< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Crash Ruminations (excerpt) Karin Anderson The first time I saw Lake Hardy I was ten. The hike is brutal, but I really wanted to make it. Dad woke me a four-thirty in the morning and we loaded our gear into the back of his old sky-blue pickup. This was just before Lone Peak and most of the surrounding ranges were designated a Federal Wilderness Area. We didn’t at the time see the point, as the whole state except Salt Lake City was more or less wilderness. Now I’m dazzled by the foresight; the Wasatch Front is on the most populous and sprawling geographies of the Mountain West. Dad pushed the truck up the old sheep road until it killed on sheer steepness. He left it in gear and pulled the emergency brake and just left it there, clinging to the face of First Hammengog. He tossed me my lunch and canteen and we started the legwork: up the front of “First,” reaching the first stand of high pines and crossing the meadow at “Second.” We hauled up the ruthless switchbacks to the spine dividing the Hammengogs from the Intake canyon, clawed up the nearly vertical apex, leveled off for an eastern traverse across the base of the granite peaks. Then we dropped into the hanging meadow, Grassy Flat, and followed the stream and its iron-stained granite boulders up to the lake. Lake Hardy is an irregular blue circle, about a hundred yards across. Fractured granite cliffs rise from the north shore, and a ponderous granite stairway rises on the west. South is the route back to Grassy Flat. The ridge where the little Boeing crashed in 1931 is another hour or two above the lake, depending on the hiker. Between the lake and the airplane ridge, and east-north curve, the passage is pure stone, not in smooth sheets but in huge broken pieces, big as Volkswagens, big as boxcars. My father was a wonderful childhood dad, funny, generous, confiding. He remained funny and generous, rampant with stories and pronouncements, but as an adult, of course, I comprehended the edges and realized how little clear access he gave to anyone. When I was ten he simply dazzled me. We talked and laughed and stopped to breathe and be breath-taken all the way up. We ate sandwiches and Hershey chocolate under a hanging rock. He shoved me up that skinny razorback ridge and told me I could make it, and so I knew I could. My legs were shaking and I felt giddy at the summit, below Lone Peak itself but still ten and a half thousand feet above sea level. Dad grasped my ankles while I stretched full length across a skyline boulder and hung my arms and head over the airplane cliff. The wall dropped sheer for three hundred feet, then angled just enough for a spectacular bounce. I imagined that if someone pushed off hard, she might clear the angled slope and take the whole drop in one shot, all eight hundred feet. I felt my hair fly back with the updraft. Because I have been to the lake many times since, I know that at seven or seven-thirty on a summer evening the wind ceases and the lake goes still, perfectly. The motion settles and the lake turns into a huge silver hole, no longer water but a perfect inversion of the cliffs and sky and sparse pines above. It looks like the entrance to a parallel world, an inside that actually corresponds with the outside, the depth revealing the surface, the release point. Seeing the silver hole makes it easy to think you could walk right down into it. Alpine folklore claims that Lake Hardy, a volcanic opening, has no bottom. “Once, the Forest Service took a pack train up with spools of bailing twine,” my fifth-grade teacher, also a summer ranger at Timpanogos Cave, told us . “They went out to the middle of the lake in a rubber raft and let down the weighted twine, just keep unreeling and unreeling, tying each end to the next spool and then another, until there wasn’t any left. So they dropped the line and went home.” For some reason this story made us feel important. Souvenirs of my first hike: a piece of brittle airplane aluminum. Image of my father, grinning, a young man, proud of me. Invisible imprint of his grip around my ankles. First published in Saranac Review , Winter 2009. The full version of “Crash Ruminations” weaves stories of three different airplane crashes that affect my personal history. Writing this piece allowed me to trace meaningful elements of my relationship with my compelling, complicated father in a tempestuous season. Plane crash #1: the wreck of a 1931 Boeing, pre-radar, carrying mail and a few passengers, lost in snowy mountain cliffs above my hometown. Crash #2: the explosion of a DeHavilland Comet, the first commercial passenger jet line, over the Mediterranean Sea, carrying (and killing) my father’s father in 1954. Crash #3: a boink-by-boink dismantling of a Piper Arrow at the Provo Airport in 1987, poorly landed by me (and a panicked flight instructor). Previous 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

11/8/16 by Joe Sacksteder God called to our fathers, Take your children, the ones whom you love, and offer them as burnt sacrifices. We walked with our fathers to the mountain, performed the chores they set us —fetched wood, built an altar— though we’d guessed the reason for our fathers’ silence before we caught the glint of silver. God campaigning elsewhere, his messenger called out, Do not reach your hand against your children, for I know now that you fear God. Hearing wrong, fearing wrong —or just angry at the wasted day— our fathers killed us anyway. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue Soon after the 2016 election, my PhD exam reading list sent me to the Rare Books Department at the University of Utah's Marriott Library to leaf white-gloved through the Book of Genesis. My mentor Melanie Rae Thon had suggested it, the Robert Alter translation. I'd held the Bible in great esteem as a young person but was feeling at a low point of charity toward a text that so many voting Americans were warping and being warped by. This poem, always a grim favorite of mine, popped into my head fully formed, a kind of revenge. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JOE SACKSTEDER is the author of the short story collection Make/Shift (Sarabande Books), the novel Driftless Quintet (Schaffner Press), and an album of audio collages Fugitive Traces (Punctum Books). His experimental horror novel, Hack House, is forthcoming from Astrophil Press. joesacksteder.com Next - Tuesday Night Bieber by Joe Sacksteder Next

klipschutz < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Ballad of U and Me klipschutz 00:00 / 00:52 Ballad of U and Me klipschutz You did not want me for an ardent suitor Yet you did not want me to forget you to forget you and your green eyes You did not choose me over any other But your brow forbade me to abandon you to abandon you and your red mouth You did not see me underneath your window When you summoned me to look up at you to look up at you and your black skirt I did not chase you through the mails or meadows For to make you mine without knowing how— green eyes red mouth black skirt Romance: the headiness of infatuation: the pursuit; catching up and being caught up with. Falling into each other’s arms: a mutual breaking down of resistance. Previous klipschutz (pen name of Kurt Lipschutz ) is a poet, songwriter, editor, and occasional literary journalist. He has been based in San Francisco since 1980. klipschutz.com Next

The Dream by Shanan Ballam the shiny taste of rain when I inhale love leads us back to the things of this world the pink roses unfurl perfume the moon is a white lily about to bloom having a stroke erases half the world half your working body and your voice the owl in the willow is a ghost it calls to me through the open night window, calls to me in my dreams in smeared colors it sounds like windchimes my lips taste like lilies— the cold scent of rain on stones— a dark curtain embroidered with light the owl is a prophetess singing to me in my sleep the owl is a part of the willow tree is a part of my heart whispering you will recover fragrance of lilies in a glass vase the crabapple tree is dotted with pearls of rain my lips taste like water that is: they have no taste the rain has turned to snow it floats down in swirling spirals like falling into a dream the windchime speaks in the voice of god like a waterfall, fluid, like the song of a canyon wren tumbling down the canyon last night I dreamed I could walk again Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue First published in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature . From first poems after the stroke (Finishing Line Press, 2024). I survived a massive stroke on January 9, 2022. I had expressive aphasia—an inability to speak. This is one of my favorite poems because my speech therapist told me to observe what was around me and to focus on details. I used an exercise called “20 Little Poetry Projects” to get me started, and it asks you to focus on the five senses and to add synesthesia, mixing the senses. .................................................................................................................................................................................... SHANAN BALLAM is the author of the poetry manuscripts The Red Riding Hood Papers (Finishing Line Press, 2010), Pretty Marrow (Negative Capability, 2013), Inside the Animal (Main Street Rag, 2019), and the chapbook first poems after the stroke (Finishing Line Press, 2024). shananballam.org Next - July by Shanan Ballam Next