Tiananmen Mother for Zhao Ziyang by Michael Wells The Beijing breeze whispers mournful strophes. Tears like the mountain rains follow slopes to tributaries until they become one with the rippling waters of the Yangtze. I am a Tiananmen mother. My eyes have swelled with this sadness before. The wetness follows a path well-rehearsed. My nights are immense. I am a lone bare branch in a dark cold world. They replicate that June night etched in my soul over and over. My son stood in the square armed only with a vision and they came— The People’s Army. My son stood in Tiananmen Square, amid a sea of other sons and daughters and they came— armored tanks clanking along the streets into Tiananmen driven by fear, ordered by paranoia. Our sons and daughters toppled to the earth at their hands. Crimson crawling into every crevice of these ancient streets; a stain still upon us today. I cannot count the nights I have wept for my son since. Today, I weep for another. There is no official news but the Beijing breeze whispers again, this time for the death of the old man. There are guards outside my door. The lump in my throat is big, I cannot begin to swallow. That is how I know the truth. Guilt always gnawing at my heart. I could not help my son that June night. Again as I am helpless. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Originally published by the Independent Chinese PEN Center. This is one of my favorite published pieces because of the story of its metamorphosis. I was at a writers retreat in a small community in Iowa and in a larger breakout group session we were instructed to write a small one to three act play. This was something I was not keen about doing. I think I recall saying out loud, I’m a poet not a playwright with a distinctly sarcastic tone. So I wrote what was on my mind at the time in a two act play. When we later read the work aloud it was very positively received. I came home from the retreat with it and a number of other drafts. I liked the concept and the subject and reworked it into a witness poem with a strong anmemorable impact. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MICHAEL WELLS calls Kansas City home but claims the San Francisco Giants as his baseball team. He is an alumnus of the Writer to Writer program. His genre is primarily poetry. He likes his wine white and his coffee black. michaelwells.ink Next - And Tenured was Dropped from the Dictionary by Michael Wells Next

The Afternoon on the Sava by Scott Abbott 9 April 2013 Every country has its rivers. That afternoon it was the Sava, not far from where it flows into the Danube under the once-stern gaze of Belgrade’s Kalemegdan fortress, far from the lesser rivers of my own American West. A houseboat was the gathering place, a rustic restaurant with no sign to announce its presence. The invitation had come in response to questions about a translation. Peter Handke had replied, in English: “On April 8th I shall be in Belgrade/Serbia. Žarko will come too, also Zlatko. And you??” On the back flap of the envelope, below F-92370 Chaville, was an Arabic word I could not decipher. A friend later told me it was “Chaville.” Packed into a little Peugeot, a big Jeep Cherokee, and a good-sized taxi, the column of friends, fellow travelers, and distant neighbors wound off the backbone of the white city. At the end of a streetcar line in New Belgrade, the Jeep bumped up over the curb and ascended a steep dirt path to the top of a dike. The Peugeot eased tentatively over the curb and up onto the dike. The taxi followed a more circuitous route but found the top of the dike as well. The cars parked and the passengers disembarked. Peter Handke tugged a dark-brown stocking cap over his grey hair. He wore a knee-length black coat, black pants that twice had been lengthened by hand, and high-top black shoes. Dark-haired Sophie Semin wore a long black coat with sleeves colorfully embroidered by her husband. Ljiljane Kapor was youthful in brown pants and a matching jacket. Her attentive assistant Marija had neon-red hair. Maja Kusturica warded off the cold with an elegant white coat and bright blue scarf. Thin-lipped poet Matija Bećković wore a brown coat and a Sherlock Holmes hat. Theater director Mladen Materić’s blue jeans were baggy at the ass. Short-haired novelist and translator Žarko Radaković had no hat but was snug in a brown wool coat. A dark-haired Belgrade journalist and her younger protégé wore dresses under warm coats. And I, a university professor who wanted, someday, to call myself a writer, was comforted by a black coat against which my long grey hair looked nearly white. The first week of April still saw the river at its spring-flood stage, making access from the shore difficult. Wooden steps led down the grassy dike to a long plank bridge that carried the party out between still leafless trees whose trunks seemed surprised to be rising out of the floodwater; at the bridge’s end ten steep steps led down into the shallow water; two weathered planks reached from the last step above water to a forklift pallet; three planks continued the makeshift bridge to a gravel bank from which two steps led up onto a platform supported by four red 55-gallon drums; from that secure perch, thick planks reached onto a long, floating bridge that ended at the door of a low-roofed restaurant for boaters on the Sava River—and on this day, for the eleven guests who had approached over the labyrinthine path. We shed our coats and scarves and hats in a dining room heated by a small wood fire in a cast-iron stove. Windows looked out over the Sava on one side and to the flooded trees on the other. We took seats at a table that stretched the width of the room along two long windows. On the previous night in the Hotel Moskva, so late in the night that the next day had already begun, so late that who knows how many bottles of Riesling, including a special bottle of Morava offered by the attentive hotel manager, had been emptied by the three who remained after the Serbian poet had said good-night and Sophie had gone to bed—on that night before the afternoon on the Sava, Žarko entertained us with stories about a legendary pair of sly and slow-witted characters. Mujo and Haso went to a soccer game. They agreed that whenever either team scored they would drink a pint of beer. The game ended in a 0-0 tie. Let’s go to a basketball game, suggested Haso. Suljo painted a picture with two naked people and took it to a gallery. It is called Mujo in Sarajevo, he told the gallery owner. “Who are the people?” the owner asked. “The woman is Fatima, Mujo’s wife, and the man is Haso.” “And where is Mujo?” “Mujo is in Sarajevo.” Peter claimed he was not a good teller of jokes but that proved to be only partially true. He said, for instance, that he was thinking about repainting Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon . He would paint only one man, he said, a drunk who would stand there contemplating two moons. I was halfway through a long joke before I remembered it required an English-language pun and the joke limped to its conclusion. I mentioned my brother who had died of AIDS two decades earlier and described the book of “fraternal meditations” I was writing: Immortal for Quite Some Time . Peter looked at me curiously: “Du bist mir ein Rätzel.” “I am a puzzle to myself,” I replied. The meal on the houseboat began with a toast: slivovitz in small glasses raised to the Austrian author whom the Kapor Foundation and the Serbian president would honor the next day. Plates of tomatoes, spring onions, radishes, and kajmak cheese were the first course, served with mineral water and carafes of red and white wine. Platters of breaded Sava fish followed, thick fish steaks with roasted potatoes and Serbian salad. My mind slipped to the afternoon at Peter’s house in Chaville. Had it been ten years? Fifteen? Peter sautéed mushrooms and served them with dark bread and Portuguese white wine. H e gave me the first pages of the American translation of Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht and asked for an evaluation. I read a few pages aloud and then pointed out an early sentence that, in the original, ended with an der Stelle des zwischendurch mich weiterwürgenden ‘Ende’ das Ding Verwandlung . The translation rendered this as the ‘end’ that still gagged me now and then was more and more firmly replaced by this metamorphosis thing. With the throwaway silliness of this metamorphosis thing , I told Peter, das Ding Verwandlung has lost its philosophical tension. And the carefully wrought, eleven-word original phrase has been bloated to nineteen flaccid words. Your sentences have been flattened; the nuance is gone. It had struck me then and now again that this is what I most feared about my own life, that it was commonplace, lackluster, banal, flaccid. At the turn of the century, at the beginning of the new millennium, still married, still practicing the Mormon religion I had been raised in, I woke from a nightmare in which my little car was surrounded by a neverending cluster of identical cars that descended from the sky in ranks of ten to land in perfect synchrony and drive obediently along an endless highway just wide enough for ten little cars. I fled the marriage, left the Mormons, and sought antidotes to the unsettling dream in Handke’s supple and self-questioning sentences, found succor in the author’s preface to A Journey to the Rivers where he asserted that he had written about his journey through Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature: a slow, inquiring narration; every paragraph dealing with and narrating a problem, of representation, of form, of grammar—of aesthetic veracity . I would live with aesthetic veracity, I thought. My life would be a slow and dialectical unfolding. And I would be skeptical of my attempts at aesthetic veracity and dialectical unfolding. That day in Chaville, Peter showed me a letter from American publisher Roger Straus to Siegfried Unseld, Handke’s German publisher: We have a problem, and his name is Peter Handke. The books weren’t selling as they once had. How was it possible, I asked myself, that an editor with Straus’ reputation had no idea what the translations were doing to Peter’s work? I removed the bones from a second fish steak and reflected on how challenging I found each of Peter’s new books. It helped to read with a pen in hand. Der Grosse Fall (The Great Fall) , for instance. I had read it slowly, fascinated by the dual metaphor of standing and falling announced by the title, attentive to the slow, inquiring development of the metaphor. I wondered if my method was compensatory gratification for the sterile pedant I feared I had become. No, I thought. I was finding my way out of dualistic dead ends through the simultaneously critical and affirmative ideas Peter so often conjoined with “and.” I had once written about this productive interplay in Peter’s novel Die Wiederholung (Repetition) , describing the method as postmetaphysical metaphysics. Peter disdained abstractions of that sort. The afternoon hours passed without seeming to pass. The courses of food and pitchers of wine were ever-changing constants as the houseboat lifted and fell with the river’s insistent current. I was experiencing, I thought, a kind of standing now, a nunc stans in which memory was as present as the experience itself. Peter moved to an adjoining table to speak with the Serbian journalists. Žarko joined them as translator, a role he had played dozens of times over the years while traveling with Peter in what had been Yugoslavia. I realized that the wine had gone to my head like the scent of elderberries at the Hallesches Tor in ETA Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot. Peter looked tired. The journalists asked their questions. Žarko translated them. Peter responded. Žarko translated the responses. Žarko looked tired as well. “Or” was my original conjunction. I spent two years in Germany as a Mormon missionary. I knew the truth and knew that other people needed it and I bore witness that if they would pray as I had, God would reveal the truth to them as well. My German improved and I began to read—Buddenbrooks, Mutter Courage, Der Steppenwolf . Nietzsche’s wild-eyed Zarathustra taught me that we create our truths instead of finding them. Lessing’s wise Nathan offered a parable in which the magic ring was mercifully lost. I too would essay a life on my own terms, I thought, on my own terms and yet in the context of the American, Mormon Volk I had left and that was still with me even as the minutes and hours of the afternoon on the Sava were stretched and enhanced by wine and tiredness. I admired the lively face of the man Žarko described as one of Serbia’s greatest living poets and marveled at Mladen’s heavy brows and enjoyed the animated interaction between Maja and Sophie as they smoked and talked and smoked. I watched red-haired Marija move around the room to take photos of the gathering. The German writer Peter Schneider attacked my translation of A Journey to the Rivers for presenting Peter’s work in a less controversial light than it deserved. I replied that Schneider either couldn’t read or refused to read. Criticize what is there, yes; but criticize what you put there with your simplistic and inflexible mind and you become the aggressive and stupid critic I was afraid Peter took me for when he called me Dr. Scott. I am a Germanist, a good one. I am also a writer, co-author with Žarko of two books described in Belgrade as a “two-seater without steering.” Couldn’t a person be both a writer and a critic? Was it the double role that made me a puzzle to Peter? When had I begun to write my non-critical work? Why had I done that? It was Žarko’s invitation, I thought. Žarko had asked me to contribute to a Belgrade journal and then to his anthology on childhood and then to the Flugasche issue on the painter Julije Knifer, and then the collaboration on the book Repetitions and later on Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary . It was Peter’s influence as well. His books engaged me, called to me even, made me want to understand, to pay attention, to weigh possibilities—and beyond the understanding to write, to write about myself. If I ever wrote a book about Peter Handke, I told myself as the houseboat rose and fell gently in the wake of a passing boat, I would write about the dialectical texts and certainly not about this afternoon on the Sava. I wanted to write a bout Žarko’s books as well. I would learn Serbian, I thought, Serbo-Croatian, so I could read my friend’s Tübingen, Emigracia, Knifer, Era, Strah od Emigracije, Pogled, Kafana , and so on. I had made that vow before. I would make it again. The river flowed past, heaving and falling like a mother’s breasts. Marija was brilliant and Handke looked tired and Sophie and Maja shared more cigarettes and Mladen gestured broadly and Matija Bećković said “hello” to me and in English which Mladen translated into Serbian I told the smiling poet that Žarko had said he was the best of all living Serbian poets. The poet winked and said Žarko always told the truth. I said I had known Žarko to lie on occasion. “Not in this case,” the poet replied. I was exhausted; time folded in on itself as did the food and the wine and Mladen’s huge head and Žarko’s solicitous translations and Sophie wincing with her back pain and another pitcher of wine and overlapping conversations translated back and forth from Serbian and English and French and German and even Spanish and the poet’s funny stories about another Serbian poet and soft cheese and onions and more wine. Peter asked the young journalist if she had a boyfriend and she said “yes,” and he asked for his name and she said “Vladimir” and he said “Vladimir?” “Vladimir!” and fish soup came and I asked Marija with her beautiful sharp nose and bright red hair about the man in blue eating alone at a separate table and she said he had a factory that made medals like the one the President of Serbia would give to Peter the next day and, she added with a smile, “he gives away a lot of medals!” I said, “he must be a very good President then” and she laughed and said “oh yes he’s the best there is,” and I suggested that perhaps the President would give Žarko and meedals too and she said it w ould surely happen but that it would probably require that we stay in the country just a few more days and I said we were leaving on Thursday and would that be long enough? and she thought perhaps it might require the weekend as well and the fish soup was followed by thick fish steaks accompanied by potato salad and the Sava flowed as slowly and powerfully as time while swallows dipped and rose outside the window and a photo of Angela Merkel handing a scholarship notice to the son of the houseboat owner hung on one wall and Peter joined the two journalists at another table for an interview Žarko translated and I stared at a photo of a man holding a huge fish in his arms and Marija asked the houseboat owner who said it was a Sava River fish like the one that lay in steaks in front of us and, raising a glass of wine to my lips, I realized that the cold spring meant that there were no orgiastic frogs croaking the way they had alongside the barge on the Danube that night fifteen years earlier when Žarko and I sat with the filmmaker Edgar Pera and drank Jelen Pivo and pissed through a hole in the restroom floor into the Danube and I thought of the book I had read by David Albahari, the one called Leeches , and about the nationalist antagonisms and conspiracy theories sucking nourishment out of the postwar Yugoslav state and we ate nicely toasted cream puffs and deliciously oily baklava and Maja told rapid stories in French while she and Sophie and Ljiljana shared stiletto-thin cigarettes from a pack that was giving out and I wondered why so many “j”s are required for the name Ljiljana and the Sava flowed unceasingly and I, politely, at least I was trying to be polite, asked Maja Kusturica what she did professionally and she asked me, in English, to repeat the question and when I did she raised her shapely eyebrows and expelled cigarette smoke through her nose and looked me in the eyes and said, “I suffer.” I wanted to laugh but smiled instead and she smiled back and time flowed on like the Sava River. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “The Afternoon on the Sava” is from the book We (On Friendship) , co-authored with Žarko Radaković and published in 2022 by Laguna Press in Serbian and Elik Press in English. We have been friends for three decades, with German as our common language and with Austrian author Peter Handke as our friend and inspiration. .................................................................................................................................................................................... SCOTT ABBOTT completed a doctorate in German Studies at Princeton University and is a professor of Integrated Studies, Philosophy, and Humanities at Utah Valley University. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger. (Common Consent Press, 2022). He has translated works by Nobel Prize Awardee Peter Handke and botanist Gregor Mendel. scottabbottauthor.com Next - The Gospel of Overconsumption by Scott Abbott Next

Walking the Bear by Star Coulbrooke I walk on water, take the river from its high Uintas down Utah’s cascades, wander Wyoming’s meanders, Montpelier’s meadows, to Soda’s hair-pin curve where thirty-thousand years ago lava turned the Bear away from Blackfoot’s Snake and sent it down to Grace. Doubling back from Gem Valley to Cache, I walk the river’s cobbled bed where tributaries surge, rowdy Cub, Little Bear, Beaver-headed Logan, six-tined fork of Blacksmith. Down the length of floodplains I pass, through wetlands of cattails and bulrushes, to bottomlands leveled and drained, where the river silts in, slows down, its honeyed pace tamed for grain. On the river’s gliding current I travel miles each step, a dreamlike passage through cedar and cottonwood, hawthorn and chokecherry, lifting like a heron over dams and sluggish lakes that halt the river’s breath. I walk the Bear all summer as it builds strength again, widens into marshes, joins in lush bird-heavy congress with the great peculiar Salt, a lake that would surely die if not for this river, this path, this milk and honey. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Published in Walking the Bear (Outlaw Artists Press, 2011) and in Deseret Magazine , July/August 2024 (Vol. 4 No. 36). My grandfather homesteaded a piece of land along the Bear River in southern Idaho in 1890. I grew up in the family farmhouse near the river. This poem came to me as I worked to save the Bear River from a proposed dam on the Oneida Narrows. I had gone to our family park on the river bottoms and as I sat looking at the water, I felt myself lift off and glide along it. The images flowed easily, gracefully, as if I were living in them as I wrote. I think I had developed such empathy for the river that the poem came gliding out of the air like that heron it mentions. I went back to the books to make sure the history was correct; otherwise, the poem needed only a few revisions. I believe it is an important poem, especially as climate change and development imperil the Bear River and the Great Salt Lake. .................................................................................................................................................................................... STAR COULBROOKE was the inaugural poet laureate of Logan City, Utah, and co-founder of the Helicon West Reading Series. Her most recent poetry collections are Thin Spines of Memory , Both Sides from the Middle and City of Poetry from Helicon West Press. Next - The Glazier by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky Next

The Other Man is Always French by Richard Peabody The other woman can be a blonde or a redhead but the other man is always French. He dresses better than I ever will. He can picnic and stroll with a wineglass in one upraised hand. Munch pâté, drink espresso, and tempt with ashy kisses. He hangs out at Dupont Circle because the trees remind him of Paris. Did I mention sex? Face it— he’s had centuries of practice. I’m an American. What do I know? He drives a fast car, and can brood like nobody’s business, while I sit home watching ESPN. He’s tall and chats about art— I don’t even want to discuss that accent. He’s Mr. Attitude. My fantasy is to call the State Department and have him deported. Only he’ll probably convince you to marry him for a green card. No way I’m going to win— the other man is always more aggressive, always more attentive. The other man is just too French for words. From now on I’m going out with statuesque German women so next time we run into each other they can kick his butt for me. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This poem is my semi-recovery after a relationship ended owing to a classic French louche. At readings it gets a lot of laughs. But I was flabbergasted by how many people have confessed that they’ve been in that situation. My students assumed I’d written the poem after seeing Addicted to Love . Nope. Though after watching it, I get why they thought so. .................................................................................................................................................................................... RICHARD PEABODY lives in Arlington, Virginia. His most recent volume of poetry is Guinness on the Quay (Salmon Poetry, 2019). gargoylepaycock.wordpress.com Next - The Barking Dogs of Taos by Richard Peabody Next

Peach by Jennifer Tonge Come here's a peach he said and held it out just far enough to reach beyond his lap and off- ered me a room the one room left he said in all of Thessaloniki that night packed with traders The peach was lush I hadn't slept for days it was like velvet lips a lamp he smiled patted the bed for me I knew it was in fact the only room the only bed The peach trembled and he said Come nodding to make me agree I wanted the peach and the bed he said to take it see how nice it was and I thought how I could take it ginger- ly my finger- tips only touch- ing only it Not in or out I stayed in the doorway watching a fly He stroked the peach and asked where I was from I said the States he smiled and asked how long I'd stay The fly had found the peach I said I'd leave for Turkey in the morning I wanted so much to sleep and on a bed I thought of all the ways to say that word and that they must have gradient meanings He asked me did I want the peach and I said sure and took it from his hand He asked then if I'd take the room It costs too much I said and turned to go He said to stay a while and we could talk The sun was going down I said no thanks I'd head out on the late train but could I still have the peach and what else could he say to that but yes Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Originally published in Poetry . It’s a bit embarrassing for my favorite of my own poems to be one from so long ago, but there it is. “Peach” sprang like Athena from my head and still has so much energy for me; it doesn’t rely in any way on my memory of the event that transpired it—no, that’s not a typo, I just made up a verb—but is its own event. .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 - Your Last Day in Madison by Jennifer Tonge Next

Sunday Morning Early by David Romtvedt My daughter and I paddle red kayaks across the lake. Pulling hard, we slip easily through the water. Far from either shore, it hits me that my daughter is a young woman and suddenly everything is a metaphor for how short a time we are granted: the red boats on the blue-black water, the russet and gold of late summer’s grasses, the empty sky. We stop and listen to the stillness. I say, “It’s Sunday, and here we are in the church of the out of doors,” then wish I’d kept quiet. That’s the trick in life— learning to leave well enough alone. Our boats drift to where the chirring of grasshoppers reaches us from the rocky hills. A clap of thunder. I want to say something truer than I love you. I want my daughter to know that, through her, I live a life that was closed to me. I paddle up, lean out, and touch her hand. I start to speak then stop. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “Sunday Morning Early” was published in The Sun magazine and in Dilemmas of the Angels (LSU Press, 2017), and was included in the Worthington, Ohio Public Library’s Garden Poetry Path public art project. I recently heard a prominent performance artist say that no great art has ever been produced from happiness. This statement made me feel deeply unhappy. I’ve spent many years working to write poems that will carry social meaning, offer pleasure, lead us to think more deeply, and explore those parts of our lives that give satisfaction, that is, happiness. I believe that great art can arise from happiness. As to whether or not the poem I’ve sent is great art I can’t say, but it is the result of happiness. .................................................................................................................................................................................... DAVID ROMTVEDT'S latest book of poetry is No Way: An American Tao Te Ching (LSU Press, 2021). He was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in southern Arizona. He graduated from Reed College, with a BA in American Studies and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a graduate fellow in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. After serving in the Peace Corps in Zaïre (currently Congo) and Rwanda and on a sister city construction project in Jalapa, Nicaragua, he worked as the folk arts program manager for the Centrum Foundation. He has worked as a carpenter, tree planter, truck driver, bookstore clerk, assembly line operative, letter carrier, blueberry picker, ranch hand, and college professor. A recipient of two NEA fellowships, The Pushcart Prize , and the Wyoming Governor's Arts Award, Romtvedt served as the poet laureate of the state of Wyoming from 2003 to 2011. davidromtvedt.com Next - Peach by Jennifer Tonge Next

Frozen January Mornings by Robert Cooperman When acquaintances call me, “Robert,” I correct them with, It’s Bob. “Robert” still conjures frozen January mornings, Mom shouting, Robert, get up, you’ll be late for school! Her voice, fingernails screeching down the blackboard of my spine, the bedroom window milk-crusted with frost, the bare floor shooting ice-tentacles up from the frozen lake of Dante’s Inferno , and all I wanted was to lie warm in bed. Fat chance! If her first volley failed, the second was louder, closer, threatening she’d rip the comforter off: no choice but to bolt up and throw on clothes. And where was Jeff in all this commotion? In the next twin bed, young enough not to be bothered with school yet, and possessing the rare talent of sleeping through even Mom’s volcanic summons. At least she kissed me on the cheek, to let me know she loved me, as she handed me my brown bag lunch, expelling me from this brief Eden. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Right now this is my favorite unpublished poem; it makes me smile, now, to remember those mornings, which were such hell back then. .................................................................................................................................................................................... ROBERT COOPERMAN "a Brooklyn boy, right down to a B.A. at Brooklyn College," moved to Denver in 1974 to study in the joint Literature-Creative Writing Program, and received a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and 19th Century British Literature. He has taught English at the University of Georgia and Bowling Green State University, in Ohio. He lives in Denver with his wife Beth. His volume In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections Pub. Co., 1999) won the Colorado Book Award in 2000. Next - Pilgrims in Argyll by Joseph Riddle Next

First Sighting Most people love butterflies and hate moth , he said. But moths are more interesting – more engaging. —Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs by Trish Hopkinson It must have been something about Monday or the dry summer evening, making me unsure of whether I’m bird or moth but feeling small, rolling out my tongue into the center of a honeysuckle blossom, flapping frenetically to hover against sunset’s breeze and hold my space in front of the flower. A hummingbird twice my size trills by toward an imposter, a red glass feeder on the porch. Funny how the humans look up and smile at the birds, watching softly but when they spot me, they squint and stare confused, grab their cameras, try to catch my likeness held in stillness—the lifelessness of my orange and gray wings against the backdrop of a high desert. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This poem is my current favorite unpublished poem because it reminds me of a specific moment when my husband first spotted a hummingbird moth and called to me to come see it. We had just recently moved to western Colorado, so I have fond memories of that time and of my husband always being so attentive that I never missed an opportunity to become inspired. I also get a kick out of the epigraph. .................................................................................................................................................................................... TRISH HOPKINSON is the author of A Godless Ascends (Lithic Press, 2024) and an advocate for the literary arts. You can find her online at SelfishPoet.com and in western Colorado where she runs the regional poetry group Rock Canyon Poets. Next - Waiting Around by Trish Hopkinson Next

THE NOMAD is a nonprofit literary magazine dedicated to writers exploring journeys through a changing world. First Issue ................................................................................................................................................................................. "FAVORITES" - 2024/2025 Siren - poem The Lure of the Unfinished -poem ..................................................................................... by Amy Gerstler Reading -poem Gradual - poem ..................................................................................... by Natasha Sajé You Oughta Know - poem The Black Flies of Home - poem ..................................................................................... by Brock Dethier Fireflies - poem Automotive - poem ..................................................................................... by Kevin Prufer 11/8/16 - poem Tuesday Night Bieber - essay ..................................................................................... by Joe Sacksteder Hiroshi Tanahashi - poem Pissing Toward the Sky - poem ..................................................................................... by Jerry VanIeperen Alien Exchange Program - Host Application - fiction A Twist of the Vine - memoir ..................................................................................... by Naomi Ulsted Something To Surrender To - poem Bone Suite - poem ..................................................................................... by Austin Holmes Village Fiddle - poem New Orleans Villanelle - poem ..................................................................................... by Ken Waldman I'd Rather be Influenced - poem Before Thirty - poem ..................................................................................... by Patrick Ramsay Still Life with Mormons in My Living Room - poem Sinatra, Sinatra - poem ..................................................................................... by Paul Fericano Sacrament Meeting Started the Three Hours of Church on Sunday - poem Teddy Thompson Croons Leonard Cohen - poem ..................................................................................... by Natalie Padilla Young The Worrier - poem Junk Email - poem ..................................................................................... by Nancy Takacs Belief - poem Without Question I Am - poem ..................................................................................... by Mike White The First Time I Saw Snow - poem The Little House: Crystal City, Texas - poem ..................................................................................... by Jeff Talmadge The Dream - poem July - poem ..................................................................................... by Shanan Ballam Missa Brevis - poem Foley Catheter - poem ..................................................................................... by Kimberly Johnson Among - poem Insomnia - poem ..................................................................................... by Cynthia Hardy Mākara Beach - poem On the Disembarkation of Sergeant Nathan E. Cook in Auckland, 13 June 1942 - poem ..................................................................................... by Michael McLane

The Glazier by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky All through the Depression he worked in the barn, surrounded by glass shards from panes he sanded and pressed into wooden frames for neighbors who brought him their broken things. His thick-gloved fingers scraped putty into grooves, carefully fit sharp edges into place, then brushed the wood with lead paint to let dry near the boiler—a furnace on the barn’s gravel floor we were too afraid to start up, after buying the house on the same quarter-acre sixty years later, the realtor’s chatter distracting us from cracked plaster, uneven floors. One night a nameless stray who lived in the loft slid through a tear in our bedroom’s screened door— our legs sprawled, sheets shoved away for the heat— and lunged onto my husband’s thigh, kneaded her claws into his skin. In my half-dream I moaned, thinking an alien creature was howling through our open window. She dug claws in deeper, and he yowled, tried to push her off as she nimbly leapt down, scrambled out. We couldn’t stop laughing, didn’t sleep for the rest of the night but talked until dawn when lilacs wafted through the screen on a morning breeze, and our dog nudged to be let out to the yard of our first garden, freshly planted rose bushes, maple trees that would shade the swing set and the barn. The stray slept in the loft for years until one winter she disappeared. We rattled the food bag in snow, called the name we gave her, returned to the bedroom, finally knowing what we had lost. I still find glints poking through soil hard-packed by a century of footsteps. Sometimes I think I see him too, beneath rafters, cutting and beveling to feel transparent weight in his hands. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue The first house my husband and I bought was a hundred-year-old house with an original old barn in the backyard—one of the last barns in Cedar City, Utah. The man who built the house was a glazier who worked in the barn. This poem captures the feeling of the first few years in our new home, and what it is like to live in a place informed by the past while not always appreciating what you have in the present. It has been a long-time favorite searching for a home. .................................................................................................................................................................................... DANIELLE BEAZER DUBRASKY is the author of Drift Migration (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021). She teaches Creative Writing at Southern Utah University and directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values. danielledubrasky.com Next - Vespers in the Great Basin by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky Next

For Hank Williams No matter how I struggle and strive I'll never get out of this world alive. by Lisa Bickmore In the back seat of a Cadillac, bloated, white boots, white hat, blue suit, all colored with pain of every stripe, a bottle of bonded bourbon in hand, riding on one shot of morphine and then, in Knoxville, two more: they’d driven north into ice and weather on the cusp of a new year, aiming to make recompense for everything: someone once described his drunkenness as shambolic, and it took misunderstanding the word twice—first Shambhala, then shaman—until I got it: shambles, as in flesh shelf, precisely that Cadillac’s back seat, that literal falling apart, as the teenage driver sped on and on for the sake of the contract and its penalty clause, right up to Oak Hill hospital, West Virginia, where two doctors pronounced him dead: he’d been booted from the Opry to the Hayride, and first one, then a second marriage gone wrong, the body bad from the start, spina bifida occulta predicting the entire pandemonium: now I’m listening to the last song he ever charted, listening hard for the hurt, and the will to thwart it, redeem the losses in a voice so brash, and brother if I stepped on a worn-out dime I bet a nickel I could tell you if it was heads or tails, thin shoe sole figuring how every harm marked the body: just a skinny twenty-nine when he went, but this song—the cool chin up as the fiddle scrapes, the beat squares, guitar slides liquid—all telling how this vernacular requires a wreck. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This poem began as a question—I read a piece about Hank Williams that used the word 'shambolic' to describe his drinking. I love when a query leads me into a poem, in this case hearing certain rhymes of meaning that ended up being false, which also led me into learning about Hank Williams and his short, tragic life, and his prodigious songwriting and recording. I have other poems that have had similar origin stories—an assumption or belief that proved to be false, but opened a door into other words and metaphors and stories. I love poems about music and musicians, too. .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 - The Other Man is Always French by Richard Peabody Next

Vespers in the Great Basin by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky Bald eagles gather among the elms with soft whistles as they glide over snowfields of thistle and jackrabbits, settle on branches, umber wings folded against their bodies, albino heads tucked from the wind. Each winter we watch them fly across the valley to this empty ranch, stretch their wingspan beyond six feet, their darkness growing in sunset until Venus appears in the west. Driving home, your right hand fumbles with my fingers as if with a rosary, while your left keeps the wheel in check. Out the window I see a brown quarter horse lean against a fence in snow, haunches turned to the wind. Our silence meets the coldness that blows in through door jambs, the chimney. Next January when mountain peaks glisten beneath miters of ice we’ll return to the elms as eagles gather across the river and the riven valley—they’ll hunch together on racked branches of winter trees, still believing they can keep the cold at bay. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue First published in Sugar House Review , and Drift Migration (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021). This poem describes how bald eagles winter over in the valley west of Cedar City, Utah, while also referring to a marriage. In this poem, I like how I paid attention to both the imagery and the sound. I admire poetry lines that have “echoes” of sound patterns, such as alliteration or assonance. In the first two lines, such echoes exist in the words “whistles,” “glides,” “snow fields,” “thistle.” I worked hard on the fifth and sixth lines to create a sense of expansion that leads into constriction as the eagles’ bodies become too dark to see in the sunset. .................................................................................................................................................................................... DANIELLE BEAZER DUBRASKY is the author of Drift Migration (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021). She teaches Creative Writing at Southern Utah University and directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values. danielledubrasky.com Next - Kayaking on Hebron Lake by Marjorie Maddox Next