Mastering the Hunt In Britain, a "red woven hood" was the distinguishing mark of a prophetess or priestess. The story's original victim would not have been the red-clad Virgin but the hunter, as Lord of the Hunt. —The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Lisa Chavez We smell him before we sight him—human rank, scent threaded with death. The grandmother waits in the cave’s mouth on her haunches, scratching at fleas. We gather in the shadows, watch him approach. He is a northerner, pale mane tangled with leaves, hair on his face darker and ragged. He’s dressed in fur—on his head a cap fashioned of a wolf’s face, wizened by death. Empty eyes above his own. Some of us turn away from that gaze He is the master of the hunt, separated from his pack. It’s dusk, early autumn. We streak forward, register his surprise. From the cave, the grandmother howls with laughter. He cocks his head. Looks at us. What does he see? Our beauty. Our flowing hair and red caps. The tilt of our eyes, golden and curious. He relaxes. One of us nuzzles his throat; another lowers herself before him with beguiling glance. He feels our hands, our tongues. When he sees our teeth he falters, but we have already relieved him of his clothes, his spear. When the grandmother joins us, we finish what we’ve begun. Brindled in blood, we lick ourselves clean, our bellies distended as if with stone. Then we rise, shake off these pale skins and lope away beneath the trees, the sky pelt dark, and the moon watching like a wolf’s amber eye. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Published in Red Rock Review and Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press, 2015). I have long been interested in fairy tales, especially ones that involve animals and transformation. This published poem was part of a series I was writing about animals and transformation. I always rooted for the animals as a child, and was particularly disturbed by the wolf’s death in “Little Red Riding Hood.” I suppose this poem is my way of finding justice for the wolves. .................................................................................................................................................................................... LISA CHAVEZ is a poet and memoirist from Alaska now living in the mountains of New Mexico with a pack of Japanese dogs. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Mexico and is the author of In An Angry Season (University of Arizona Press, 2001) and Destruction Bay (West End Press, 1998). Next - The Fox's Nonce Sonnet by Lisa Chavez Next

Sacrament Meeting Started the Three Hours of Church on Sunday by Natalie Padilla Young A friend taught her how to pass the time: flip through the hymn book and add “in the bathtub” after any song title: How Great Thou Art…in the Bathtub Now Let Us Rejoice…in the Bathtub Did You Think to Pray in the Bathtub? Know This, That Every Soul Is Free in the Bathtub. An hour of speeches broken up by hymns, prayers and eating Christ’s blood and body (blessed, white Wonder Bread and a doll’s cup of water for each worthy member). She no longer sits through church meetings or questions her questioning, though often hums those hymns around the house, slips holy ingrained choruses into a tub of hot water. Ears immersed, she can hear the sounds of her own choir. The heart’s bahdum, bah-dum bahdum, too fast for its own good. Rejoice a Glorious Sound Is Heard…in the Bathtub. From a gurgle to a shout, rustling empty stomach. Whooshes of breath tunnel in and out. Hard enough to simply sit still, then left to a porcelain amphitheater— Where Can I Turn for Peace? In the bathtub thoughts thud and whirl. Come Along, Come Along With All the Power of Heart and Tongue. Maintenance of this submerged body too tough, too much Master the Tempest Is Raging. Not enough still, small whisper: Ye Simple Souls Who Stray Let Us All Press On. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue First published in The Wax Paper and All of This Was Once Under Water (Quarter Press, 2023). I’m terrible at picking a favorite of almost anything, so I chose this previously published because I am proud of the craft. It does a lot of lifting to fill what was a gap in the manuscript/book, combining humor and religion, while helping to flesh out one of the main characters. .................................................................................................................................................................................... NATALIE PADILLA YOUNG co-founded and manages Sugar House Review . Author of All of This Was Once Under Water (Quarter Press, 2023). natalieyoungarts.com Next - Teddy Thompson Croons Leonard Cohen by Natalie Padilla Young Next

I'd Rather Be Influenced by Patrick Ramsay to send more postcards. To kiss with more tongue and let cantaloupe juice run all the way down to my elbows. I’d rather be influenced to cook more quiche and make cold brew at home. To wake up early and stay in bed. To be better at remembering my friends’ birthdays. To vote early. I want an algorithm that worships heirloom tomatoes. The sound of that one summer cricket outside my window. Peach sorbet with tiny spoons. The way the mountains go copper at dusk. The chatter of your dog laughing in a dream across the room. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue First published in Gwarlingo , "The Sunday Poem." This poem marked the beginning of a new season in my writing. It emerged when I felt like I was finally settling into my life in Utah after years away. More importantly, I was settling into my own voice as a poet. I was slowing down. Whispering instead of yawping. I was making the case for a slower life, one where influencers focus their attention on unsellable glimmers of life beyond the algorithm. James Crews featured it as The Sunday Poem on Gwarlingo and it went viral. Funny enough: many folks sharing it online were the influencer-type who inspired it. .................................................................................................................................................................................... PATRICK RAMSAY is a queer poet & owner of the indie shop Happy Magpie Book & Quill. He explores land, community & heart in Ogden, Utah. patrickramsaypoet.com Next - Before Thirty by Patrick Ramsay Next

Bruce by J. Diego Frey Cattlecar, chicken car, people car caboose. I like red wine. You like red wine. We drink beer with Bruce. Storage building, office building, luggage rack museum. I have no time. You have no time. Bruce is on per diem. Elementary, tertiary, seventh manifold. I'm remorseful. You're remorseful. Bruce keeps us on hold. Doppelganger, pterodactyl, ectoplasm scones. I'll distract him. You vivisect him. Let the desert bleach his bones. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This poem appears in my first collection, Umbrellas or Else (Conundrum Press, 2014). Among other reasons why I am fond of it, it is the oldest poem in the collection, having been written two decades earlier on a train rolling through Nevada. I like to tell myself that I can hear the sound of the train in the lines. Another thing that I enjoy about it: the rhymes and playfulness. It feels very much influenced by one of my primary literary influences: Dr. Seuss. I also feel like I’m being a little bit Robert Frost-y with the tiny meter break in the second to last line. (I admit to some self-aggrandizing here.) Overall, a poem that I still enjoy reciting in public. A little tip: rhyming poems are easier to remember for later recitation. .................................................................................................................................................................................... J. DIEGO FREY is a poet living in the Denver area, which is where he grew up and never completely escaped. He published two quite likable collections of poetry, Umbrellas or Else and The Year the Eggs Cracked with Colorado publisher Conundrum Press. jdiego.com Next - Past Lives.....That's Still a Thing, Right? by J. Diego Frey Next

Knotted Wrack by Maureen Clark I can see now that it was a winter for travel although I never left the house in Bountiful and the cat rarely traveled far from the southern windowsill I traveled to the edge of belief my religion like seaweed tangled around my ankles pleading to some God: help me traverse this trouble the loss of the religion I traveled with my whole life I am searching for the right word to describe this battle with my old self those unpredictable words that I see out there beyond my small life I want to travel to those exotic places where I might find the woman I believe I really am the woman I want to be authentic and unrepentant as thunder and lava the woman just out of my reach the object of all my inner battles I have been defined: weaker sex helpmeet the kept woman goodwife better half one of nature’s agreeable blunders the woman behind the man sister second-class citizen, I live in the heart of Bountiful where my story is full of women ruled by religion women sacrificed to religion for man’s love of God more than woman the tangled sacred sense of God turns out to be the Devil’s shoelace seaweed in thin filaments that trip the logic beached lumps of seaweed the smell of salt a time of wrack and loss and women cast up cast out scapegoats I want a word to describe this kind of wordlessness I am labeled by this language so many words none of them written by women I am not a consolation prize a word that can be underlined pinned down I am the word dangerous the word wild I can only travel in one direction I’ll be a scalpel cutting out the words that insist I take someone else’s word for it not my own here in Bountiful I will weave an elaborately and bountiful life of shells and string and the words I’m not supposed to think question I can’t ask caught in this seaweed my whole life a sweet tangle of weeds separating the self from the saint/sorceress/sinner/seaweed the colors of the ocean I drown in I collect words for kelp: knotted wrack sea whistle gulfweed the cottage industry of green bottle seaweed the metaphor for a woman’s hair what is acceptable what is not chenille seaweed black tang lady wrack carrageen mermaid’s fan I will find a way to travel away from my past unknotting myself travel to an ocean big enough for Saturn to float surrounded by seaweed I will find answers there that I can’t find in Bountiful where I drown in the unappreciated bounty of identical houses a cherry tree in each yard bountiful place in the desert of roses near the Great Salt Lake where no seaweed beaches just crusted salt oolitic sand the bounty of silence of being silenced how ironic that Bountiful is the place where I lose my religion where it’s not just a word for abundance where I am finally full of loss enough to let go and accept the bountiful imperfection of myself this is where I live just a woman who is naming herself one letter at a time a woman who lives in a kind of poverty so rich I can be full of questions my feet bare I carry a jar of ointment I am a traveler looking for answers I will choose what I need to take with me I travel towards my own definition the one I choose I travel alone into this bountiful place to become a woman who gathers words and stones shells and seaweed a woman who hoards her verbs Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue I wrote this poem about fifteen years ago. I was reading the poem “Lennox Hill” by Agha Shahid Ali from his book Rooms Are Never Finished (W.W. Norton, 2001) and the repetition of the Canzone was mesmerizing. This was a poem that took a long time to compose. Any kind of poetic form needs to work without drawing attention to its rhymes and repetitions. The Canzone felt like the perfect form for the project of trying to explain the journey o f a woman leaving the religion she has always belonged to and arriving at a place where she could define herself. The repetition was a good tool for this often-circuitous journey. [Editor’s Note: “Knotted Wrack” has since been published inThis Insatiable August (Signature Books, 2024), and was nominated for The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best of the Small Presses .] .................................................................................................................................................................................... MAUREEN CLARK retired from the University of Utah where she taught writing for 20 years. She was the director of the University Writing Center from 2010-2014, and president of Writers@Work from 1999-2001. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review , Alaska Review , The Southeast Review , and Gettysburg Review among others. Her first book is This Insatiable August (Signature Books, 2024). Next - Acrostic Lifeboat by Maureen Clark Next

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

The Fox's Nonce Sonnet by Lisa Chavez Across the river, trotting, the fox. Who pauses to test the river’s rotten ice with ginger step. Will she trust it this late in the year? She draws back her paw, licks. Appraises the river’s dangerous skin. Looks at me as if to say what purpose, these stories, that make fable of my life? None, I say, but the sheen of dream and magic they lend to our lives. She cocks her head, considering. Squats to piss. She is just an animal, marking with scent. She scratches at her haunch, stands to shake herself, is gone. I’m left alone on the human side, in this territory demarcated by words. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This unpublished poem was inspired by stories of fox wives, animals who transform into humans. This is the final poem of a series that didn’t quite materialize. The poem reflects the longing I felt as I wrote: I wanted transformation too, but to escape words and human constructions. This poem points to the impossibility of that and returns from myth to the real world of the fox. It’s also my only poem written in form. .................................................................................................................................................................................... LISA CHAVEZ is a poet and memoirist from Alaska now living in the mountains of New Mexico with a pack of Japanese dogs. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Mexico and is the author of In An Angry Season (University of Arizona Press, 2001) and Destruction Bay (West End Press, 1998). Next - A Cat Place by Star Coulbrooke Next

Acrostic Lifeboat Take words with you and return to God. Hosea 14:3 by Maureen Clark The bug zapper flashes Morse code, A spark for each dot and dash - saying - pay attention. Words are being Kindled from these fried insects. The rise and fall of empires depend on Each death. Our elliptical orbit brings another year of language. Why would you take words to return to God? Why not bundles of wheat? Oil in clay jars? Fresh baked bread. Why not take salt? Red wine, purple cloth, things more like worship? Depending on the alphabet is risky with its creation of ambiguity Scratched onto vellum, paint on papyrus, so much lost in translation. Poems Written on napkins and grocery receipts. I can’t deny that I’m compelled, enticed even, To thrust my fingers into a bowl of letters and return Holding on for dear life, writing ‘lifeboat’ just in time, Yielding to the possible safety of the right word. Only language can tell our stories. Some letters generate echoes of the Utterly haunting past, mistakes, the resonance of the earth. Any word can be a talisman. I’ve always wanted to Nail down how civilization evolved into writing. I want to write the word Dromedary because the cadence mirrors the way it moves. Ridiculous of course, but I’d ride that one-hump camel to the oasis any day. Even the unvoiced desire can eventually be put into words, and spells To cure warts, whip up a tempest, make a magic potion. Unless words carry different weights like numbers and can be Rounded up or down. Someone show me the runes! Never mind, I’ve wandered off again, Too full of questions that can’t be answered Overwhelmed with finding a word to rhyme with orange, Grappling with the alphabet, the number of syllables in a perfect line, One too many or needing one less. It’s futile. Please take my words God, Do whatever it takes to return to me. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue First published in Utah Lake Stories: Reflections on a Living Landmark (Torrey House Press, 2022). I like to try different poetic forms. I had never tried the acrostic in a serious endeavor, but I found it to the be right fit for this poem and the idea of creating words as a means of returning to God. I also liked how it allowed me to turn the phrasing around so that God needed to return to me. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MAUREEN CLARK retired from the University of Utah where she taught writing for 20 years. She was the director of the University Writing Center from 2010-2014, and president of Writers@Work from 1999-2001. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review , Alaska Review , The Southeast Review , and Gettysburg Review among others. Her first book is This Insatiable August (Signature Books, 2024). Next - The Afternoon on the Sava by Scott Abbott Next

Fireflies by Kevin Prufer He was fifteen and feeling hassled and he asked his mother to please fuck off, so she slapped him hard and told him to get out of the car because he could walk home. + As he walked, his anger smoldered. He imagined her car crushed against a tree, he imagined her pleading for help as he strode right past toward home exactly as she’d commanded— + and half an hour later, as he rounded the corner to their yellow house, he saw her blue Honda in the driveway, and knew she was already at her desk because + it was evening, because she had homework, because she had her accounting class early in the morning at the college and still he was angry, though his anger had lost its focus— + why had he said what he’d said? Why had she slapped her own son? Anyway, he wanted to hate her + but it was a beautiful summer evening, the chirring of crickets, the fireflies— he would remember the fireflies years later rising and falling in the gloom, + his old gray cat uncurling on the porch steps, walking up to him, purring and rubbing her cheek against his leg there beneath the streetlamp. + The cat was long dead, but his mother was still alive. Just today he’d brought her another mystery novel, then sat with her in her hot little apartment while she went on about what someone or other said to someone else, he didn’t try to keep track, + but as she spoke, his mind reached back to that evening long ago, how he’d stood in front of their old yellow house in the hot evening, his hatred dissipating among the now-extinct fireflies that rose and fell above the rhododendrons. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue I’ve always been interested in the way a poem can move through time, making use of white space and shifts in narration to accomplish that movement. Also, how memory works in a poem—how, in this case, the boy’s conflict with his mother in his memory is every bit as real as the present day, when she has grown old and reads mystery novels in the hot little apartment they never lived in together. It’s this telescoping of time and memory that excited me as I wrote this, and the complex dissipation of childhood anger. .................................................................................................................................................................................... KEVIN PRUFER'S newest books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) and Sleepaway: a Novel (Acre Books, 2024). Among his eight other books are Churches , which was named one of the best ten books of 2015 by The New York Times, and How He Loved Them , which was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book from the American literary press. Prufer’s work appears widely in Best American Poetry , The Pushcart Prize Anthology , The Paris Review , and The New Republic , among others. He also directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to rediscovering great, long forgotten authors. kevinprufer.com Next - Automotive by Kevin Prufer Next

Teddy Thompson Croons Leonard Cohen by Natalie Padilla Young tonight will be fine, will be fine, will be fine It’s not even a love song, it’s the last drop of milk on dry cereal: the I that knows small windows, bare walls, a finale of soft naked lady: a sighing stripped, a woman. (Remember that first side sway, first spinning hug with someone of possibility? A lot of sweaty skins ago.) Not just ooh-la-la slow stuff, also others with beats, a call to feet, to hips, to who must swing, must knock the head back in time—not century time, music time—4:4, two-step, whatever. (Try not to remember. You still feel a grapefruit clenched in your chest.) Maybe it’s a full room in coordinated sigh. I know from your eyes, and I know from your smile An exhale in, out of that mouth. Maybe things will work, maybe just fine. (A lot of things conjure craving, but he’s only a man, a man too thin singing sweetly.) At the end, there is plenty and not enough to be so brave and so free In this place without explanation, put Teddy on repeat. Teddy repeats Leonard and someone hums along for a while Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue I must admit I have no clarity with this one—is it the poem or the song that I’m attached to? I wrote this when I heard Teddy Thompson cover Leonard Cohen’s “Tonight Will Be Fine,” initially thinking the lyrics were “tonight we’ll be fine.” I sent this little guy out quite a few times and then benched it for years, until a few months ago when I decided to revive and revise. Maybe go listen to Teddy sing Leonard and see what you think. .................................................................................................................................................................................... NATALIE PADILLA YOUNG co-founded and manages Sugar House Review . Author of All of This Was Once Under Water (Quarter Press, 2023). natalieyoungarts.com Next - The Worrier by Nancy Takacs Next

Ignatius by Karin Anderson My God. Maybe I’ve had enough. Let me go home to my own descendants. Maybe my grandmother was right: why dwell on such tragic tales? You’re in too deep. Sudden withdrawal will harm you, distorting all that you dream. What, like meth? I do not understand your meaning. I do not understand my meaning, either. How do I return? Return is eternal. There is nothing but return. I’m not yet ready to believe that’s true. Derrida says the real future is the one we have never seen. I take that to mean our children may still have a few surprising options. Who the f--- is Derrida? Never mind. Send me one last guide. Someone to help me find my mother’s lost people. Please. I want to bring them to her while I can. So many early deaths—no one to preserve the stories. Her mother’s whole family vanished, so young, so many consecutive generations. So many well-meaning replacements insisting on their erasure. How can you tell a four year-old to quit crying for the sudden disappearance of all she understands? She sure did learn to stop the tears. Taught us to do the same. Do we even exist—did we ever exist—if the stories, even the imperfect ones, even the fragments, dissipate with the tellers? My leg hurts. Mine too. So I want a guide on this one. Rational, undramatic, sympathetic. Like my mother. Woman, all you have to guide you through this last mystery is the internet. You’ve run the well of revelation dry. I’m very old, and I’m tired. You purport to be a scholar, do you not? Find her people within the Babel of that lighted box. They do trace themselves in her; you will recognize them as they speak unto your mind. Give me a head start. How far back before we find something familiar? An origin—not just a genealogy? Not so far, in my reckoning. A long time in yours. Begin in Providence, say, 1800. They are, already, five generations made by this perplexing and violent New World. You will be among fellow Americans. Okay. Two brothers, Silas and Festus Sprague, seven years apart. Twin sisters, Barbara Ann and Millicent Lindenberger. The brothers are first cousins to the sisters. Now a multi-family removal to the Ohio frontier. A ricochet of marriages and a sensible family’s capitulation to a story of American angels. A trek to a landscape alien as a moon. My mother wants me to disentangle an administrative forgetting: “The record says that Barbara Ann is married to either Silas Sprague, or Festus Sprague. Which is it? We need to get it right.” Her urgency is different from mine: she wants to put those old lives in order. She wants to send correct information to Salt Lake City, so the Mormon Church can make the long-ago union eternally official. I wish to deconstruct. But we’re both leaning over the same diorama. So I’ll do the homework, and then I’ll walk her in. I will be my mother’s guide. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue As an ‘apostate,’ I work to redeem idiosyncratic meanings from my Latter-Day Saint and Lutheran heritage. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams (Torrey House Press, 2019) portrays peculiar impacts of ancestry; I “resurrect” genealogical figures by inventing a relationship with the medieval Catholic Saint Ignatius, who taught his followers to meditate on a scriptural story so intensely that they could enter it and converse with its characters. This passage appears late in the book’s sequence, as Ignatius loses patience with his cynical acolyte. .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 - Knotted Wrack by Maureen Clark Next

Interstellar by David Romtvedt When I was a kid I wanted the aliens to land, open the door of their ship and appear, halo of light around their heads, seven-fingered hands in silver gloves waving me on board while speaking some unknown language like French. The years have passed and the ship hasn’t come. I lean out the door and sniff the air, cock my ear listening for the UPS truck in the distance, back ordered package on its way. When the truck stops, I lift my front paws onto the steel step and leap up. The driver leans down biscuit in hand. From the open doorway, I call out, Ne t’inquiètes pas— je t’enverrais une postale , surprising everyone with my knowledge of French. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This poem speaks to the interpenetration of experience and imagination. As a child in a rather unhappy home, I dreamt of flying away with the aliens. Indeed, my wife has said she hopes the aliens never land as she’s certain I’ll get on board. Then there’s my dog who will climb up into any UPS truck he sees. Finally, there’s the dog I’ve not yet met who not only speaks French, but appears to write it, promising to send me a postcard, me promising to send you one. Currently unpublished, “Interstellar” is the opening poem in Still on Earth to be published by the Louisiana State University Press. .................................................................................................................................................................................... DAVID ROMTVEDT'S latest book of poetry is No Way: An American Tao Te Ching (LSU Press, 2021). He was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in southern Arizona. He graduated from Reed College, with a BA in American Studies and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a graduate fellow in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. After serving in the Peace Corps in Zaïre (currently Congo) and Rwanda and on a sister city construction project in Jalapa, Nicaragua, he worked as the folk arts program manager for the Centrum Foundation. He has worked as a carpenter, tree planter, truck driver, bookstore clerk, assembly line operative, letter carrier, blueberry picker, ranch hand, and college professor. A recipient of two NEA fellowships, The Pushcart Prize , and the Wyoming Governor's Arts Award, Romtvedt served as the poet laureate of the state of Wyoming from 2003 to 2011. davidromtvedt.com Next - Sunday Morning Early by David Romtvedt Next