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< Back to Breakthroughs Issue AT ABU ALI Alison Moore It is late summer in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. Iran and Iraq are declaring jihad , a holy war on each other, and on the day the missiles begin to rip through the air we think about being in the water. We think about swimming, pretending we're somewhere other than the Middle East for an afternoon. We drive to find a beach at Abu Ali. Giff and Ardelle sit in the front of the pickup, Dennis and Bob and I ride in the back. The little sliding window at the back of the cab is open so we can all hear the classical music hour from Radio Bahrain. Beethoven urges us forward and we leave a plume of dust behind. We can't get away fast enough, out of Jubail and the industrial project where the men work endless hours trying to carry out the erratic whims of the Saudi Royal Commission. As women in an Islamic country, Ardelle and I struggle to find ways to fill our time. We are forbidden to work, to drive a car, even to sit on the seat of a bicycle. We walk to the commissary in 125-degree heat with 100% humidity in long-sleeved, full-length kaftans, thankful at least not to be veiled. At Abu Ali we will be almost naked in bathing suits, visible if only for an afternoon, and very nearly free. We are stopped at a barricade on the narrow causeway to the island. A teenage Saudi soldier sits slouched on a tall stool in the tiny guard hut, listening to a tape of the Rolling Stones on his cassette player. He switches the music off, then saunters slowly toward our truck, scuffing across the asphalt in his dusty sandals. He grips a machine gun in his small hands. He leans down to our open window, peering in at our I.D. badges, warily comparing us to the tiny, laminated photographs on the cards. Straightening up, he flicks one of the tasseled ends of his red and white-checked shemagh over his shoulder, then waves us through with the barrel of the gun. Abu Ali is a wild, uninhabited island. Except for the road and the pipeline, there is nothing but camel grass and low dunes. Sand tracks lead off the narrow road at abrupt angles, veering to either shoreline. We pick a track at random and stop to put the truck in 4-wheel drive. We head for the dunes, growling in the lower gears. It is only a kilometer or so to the shore of the Persian Gulf. Lapping against the white sugar sand is water bluer than the stone in a Navajo ring, shimmering in the thick, humid air. We climb out, laughing and stretching. A blanket is laid down, a square of white cloth like a flag of truce on the sand. We drag our provisions to it—all the things necessary for survival: water, food, paperback novels, sunscreen. We sit down cross-legged, eating fried chicken with our bare hands, tossing the bones over the side, and guzzling iced tea until it drips down our chins. We wear an odd assortment of hats: Giff in a sailor's cap with the brim folded down, Ardelle in a safari helmet. Bob wears a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Dennis has a homemade gutra made of a white T-shirt that says "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore" held on his head with a bungee cord, and I wear a frayed straw cowboy hat with a blue-black crow's feather stuck in the hatband. We gaze out over the gulf, north to Iran. When the flies begin to drive us mad, we submerge ourselves up to our shoulders in water. The tide is moving out fast, leaving us sitting in the shallows. The water is not exactly refreshing—it’s thick with salt and close to body temperature. But it lulls us, an amniotic fluid gently rocking our weightless bodies. We are so still that a large, white bird, an egret, drifts close to us on the current. Very slowly, I begin to follow it, walking my hands on the sandy bottom, trailing my legs out behind me. I move parallel to it, keeping the same languid pace, and the bird, if it notices anything at all, sees only a floating hat, which memory tells it is not a dangerous thing. I turn carefully to look over my shoulder and see the others behind me. Now the bird leads the five of us and we all move north along the shoreline as if pulled along on a string. It is the bird who breaks the silence, opening its beak to let out a shrill cry. It rises heavily, beating its spreading wings, and the sound the air makes moving through its feathers is the sound of a lasso in the wind. Its legs hang, black stalks beneath the white body, the toes like the long tines of forks dripping salty water. We watch it go, flying low over the Persian Gulf. We watch until we can't see it clearly anymore, until the white wings disappear into the wisps of black smoke that drift slowly towards us from the north, from the burning city of Abadan. Originally published in The North American Review , March 1987. I lived near Jubail, Saudi Arabia as an expat from 1980 to 1982. My husband was a photographer on contract and had spent two years there already when I joined him. Abu Ali was an uninhabited island in the Persian Gulf where we occasionally went to get away from the restrictions of living in a Muslim city not behind the walls of an American compound. This is the story of our breakaway, one day, with friends, when a bit of the Iran-Iraq War broke through. "At Abu Ali" was a breakthrough in that it was my first published piece. Previous ALISON MOORE was conceived in the caretaker’s cottage of the Harriet Beecher Stowe estate and born in Stockbridge, MA. Since then, she has traveled extensively, written and published both poetry and prose, and graduated from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Alison is the author of four books of fiction, the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fiction fellowships, and a Dobie/Paisano fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in a vintage Spartan trailer in Driftwood, TX, with a rescue dog named Honey. substack.com/@alisonmoore Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue A HIGH SCHOOL MADRIGAL Naomi Ulsted Derek and Stephanie were in their usual eight-fifteen in the morning position: Stephanie pressed up against a bank of lockers, Derek’s hand on her ass, as they proceeded to eat one another’s faces off. At least that’s what it looked like to me. Frost clung to the grassy field beyond the lockers, but Derek and Stephanie didn’t mind the cold. I focused on getting past them and into the choir room. Slipping on a spit wad, I stumbled through the doors into Mr. M’s choir room. Unlike most of the teachers, Mr. M. opened the doors early so kids could hang out in the warmth. He rummaged through a haphazard pile of sheet music. “Morning, Mr. M.,” I called. He glanced up, giving me a distracted wave. Mr. M. was always fidgeting, rummaging, starting to review music, then jumping up to plunk notes out on the piano, then patting the pockets of his corduroy suit jacket as if searching for something, then darting into his office for his briefcase, then without opening it, returning to the pile of cluttered papers on his desk, a whirl of constant movement, anxiety, and distraction. And I loved every bit of it. In the bathroom, I checked the bandages on my shins. I was out of clean pants, so I’d had to wear a skirt, even though that meant I couldn’t hide my shins. After a massive argument, Mom had finally relented on her vow that I wouldn’t be allowed to shave my legs until I was eighteen, but she wasn’t happy about it. She had left a handwritten notecard. “Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” – Proverbs 31:30. During my first shave, I’d sliced myself up good. Punishment for my vanity of wanting smooth legs. I took up my usual spot next to my best friend, Theresa. She offered me a slice of green pepper from a plastic bag. Theresa and I had basically been inseparable since second grade. We shared a locker, ate lunch together, and spent nights at each other’s houses at least a couple of times a month. I was grateful our school schedules were nearly identical because without her, I was awkward, silent, and withdrawn. In classes, surrounded by kids on the bus, or even at home with my own large and loud family, it was like I couldn’t figure out where to place myself in the scene, or what my role was. I really only fit as one half of a pair with Theresa. Mr. M. kneeled down, so his bald head was level with me. “Have you injured yourself?” His eyes darted to my legs. “Oh,” I said. “I was shaving.” I blushed. “With a machete?” He winked at me and then darted up to the front of the room as the bell sounded. I moved into my place in the front row of the soprano section. “Adams!” Mr. M. barked. “Put that lighter away before I set you on fire with it!” John Adams was several rows behind me, and as I turned, he threw a wad of paper at Stacy, whose hair flipped back as she swore at him, laughing. Stacy and her senior friends were loud girls who wore heavy eye makeup and talked about “partying,” and I was quite sure they weren’t virgins. They used profanity, which I figured was an indicator. John’s hair was long and flopped into his eyes, which were such a light and gentle blue that they were nearly transparent. I had fallen for him the day I walked behind him while he sang “Still Loving You” by the Scorpions. He was a senior and had only said possibly ten words to me, and those were words like, “Hand me that pencil, will ya?” Yet, there was something I loved in the sincerity of his singing and the earnestness of his face as he tried to pick out the tenor melody. “Jasmine!” Mr. M. hollered. “Give us an E.” Our foreign exchange student from Brazil, who had perfect pitch, sang out an exquisite E note. It was only during choir that we heard Jasmine’s voice. She was painfully shy otherwise. Much like me, but without the benefit of a best friend. She almost always had her nose in a textbook and she never laughed. Mr. M. closed his eyes, savoring Jasmine’s clear voice, then raised his arms, and without taking roll, without greeting the class, and without preamble, he launched us into our first madrigal of the day, “My Heart Doth Beg.” Mr. M. had a fondness for fifteenth-century madrigals. They presented four parts moving within one another, forcing us to pull together the frayed ends of our harmonies. When we were so bored with “My Heart Doth Beg” that we pleaded for a different madrigal, he’d have us learn one another’s parts until we could see how the piece was complete with the four lines interwoven. As usual, I wanted Mr. M. to know how well I’d learned my part. I was desperate to be heard and to stand out in his mind as someone special. Contradicting my mousy and withdrawn self, my voice could be wild and out of control, demanding attention. I belted out my part, but I was clearly overzealous or off-pitch because I immediately got “the hand.” When a singer was too loud or off-key, Mr. M. would raise his palm toward them. If the singer didn’t back off, he’d get closer until, if you were in the front row like me, the hand could be right in your face while Mr. M. crinkled up his own face in what could only be physical pain caused by atrocious sounds coming from your own voice. That’s what I got now, and I forced my voice into a near whisper. My failure still stung at the end of the period as Mr. M. reviewed our upcoming trip's details. The following week, the choir would take an overnight trip to perform at a middle school a few hours away. At home, this event had been preceded by multiple conversations with my mother, where it took all my persuasive arguments to get her to sign the permission form. She did not think it appropriate for girls and boys to be spending the night together, even though I explained, not so patiently, that we would all be on a gigantic gymnasium floor with the girls on one side and the boys on the other. Plus, there would be tons of chaperones, so it’s not like people would even have the chance to be fornicating. Well, Derek and Stephanie would probably figure something out, but I didn’t mention that. Finally, after promising to attend church on both Sunday and Wednesday nights the weeks before and after the trip so my Christian defenses would be ready for whatever temptations the choir trip would bring, she agreed to let me go. Theresa and I were beside ourselves with excitement, spending most of our time talking about which of our classmates would be the most fun to ride with on the bus. For Theresa, I knew that it was Bob Dietz. As we left the choir room, he swaggered in front of us, swinging his bangs out of his eyes. In a “secret” survey passed around the school last year, Bob’s ass had been voted the best in the junior class. The great divide between the junior and sophomore classes wasn’t the only thing keeping Theresa from talking to him, though. He had been voted Junior homecoming prince and was forever surrounded by his pack of popular kids. In the social hierarchy of high school, Theresa and I weren’t at the bottom, but we were nowhere close enough to the top to be allowed to speak to Bob. He was just as out of reach for her as John was for me. So we just kept to our own world and watched from a distance. We boarded the bus a week later as early morning mist rose from the grass and floated over the baseball field. The parking lot was empty except for cars belonging to upperclassmen. My dad had dropped me off on his way to work after we’d spent the forty-five-minute drive in silence. I’d glanced at him through the window as he pulled away, but it was dark, and he was shadowy behind it. It was the way things were with us. Theresa and I found a seat in front of Tim Anderson, who had already fallen asleep, his head resting against the seat in front of him. It was warm and quiet inside, and nearly everyone dozed. When I woke, Tim was placing tiny paper airplanes on my head. Theresa whispered he’d been doing this for several minutes. I was mildly flattered, but Tim was even lower in the hierarchy than we were. He wore jeans hiked up high on his waist, yet they seemed to be drawn downward, and when he bent over to pick up his duffel bag, I would see more of Tim than I wanted. “Knock it off,” I said, flicking the airplanes away. “Hey, Mr. M.’s telling a story.” Up in the front section of the bus, I could see Mr. M.’s bald head scrunching up and his hands gesticulating wildly. I knew right away he was telling the snowball story. Theresa and I made our way up front, and soon, a group of us was squeezing three or four bodies into the seats closest to him. Mr. M. told our class a story about once a week, although we begged for one every day. “Tell us about the loogie in the sandwich!” we’d say, or “Tell us about the one when the cow gets shot.” He repeated his stories often, which no one minded because his telling of them was so detailed and full that we felt like we were living it anew each time. Sometimes, his stories stung with sadness, and we’d file out of the choir room subdued and foggy, distractedly making our way to our next classroom. More often, though, his stories were full of tiny details that left us rolling with laughter. Mr. M. opened his eyes comically wide as he described the truck driver’s eyes as the snowball barreled toward him. He ducked from view behind his seat to show how the driver disappeared when the snowball hit its target. By now, our group had grown, so seniors, freshmen, and everyone in between were squashed together around him. A couple hours later, we stood in a close semi-circle in the school’s gymnasium. It was an hour until our performance, but Mr. M. wanted to hear the acoustics. We focused on him as he pulled us in tighter, pleading with us to listen to one another, hear one another’s parts, and remember what the song was about. Mr. M. always made us dissect the madrigal’s lyrics, pushing us to feel the passions of the fifteenth century. “Live it!” he would shout. I sang with zeal, watching him for signs that I should back off or, hopefully, sing more enthusiastically. Theresa was across the semi-circle from me, and I could usually pick out her part, but this time, I could only catch it faintly. I grasped my own part and sang confidently until Mr. M. gave me the hand, and I knew I’d blown it again. Defeated, I headed to the locker room with the rest of the girls. Theresa had gone ahead of us, and I looked for her as I stood in the mirrors, my reflection small and childlike next to Kathy and her perfect hair and makeup. “Hey, Steph!” Kathy shouted. “Let me borrow your eyeliner, bitch!” “Only if you twist my titties!” There was raucous laughter, and the eyeliner flew above several heads to Kathy. I recognized Theresa’s shoes under the stall and knocked. “Are you okay?” “My stomach hurts.” Theresa opened the door and sat down on the bench. She was white. “Do you have the flu?” “I guess,” she said. “I don’t know.” “Are you going to sing?” I asked. “Do you want me to tell Mr. M. you can’t?” “No.” She was unusually closed-lipped. My hands lay helplessly in my lap as if they didn’t know what to do. But as we walked on stage, it felt like every one of those middle-schoolers was clapping for me. Jasmine’s soft doe eyes locked with Mr. M.’s, and she sang out our starting note. I watched Mr. M. and I lived the lyrics, and I barely noticed anything else. Until partway through the second song, when Theresa quietly walked off stage as if she had a pre-arranged appointment. As I watched her disappear into the locker room, I faltered and lost my part. Mr. M.’s eyes had followed her, but now he scowled at me, and I struggled to re-find my place. After the performance, I found Theresa doubled over the bathroom stall, full-on sobbing. “I think you need to get someone.” We waited in the emergency room for what seemed like an eternity. The chaperone who had driven us had returned to the gymnasium, as we were evidently understaffed after all, and there was a major concern that without proper chaperoning, there would be fornication or drinking. The chaperone had already asked a couple of pointed questions about whether Theresa might be pregnant and seemed doubtful when Theresa had adamantly shaken her head. I had never been in an emergency room and was surprised at the amount of sitting and doing nothing involved. A middle-aged woman read Cosmopolitan as she waited. The cover advertised an article about the “10 Sexiest Things for Celebrities.” I wondered if that was different than the 10 Sexiest Things for Derek and Stephanie. Theresa rocked back and forth without talking, her head down. Every time the nurse entered, I was sure her name would be called, but it was not. Tears were dropping onto Theresa’s arms she had clutched around her middle. I went to the front desk, staffed by a woman with dull eyes. “My friend has been waiting a long time.” “We’re just a little busy right now,” she replied. “We’ll get to her as soon as possible.” I felt a twist of panic. I gripped the counter. “Something is really wrong with her. She’s not pregnant, she’s not on drugs. She needs to be seen right now. If she isn’t taken care of now, I don’t know what is going to happen.” My voice broke then, and embarrassingly, I stood at the counter and cried. But I saw a little life flicker in this woman’s eyes, and she went into the back. A minute later, she returned. “We’ll see your friend now.” I didn’t see Theresa again until she was in the recovery room following her appendectomy. Her skin was still pale, and her hospital gown lay sloppily, exposing her shoulder. I looked down, and the black and white tiles of the floor began to rush up toward me, and then there was a nurse holding my head down in between my knees. When I could stand, she guided me out of the room. I arrived back at the gymnasium long after our classmates had stopped laughing, shouting, and trying to sneak over to the other side of the gym. Theresa’s parents had offered to let me stay with them at the hotel and return home when Theresa could leave the hospital, but I had chosen to continue the tour. I still wanted to sing. But now, standing in the dark, listening to snores and trying to see which lump was my own waiting sleeping bag, I wished I had gone with them. I was relieved when Mr. M. appeared to guide me to my bag. As we made our way through sleeping bodies on the floor, I wanted to tell him the whole story. I wanted him to know how scared I’d been. I wanted to cry. I wanted him to hug me. But as soon as we were at my spot on the floor, he said, “Get some sleep,” and disappeared. I wondered where John was. Even Tim would have been a welcome conversationalist. But no one appeared. On the bus the next day, I sat in the seat with Jasmine as we drove down the highway. I was exhausted and felt out of place without Theresa. I leaned my head against the bus window. “What kind of music do you listen to?” Jasmine’s voice startled me. It may have been the longest sentence I’d ever heard her speak. “Only madrigals?” “Um, no. I don’t really listen to madrigals outside of choir.” We talked, working slowly through her struggles with English. I noticed that she laughed easily, just quietly. She wasn’t serious at all. I saw John making his way to the front of the bus to listen to Mr. M.’s stories. “He walks like, what do you call it? A big spider,” Jasmine said, mimicking his swinging arms. “You aren’t like I thought,” I said. “I thought you studied all the time.” “I just never have anyone to talk to.” Just then, Stacy plopped into the seat in front of us on her knees, her chin resting on her hands as she looked at us. “Hey,” she said. “Hi,” I offered. I couldn’t imagine what Stacy wanted with us. “You want a Twinkie?” She held a Twinkie out toward me. “They gave them to us last night and you missed out. I got an extra, though, so you want it?” “Okay,” I took the Twinkie. “Thanks.” “That must have sucked last night.” Stacy’s heavily lined eyes were kind. Right now, she didn’t really seem like a wild and promiscuous partier. Even if she did swear and use bad words. “God,” she said. “Where are we even going?” The bus was taking a detour. Mr. M. knew of a church with good acoustics in one of the tiny towns the freeway blew past. He’d arranged for us to have access to the sanctuary. Inside the domed church, sunlight shone through stained glass windows, and a quiet reverence filled the space, silencing our jokes and laughter as we filed into the center of the sanctuary beneath the high domed ceiling. The only audience member was a church secretary sitting in the back pew. Mr. M. drew us into a huddle and placed his finger over his lips. He waited until we were completely silent and then raised his hand to Jasmine for the starting note. The sound was incredible. It rang up and throughout the dome, bouncing from one angled section of the roof to another. One full measure later, as I began my second soprano part, I could still hear the ringing of the first note. The sound swelled through the room and seemed to move around and between us, even as we stood shoulder to shoulder. I closed my eyes and heard Jasmine’s first soprano dancing across the melody. Stephanie’s deep alto voice established strength and consistency. Kathy’s second soprano sang a note slightly under mine, and I recognized it as truer, so I matched it. John’s tenor played off the melody, and I heard the desire in it. I missed Theresa’s alto, but Tim’s bass struck a confident chord that anchored me. I listened and let my voice blend with the others. I realized I hadn’t been watching Mr. M. and no longer needed his gestures and facial expressions. Together, our voices wrapped around each other and became something beyond our own individual wishes, our loneliness, our restlessness, our confidences and confusions, and rang out; our voices rose up and into the dome of the church, then outside past the school bus and outside over the fields into the clear, clean air. When the last note stopped ringing, I opened my eyes to Mr. M beaming. He pointed a long finger at me. “Yes!” he said, “Yes.” “A High School Madrigal” has looked for the right home for many years. It was one of the first chapters I wrote in my memoir, A Bouquet of Weeds: Growing Up Wild in the Pacific Northwest , forthcoming from High Frequency Press. During one of thousands of revisions, I removed it because it didn’t fit in the book's arc. However, I still love this story about belonging. High School is such an interesting time when you define who you are while you find the space where you fit. The breakthrough I had, where for a moment I stopped seeing people through their differences, but instead, through what we were as a whole, was pivotal for me. Previous NAOMI ULSTED writes fiction, non-fiction, and stage plays. She’s the author of the YA novel The Apology Box (Idle Time Press, 2021). Her memoir, A Bouquet of Weeds: Growing Up Wild in the Pacific Northwest, will be published in the fall of 2026 by High Frequency Press. She lives on the southern coast of Oregon. naomiulsted.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue TIP Marjorie Maddox of the tongue not tickling the undiscovered decay; of the finger, stubbed into silence; of the #2 pencil, poised and pointed, suddenly stifled, its nonpoisonous lead unable to undo any tabula rasa—mine or yours or my mother’s, who keeps asking with the tongue and the finger and the blank slate of her almost ninety-year-old face, “How old? How old?” How old this silence that faces the poised, the stubbed mother tongue— yours, mine—blank as any tabula rasa before words knew how to rise, or fingers how to point at the poisonous, the decayed, or merely the undiscovered hiding behind the stifled face, ninety #2 pencils unable to answer such sudden questions. How to answer what tickles the stubbed mind, undo the poisonous—yours, mine— face the tabula rasa without pencil or tongue, the blank of silence its own discovery of decay, the pointed “How old? How old?” suddenly stifled, leading back to the undoing: blank slate where ninety keeps asking after itself as the finger points in question, and the poised tongue raises again its unanswered Tip "Tip" was previously published in Southern Florida Poetry Review and in the poetry collection Seeing Things (Wildhouse, 2025). This poem, the first I wrote during a Fall 2018 writing residency, tumbled out the evening that I arrived, the process “tipping” me into a “tip of the tongue” space that writing often pushes through. This time, the process provided insight into the early stages of my mother’s dementia. What, I wondered, did it feel like to her when words became evasive at a more extreme level than common “tip of the tongue” syndrome? “Tip” thus paved the way to other poems on dementia, caregiving, and the shifting roles of memory that eventually became the book Seeing Things (Wildhouse, Feb. 2025). Previous MARJORIE MADDOX has published 17 collections of poetry, a story collection, five children’s and YA books, and two anthologies (co-editor). She is a Professor Emerita of English at the Lock Haven Campus of Commonwealth University. marjoriemaddox.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue GLAMOUR SHOTS Naomi Ulsted I had spent my morning fantasizing about the UPS guy. He had thick dark hair and a natural smile, and he usually arrived at the office around ten in the morning. While booking reservations at La Quinta hotels across Texas for the children’s theatre show I worked with, I made sure I was in the front office in case he was just running late. After lunch, I gave up and was in the back room reorganizing our costumes when I heard the door open. I draped my sparkling green witch costume over an office chair and darted to the front, ignoring the office manager’s disapproving look. She didn’t care for me bolting in or out of rooms. She pursed her lips as I slugged back Gatorade, suffering from the after-effects of an evening dancing down on Sixth Street. My new life in Austin was days of bland mediocrity punctuated by dancing on Sixth Street and the UPS guy’s arrival. Sadly, it was only a salesman selling Glamour Shots from the mall. So maybe I bought them because I was consoling myself about the UPS guy. Or maybe because the office manager sniffed with disdain as I reviewed the package they were offering: a professional sitting that included makeup and dress for up to three people and one eight by ten print, all for a flat rate of sixty dollars. I handed over my credit card. It’s not like I was dying for a photoshoot. I hadn’t wanted to be a model since I was twelve, but my little sisters were coming to visit. They were eleven and thirteen years old, and I’d convinced our mom to let them fly from Oregon to Texas to spend two weeks with me. I imagined us dressed to kill, looking sophisticated and elegant. I felt very adult as I tucked my credit card away and returned to my shimmering costumes. I picked Leah and Tanya up from the airport, where the three of us crammed into the cab of my pick-up truck and let their suitcases slide across the bed. We stayed up late drinking root beer and feeling our way back to the comfortable rapport we’d had before I moved away. Tanya, the eleven-year-old, sat on my only piece of furniture, a large papasan chair. She curled her tiny self into the nest of it, eating microwave popcorn from the bag. Leah and I sprawled on the floor, our root beer bottles sitting on a square block that had been part of a book display at Barnes and Noble, where I’d worked before the theatre job. It served as my dining room table. The soles of Leah’s feet were thick and calloused. She rarely wore shoes, preferring to toughen her feet on the unforgiving terrain of southern Oregon, priding herself on her ability to walk on the thistles that grew rampant across thirsty dirt. “So, how are things with Rick and Mom?” I asked. Our mom had married Rick a couple of years ago. When I came to visit, I rarely stayed for more than a couple of nights. Rick was snide and derogatory toward me. I hated him for being in my sisters’ lives. “He’s an asshole,” Tanya said immediately. “They fight all the time,” Leah said. “As if you even hear it,” Tanya said to her. “You just hide in your barn all the time.” Leah kept vast quantities of animals, including goats, rabbits, and sheep. She secretly housed and fed a black widow spider in a jar in a dark corner of the barn. “He eats mayonnaise from the container,” Tanya said as if that ended any and all discussion of our stepdad’s character. Which, in some ways, it did. “Screw him,” Leah said. “He said I was mean to my animals and told me I’d never be a veterinarian.” Tanya curled up even smaller. “He told me I probably wouldn’t graduate from high school. He said statistics prove it.” “What statistics?” I asked. “Girls from,” and she raised her fingers in quotations, “lower economic backgrounds .” She gestured to my barren studio apartment. “I can’t wait to live on my own.” I had two bachelor's degrees and spent my days researching La Quinta and waiting for the UPS guy. On performance nights, I wore my glittering witch costume and danced on stage, expertly twirling my witch’s broom. But performance nights were only a few times a month, and the rest of the time, it was just mediocre old me. Austin wasn’t cheap and once I’d paid for rent, I usually only had enough left for food and liquor. I had a refrigerator with cheese, dill pickles, and Shiner Bock beer. A recent photo of myself showed thin legs and too prominent shoulder bones. Weak and brittle. “It’s not all that,” I said. On the day of our Glamour Shots, we made our way through the mall. My sisters’ reaction to my big photoshoot idea was underwhelming. Grudgingly, Leah had put on shoes for the trip. Tanya asked if we could go to the arcade instead. I tried to make up for it with my own false enthusiasm. “It’s going to be fun,” I bubbled as we navigated through crowds of girls wearing crop tops who laughed loudly at jokes made by boys who sauntered as if they knew their place at the top of the hierarchy of mall goers. Which they did. As we passed by a group of girls emerging from J.J. Jeans with packages dangling from their arms, one of them narrowed her eyes at Leah’s overalls and sneakers. She nudged her friend and giggled. Leah reddened, shoving her hands further into her pockets. “Oh, look,” Tanya said, glancing toward the girls. “There’s a sale on Barbies.” I had imagined Glamour Shots would be located in a posh studio, but this place had as much elegance as the Standard Optical shop next door. The receptionist wore pancake makeup and long false lashes. She raked her eyes over us as if overwhelmed by the exhausting task before her. “Okay,” she said in a tired voice. “We’ll get you dressed.” We had been encouraged to bring our own clothes, but since all we had were overalls, jeans, and sweatshirts, we’d decided to choose from their wardrobe. We squeezed into the dressing room and rifled through our options. Too many sequins. Too much gold lamé. The receptionist-turned-stylist held a leather dress toward me with six inches of fringe hanging from the bodice. I shook my head. Tanya pulled out a red denim dress cut scandalously low, raising her eyebrows. Leah stared blankly at the racks of clothes as if someone were speaking in Swahili to her. Feeling the whole adventure was going sideways, I began yanking dresses out and holding them up to her. “Try this velvet one,” I pleaded. What if they never wanted to visit me again? What if they went home feeling worse than when they got here? What if the UPS guy never came back? What if I never did anything but call LaQuinta so I could pay another month’s rent? What if my sisters started to believe Rick? What if the statistics were right? Finally, we settled on three black dresses. They were cut lower than I’d like for us, but this was Glamour Shots, so we didn’t have much choice. My dress sagged around my thin frame, so the stylist tightened it by fastening it in the back with a binder clip. Tanya stuffed wads of toilet paper into her bra to help fill out her dress. Leah refused to put her shoes on, and the stylist finally relented since they wouldn’t be in the photograph. She hiked up her dragging skirt as she padded toward the hair station. There was hairspray, thick foundation too dark for our skin, more hairspray, contouring, shading, more hairspray, a thick coating of mascara, bright red lipstick, and then we were done. My face felt like it was a pound heavier. Leah coughed her way toward me through a final cloud of hairspray. Tanya looked like a child prostitute. I thought I might have seen our photographer doing Jello shots on Sixth Street. His wavy hair fell over one eye, making me wonder if it would impair his photography skills. He hoisted a blank screen behind us and situated us close together. A strand of Tanya’s hair got in my mouth, and I tasted chemicals. The photographer squeezed us together. As he moved Leah into place, she reached behind me to steady herself on the stool, accidentally brushing her arm against Tanya’s face. Her arm came away with a smear of makeup. Tanya tried to inch her way behind me to hide her cleavage, but the photographer kept pulling her back out. The lights were hotter than stage lights, and I wondered if all this makeup was going to slide down my neck. The camera began to click as we tried to maintain the awkward stances he’d shoved us into. “Okay, now smile,” he said. We tried. “Close-mouthed smile this time, Ladies. Give me some sexy!” Leah’s grip on the stool slipped, and she stumbled out of view. The photographer glanced at his watch. “Come on, ladies, show us your glamour!” We tried for glamour. We smiled with closed mouths. We smiled with wide-open grins. He turned on the fan so our hair wafted behind us in gentle waves. Tanya sneezed. “Okay,” he said finally. “Let me take a look.” I felt a small wave of nausea in the heat of the lights. I wondered what to do tonight to keep my sisters from getting bored. “Hmm,” the photographer said as he studied the photos in his camera. “Your eye,” he said to me. “You’re kind of blinking.” He brought the camera to me so I could see the small photos. My right eye wasn’t open as wide as the left. I wasn’t actually blinking, but it was definitely noticeable. “Let’s try a few more,” he said. Leah sighed as we arranged ourselves again, trying to be glamorous and seductive and elegant once more. He snapped a few pictures and then checked them in the camera. “Same problem,” he said. The receptionist joined our group, and the five of us peered into the camera at my stubbornly drooping right eye. “That’s one unglamorous eye,” Leah said. “Can you try opening it wider?” the receptionist suggested. So, for the next round of clicks, I concentrated on opening my right eye wide. When the photographer checked the shots, his brow furrowed, and he glanced at his watch again. “Well, I think that’s what we’re going to get,” he said. “You can view the final photos at the kiosk out front.” “I can’t wait to get this shit off my face,” Tanya said as she removed the toilet paper from her bra. Leah unclipped my binder for me, and I hung the dress up. I felt a pinching and a sudden urge to cry. My stupid eye. Ruined the whole thing. We gathered around the kiosk monitor to view the final photos. “I look like a porn star,” Leah said. Her cleavage was pushing up, and as she had been leaning awkwardly, one boob especially was getting a lot of exposure. “You could have a new career ahead of you,” Tanya said. We flipped to another photo where Tanya leered into the camera seductively. She was drama and sex. She was striking. She was a child beauty pageant nightmare. And then, photo after photo of us dealing with my eye. It drooped and sagged. The photos where I tried to open it were worse. My eyebrow raised, but my eyelid sagged even further. My left eye tried to compensate by opening wide as if I was shocked. My expression was pained and stressed. My teeth were bared in a strained smile. “You look like you’re peeing your pants.” “You look like you just stuck a fork in a light socket.” “You look like you have a massive wedgie.” “You look like you just walked in on Mom and Rick having sex.” As we flipped through the photographs, we began to laugh and couldn’t stop. Tanya laughed so that tears cut through her pancake makeup. The stylist-turned-receptionist gave a withering glare, but we laughed so hard that customers at Standard Optical stopped trying on glasses and squinted our way. Leah gripped the monitor to steady herself, bent over in hysterics. “Oh, look,” I said as I flipped through the photos. “It’s the double child hookers and their very surprised pimp.” “I need double copies of each one,” Leah said. “This was totally worth the toil of putting on all this makeup.” “We are such trouble together,” Tanya said. The three of us huddled around the monitor, cackling so that our laughter rang up and past the annoyed receptionist and through the mall, casting its spell, causing workers and shoppers to stop and look around curiously. I took out my credit card and bought $150 worth of prints. Back in our normal clothes, with our voluminous hair still sprayed into place, we headed into the mall. We passed Jordache and Guess, and Versace. Every now and then, we’d take a photo from the package and burst into laughter all over again, stumbling and crashing into each other as we howled. Mall girls moved out of our way. A man trying to give out face cream samples called to us, but I silenced him with a glare from my evil right eye. We bought candy apples and strode down the middle of the aisle in our coven, and as we crunched through the red shells with our sharp teeth, my empty apartment, our stepdad’s words, and every statistic holding us back disappeared before us like wisps of smoke in moonlight. “Glamour Shots” was originally published in the blog Sacred Chickens in February of 2021. This is one of my favorite memories of my sisters. It happened soon after I’d left home, glad to be free of the challenges of childhood. However, on my own, I felt powerless in a different way as I struggled to pay the rent or do anything “interesting” with my life. That day, with my sisters, I felt that together, we could take on the world. Rise above the world’s expectations for us. That breakthrough, that feeling of power, gives me strength still. Previous NAOMI ULSTED writes fiction, non-fiction, and stage plays. She’s the author of the YA novel The Apology Box (Idle Time Press, 2021). Her memoir, A Bouquet of Weeds: Growing Up Wild in the Pacific Northwest, will be published in the fall of 2026 by High Frequency Press. She lives on the southern coast of Oregon. naomiulsted.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue AT THE END OF OCTOBER Dennise Gackstetter All day I worked to ready the garden for winter, kneeling on the earth to trim spent seed heads and crispy curled leaves, bowing low to cut brittle stems and browned stalks close to the ground. From far overhead I hear sandhill cranes call to each other in flight, their harmonic clicks and whirrs and bugles traveling through the clear expanse of sky. I leaned back and turned my eyes upward, but I did not see them. I stood and searched across the brilliant blue and still, I did not see them. Standing amidst untidy piles of plant debris saturated in sunlight, I continued to listen long after their voices faded away. This poem expresses the deep reverence I have for the world in all the ways it reveals itself, and in all the ways I can meet it. It stands as a breakthrough for me because I successfully engaged the power of narrative in a prose poem. My poet friend, Star Coulbrooke, called this a strong example of “incantatory prose.”Through sound, rhythm, and repetition, I conjure deep sensuous qualities that invite the reader to share in the visceral magic of the moment. Previous DENNISE GACKSTETTER is an artist, educator, and writer whose courage and curiosity have taken her to many places across the world and around her own backyard. In all her creative practices, she celebrates the levity and gravity of wonder and connection. She and her husband live happily in Logan, Utah. dennisegclayworks.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue NO MORE BLOWS David Romtvedt First the dog died and we pulled the sledge ourselves. A couple of centuries later a wheel fell off the cart and another millennium gone by, the pistons started to knock, rings worn, fuel to air mix off. When they landed, the aliens promised peace beyond understanding. You think a civilization able to cross space and time can fix anything, think again. In the end it was, “Sorry, we’ve done all we can,” stepping back into their ship and closing the door, tears in their eyes. That was a surprise, seeing the aliens cry. As a child, if I cried, my father beat me, saying, as so many fathers before him have said, “You wanta cry, I’ll give you something to cry about.” Confused, I came to hate not what he’d done to me, but crying. Later, I too was a father. When my daughter, suffering from severe colic, cried, I wanted to strike out, not knowing at what, having worked so hard to forget my childhood, afraid I might hit my daughter as my father had hit me. I turned away and left the house, walking across the frozen lake, the windblown surface free of snow, the fish moving silently beneath my feet. Sometimes in the cold, things come clear— my daughter cried and I heard my father’s ragged breathing, recoiled from his blow, but this time I stepped aside, and never again feared I might hit my child. In understanding why my daughter’s or anyone’s crying so disturbed me, I was to some degree freed from my father’s blows and so never again feared that I might lose control and hit my daughter. I also understood that the aliens had to leave, that no outside force could solve my problems. Finally, I accepted that even if I were not ruled by the association between tears and being beaten that I’d made in childhood, crying might always make me uncomfortable. Previous DAVID ROMTVEDT is from northern Wyoming. His most recent books are Still on Earth (LSU Press, 2025) and Forest of Ash: The Earliest Written Basque Poetry (Center for Basque Studies Press, 2024). davidromtvedt.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue FRANK'S BUICK David G. Pace I’m not sure when my late father-in-law’s town car became our car. It wasn’t when we wrested it from Mom, who we decided couldn’t safely operate it anymore. It wasn’t when we changed the title to my name. For even after that, I saw it as Frank’s Buick, a.k.a. the Batmobile, so named because of its dual automatic “ComforTemp” controls in the front seats (leather), its “Twilight Sentinel” feature that turns the headlights on and off depending on how light it is outside, the heated windshield, the cruise control with automatic reset, the illuminated entry system around door locks, the electric radio antennae that telescopes into hiding every time you turn off the radio. The sexy stereo system. Actually, the stereo is one I had installed, complete with a CD player. The old one, which came with the car in 1991, freakishly shut down with a pop while I was listening to the radio and approaching the Verrazano Bridge from the New Jersey side in 2001. It was at night, just days after the terrorist attacks on New York City and, of course, the first thing I thought was that there was another downed transformer on top of a burning skyscraper. Embedded as I was within those many pounds of Detroit excess, I still felt vulnerable. When I replaced the stereo, I actually wondered what Frank Daley would think, what style he would prefer. I winced after it was installed when I realized it didn’t mesh too well with the dashboard, designed at a time when CD players were probably a thousand dollars each and Americans were still getting tangled in their cassette tapes. I didn’t think of the Batmobile as ours even after we made arrangements for Mom to live in a rest home in Western Massachusetts and took the car home to Brooklyn, where we hobbled it with a newly bought “club” on its steering wheel. The maroon monster with the runners on top of the trunk sat parked on Prospect Park Southwest as a persistent reminder of the suburban car culture I had fled. My wife, Cheryl, and I talked about never using it except to visit Mom. That it was a gas guzzler and the size of a small pachyderm and therefore couldn’t be trusted on the narrow, pocked streets of New York. Its very presence suggested that we weren’t really New Yorkers who take the subway everywhere. I wondered what my late father-in-law would think if he knew that his ten-year-old car, which cost more than his pre-fab in a Florida golf village, was sitting on the streets of New York and dodging yellow cabs on the monthly trip up to his boyhood home of Florence, Mass. to see his widow. It was shortly after the Buick’s Brooklyn era started that I found Frank’s auto log. It was in the glove compartment, and in it he had put the history of the car’s maintenance: the lube in 1992 shortly after he bought it at a Ft. Pierce, Florida dealership; the wheel balance later that year; the replacement of this with that. It was detailed, fastidious, and very Frank— the type of man who labeled his Christmas storage boxes with reminders of which ornaments he’d hung each year. I found this log scoffable, coming as I did from a family whose patriarch was lucky to remember to put gas in the car, but months before the stereo got replaced, I found myself adding to the log as the car needed service: Re-set RF wheel speed signal code (2/11/00) Horn button replaced (9/21/00) Inspection (10/03/00) I would return the small pencil—expertly sharpened with the pocket knife I had inherited from him—to the wire rings of the notebook and wedge it back into the glove box as if the car would fail to turn over unless its history were kept intact. Frank Daley’s story was one largely written by the time I met him in 1992. The Buick was barely a year old, and I remember standing with him behind the trunk that automatically closed and locked itself, a cooler of drinks on the runners, watching Fourth of July fireworks over a saltwater river. He had a natural fascination for celebrations, which brokered easy conversation with me, someone I’m sure he thought was just his daughter’s summer boyfriend. She was twice divorced, and I was nearly twelve years her junior. I kept my distance from this short, stocky man. At the pool earlier that day, Frank, white and hairless, was nearly luminescent next to the blue tile, his body a network of scars that crackled from the notch in his throat through his sternum and to his left leg, where they had stripped away a vein. I knew that Frank had developed a seizure disorder late in life and had suffered more than one heart attack, the first when he was just fifty-three-years old, which forced him into early retirement from his work as wonder-boy salesman for Rustcraft Greeting Cards. In Brooklyn, I got a lot of respect driving around in the Batmobile, even though for the first month I had to reassure myself vocally that I had the right to drive this car that wasn’t mine and that my mother-in-law sorely missed. The Buick was sleek, its nose tapered from its grill to the center of gravity over a muscled chassis. Its maroon color was all sheen except for a couple of nicks that Frank had judiciously touched up with a tube of car paint he kept boxed in the trunk along with every imaginable car care and travel item, including a chamois, hub cab cleaning foam, flares, and an impressive first-aid kit. The car’s trunk was big enough to hide not one, but two bodies. Only twice did I wheel my luggage past the Batmobile to the subway for the two-hour commute to JFK International where I was based as a flight attendant. After that, the siren call of convenience lured me to its side, all sheen. As I shot down Caton Avenue and Linden Boulevard, I actually had people flagging me down, thinking that with a town car, I was operating a car service. Other vehicles moved the hell out of the way when they saw me angling into a lane or chasing a yellow light through a busy intersection with Flatbush Avenue. That is, until one day about a year after I started taking the car to work. I was on North Conduit, the final feeder of my trip before hitting the straight shot to the airport, and I was late. The chaos of late afternoon bore down on three lanes becoming one, and the world narrowed to this stream of fenders, a mass migration of diverse species nosing into one another’s paths. A man in a Celica was performing the infamous New York Ace: entering the flow of traffic by assuming that if you ignore eye contact with the driver you’re cutting off, he will have to brake for you. I’m not sure if my aggression stemmed from my anxiety over being late, or if I resented that this four-wheeled gazelle would so easily ignore me, a far superior animal bearing down on it—and with the right-of-way no less. The game ended with the gazelle’s left hoof implanted just behind the right shoulder blade of my leopard, the Buick. There was much honking and yelling while the rest of the herd instantly re-directed itself around the new obstacle. “What happened to the Batmobile?” asked Cheryl, who often claimed that when she wanted to lose weight she sat in the passenger seat of Frank’s Buick while I drove. “Bummer, huh? Somebody hit me in the parking lot at work. Didn’t even leave a note. Gotta love New Yorkers.” Frank would have been disappointed, but not because I lied. One of his many maxims to my wife was, she reported, “Lie to others if you must; just don’t lie to yourself.” He would have been disappointed that first, I was driving his Buick on the streets of an uncivilized city (after meeting his wife in New York City on leave during World War II, he never bothered to visit the city again), and second, that I had been so stupid as to crash a car. That was something his wife did, or a man of lesser character, a man who would never be driving a Park Avenue Buick in the first place. Repairs to right quarter panel (6/04/02) $250.00 deductible. Frank and Mabel had lived well, even after Frank was disabled in the late seventies. One could fairly say that in their salad, G.I. Bill days, Frank made “more money than God.” That they could summer on an island every year even while maintaining their home in Rhode Island was a testament to just how much money there was. That after selling both homes they moved into a Florida don’t-call-it-a-trailer trailer was a testament to the price of his disability. The new Batmobile was the final imprint of the life they once had. When Cheryl and I married, we would visit the folks in sodden Florida, where we seemed to hydroplane in the Buick to go marvel at the manatees, to visit the water locks, to lunch at the crab houses before cruising back to the gated village’s swimming pool in which, at the time, I was technically too young to swim (under thirty-five). “If he’s a writer, why is he still working for the airline?” Frank once asked Cheryl who, by sheer dint of character, would always defend me. For me, the question, even second hand, lodged in my cranium like a foul ball pounded into the metal fence behind home plate. And by sheer dint of character, I defended myself to myself: “Why did he hang onto a town car when he lived in a golf village with a five-mile-per-hour speed limit and refused even to pick us up at the airport?” Frank and I had little, if anything in common. I was almost young enough to be his grandson. I was from the West and Mormon, while he was a Yankee, originally from Massachusetts and Episcopalian. I was a romantic with ambitions to write while Frank was all business—in more ways than one. But a writer is a good listener and a former salesman is a talker. True, at times I had to struggle to decipher his “dole-house” from “doll house,” his “khakis” from “car keys,” but I could listen to my father-in-law, and we could watch TV and I could help him paint the garage door at the island house. It was early January 1997, two weeks after Cheryl had returned from a marathon session of changing her parents’ pre-fab into a hospital-away-from-hospital, that the phone rang. It was Mabel. She told us Frank had died in the night. Congestive heart failure. There was no money, only a few investments, insurance, a double-wide fast losing its value in a golf village. The $35,000 Batmobile. We moved Mabel to the rest home near Northampton, Massachusetts, where Cheryl could visit her. Meanwhile, we invested what was left of the money to keep Mom off Medicaid. Except for a fender bender in Florence, Mass. and my secret one in Queens, the Batmobile remained unscathed. After nearly ten years, it was approaching only 60,000 miles, less than half of what most cars had at that age. Still, even after a full year of driving it, I had to remind myself whenever I drove that I had a right to Frank’s Buick. Perhaps I felt that I deserved Frank’s Buick only when I started getting mail from credit card companies addressed to “Frank Pace,” a creepy confusion in the system resulting from the transfer of funds from Frank’s name to mine. If I had to take his name, then certainly I was welcome to take his car, even if it was one that I would have never selected myself. I couldn’t sell it. For one thing, we needed a car to get to Mom, and this one was paid for. Finally—surprise, surprise—it got over thirty freeway miles to the gallon. The Batmobile sat street-side, braving vandals and snowplows in equal measure until Mom died and we decided to return to the West. It was a year after 9/11; the market had been good to us, including the real estate market for our Brooklyn co-op, and the Batmobile was growing on me. I liked the big engine, the big trunk, and the way it plowed through the snow. I liked how Adam from the writers’ group was clearly impressed with its digital temperature control that beeped like a microwave whenever you adjusted it. I guess I liked it because, for me, it was contact with luxury, even as I rolled my eyes at it as “the clunker we inherited from my mother-in-law.” The trip to Utah was not kind to Frank’s Buick. The moving company lifted it right into the semi behind all of our other stuff, then placed a “protective” false ceiling over it so that boxes wouldn’t fall on the car’s roof. Instead, the Batmobile bounced over 1,800 miles, its top rubbing against the unpadded wood ceiling and grinding it raw. Frank would have been appalled. The moving company dodged any and all compensation, so the roof still sports the bands of paintless metal suffered from the car’s prairie crossing. Despite the Buick’s mounting bruises, my relationship to Frank, now deceased for five years, was improving. Though he made over twenty Atlantic crossings during WWII as a cook on the USS Wakefield —we have a picture of him in the galley with Jack Dempsey—Frank was otherwise not a traveler and would have found it inconceivable that his wonder machine, bought in the twilight of his life, would have survived not only the Big Dirty Apple, but also the 4,500 plus-foot elevation of Salt Lake City. Just the ski rack on top of his beloved Park Avenue would have enraged him. So in my mind, I explained all of this to my postal namesake. How the Buick was now Frank’s vicarious time machine, taking his spirit to places he had read about but for whatever reason, found impossible to visit. How he and I were having an extended conversation with each other as father and son, a conversation that motored beyond time zones and dimensions, beyond my life and his death. I realize now that I’d been conversing with him all along, ever since I took over the Batmobile: those harried rides to work through the heart of Brooklyn; that time in Manhattan when he and I sped up the West Side highway and ogled the runners and rollerbladers along the Hudson River, the hard-bodied men cavorting with bikini-topped women—or more shocking, with other hard-bodied men. I imagined that he sat in the back seat on our way up to Niagara Falls and Mormon Country, when I tried alternately to detail and defend my background to him. I could hear him chiding me on my reckless driving, more than once, through Times Square, as if there were any other way to move through that crossroads of the world without at least appearing reckless. He even wept with me right out of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel when we were detoured away from Ground Zero, but saw Buddhists on the wooden, West Side Highway platform conducting a purifying smoke ritual for the three thousand dead. And then we were in Utah, and I could hear him berating me for thirty minutes for having pushed the car so hard up from Las Vegas and into the high desert that the right front tire gave out and tore a hole in the front panel to the tune of a thousand dollars. But he was also the one prompting me to give twenty bucks to the two penniless sixteen-year-olds halfway home from Las Vegas in a broken-down Monte Carlo they forgot to put oil in. “By the time their Mom makes it down from Brigham City to pick them up,” I remember him whispering to me, “they will have learned their lesson. Meanwhile, they have to eat.” And in the Wasatch Mountains, he forgave me for installing the ski rack when we rounded a corner to Sundance and he saw, for the first time, the mighty scalloped backside of Mt. Timpanogos, cyanic and terrible in the frigid February air. At Arches National Park, I left him at the aptly named, free-standing Delicate Arch, where he insisted on taking pictures of all the hikers and finding out where they were from, and marveling with them: “There isn’t anything like this in the East!” “I’ll catch up with you later,” he said. In the end, we parted company for good out in the desert two hours west of Salt Lake, where the world’s fastest cars shoot across the salt flats at, literally, rocket speeds. It was hard to know what would have appealed to Frank more, the awesome vastness of the desert, or the fact that man had scored it with his fast, rocket-propelled cars. The flats, white and carrying the form of tiny waves in their crystals, extend for miles to the dusty range of mountains below ribbons of high clouds trailing east. The wind is all around in a place like this, solitary tumbleweeds bumping across the hardened surface of an inland sea that in its horizontality must have reminded Frank of the sea off Peaks Island where he summered, or the sea beyond the bulwarks of the Wakefield as it plowed through the Atlantic before it was eventually torpedoed and sunk. In a place like this, even a New Englander—perhaps especially a New Englander—can let go and leave this world, can imagine that unlike the sea, this is the real end of the world, of the hard-baked rock that we call home. From the edge of Interstate 80, I honked the car horn for several long minutes. I motioned him back to me. But he wouldn’t return. I saw Frank Daley standing out there in his flak jacket and cowboy hat he’d taken to wearing since his removal to the West. Finally, he motioned for me to leave. To take his Buick and return to civilization where it belonged. Where it belonged, and where he no longer lived. So I did. The engine turned over, and the Twilight Sentinel flipped on the headlights automatically like it does. A bit of a clunking noise was coming from the back near the gas tank. The muffler maybe? I’d have to get that checked. And get to the paint shop before the roof started to rust. That’s what I was thinking as I babied my Buick up to seventy-five miles per hour, hit the Dynaride cruise control, and settled in. # # # "Frank's Buick" was first published in Alligator Juniper . This essay follows the author's continuing and somewhat strained relationship with his now dead father-in-law through the inheritance of the older man's prized Buick. When does your deceased father-in-law's car become your own after its title is handed over to you? Answer: years later, on the salt flats of Utah near where you've relocated, two thousand miles-plus from where the car's original owner is buried. Previous DAVID G. PACE is a narrative nonfiction writer located in Salt Lake City where he writes about the liberal arts and sciences for the University of Utah. His collection of short fiction, American Trinity: and Other Stories from the Mormon Corridor (BCC Press, 2024), won the AML Best Short Fiction Collection Award and 15 Bytes Award for fiction . Pace's debut novel, Dream House on Golan Drive (Signature Books, 2015), won first place in the Utah Original Writing Competition. davidgpace.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue FIVE DAYS INTO THIS NEW ADMINISTRATION Alexandra van de Kamp and I’m fluent in the words Executive Order, its acronym, EO, and, as a '60's kid, know it has little to do with Electric Light Orchestra , unless, by electric, we mean relentlessly on edge, our veins aglitter with news-minnows. Five days into this new game show, and there’s already an eloquent, cascading disorder; an eddying, occupying flora overgrowing grasses and skies, fogging up our panes. Five days in, and I’m looking at the squirrels, their bodies calligraphing the trees, for some philosophical tidbits, some wisdom outpacing my brain. I’m asking the clouds how they buoy despite their soggy weight. I’m renegotiating what feels safe. And today, safe feels like a shriveled postage stamp, running with ink. It feels like the overflowing clawfoot tub in a BBC mystery when the mother slits her wrists in the bath, expecting to be found—her blood a dark lily swaying in the water as her daughter arrives, witnesses what she’s done. Five days in, and I’m wondering: Am I this woman, misjudging the time I have left? I'm wanting a vaster, faster-reacting vocabulary for doubt and dread . What about lead-bout , hammered-heart , dead-gut ? And despite all this, here you are on a Saturday morning, wearing the bright blue pullover you said you'd never wear and drinking a second cup of coffee, anchored to our small history, our kitchen—my other voice, my trembling wind socket, my skin chime. "Five Days into This New Administration" was a breakthrough because I learned political anger could be channeled through a poem with playful aspects, like referencing Electric Light Orchestra while thinking of the onslaught of Executive Orders signed by the Trump Administration. I also saw that a political poem could have a certain elasticity and could include a scene from a BBC TV series to comment on the unfolding and highly disturbing political atmosphere. Lastly, writing this poem helped me find my voice in a challenging time. Previous ALEXANDRA VAN DE KAMP is the Executive Director for Gemini Ink , San Antonio’s Writing Arts Center. She is the author of the poetry collections Ricochet Script (Next Page Press, 2022), Kiss/Hierarchy (Rain Mountain Press, 2016), and The Park of Upside-Down Chairs (WordTech, 2010). alexandravandekamppoet.com Next

Michaelmas by Lisa Bickmore On Michaelmas, the day the gold drains into the lake, the equinoctial sun tilts, sinks to the bottom, stays there for months, the day the rents came due for the quarter, when they baked the bannock and roasted the stubble goose, the day beyond which the blackberries must not be eaten, since Satan once fell and cursed the brambles, the day with the same name as the daisies I will soon pull up by the roots because their color displeases me: on that same day, when the archangel, warrior and tutelar, flourishes, trampling, if only briefly, a fallen Lucifer, a glory round his head, I see the dark-lashed, dark-browed boy, unsmiling, drive past him as he looks up, hooded, unkempt, skateboard under his arm. He emerges under the bridge. Today the day lasts just as long as the night, a balance listing to dark till the dark has had its say. The daisies I planted, thinking they were asters, are a thicket, of no use to me, though they grow tall, flower when there are few other flowers, their petals forming a pale, feathery corona round a golden eye. Brush my hip as I take the step. Back at the underpass, I correct myself: surely he must have a home. I exit the highway, pass under cars speeding and fuming their smoke above. My heart is a weight. The flowers arch like a Roman bridge over the walk. The boy’s hair’s a blond halation. He pauses, sees only movement, just a parting where he might take the road. Genius who does not meet my eye, whose gaze rakes over ripple and heat, whose titular flower I’ve let flower, your silks unfurl before me in a brief flame but I regret them, I’ll unroot them, tear them out before snowfall— you, whose hymn is unvenerated, whose home is shadow. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue My friend Ann identified a little fringe-petaled flower that blooms in autumn for me—among other names, it is called a Michaelmas daisy. They grow quite prolifically in my yard, and once, she even gave me a start of a particularly lovely variety. This prolificity ends up being an analogue for the recurrence of figures, ideas, stories, especially ones that seem at this point to be locked into a season, an annual moment, a certain slant of light, as Dickinson said. Michaelmas is, of course, a very old festival on the ecclesiastical calendar. I loved finding these things out, and making a poem out of them. .................................................................................................................................................................................... LISA BICKMORE is the author of three books of poems and is the publisher of Lightscatter Press . She is the poet laureate of the state of Utah. lisabickmore.com Next - For Hank Williams by Lisa Bickmore Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue BECAUSE WE CAN Brock Dethier When asked why he was attempting to be the first to climb Mt. Everest, George Mallory said, “Because it’s there.” He died on Everest in 1924. It’s not because it’s there that we climb the highest mountain. It’s because we can. Adventurers know that our abilities can change instantly and will inevitably change slowly, so the climbing route, the powder line, the 20-knot windsurfing blow that you can just barely handle today will be beyond you tomorrow. I did 4000-foot-vertical hikes because I could. I ran every other day for thirty years, hating every step, because I could. I tried every drug that came my way, often more than once because I could. I skate skied up Green Canyon nonstop because I could, just barely. I swam underwater to the Green Room behind the travertine falls because I’d lost my mind. I can’t do any of those things now. Nor can I drive a golf ball out of sight, hit a forehand passing shot, or backpack nine miles into the Wind Rivers. Somehow when I wasn’t looking, my body’s motto went from “Whatever you need, whenever,” to “Nope, can’t.” What can my body still do that’s worth doing and I might well lose tomorrow? C’mere Babe. “Because We Can” is a new poem. I grew up with Mallory’s “Because it’s there” in my head, wondering what it meant and why I too embarked on pointless, dangerous adventures. The insight is of limited benefit to me now that I’m 73, and it might not make sense to someone who’s young enough to feel that there will always be another tomorrow. But understanding WHY we should seize the day was a breakthrough for me. Previous BROCK DETHIER retired from Utah State University after directing the writing composition program for 11 years. His publications include From Dylan to Donne: Bridging English and Music (Heinemann, 2003), First Time Up: An Insider’s Guide for New Composition Teachers (Utah State University Press, 2005), Twenty-One Genres and How to Write Them (Utah State University Press, 2013), and two books of poetry, Ancestor Worship (Pudding House Publications, 2008) and Reclamation (Popcorn Press, 2015). Next

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< Back to Breakthroughs Issue FOUND Shari Zollinger I entered psychedelic space for the first time with a microdose. Alice, who once fell through, was offered a red pill or a blue one. Adriana offered me gray green on the morning of an eclipse. My body clearly and without hesitation chose which dose (a tiny bite of a tiny piece of filigree fibrous cap) and which environment (supine on a brown leather couch in the middle of the living room with the Moab red rock desert reflecting through). Time travel was/wasn’t possible? Eyes closed. What if we’ve left parts of ourselves out there, along the continuum? What if the cold-framed window in the Taipei, Taiwan hospital waiting room still existed and she was still waiting there looking out at the night? What if, along that continuum, there were points where it was possible to make changes? Scroll back along the thread-gauzy timeline, web-filamented, to check for the nodes that need attention. In astrological terminology, eclipses were both omen and boon. We don’t know if this is true, yet it seems to hold across the timeline when we’re looking for possible wormholes, when we’re bending back toward where she sat waiting. Where she’d waited a long time. It was a surprise to see her there. Had it been 15 or 20 years since she’d gone to the Taipei hospital to seek assurance, wondering how fast and furious the body breaks, how quickly the psyche can sit down like a cipher without language sturdy enough for meaning? It was a thing to recognize her. Wonder how she’d passed the time. How many names for the color of night she had coined and counted out that window. Did she always know someone would return for her? Did she count time or build mnemonics or hear the distinct click of a metronome reminding her that she wasn’t exactly alone? And how did she know what to do? The first thing—to walk out into the sunlight that was there beyond the hospital night, because it could be there because she was found in-continuum where narrative couldn’t demand length or cord or fibrous linearity, where the weather could change every second and day and night could click in time with the metronome. Sunlight came to her skin first as fire. And she said watch as her body burned down like an incense cone starting with her head, a thousand points of ash scrolling down her frame as she gave herself permission to translate into a substance that the wind could move. And finally, she moved. Each piece companioned to the unseen. And she said the thing I didn’t know then was that it was okay to let a piece of me die. It was okay to blow away. She left a small diamond on the concrete sidewalk outside the hospital in Taipei, Taiwan. I took the carbon remnant in hand—returned to the brown leather couch, to Moab, the supine position, my own unmoving body making its way from closed eyes to open where I saw red rocks obscured by night. "Found" was written after attending a lecture on the lyric essay, a medium I'd been curious about but hadn't spent much time with as a writer. I've enjoyed exploring the genre, defining and redefining its framework to fit the needs of my writing. It was a breakthrough to crossover into this form, and the piece itself was written at the crossroads between breakdown and breakthrough. Previous SHARI ZOLLINGER is a Salt Lake City-based poet, essayist, and bookseller whose work examines memory, place, and the traces we leave in both landscape and life. She currently reads for Sugar House Review and has spent 25 years in independent bookselling as a buyer and community advocate for literary programs. Her work has appeared in Sugar House Review , Redactions: Poetry & Prose , The Shore Poetry , and Ephemeral Magazine. sharizollinger.substack.com Next