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 Currently unpublished, “Interstellar” is the opening poem in Still on Earth to be published by the Louisiana State University Press.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

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

The Little Old Lady in the Woodstock T-Shirt by Robert Cooperman I spot her in the Safeway parking lot, at least 80 and hanging onto her shopping cart as if teetering with vertigo at a cliff’s edge, her cane resting on the cart’s handle. On her T-shirt, the Woodstock symbol: birds trilling on a guitar’s frets, Love and Peace in the grass-aromatic air, while her cart totters with the blind staggers to her Bug that she trembles open. “Can I help you, Ma’am?” I ask, as she struggles to lift her shopping bag as if a barbell, and drops the dead weight into the back seat. She stares at me, as if afraid I’ll hit her over the head for her purse she grips like a lifeline, which maybe it is: with all her money, I.D., and credit cards. She looks at me again, notes my beard, what’s left of my hair gathered in a ponytail, sees my Jerry Garcia T-shirt, and demands, Wanna score some righteous shit? If not, get the fuck outta my face. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This might be my favorite published poem, partly because I manage to bring in one of my favorite obsessions, the Grateful Dead, but even more because of her unexpected and totally irreverent and defiant reply, breaking our assumptions about what a frail old lady should be and what she should say. .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 - Frozen January Mornings by Robert Cooperman Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue DEAR CARLEY Beth Colburn Orozco My daughter turned four the day before my scheduled trip to Honduras, where I had accepted a teaching position at a secondary school in El Progreso. The paperwork, pictures, and letters I saved from my pregnancy and her adoption were scattered on my bed. Packing would have to wait as I studied her baby pictures taken by her adoptive parents and sent to me through the adoption agency. In one, she was propped up against sofa cushions holding a baby ring with plastic keys, her chocolate-brown eyes and chunky cheeks smiling back at me. The guilt and shame acted like trained assassins hired to kill me. I thought of canceling my trip and curling up among her things. Instead, I picked up the little wristband she wore at the hospital, searching for parts of her, hoping her DNA, like a map, would lead me to her. I had chosen her parents from a stack of letters from people wanting a family. I wanted a family, too, and had promised myself, while in a Milwaukee courtroom, signing away my parental rights, that I was making the right choice. I was wrong. I was in my twenties when I got pregnant, squandering those precious young adult years with the wrong people while making one bad decision after another. For years, I worked in restaurants and bars. Living on tips, I worried about making rent and car payments. I didn’t have a safety net or a place to raise a child. My friend Tammy got pregnant during her second semester of college. She was raising her little girl in government-assisted housing with the help of welfare assistance and food stamps. One morning, I stopped by with donuts. A little pink bike with a banana seat, a flat tire, and mangled training wheels lay on its side on the front stoop of the apartment building. I dragged it into the yard. Tammy and her daughter lived on the second floor. The dingy linoleum stairs and hallway were filthy, and the walls were in dire need of a fresh coat of paint. The apartment door was ajar. Tammy’s little girl sat on a tattered rug, eating a bowl of cereal, and watching Scooby Do. Tammy’s feet dangled off the sofa. She was asleep. I set the bag of donuts on the floor just inside the apartment. Tammy’s little girl never looked up. Outside, the broken bike lay on the grass like a wounded animal. Instinctually, I placed my hands on my belly to protect my baby. I’m not raising my daughter like this. The memory of the broken pink bike, an image stacked among so many I collected like tarot cards during that time, reminds me why I chose to give up my daughter. I named my daughter Carley after seeing Carly Simon singing “Coming Around Again Itsy Bitsy Spider” on an MTV video: I know nothing stays the same / But if you’re willing to play the game / It will be coming around again. Her adoptive parents changed her name to Kelsey. That name belonged to someone I hadn’t held in my arms at the hospital when she was born. I was unable or maybe unwilling to accept the truth. For years, my journal entries would begin, Dear Carley . I picked up the journal given to me by a dear friend who would, years later, die from colon cancer while her three children were still in school. It wasn’t fair. There was a single entry because, even though I had promised to write, it was too painful to address my daughter in such a concrete way. I scanned the entry for clues to help me understand how I came to surrender my baby. Then, as now, it makes no sense to me. March 3, 1992 Dear Carley, -If I wrote to you each time I thought of you, I would have volumes of letters to share. -[The day I gave you up] was the worst day of my life. I felt alone and empty. I also felt about ten years old and that at any minute someone was going to start making decisions for me that would take away the pain and guilt. -Before I had you, I always had a net or web under me to catch me if I fell: My friends and family, even things like money, a car, and a job. But all the security I had could not help me make the decisions I made with you. In many ways, I had to grow up. You have helped me do that. -I am sorry. I am sorry I wasn’t there to hold you when you couldn’t sleep. I am sorry I wasn’t there to catch you when you took your first steps, and I am sorry I won’t be there to answer all the questions you will have about your adoption. There wasn’t time to sink into the dank well where I often treaded deep, dark waters. There was still so much to do before I left in the morning. I gathered the papers and photos and returned them to the adoption box, a plastic tote I kept stored in my closet. I debated taking it to Latin America, but the box was insurance that someday I would return. I would never leave my daughter behind again. I slid the journal along with a few notebooks and a pocket-sized calendar I purchased at Walgreens, into my backpack. It was time to finish packing, and it was time to untangle Carley from the past. I would take her with me as a traveling companion rather than a symbol of grief I had worn like a heavy talisman around my neck for so long, I had forgotten what a privilege it was to have brought her into this world. "Dear Carley" is an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir, The Seasons of my Bones . It's been thirty-six years, yet I still struggle with these words: I gave my daughter up for adoption. In this essay, a breakthrough occurs when I decide to look toward the future rather than dwell on the past. Previous BETH COLBURN OROZCO teaches literature and creative writing at Cochise College in southeastern Arizona. Most recently, her work was published in The Ana and was accepted for The Letter Review shortlist. Beth's short stories and essays have won awards, and more can be found at bethcolburnorozco.com . Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Review of EL REY OF GOLD TEETH by Reyes Ramirez Willy Palomo El Rey of Gold Teeth by Reyes Ramirez is a striking contribution to the poetry of the Central American diaspora. Ramirez writes in a form-forward style with a microscopic attention to language. His pen treks across an ambitious range of topics, including toxic masculinity, the climate crisis, as well as colonization and its hangovers. There is hardly a poem in this collection that doesn’t fit into his tightly woven thematic tapestry and the following four series: the “hijo please series,” where his mother provides him with sometimes toxic but always loving advice and admonitions; the “A Lesson …” series, where Ramirez unpacks the weight of colonization, migration, and (dis)possession, especially in gendered terms; “The Fabulous Wondrous Outfits of the Fabulous Wonder Twins” series, where Ramirez takes images of twinning from 80s and 90s music videos and spins them out to comment on the bifurcation of identity so frequently discussed by diasporic authors; and finally the “… is My America” series, where Ramirez takes moments of both joy and disaster to paint us the cultural landscape of his personal America. Such a tight grip on his pen gave me little space to doubt Ramirez’ intention, sequencing, or mastery of form, even when I may have wrestled against them. Take, for example, Ramirez’ use of codeswitching. The poet intentionally codeswitches in a staggering manner that pushes against the fluency of typical bilingualism. This excerpt from “A Broken red-eared Slider’s Shell” is case in point: house de flesh y hueso glides about un azure womb skyed con marbled membrane struck numb por prisms que shatter y skitter. The average bilingual reader will recognize that this is not how we generally codeswitch and likely will have difficulty saying this sentence aloud. For some, that will be a turn-off and valid criticism. It’s obvious to me at least that this move is intentional. The clash of languages in between articles and prepositions forces me to slow down to pronounce the language Ramirez conjures, which is beautiful even if I experience some pain in the difficulty of speaking it. Rather than flip the page in frustration, I marvel: what a clever way to corner his readers and force them to slow down and experience the violence of language. The trip of the tongue is a trip I experienced many times in my lifetime of losing and acquiring my Spanish. El Rey of Gold Teeth will routinely dazzle you with flashes of perfectly sketched moments and images Ramirez uses to transport people directly into his neighborhoods. In “La Pulga,” you will rummage through “a series of shirts,” where “Tweety is Chicana / Bart Simpson is Domincan” and “Vegeta is Salvadoreño now.” In “Finding Kittens After a Tropical Storm is My America,” Ramirez surveys his devastated city in an effortless contrapuntal, showing the reader “edgeless mouths struggling to speak” and how “raw pink paws thrash again / for nipples on rusted air conditioner.” In “A 4th Grade Dance Party in a Cafeteria at 1 P.M. is My America,” Ramirez shares the magic of watching children spontaneously dance “the milly rock, / the juju, running man. even ones before / their birth like the macarena, wobble, cha cha slide.” Ramirez displays such charm and mastery time and time again in poems about pupusas, pozole, Selena, and more. Ramirez writes from Houston, Texas, a city bursting at the seams with powerful Black and Latinx voices in a state that has banned more books than any other state as of 2023 and where diversity, equity, and inclusion has been outlawed in higher education. In El Rey of Gold Teeth, Ramirez follows the thread that stitches his Latinx communities, their significant leaders, their pop stars, and even their children, indelibly into the American empire. Their presence is frequently in resistance to colonization, surely. Other times, such as the poems “El Salvadoreño-Americano as Decolonizer, 1929-1936” and “The First Mexican American Astronaut Was Once,” I read Ramirez as a colonized intellectual a la Fanon, wrestling to provide meditative, compassionate portrayals that champion significant Latinx leaders whose jobs were ultimately intimately tied to American imperialism and settler colonization. I lay exhausted with my back to the mat in this wrestle with Ramirez, as we struggle to recuperate a history banned once again and attempt to forge a future where our people may still be nourished by their roots. The coming fascists will be willing to do more than ban us to stop us. It is our duty to survive. It is our duty to keep writing down our truths. Ramirez says of El Rey of Gold Teeth (Hub City Press, 2023): "Colonizing languages and subverting forms, rerouting histories, and finding the mundane made extraordinary, El Rey of Gold Teeth breaks open notions of destiny, in humorous and devastating ways, to reimagine the past and present a new future where lack transforms to abundance, where there will be many answers to every question." Previous WILLY PALOMO (he/they/she) is the author of Mercury in Reggaetón, winner of the Light Scatter Prize, and Wake the Others (Editorial Kalina/Glass Spider Publishing, 2023), a winner of a Foreword Prize in Poetry and an International Latino Book Award honorable mention in Bilingual Poetry. A veteran of the Salt Lake City poetry slam scene, his fiction, essays, poetry, translations, and songs can be found across print and web pages, including the Best New Poets 2018, Latino Rebels, The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, and more. He has taught classes on literature, rap, and creative writing in universities, juvenile detention centers, high schools, and community centers. He is the son of two refugees from El Salvador. www.palomopoemas.com 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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue CRASH RUMINATIONS (excerpt) Karin Anderson The first time I saw Lake Hardy I was ten. The hike is brutal, but I really wanted to make it. Dad woke me a four-thirty in the morning and we loaded our gear into the back of his old sky-blue pickup. This was just before Lone Peak and most of the surrounding ranges were designated a Federal Wilderness Area. We didn’t at the time see the point, as the whole state except Salt Lake City was more or less wilderness. Now I’m dazzled by the foresight; the Wasatch Front is on the most populous and sprawling geographies of the Mountain West. Dad pushed the truck up the old sheep road until it killed on sheer steepness. He left it in gear and pulled the emergency brake and just left it there, clinging to the face of First Hammengog. He tossed me my lunch and canteen and we started the legwork: up the front of “First,” reaching the first stand of high pines and crossing the meadow at “Second.” We hauled up the ruthless switchbacks to the spine dividing the Hammengogs from the Intake canyon, clawed up the nearly vertical apex, leveled off for an eastern traverse across the base of the granite peaks. Then we dropped into the hanging meadow, Grassy Flat, and followed the stream and its iron-stained granite boulders up to the lake. Lake Hardy is an irregular blue circle, about a hundred yards across. Fractured granite cliffs rise from the north shore, and a ponderous granite stairway rises on the west. South is the route back to Grassy Flat. The ridge where the little Boeing crashed in 1931 is another hour or two above the lake, depending on the hiker. Between the lake and the airplane ridge, and east-north curve, the passage is pure stone, not in smooth sheets but in huge broken pieces, big as Volkswagens, big as boxcars. My father was a wonderful childhood dad, funny, generous, confiding. He remained funny and generous, rampant with stories and pronouncements, but as an adult, of course, I comprehended the edges and realized how little clear access he gave to anyone. When I was ten he simply dazzled me. We talked and laughed and stopped to breathe and be breath-taken all the way up. We ate sandwiches and Hershey chocolate under a hanging rock. He shoved me up that skinny razorback ridge and told me I could make it, and so I knew I could. My legs were shaking and I felt giddy at the summit, below Lone Peak itself but still ten and a half thousand feet above sea level. Dad grasped my ankles while I stretched full length across a skyline boulder and hung my arms and head over the airplane cliff. The wall dropped sheer for three hundred feet, then angled just enough for a spectacular bounce. I imagined that if someone pushed off hard, she might clear the angled slope and take the whole drop in one shot, all eight hundred feet. I felt my hair fly back with the updraft. Because I have been to the lake many times since, I know that at seven or seven-thirty on a summer evening the wind ceases and the lake goes still, perfectly. The motion settles and the lake turns into a huge silver hole, no longer water but a perfect inversion of the cliffs and sky and sparse pines above. It looks like the entrance to a parallel world, an inside that actually corresponds with the outside, the depth revealing the surface, the release point. Seeing the silver hole makes it easy to think you could walk right down into it. Alpine folklore claims that Lake Hardy, a volcanic opening, has no bottom. “Once, the Forest Service took a pack train up with spools of bailing twine,” my fifth-grade teacher, also a summer ranger at Timpanogos Cave, told us . “They went out to the middle of the lake in a rubber raft and let down the weighted twine, just keep unreeling and unreeling, tying each end to the next spool and then another, until there wasn’t any left. So they dropped the line and went home.” For some reason this story made us feel important. Souvenirs of my first hike: a piece of brittle airplane aluminum. Image of my father, grinning, a young man, proud of me. Invisible imprint of his grip around my ankles. First published in Saranac Review , Winter 2009. The full version of “Crash Ruminations” weaves stories of three different airplane crashes that affect my personal history. Writing this piece allowed me to trace meaningful elements of my relationship with my compelling, complicated father in a tempestuous season. Plane crash #1: the wreck of a 1931 Boeing, pre-radar, carrying mail and a few passengers, lost in snowy mountain cliffs above my hometown. Crash #2: the explosion of a DeHavilland Comet, the first commercial passenger jet line, over the Mediterranean Sea, carrying (and killing) my father’s father in 1954. Crash #3: a boink-by-boink dismantling of a Piper Arrow at the Provo Airport in 1987, poorly landed by me (and a panicked flight instructor). Previous KARIN ANDERSON I s the author of the novels Before Us Like a Land of Dreams , What Falls Away , and Things I Didn’t Do (forthcoming in 2025), published by Torrey House Press. She hails from the Great Basin. karinandersonauthor.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue ONE SMALL CHANGE Max McDonough I was suddenly ill as the rattling bus curved around the mountains’ repeating elbows toward the distant summit’s tourist village, last breath before three hours of ancient stairs crumbling up to green ruins. To steady myself, I muttered the memorized fragments of old poems. We look at the world once. Taciturn, oblivious. I repeated them for forty minutes or so, until the spell expired, and the glass ball of pain in the bloated cradle of my stomach shook the poems’ grip on my clenched attention and the passing rusts, grassy wavering of pastures, cliffside, andenes, running streams loosened, broke open, refracted into something unexpected— the rosary prayer I had finally memorized in childhood, bead by bead, to protect my hands from the volunteer mom CCD teacher who paced stork-like at the head of the classroom, surveying the grid of melamine desks the color of a flock of manila folders, my legs already quivering though I was just becoming awake to my internal situation. She possessed the expected vengefulness, slapping with her neon-pink plastic ruler the clumsy, unremembering knuckles of my left hand (because she had seen such a punishment on TV?), the pale summits and valleys of my hand deepening red and white as the beads I should’ve known by then how to pray by. I had no such beads on the bus, but the mossy geography of the words of the prayer like stepping stones surfaced from the flooded landscape of my brain where the murk and water that covers everything receded to issue, after decades, in front of me a path: Hello, how art thou! who art in Heaven!, hallow be thy, thy will be, on Earth, give us , and then the classroom around the prayer which had formed the prayer to begin with formed itself again where the undefined and twiggy gay boy I had been tried with crayons to create the illusion of his favorite color “tie-dye” in the pages of a mass-produced coloring book filled with handsome depictions of Jesus, and soon-to-be tie-dyed doves and tie-dyed execution crosses, clenching his legs in a kind of prayer in the absence of poems, until, like a tragic sideways benediction of food poisoning and bad timing he, I, shit my pants, right there in the church classroom as the faces of the surrounding kids changed, as the teacher-mom oversaw my legs squirming with the question I would’ve asked if not for burying it in my larynx instead or, rather, burying only its beginning, Miss, can I go —my hand not shooting up, knowing what I needed but still not saying so. Then I remembered I was on a bus, weaving through mountains and the vision, if we can call it that, finally compelled me to turn to my friend who sat beside me, quite oblivious, reading Nabokov how I imagine everyone reads Nabokov by watching clouds drift in the nearest window instead, the book open in her lap. I said, Please . Which plainly meant, I am dying. I was not dying, of course, merely preferring death, my body the object again, the soul in this case a thin thread in a whirlwind having no business being where it was though having no volition either, so I relinquished and said thank you for the prayer, thank you for the classroom, the teacher-mom and her pacing, thank you for the poems that were the trouble, the broken ringlets, the unbroken surface of the pond of the poems that bought me the forty minutes or so through which the light of time shattered and burst across the bus forming the classroom of the Parish of Elizabeth Ann Seton in Absecon, New Jersey, reforming as the passing of language to my dear friend to the fluent couple in the front row who convinced the driver to pull over into one of the villages along the tourist road where a shopkeeper, thank you , permitted my Please, please, please, please , my flinging open the door at the rear for my sheepish body, which is living. So much of growing up Catholic for me was about learning shame and pretending that I didn’t have a real body. My body was always getting in the way. The wrong desires and needs meant my body was betraying me. How small could I make my body? How well-behaved and quiet? I tried inverting that in this poem. How much space can I take up? How long can I go on gabbing? What if said what I wanted and needed? Previous MAX MCDONOUGH'S debut poetry collection, Python with a Dog Inside It, won the 2023 St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press. His work has appeared in The New York Times , AGNI , Best New Poets , The Adroit Journal , T Magazine , and elsewhere. maxmcdonough.co 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 Albequerque, 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. Next

Lauren Camp < Back to Breakthroughs Issue SIGHT Lauren Camp 00:00 / 01:47 SIGHT Lauren Camp This isn’t how I intended to begin. A woman in a white dress. Comăneci’s routine on the uneven bars. How a friend gets her contacts to the river. The tumor larking an ankle. Why did you come, I ask everyone. Everyone has photos of sunset that summer. Moving away from the plains. A legal brief, a will. How you knew she would say, shouldn’t we? Glass doors into a hotel lobby. Fitting a key to the indifferent frame. That season I babysat for Danielle and her birthmark. A condor laving the canyon. My very first diary: pink with a lock. What are you looking for? Two men taking turns taking photos of selves as a layer, a promise. The couple on the bus in the wobbled tip of an argument, building a fault line. My father’s bald head and why didn’t I run my small hands over it. The spine of a cloud. The courtesy and plop of water as it takes each notch. How many times you write that you miss us together. So small yet I figure you’re hollering. Jupiter through a telescope. My grandmother’s cowbell in Tulsa. The camels in Luxor. Satellite images of the past. And now darkness. First published in In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024). This poem is one of many I began during a month-long stint as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. My focus was on the pristine natural darkness that spanned across and above this wonder of the world. I often write into a subject somewhat obsessively, interested to see what comes out when I’ve exhausted the easy response. “Sight” takes on a large collection of objects and experiences that continue to unfold and deepen for me. Every one can be summed up as ephemeral, though they left me with residual memory, and with things to turn over and question further. Previous LAUREN CAMP serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight books of poetry. www.laurencamp.com Next

klipschutz < Back to Breakthroughs Issue HYMN FOR LORCA klipschutz 00:00 / 00:37 HYMN FOR LORCA klipschutz When the sun shines I do not dream of Revolution There is a naked girl in the sand singing Now the clouds have swallowed her and the streets are in chaos Sad guitars are gleaming swords— As we storm the Palace I awake Her shy tongue is restless as it darts from mouth to mouth from revolution to revolution. "Hymn for Lorca" was previously published in The Erection of Scaffolding for the Re-Painting of Heaven by the Lowest Bidder (1985). Written when I wasn’t yet 20. (I am 68 now.) I was channeling the man himself, or thought I was. The ending surprised me, still does. A revolution is a breakthrough, no? Previous klipschutz (pen name of Kurt Lipschutz ) is a poet, songwriter, editor, and occasional literary journalist. He has been based in San Francisco since 1980. klipschutz.com Next

Jan Mordenski < Back to Breakthroughs Issue YES, EMILY, HOPE Jan Mordenski 00:00 / 01:00 YES, EMILY, HOPE Jan Mordenski is something feathery but even you knew of its highly seductive danger. Like you, we tend to revel in the cloudless sight of the untarnished dove that lifts our thoughts then sets them down, so tenderly, in fields of whitening flowers. But you also knew that other call, that of the drifting hawk who inscribes the autumn air in mesmerizing circles— the sort we all made on grey hyphenated pages before we actually learned to write— that we need consider his unmatched sight, his claws, his deft ability to snatch up life pick it to the bone before we ever hope to set down our minds on paper. "Yes, Emily, Hope" was written after I toured the Dickinson house at Amherst. Her famous lines about hope had always cheered me, but her life and surroundings offered insight into the more serious aspects of writing poetry. Only after that visit did I begin to realize the great responsibility we writers have to our readers regarding truth and honestly. Previous JAN MORDENSKI was born in Detroit, Michigan. She is the author of the chapbook The Chosen Pattern (Quadra-Project, 1988). Her poem "Crochet" was published in Plainsong and in Ted Kooser's series, “American Life in Poetry.” Next