful in its arrangement as well. With any ekphrastic poem like this, I hope to find release from the artistic image so that the poem finds its own voice tinged with the atmosphere of the trigger artwork. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JOEL LONG'S book of essays Watershed is forthcoming from Green Writers Press. His book Winged Insects won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Lessons in Disappearance (2012) and Knowing Time by Light (2010) were published by Blaine Creek Press. His chapbooks, Chopin’s Preludes and Saffron Beneath Every Frost were published from Elik Press. His poems and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review , Ocean State Review , Sports Literate , Prairie Schooner , Bellingham Review , Rhino , Bitter Oleander , Massachusetts Review , Terrain , and Water-Stone Review , among others. He lives in Salt Lake City. Next - Storms, Maybe a Metaphor for Us by Kase Johnstun Next

July for Dylan, April 20, 1989 - July 7, 2013 by Shanan Ballam April isn’t the cruelest month. That would be July, the month you died, when asphalt gleamed heat and construction cones lined the lanes on the break-neck freeway— I slumped in the back like a sack of trash as our sisters and I raced tear-blind to the scene, bodies flung side-to-side as we whipped in and out of traffic, tires screeching, only to stand stunned, worthless, gagged with Dad’s cigarette smoke— oh—I can still hear him sobbing in the scorching garage. In April, crocus spear through soil, open pale purple, thin as tissue paper, lacewings luxuriating in the saffron like cats rolling on their backs in the sun. In April, the lilacs’ tiny blossoms, hard as oysters, begin to soften, and when they open, iridescent frills the color of pearls, their fragrance drifting through the windows, sheer curtains shimmering. Maybe if I’d called you to say I’m worried, I love you, You could have said Help me. Dad won’t. In the cement basement I saw the message you scrawled on the wall: Why won’t it rain? I saw your self-portrait in black spray paint. You blacked-out your own awful eyes. The anniversary creeps closer, hobbled, like a baby buggy with one wheel missing. July is cruelest because I still must drive past the hospital where the doctor pronounced you dead, past the chapel, its gold and crimson windows, past the Wal-Mart and the Maverik where you bought your beer and cigarettes, past the woman with the dead baby’s footprints tattooed on her breast, and down there near the tracks: sagebrush, vodka bottles, and a single sego lily, basin blushed ruby red. Oh July—you emergency! July with your wildfire heart. But I drive past the field silvered with sprinkler mist where the two painted horses bend their graceful faces to the grass, their black manes shining in the falling sun, shining like your black hair in the obituary picture. This time I’ll stop the car, and we will walk to horses who know only this emerald field, its musky soil, know only the sky spreading its deep indigo, and we’ll pull up clumps of silky grass. See how they move toward us, bodies glistening as the day disintegrates. Together we'll touch the sleek gloss of their manes, their velveteen noses, see deep into peace, their wet ebony eyes. We'll stand together in the lavender light as the horses pull sweet grass from our hands. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue My youngest brother Dylan Thomas drank himself to death at age 24. This poem is my favorite unpublished piece because it takes so many surprising turns and utilizes different tones—panic and calm. It contains surprising comparisons: the anniversary of his death compared to a baby buggy with one wheel missing and comparing July to a wildfire. I like how it contrasts April and July—extreme heat and early, raw spring—and uses connotations from Eliot’s famous poem, “The Wasteland.” .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 - Missa Brevis by Kimberly Johnson 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

Siren by Amy Gerstler I have a fish’s tail, so I’m not qualified to love you. But I do. Pale as an August sky, pale as flour milled a thousand times, pale as the icebergs I have never seen, and twice as numb—my skin is such a contrast to the rough rocks I lie on, that from far away it looks like I’m a baby riding a dinosaur. The turn of centuries or the turn of a page means the same to me, little or nothing. I have teeth in places you’d never suspect. Come. Kiss me and die soon. I slap my tail in the shallows—which is to say I appreciate nature. You see my sisters and me perched on rocks and tiny islands here and there for miles: untangling our hair with our fingers, eating seaweed. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue From Bitter Angel, (North Point Press, 1990). "Siren" is an older poem that still has a place in my heart because it dates from a time in my life when I was first realizing I wanted to write about women's lives: even mythical women, my obsession with the archetype of mermaids, etc. and I was trying to work out ways to do that in poems. .................................................................................................................................................................................... AMY GERSTLER has published ten books of poetry and received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Los Angeles. poetryfoundation.org/poets/amy-gerstler Next - The Lure of the Unfinished by Amy Gerstler Next