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< 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

northern climate II by Gabriela Halas New morning ice floats the bay, or old fragments that calved as we blinked the days past. The scour of stranded crystals unfold as water resigns to stay. Once this bay held fast as I moved the dogs across — unsheathed the shape and shiver, the steadfast lock of mid-winter. Now I watch the land emit another kind of chorus, a cacophony of flats and sharps unfamiliar to my ears. The dogs, unable to match the measure, fall through thinned aufeis, halt in lead — my urging ended in spurious falsetto. Lungs work at half capacity, the patterned inhale and exhale of an un-patterned bay. Faithless in a future we thought would never arrive. The water, bewildered, as loosened methane destabilizes what we once trusted. Lost in a seismic language, untranslatable as a colonizer’s tongue. The dark imprint of unrequited ground. I hear an old man speak of glacier’s gone: will the river flow, it’s steady lilt, by rain alone? We should fear the shoals who rock glinting bodies out of time. In the retreat of all named matter, I hear the discord rumble on — the fight of voices gathers. A recoil from our role in all things large, mysterious. The dogs turn to me, huddle in question, eyes as brown as an Arctic March. No answer for the soft ground pressed between their toes. I unhook each in turn, let the lead run on, while the others collect in whimpered harmony. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue First published in The Louisville Review. "Northern Climate II" is about being on a northern landscape and witnessing change. The body feels and conveys all in these poems. .................................................................................................................................................................................... GABRIELA HALAS immigrated to Canada during the early 1980s, grew up in Alberta, lived in Alaska for seven years, and currently resides in British Columbia. She has published poetry in a variety of literary journals including The Antigonish Review , Cider Press Review , About Place Journal , Prairie Fire , december magazine , and The Hopper , among others; fiction in Room Magazine , Ruminate , The Hopper , and subTerrain, among others; and nonfiction in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Whitefish Review , Grain , Pilgrimage , and High Country News . She won first prize for her poetry chapbook Bloodwater Tint from Backbone Press (forthcoming). She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and lives and writes on Ktunaxa Nation land. gabrielahalas.org Next - Some Things to Do in the Face of Death by Jim LaVilla-Havelin Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue SUMMONING Shari Zollinger “I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.” – Jeanette Winterson What if we were born with an assumption, we tiny creatures without verbal webbing in our already formed pulsing cortexes, and what if that assumption was simply that we belong to the world and the world belongs to us—even while our gooey little bodies spill out into gravity? And how do we reconcile the betrayal we feel when we learn that belonging never was the static act of our grand assumption? That we'll have to walk round its bend repeatedly, that we'll get caught inside the crook of its elbow, that we’ll get lost. I once tried a thing called soul retrieval. A bandied term that lies thick with ambiguity. The practitioner lay by my side, hip to hip, after calling upon the four directions. She took the responsibility for driving from me for just a moment, and I was grateful. A relief to let her hold the space for this expedition, as I handed over my consent for her to act upon my body, just this once—not as renunciation but investigation. To scry inside my webbing long enough to see what I’d not seen. To lead me through a matrix of memory. After I lay on the decorative rug next to her for some time, she sat up with a story to tell. Was this what she meant by retrieval, reaching for what had been dropped into the margins and carrying it home? Her story was about a rock. The rock was in the hand of a girl. The hand of the girl was clenched around the rock. The rock and the girl were asleep deep underground. The girl was eight years old. As the rush of the story came into our space, I thought, well, there was a time when I was eight years old, when we were exiled from the sprawling Mormon farm full of cousins, playmates and caretakers. We were given orders to leave. Reasons as messy as families are, the breaking fraught with financial mistakes, personality conflicts, scapegoats. And because I was eight, and I didn’t know that eventually I’d break with this tribe deliberately, I’d taken the orders as religious gospel. As once we might belong, so too shall we not. We became, in my eight-year-old head, the Boxcar Children looking for pine needle beds. And because we were used to caretakers in multitudes, how then would we survive, being reduced to two parents who’d possibly never considered that they’d have to bear the emotional weight of 9 children on their own? What if this story buried itself inside a rock in a small bird-claw-hand, deep under the earth, because this girl simply didn’t want to leave? Perhaps at that point, she’d searched the farm, walking dusty paths by the cow corral, next to the silage pit, underneath the red-twined hay bales for a place to bury one piece of her with a rock to keep her company. She’d allow this separation because, although leaving was inevitable, perhaps it could be mitigated by letting one piece stay—the rock piece. How long do we stay in a place with our hands wrapped around stone? Then the practitioner excavated the metaphorical rock and in shamanic ritual, blew it back into my belly, creating a crossroads of then and now, where something lost was found—something buried, reclaimed: the revolutionary act of remembering. "Summoning" debuted alongside a film by Amanda Madden, A Spell for Queer Home , in 2023 in Moab, Utah. In this lyric essay, the summoner leads a seeker to revisit childhood traumas and achieve a 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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue REAL ESTATE Marjorie Maddox At 92, my mother was the house I forgot I once lived in. With her bad hips, curved spine, and one missing breast, she’d still power-wash dirt off her beige, still accessorize with seasonal décor— poinsettia scarves and earrings, pastels for spring, no white after Labor Day. She’d still shuffle to the mirror to touch up the exterior with red lipstick, then welcome me home to the home that was her home away from home where living was assisted. When she pursed her lips in the Community Room in this old but beautiful house of hers where the bones of her foundation creaked, she didn’t see how her right shoulder, lower than the left, jutted just so toward the one eligible bachelor of 95 in the paisley-decorated room where she refused to fall apart or age, flirting all the way through supper— beef stew, fried chicken, or fish fillet served each evening at 5:00 pm sharp in the cozy dining room wallpapered with cottages of Cape Cod. Once, when we called her room, she wasn’t there. Once when we called after dinner, she wasn’t there. Once, or maybe more than once, this proper structure of a woman, circa 1929, retired to the bedroom on a “date” with an older man, both politely glued to Jimmy Stewart on a wide-screen TV larger than any she’d ever owned in the suburban home she owned with my father. My mother, too prim to breastfeed; who weathered two husbands (heart attack and Alzheimer’s); my mother who went back to work at forty and won awards selling real estate, top in her office; my mother whose baby body was a house abandoned by an architect and his lover, and then again by the new owner. This mother of mine, this house in which I’d lived, then lived outside of for sixty-two years, now clean and tidy, now emptied out, now for sale, now nobody’s home. It’s been almost five years since my mother’s death. Before her passing, I penned the collection, Seeing Things (Wildhouse Publishing, 2025) intricately exploring what it meant to be the daughter of a mother with dementia. As my mother’s memories floated away, my grief came slow and steady, so much so that after she died, it seemed there were no more grief poems to write. That changed this week. Unexpectantly, when I responded to a prompt on “houses,” fresh grief broke through. Today, I give you “Real Estate,” a poem that has now given me permission to write more poems on loss. 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

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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue LET'S SAY Maureen Clark there is not a happy ending here the man stuck upside down in the cave will die what then? you will keep living more empty days you’ve begged before and no one came to save you there was no stretcher hauled out with a body breathing but broken mud and dirt worth the life how do you walk away without the rescue live the rest of your life with the always lost In trying to find new ways to deal with difficult subjects, I wrote in the Italian Rispetto form: eight lines, eleven syllables in each line. I like the way a very complex idea fits into this container, like a bento box. "let's say" was published in Sonic Boom . Previous MAUREEN CLARK is the author of the poetry collection This Insatiable August (Signature Books, 2024 ) and has received two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her memoir, Falling into Bountiful: Confessions of a Since Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl , is forthcoming from Hypatia Press. maureenclark.art Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue THIS HORSE IS THE BOSS OF ME Mike Wilson An opening in the ground in my chest opens a box that opens another world bigger clear, silver, and empty like Montana. # Steel spurs on my boots are for show: the barest motion sends the horse galloping through frictionless pixelation intimate as my retina. This mind-blind land is beyond my ken. I trust the horse to carry me where I should go. "This Horse is the Boss of Me" describes breaking through to the other side, as Jim Morrison put it, where desire carries us through a land we normally cannot see. Previous MIKE WILSON 'S work has appeared in many magazines and in his poetry collections, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic (Rabbit House Press, 2020) and Before the Fall (Kelsay Books, 2026) , as well as a debut novel, Food Court , forthcoming in 2026. Mike lives in Lexington, Kentucky. mikewilsonwriter.com Next