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

Sinatra, Sinatra by Paul Fericano Sexual reference: a protruding sinatra is often laughed at by serious women. Medical procedure: a malignant sinatra must be cut out by a skilled surgeon. Violent persuasion: a sawed-off sinatra is a dangerous weapon at close range. Congressional question: Do you deny the charge of ever being involved in organized sinatra? Prepared statement: Kiss my sinatra. Blow it out your sinatra. Financial question: Will supply-side sinatra halt inflation? Empty expression: The sinatra stops here. The sinatra is quicker than the eye. Strategic question: Do you think it’s possible to win a limited nuclear sinatra? Stupid assertion: Eat sinatra. Hail Mary full of sinatra. Serious reflection: Sinatra this, sinatra that. Sinatra do, sinatra don’t. Sinatra come, sinatra go. There’s no sinatra like show sinatra. Historical question: Is the poet who wrote this poem still alive? Biblical fact: Man does not live by sinatra alone. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue “Sinatra, Sinatra” was responsible for cementing (pun intended) my so-called reputation as a social and political satirist. Being an outlaw member of a poetry scene that seemed to have little interest in, or understanding of, the art of satire, I was constantly pushing myself and the envelope. The poem, a takedown of extreme conservative politics that used Sinatra’s name in vain, was completed in early 1982 after many drafts. The poem actually managed to attract the attention of Frank Sinatra and get under his skin (again, pun intended). It provoked some poetry lovers to dismiss me and the poem outright (this was, after all, the Reagan era). But it also motivated many others who didn’t really read poems to actually read mine. This favorite was the lynchpin for the 1982 Howitzer Prize, a literary hoax that mocked the absurdity of all competitive awards. After the intended target (Poets & Writers) was hit dead center, I dutifully exposed the hoax myself. This caused the usual righteous indignation and predictable blacklisting. But the overwhelming support of those who clearly got the message (and the joke) was all the more satisfying. .................................................................................................................................................................................... PAUL FERICANO is the author of Things That Go Trump in the Night: Poems of Treason and Resistance (Poems-For-All Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Bulitzer Prize. yunews.com Next - Sacrament Meeting Started the Three Hours of Church on Sunday by Natalie Padilla Young Next

The Lure of the Unfinished for Elise Cowen by Amy Gerstler intercepted mid brush stroke those who die young or trun- cated loom still wet with potential those who elude us who fled into death their echoes gnaw at our future and we the abandoned remain unfinished too friends/lovers/ interrupted mid gesture or caress given the slip by loves gone to fossil or scholars' fodder or life-size paper dolls we chase through dreams we cast them in roles they never auditioned for blurred wrecks at rest on the sea floor fish flit through their dissipating hulls sentiment clouds the water their incompleteness = infinite possibility how ravenously I wish her back during nights spent struggling (without success) to decipher her handwriting— Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue This is a recent poem, sparked by reading the work of Elise Cowen, a female Beat poet whose small but intriguing body of work was a revelation. She died at 28, so I was left wanting more, troubled by regret about those who die young, wishing it could have been different. My excitement about her work was inextricable from an elegiac feeling. I'm fond of the poem because it's a document in which I try to contemplate and honor the effect her work had on me, and my sadness re: lives cut short. .................................................................................................................................................................................... AMY GERSTLER has published ten books of poetry and received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Los Angeles. poetryfoundation.org/poets/amy-gerstler Next Next - Reading by Natasha Saj é

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue WEST ON PICCADILLY Shauri Cherie Stop for a moment to feel the air grow colder, chilled by the rush of passersby milling on steps, on escalators, staying on the right to make way for those rushing for the platform. Take a step and listen to the sound of footfall and the grind of the train on the rail and the faint trill of Mind the gap over the speakers. Push between two teenagers stumbling out onto the platform for Russell Square. There’s little room on the Tube at this hour, but squeeze yourself into a corner, wrap your hand around the bar, and bear it as more and more people crowd around you. Some might have come from King’s Cross (they keep luggage tucked protectively between their knees as if anticipating the worst) or perhaps they’re on the journey home tonight (the woman next to you has mascara smudged beneath her eyelids and a seated old man is slumped forward onto his wrinkled palms). The doors will shut behind with a mechanical hiss. Sway with the lurch of the train as it departs, see a girl holding her mother’s hand shift her footing. The train twists and turns and tilts until brakes squeal to a stop at Holborn, Covent Garden, and, finally, Leicester Square. The doors open to a white-tiled wall, and here, the people move faster, faster, faster, so pause in this moment to watch the tide of bodies swell around you. Wait to watch a group of girls sway concert-drunk and tourists take selfies to post on Instagram, men hovering next to their wives, children swinging their feet in their seats while parents shush them and apologize to those seated beside. Wait here until the doors begin to hiss once more, then you, an American in a country that isn’t your own, step off the Tube and onto the platform, careful to mind the gap. "West on Piccadilly" was the first poem I wrote for my European travel lyric sequence as an undergrad. It was originally published in Outrageous Fortune , but this version has been edited in preparation for a chapbook. It's sensory-focused, meant to capture the barrage overwhelming the senses of someone from a rural Utah town in the heart of London. It was a breakthrough experience that boosted my confidence, and rereading it brings the Tube vividly back again. Previous SHAURI CHERIE is easily excited by travel, curry, and stingrays. Her work appears in Trace Fossils Review , Ghost Light Lit , and others. shauricherie.com 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

Barbara Huntington < Back to Breakthroughs Issue SHIFT Barbara Huntington 00:00 / 00:41 SHIFT Barbara Huntington Sit on meditation bench something happens, doesn’t mind falls into abyss No words, no images bow to towering stone Buddha sit on meditation bench Above me the Buddha sits serene below the Buddha I bow something happens, doesn’t I am the one who bows to the stone Buddha I am the statue that crumbles as it bows to me mind falls into abyss I wrote "Shift" on a day when I was at a five-day silent Buddhist retreat in the desert in Joshua Tree, California, just sitting and meditating when I found myself both on the meditation bench facing the Buddha statue, and also as the Buddha statue facing me. I wrote it as a way to remember the time I felt my consciousness shift. Previous BARBARA HUNTINGTON was born in Albuquerque, NM and recently retired as Director of the Preprofessional Advising Office at San Diego State University. She has written poetry, children's books, memoir, and a handbook about how to get into the school of your choice, and her students who overcame tremendous odds to become wonderful healers as physicians, pharmacists, dentists, veterinarians, physician assistants, optometrists, chiropractors, and naturopathic doctors. barbarahuntington.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

This Poem is Backlit by Alexandra van de Kamp by shoeshine clouds and wreathed in a resonant sneeze. This poem wants another cup of caffeine to take on the headlines again, with state legislatures voting mean. Can I have another umbrella, please, for this senior citizen whose been standing in the sultry heat, for the woman with the unkempt hair trying to vote as the rain drains down her rumpled coat? This poem smells of crushed sage from a walk in Spain and the mountain in North Wales I tried to climb when I was twenty. Note to self: avoid rubber-soled boots when knee-deep in snow and hiking with beer-smitten geology students. Dear Reader: Don’t underestimate how much it takes to get perspective on the moment you are in. This poem is a bouquet of yes’s—some of them happier than others, such as the yes to marrying my husband at 32. Not the yes to the Oxford grad I met on a London train who was aghast when I told him I was still a virgin and asked me back to a dingy hotel by the station. Not his hands like oil slick on my skin and the stare of the receptionist when we arrived, like I was some kidnapped teenage bride. This poem is a roll call on all that a poem can’t solve: the people who furl their tongues so silkily around a lie, gods of their own slick, gnarly gardens—the squash and radishes sweating in the August sun. This poem is not the height of the Eiffel Tower when you place its pages end-to-end, not the hotel where I stayed in the Latin Quarter, with its bulging walls and motorcycle bar downstairs. My sister and I had to pay 10 centimes to use the bathroom in the hall. This poem is not those centimes but it could, if required, become an umbrella, a tiny and limber roof of breath held over your soft and dimpled head. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue I like this poem because of how it allows itself to make leaps from headlines and state legislatures to hiking in North Wales, youthful indiscretions, and needing 10 centimes to access a hotel bathroom in Paris. I thought of this as a type of ars poetica when I wrote it—a poem pushing at the boundaries of what could fit into one poem and, simultaneously, a poem describing what a poem can be. I also enjoy the sense of play at work here that allowed me to open up what I included within this poem. I’m not sure all the leaps and images cohere, but then I also like this poem for that! .................................................................................................................................................................................... ALEXANDRA VAN DE KAMP is the Executive Director for Gemini Ink, San Antonio’s Writing Arts Center. Her most recent book of poems is Ricochet Script (Next Page Press, 2022). alexandravandekamppoet.com Next - Day Dreaming by Stacy Julin Next

Nano Taggart < Back to Breakthroughs Issue ON SELECTING THE CONTENTS OF CARE PACKAGE NUMBER THREE Nano Taggart 00:00 / 01:12 ON SELECTING THE CONTENTS OF CARE PACKAGE NUMBER THREE Nano Taggart We can’t help and we can’t help but postpone grief with something. Our hero had given up but hope has again regained hold. Isn’t it strange that zero isn’t nothing? And so we learn you can buy time (once it's running out) with winter’s inversion bearing down so low we could lose the sun if we didn’t know where to look. It's strange to know that zero had to be invented as I notice Natalie’s row of unlit candles has collected a thin skin. What would you mail a twenty-five-year-old who's dying? Hand- written notes from all of us. Knick-knacks of short purpose? We feel as though we’ve cut a larger hole around a hole. It’s stranger still that zero was invented independently and all over. It’s not the same as nothing. We’re making a list. A short list. Originally published in The Shore , this poem addresses the helplessness that hollows us out once we hear the clock's awful ticking on a loved one; in this case, Clark Gunnel (d. June 15, 2012). It went through more drafts than I can count over the course of more than a decade. Previous NANO TAGGART is a founding editor of Sugar House Review , and would like to meet your dog. Next

Your Last Day in Madison by Jennifer Tonge you tell me to come over and I do, to hover helpless while you clean. Finally I can't take it and wipe out the fridge, that old song from Hee Haw twanging in my head—Gloom, despair, and agony on meee. . . I am trying to cheer myself, and it is a bitter cheer: Here's to you leaving me destitute, deprived of a movie companion and provider of sliced pears and tea, gossip, and the Sunday crossword; bereft of conversation, lurching with pauses and laced like a punch with your startling, sly wit; of margaritas on the porch, freezing under blankets, even though it's May, and Hank Williams, Sr., retrospectives. Gloooom, despairrrr. . . I scrub my guts out. You're the only friend I have who’d consider buying a mint-green polyester suit, or rent Island of Lost Souls just to hear the line, The stubborn beast-flesh creeping back. In the front room, after the fridge, I pace tight circles on the barren floor, an augur turning with grim purpose: I will not cry. I will not cry. You say, You're not going to start crying, are you? You look like a little boy who's lost his wagon. Already you've finished, and tell me to come out with you onto the jetty, where you take my photograph. I try to look summery. Then we sit down together and you eat your lemon sorbet. I stretch my legs out, wary in the sun, regarding the tree that swoons at the edge of the lake. Soon you’ll get into your yellow truck and drive away. We don’t say much; there’s not much we can say. Our sadness is inarticulate, previous to the glib deflections of the screen, beyond the pale of the pop songs. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Most of my favorite poems have been published, but this one remains in my finished-but-unpublished folder after many years and many submissions and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s too sentimental? Maybe it’s to narrative? I don’t know. I like it because it’s both playful and sad, as I was on that last day in Madison with my friend. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JENNIFER TONGE Received an MFA from the University of Utah. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Quarterly West , Poetry , Ploughshares , New England Review , and Bellingham Review . The recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ucross Foundation, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Tonge has taught creative writing at the universities of Utah, Wisconsin, and Texas as well as at Butler University. She served as poetry editor of Quarterly West , as president of Writers@Work, on the board of City Art, and as associate editor at Dawn Marano and Associates. She lives and tends cats in Salt Lake City. Next - Stand Up Comedy by Joel Long Next

The Black Flies of Home by Brock Dethier Black flies dance in the air between my head and my brother’s, distorting the view. We sit on pinkish granite smoothed and sloped by retreating glaciers ten millennia ago. Below us, the Rocky Branch of the Saco River, then the ridge that leads from Stanton and Pickering all the way up to Davis, Isolation, and Washington itself. Farther west, the ski trail scars of Mt. Attitash, still the new ski area, though it opened in 1965. Black flies are small, hard to see, quiet. They like warm sheltered places-- behind your ear or knee. They follow the blood others have left. And bite. I react with large hard itchy welts that I scratch bloody in my sleep. Mosquitoes are everywhere but I’ve never seen black flies outside New England, so their presence is a special “welcome home!” to the region. Around us, blueberry bushes with subtle flowers-- little cream bells that will become the fruit of the New Hampshire gods-- rhodora about to brighten the ledges with cerise blossoms, grus eroded from the ledges filling the cracks between them, sweet fern. I wasn’t aware of being bitten but I find blood behind my ear. Within our view, we’ve skied both downhill and cross country, canoed, floated, kayaked, swam, hiked of course. We were born just out of sight to the left. We’ve come in search of iron mines and leave with sparkly ore, black fly bumps starting to itch, and a few crystals to take back west to what still seems after 26 years a temporary home. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Issue 1 Few who have experienced New England’s black flies would argue that they make the world a better place, yet for people who have grown up with them, the flies mean home. Having spent half my life in New England and half in Utah, I’m interested in how we think about “home,” and this unpublished, personal poem tries to illuminate the complexities of the concept and to highlight the irony that sometimes what bugs you may come to signify home for you. .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 - Fireflies by Kevin Prufer Next

Storms, Maybe a Metaphor for Us by Kase Johnstun Storms, here along the Wasatch Front in the summer, change things. They have become so rare that when they do come, they sweep across our landscape like hands picking up lost children. They never last long enough to cleanse us, to give us a fresh start, like the storms did during my youth, but they come to let us know that our skies can, if pushed hard enough, give us rain. Then they leave us to ache for another flash in the sky. We go whole summers without them, the dry and hot air settling in the valley as if it were a squatter claiming its land and unwilling to leave. We pray for it to leave. The high desert cries for a drink. Just the other night, I lay in my son's bed. He and his mom lay in ours. I had a big run the next morning, so I didn't want to bother everyone when I got up early to drink coffee, and eat breakfast before heading out. A storm came. We hadn't had our windows open for days. It was early August, and it had been 99 degrees during the day for more than a week. A stiff air filled the house like a corpse lying immovable in a tomb. The trees began to move outside when I lay down. They moved just a bit at first, so I closed my eyes, crossed my hands over my chest, and tried to sleep. A thwapping sound managed to break through the closed sliding glass door that opens up to a deck outside my son's room. I sat up, looked outside, and saw the limbs of our massive trees begin to sway back and forth. And then a shot of lightning lit the sky over Great Salt Lake. Within moments, I made my way around the home and opened any window that could be opened. I turned on all the fans and then returned to bed. I lay there again. This time, sprawled out, exposing as much of my skin to the cool breeze that I could, its frequent gusts bathing me in damp air. It came in waves at first. A hot wind. A cool breeze. A warm wind. A cooler breeze. A brisk wind. Then it stayed so cool. And then the rain came, and wind carried its scent into the room. I did not want to sleep. Instead, I lay there until 1:00 AM, long after my wife and son had begun to snore together in the room across the hallway. I thought about so many things that night just to keep myself awake, to be able to feel the cold breeze and smell the rain and live in a home that had just taken its first breath of fresh air in months. *** Lightning storms were like magic in our Utah childhood home. During the dry summer, when the lightning came, my dad would turn off the television, turn off the lights in the living room, and open the windows that faced the Weber River. The breeze picked up and turned into a wind. We lived at the mouth of Weber Canyon, so when the winds came, they came hard. They rushed through our open windows and flushed out the stale air of summer. We huddled together on the couch, the four of us, and we watched the darkened skyline. And then the show began. Lightning lit up the hill a mile away like the graceful and powerful legs of ballet dancers, touching down and lifting and touching down again. Moments later, thunder shook our home while we waited for an encore. The house had been filled with the smell of a storm. I placed my hands and arms on the back of the couch and kneeled down and leaned against its soft cushions and watched the skyline drop lightning against the night. Sometimes rain came too. We wouldn't go to bed or turn the television back on until the storm had passed. The breeze would stay all night. The windows would stay open until morning. The next day, the house would smell new. And yes, we would talk about the storm as if it were a new show or movie we had all watched on opening night. In 1999, I would leave Utah to live somewhere else for the first time in m y oung life. I packed up my Toyota and drove across Colorado and most of Kansas. The peaks of the Rocky Mountains faded into the dry detritus of the high plains of Wyoming, the winds covering the road behind me in a whirl of sand and heat and thin air so far above sea level. Denver rose out of the eastern slope and then Kansas came, not like a riptide or a wave or a rush of earth that sprung out of the ground, but like the gentle feel of a morning when there is nothing on the day's agenda, a slow and peaceful rise that can only come from the vast plains of soy and wheat, corn and cattle. That day, the day I left my hometown for the first time, I could have driven across those Kansas plains forever. I was on that first real journey, the one that would change the course of everything I would ever do from then on. They all do. All the big moves. All the moves that promise no real return home to the place where we grew up. The sun sets differently in Kansas than it does in northern Utah. It seems to take its time. In Utah, the sun drops fast over the lake and the Oquirrh Mountains, the peaks of the mountains cutting into its bright orange roundness until they have cut it all the way through. In Kansas, the sun does not 'drop.' It does not 'fall.' The plains stretch out forever toward the horizon. The curve of the earth dips in the farthest distance. And the sun settles on the earth's subtle edge and seems to hold there for hours, the rich reds and oranges and yellows of light dripping onto the plains. And the storms. When I first saw a wall of clouds move across the sky, I was a newbie graduate student; I was still a child. A new friend and I stood in a park in the center of the city of 50,000 people, most of whom were students. We tossed a baseball back and forth. It thwapped in our gloves, leather smacking against leather, moments of clarity and fulfillment that always come, catch after catch, when playing in an open park. We played catch for an hour, just bullshitting about our lives before we moved to central Kansas. We talked about writers we loved while sharing our fragmented, short biographies that we believed to be so rich and full and long at the time, both of us barely nearing our mid-twenties. That's when the storm came. It moved across the plains. The sky turned a hazy green, a Kansan's telltale sign of an oncoming tornado, and then the hail came. My friend and I ran to his car and huddled in the front seats to ride out the storm. He cracked a beer and gave me one. We sat there and watched the storm and listened to the radio as the tornado circled the city; we became friends, sitting in a car, watching the storm roll. Once, while traveling back to Kansas from a long break spent in Utah, a large storm front pushed toward I-70 just past the eastern border of Colorado and the western border of Kansas. Like a wall of black night had come for me, it shot bolts of lightning toward the earth, trumpeters announcing the arrival of a powerful demigod that shook the earth. At the edge of the storm, as if a sharp knife had cut through the clouds, leaving a nearly perfect line between the storm and the open sky, the7 bright, bright blue of a sunny, cloudless day struck a contrast so deep in color and texture that it shocked my senses. And the black wall pushed fast against the blue sky, toward me. Where I came from, from the Mountain West, storms do not come like this. They follow our mountains like trail guides from the Pacific Northwest or come up through the Southwest or from California, slowly. We see them coming a long way away. By the time storms reach Utah, the second driest state in the Union, they have long lost their battle against the high pressure of the mountains or dropped their rain in Oregon or Washington or were weakened in the deserts of Arizona and Las Vegas. Sure, there are winds and rain and thunder and lightning. Now, in a world that we know is getting hotter and in a time when we know a shift in the climate could take the wind and our precious dry snow from us for years, we want the storms to punch us hard in the gut of the valley. In 2001, I left Utah again, only having spent one month there after graduating from school in Kansas, I headed to Dublin, Ireland. In Dublin, my first night, I lay in bed in a convent just outside of Trinity College. The building was completely silent, by rule. The nuns hosted travelers like me who had yet to find a place to live. I checked into the massive, old building with stone archways that bent over the stone floors, all parts of building that have stood longer than Utah has been a state, longer than the Mormon church has existed, before my Hispanic greatgrandfather crossed the Atlantic Ocean and married my Native American great-grandmother, long before any of those things that brought me here, a child in his mid-twenties who lay in his bed. It rained hard outside my window. I would find that this heavy rain was not a storm at all in Ireland, only a shower that came most days in the months leading up to winter. But it was a storm to me, a boy coming from a cold desert in the Rocky Mountains. I listened to the rain pound against the window. I doubted every decision I had ever made in my short life. Relationships. Family. School. Drug use. I lay next to the opened window and listened to the rain hit the exterior walls. It splashed down and puddled up on the window sill and clinked against the fire escape ladder. It smelled so fresh, so real. I missed home. Mostly, I thought about the girl from Kansas I had started to date before I left for Dublin. She is now my wife, nearly 20 years later. As a gift, she sent me away with a folding picture frame, a small, black thing that I could carry in my pocket. When I opened it up, I saw her face. When I pushed a circular black button, she spoke to me through a recording. I opened it every night before I fell asleep, multiple times, and listened to her say 'hello.' Six months later, I drove back to Kansas from Utah to see the same girl who put her picture in that little frame. A storm front moved across the plains toward my truck. At first, I was amazed at how thick and predominant the edge of the front looked, how the defined wall of storm drew a line in the center of the vast blue sky. When the winds picked up and began to blow my truck from side to side on the interstate, and as drivers with Kansas plates began to pull the cars beneath overpasses and put on their hazard lights, the awe of the storm remained, and the darkness moved toward us. I turned on the AM radio and scanned for weather updates. The updates ran on repeat as I drove through small towns, one of the few cars still pushing its way through head and side and tail winds that whipped the one-ton vehicle around like a paper airplane caught in the breeze of a house fan. I never saw the twister, never looked out my front window and saw it coming my way, but the radio, keeping everyone listening up to speed, told me that it chased me northeast toward The Little Apple. I would pass a town sign. The radio's voice would say that the tornado was heading toward that town. I would pass another town sign, and the radio would warn the people there, telling them to listen for the tornado sirens and to get indoors and in their basements. The wind pushed my Toyota back and forth across the barren road. Huge chunks of hail slammed hard into my truck, and the storm chased me. I drove as fast as I could across the plains. I turned off I-70 and the storm turned southwest and the winds calmed, and I waited for my girlfriend, the clouds above us just a hazy gray over bright blue. When she finally came out, our official life together started. Twenty years later, however, I lay in my son's bed, and the upheaval of the choices of my youth have calmed along with rising drought of my Utah home. The cold wind comes into the room and touches all of my exposed skin. My family sleeps so close by, their snores in asynchronous wave together. Mom and son. I think about storms, about rain, about wind, and watch the tree branches waving. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “Storms, Maybe a Metaphor for Us” is one of my favorites, and one I was baffled about when it didn’t find a home. If you know me, I am not very confident in saying that about any of my work! [Editors’ Note: “Storms, Maybe a Metaphor for Us” was nominated for The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best of the Small Presses .] .................................................................................................................................................................................... KASE JOHNSTUN is an award-winning essayist, memoirist, and Manager for The Utah Center for the Book (Library of Congress). Kase is the author of the award-winning memoir Beyond the Grip of Craniosynostosis (McFarland & Co., 2015), the award-winning novel Let the Wild Grasses Grow (Torrey House Press, 2021), and the novel Cast Away (Torrey House Press, 2024). kasejohnstun.com Next - Fake Soldiers by Kase Johnstun Next