< Back to Breakthroughs Issue AT ABU ALI Alison Moore It is late summer in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. Iran and Iraq are declaring jihad , a holy war on each other, and on the day the missiles begin to rip through the air we think about being in the water. We think about swimming, pretending we're somewhere other than the Middle East for an afternoon. We drive to find a beach at Abu Ali. Giff and Ardelle sit in the front of the pickup, Dennis and Bob and I ride in the back. The little sliding window at the back of the cab is open so we can all hear the classical music hour from Radio Bahrain. Beethoven urges us forward and we leave a plume of dust behind. We can't get away fast enough, out of Jubail and the industrial project where the men work endless hours trying to carry out the erratic whims of the Saudi Royal Commission. As women in an Islamic country, Ardelle and I struggle to find ways to fill our time. We are forbidden to work, to drive a car, even to sit on the seat of a bicycle. We walk to the commissary in 125-degree heat with 100% humidity in long-sleeved, full-length kaftans, thankful at least not to be veiled. At Abu Ali we will be almost naked in bathing suits, visible if only for an afternoon, and very nearly free. We are stopped at a barricade on the narrow causeway to the island. A teenage Saudi soldier sits slouched on a tall stool in the tiny guard hut, listening to a tape of the Rolling Stones on his cassette player. He switches the music off, then saunters slowly toward our truck, scuffing across the asphalt in his dusty sandals. He grips a machine gun in his small hands. He leans down to our open window, peering in at our I.D. badges, warily comparing us to the tiny, laminated photographs on the cards. Straightening up, he flicks one of the tasseled ends of his red and white-checked shemagh over his shoulder, then waves us through with the barrel of the gun. Abu Ali is a wild, uninhabited island. Except for the road and the pipeline, there is nothing but camel grass and low dunes. Sand tracks lead off the narrow road at abrupt angles, veering to either shoreline. We pick a track at random and stop to put the truck in 4-wheel drive. We head for the dunes, growling in the lower gears. It is only a kilometer or so to the shore of the Persian Gulf. Lapping against the white sugar sand is water bluer than the stone in a Navajo ring, shimmering in the thick, humid air. We climb out, laughing and stretching. A blanket is laid down, a square of white cloth like a flag of truce on the sand. We drag our provisions to it—all the things necessary for survival: water, food, paperback novels, sunscreen. We sit down cross-legged, eating fried chicken with our bare hands, tossing the bones over the side, and guzzling iced tea until it drips down our chins. We wear an odd assortment of hats: Giff in a sailor's cap with the brim folded down, Ardelle in a safari helmet. Bob wears a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Dennis has a homemade gutra made of a white T-shirt that says "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore" held on his head with a bungee cord, and I wear a frayed straw cowboy hat with a blue-black crow's feather stuck in the hatband. We gaze out over the gulf, north to Iran. When the flies begin to drive us mad, we submerge ourselves up to our shoulders in water. The tide is moving out fast, leaving us sitting in the shallows. The water is not exactly refreshing—it’s thick with salt and close to body temperature. But it lulls us, an amniotic fluid gently rocking our weightless bodies. We are so still that a large, white bird, an egret, drifts close to us on the current. Very slowly, I begin to follow it, walking my hands on the sandy bottom, trailing my legs out behind me. I move parallel to it, keeping the same languid pace, and the bird, if it notices anything at all, sees only a floating hat, which memory tells it is not a dangerous thing. I turn carefully to look over my shoulder and see the others behind me. Now the bird leads the five of us and we all move north along the shoreline as if pulled along on a string. It is the bird who breaks the silence, opening its beak to let out a shrill cry. It rises heavily, beating its spreading wings, and the sound the air makes moving through its feathers is the sound of a lasso in the wind. Its legs hang, black stalks beneath the white body, the toes like the long tines of forks dripping salty water. We watch it go, flying low over the Persian Gulf. We watch until we can't see it clearly anymore, until the white wings disappear into the wisps of black smoke that drift slowly towards us from the north, from the burning city of Abadan. Originally published in The North American Review , March 1987. I lived near Jubail, Saudi Arabia as an expat from 1980 to 1982. My husband was a photographer on contract and had spent two years there already when I joined him. Abu Ali was an uninhabited island in the Persian Gulf where we occasionally went to get away from the restrictions of living in a Muslim city, not behind the walls of an American compound. This is the story of our breakaway, one day, with friends, when a bit of the Iran-Iraq War broke through. "At Abu Ali" was a breakthrough in that it was my first published piece. Previous ALISON MOORE is s a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and a former Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in fiction, and tours with the multi-media humanities program, "Riders on the Orphan Train," which she co-created with the musician Phil Lancaster. ridersontheorphantrain.org Next

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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Street Imagination Stephen Ruffus Night is a hood after a day’s exile stepping over broken glass. I scratch fractured stories on brick walls, sidewalks, the underpass for pigeons to sing to. They are all that I am, my only letters to the world. A library is a good place for hiding. You can tear pictures from art books of the famous paintings far across the East River tape them onto your bedroom wall and feel like you’re something. Make a few holes in your t-shirt before someone does it for you. Scuff up your brand new PF Flyers and deny all others the pleasure. At the corner store buy a Mission orange soda. No one will steal a swig. I’ll spit in the bottle first. Here you keep what is yours by corrupting it. First published in Hotel Amerika. In "Street Imagination," I describe the loneliness and vulnerability I felt as an adolescent growing up in a New York City neighborhood, and the small ways I challenged its threats and asserted my own identity to survive. Previous STEPHEN RUFFUS is the author of a chapbook, In Lieu Of (Elk Press, 2024) His work has appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, 3rd Wednesday, the American Journal of Poetry, The Shore, Poetica Review, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, and Stone Poetry Quarterly , among others. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his work also received two awards in the Utah Original Writing Competition. Stephen was a founding poetry editor of Quarterly West . Originally from NYC, he still considers himself a New Yorker in many respects, and currently lives in Salt Lake City with his wife. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue PURSED LIPS Robert Cooperman My diminished stamina? I take in too much breath to expel, but you show me how to blow out, pursing my lips, not holding my breath and exhaling in a giant explosion— like a whale through its blowhole— ineffective and exhausting. Along with a pulmonologist’s inhaler, my pursed lips let me exercise, though I’ll never run a marathon, not that I ever did, but at least I don’t feel like I’ve gasped through twenty-six miles when I climb a flight of stairs. But what I can’t get out of my head: those pursed lips: remembering seeing To Have and Have Not as a kid, Bogie telling Bacall to walk around him, taunting he comes with no strings attached, and she comes back with, “If you want me, Steve, all you have to do is whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?” her mocking purr. “Just put your lips together and blow ,” and now all I want to do is purse my lips and kiss and kiss and kiss you forever. I’ve been suffering from shortness of breath for quite some time, but recently got good advice from my wife Beth about one way to deal with that problem, and also from a pulmonologist. Also, for our 50th anniversary, I thought a poetic tribute to Beth was very much in order. Previous 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

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

Some Things to Do in the Face of Death for Manny Castillo "The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real." —To Be of Use by Marge Piercy by Jim LaVilla-Havelin Paint the casket. Stare back. Bring the gifts. Don’t mourn, organize. Do the right thing. Stand at the four corners, watchful. Do what the moment suggests, facing an eternity of moments. Drum. Do what needs to be done. Do more. Play the sax. Embrace. Follow the example of the exemplary life. Laugh. Cry. Sing. Gather light. Remember, but do not lock away as past. Re-dedicate. Make food. Make art. Make peace. Make love. Continue the work. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Originally published in Counting (Pecan Grove Press, 2010). This is a favorite because it’s an elegy and a list poem, a really good poem to read aloud, and one of the first poems of mine that actually live in San Antonio. Manny, who died young, was the director of a community organization called San Anto Cultural Arts, a force on SA’s Westside visible in a mural project across the neighborhood, and newspaper of place. The poem’s specifics are from his memorial service in Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JIM LAVILLA-HAVELIN is the author of eight books of poetry, including two forthcoming in 2025, Mesquites Teach Us to Bend (Lamar University Press, 2025) and A Thoreau Book (Alabrava Press, 2025). He is the co-editor of the Houston University Press, Unsung Masters volume on Rosemary Catacalos (2025) and as Literary Executor for Catacalos’ estate, he is assembling her unpublished work for a volume Sing! . An educator, editor, and community arts activist for over 50 years, LaVilla-Havelin coordinates National Poetry Month activities in San Antonio. Awarded the City of San Antonio’s Distinction in the Arts for Literary Art, he teaches at The Cyndi Taylor Krier Juvenile Correctional Treatment Center for Gemini Ink’s Partners Program, teaches senior citizens in the Go Arts Program through Bihl Haus Cultural Arts, and high school students as Poet in Residence at the Young Women’s Leadership Academy. Next - The Concrete Poet by Jim LaVilla-Havelin Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue STILL LIFE WITH FLY Shawn Stradley Two concrete strips separated and edged by weeds run between red brick walls, past a corrugated steel garage door, bare lightbulb, crooked wood door, past the weed patch of leftover space at the end of the dead end. Why there's a garage door alongside the alley is a good question, no vehicle could make such a tight turn. Raised, the door provides ventilation, natural light. Closed, it secures. Inside, two dusty double-hung six- over-six divided light windows look out to morning glory, sow thistle, other brick walls, let in muted light, cast shadows. For consistency and night, a couple of flood lights on poles provide directed light, harsh and bare, or softened with a scrim. Tea cups, angel wings, fabric, rusty train shock springs, spoiled fruit, skulls––one human found in a basement among medical school training supplies, one cat found in the corner of the weed patch by the downspout, one beaver found by the river––old books, empty vodka, whiskey, wine bottles. Mason jars filled with marbles, fortunes, rocks, air, pennies, turpentine, thinner. Dolls' arms, radio tubes, bones––vertebrae, jaw, femurs from deer or cow––statues of saints, rosaries, forty-hour candles wrapped with prayers, used coffee filters, condom wrappers, a shopping cart, mannequin torso, the ball cap left by last Saturday night's trick, dead flowers. Stretched canvases lean against bare brick walls, too much accumulated amid the buzz of a single fly. The couch sags. Open beer flattens. There's not enough time to paint it all out, step back, take it all in. Turpentine rags stained crimson, violet, fern and blue, used to clean brushes, wipe up spills, unstain hands, litter the floor like jock-straps in a strip-club backroom––spontaneous, combustible. "Still Life with Fly" was published in Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art . The personal breakthrough in this poem was derived from the concept that the next thing always belongs. If that is true, then why not keep going, keep adding? So I did. I’ve always been fascinated with artists' studios, the mess, the clutter, the curiosities, all the bric-a-brac, the inspiration. To me, these spaces have always held an air of potential eroticism. It’s all so exciting? Based on my many studio visits over the years, I imagined and I wrote, and I brainstormed, and I kept writing, and adding. In this case, even the gradual increase in line length keeps building to the chaos, the clutter, the potential. After the additions though, there is always the work of revision, grammar, sentence construction, flow, enjambment. Are these tools helping to build, helping to hold together? In a "kitchen sink"-type poem, I believe they have to. Previous SHAWN DALLAS STRADLEY grew up in Utah and California. He holds a B.S. in Horticulture from BYU, and a Master of Landscape Architecture from University of Colorado. In 2013, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing and Translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Shawn began writing poetry at age 16. His mystical fascination with the natural world weaves throughout his work, and mixes with the urban. Shawn became active in the Utah poetry scene in 1997 and published his first full-length poetry book in 2003: Beyond October (Black Rock Books). Shawn has worked with poets and artists to produce chapbooks and a collaborative catalog for the art exhibit, The 9 Muses . Two chapbooks of Shawn's poetry were published in 2025 by Moon in the Rye Press, Fragile House and a group collaboration, When Cupboards Open . His poetry has been published by City Weekly , Exit 7 , Panorama , The New Era , Nine One One , The Poeming Pigeon , and My Kitchen Table. Next

Nominations for the Pushcart Prize Anthology Best of the Small Presses From Issue 1 "July" by Shannan Ballam "Still Life with Mormons in My Living Room" by Paul Fericano "Missa Brevis" by Kimberly Johnson "The Little House: Crystal City, Texas" by Jeff Talmadge From Issue 2 "Knotted Wrack" by Maureen Clark "Storms, Maybe a Metaphor for Us" by Kase Johnston Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue FIVE DAYS INTO THE NEW ADMINISTRATION Alexandra van de Kamp and I’m fluent in the words Executive Order, its acronym, EO, and, as a '60's kid, know it has little to do with Electric Light Orchestra , unless, by electric, we mean endlessly on edge, veins aglitter with news-minnows. Five days into this new game show, and there’s already an eloquent, cascading disorder; an eddying, occupying flora overgrowing grasses and skies, fogging up our panes. Five days in, I’m looking at the squirrels, their bodies calligraphing the trees, for some philosophical tidbits of wisdom to outpace my brain. I’m asking the clouds how they buoy despite their soggy weight. I’m renegotiating what feels safe. And today, safe feels like a shriveled postage stamp, running with ink. It feels like the overflowing clawfoot tub in a BBC mystery when the mother slits her wrists in the bath, expecting to be found—her blood a dark lily swaying in the water as her daughter arrives, witnesses what she’s done. Five days in, and I’m wondering: Am I this woman, misjudging the time I have left? I want a vaster, faster-reacting vocabulary for doubt and dread . What about lead-bout , hammered-heart , dead-gut ? And despite all this, here you are on a Saturday morning, wearing a bright blue pullover and drinking coffee calmly, anchored to our small history, our kitchen—my other voice, my trembling wind socket, my skin chime. "Five Days into the New Administration" was a breakthrough because I learned political anger could be channeled through a poem with playful aspects, like referencing Electric Light Orchestra while thinking of the onslaught of Executive Orders signed by the Trump Administration. I also saw that a political poem could have a certain elasticity and could include a scene from a BBC TV series to comment on the unfolding and highly disturbing political atmosphere. Lastly, writing this poem helped me find my voice in a challenging time. Previous ALEXANDRA VAN DE KAMP is the Executive Director for Gemini Ink , San Antonio’s Writing Arts Center. She is the author of the poetry collections Ricochet Script (Next Page Press, 2022), Kiss/Hierarchy (Rain Mountain Press, 2016), and The Park of Upside-Down Chairs (WordTech, 2010). alexandravandekamppoet.com Next

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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue FRANK'S BUICK David G. Pace I’m not sure when my late father-in-law’s town car became our car. It wasn’t when we wrested it from Mom, who we decided couldn’t safely operate it anymore. It wasn’t when we changed the title to my name. For even after that, I saw it as Frank’s Buick, a.k.a. the Batmobile, so named because of its dual automatic “ComforTemp” controls in the front seats (leather), its “Twilight Sentinel” feature that turns the headlights on and off depending on how light it is outside, the heated windshield, the cruise control with automatic reset, the illuminated entry system around door locks, the electric radio antennae that telescopes into hiding every time you turn off the radio. The sexy stereo system. Actually, the stereo is one I had installed, complete with a CD player. The old one, which came with the car in 1991, freakishly shut down with a pop while I was listening to the radio and approaching the Verrazano Bridge from the New Jersey side in 2001. It was at night, just days after the terrorist attacks on New York City and, of course, the first thing I thought was that there was another downed transformer on top of a burning skyscraper. Embedded as I was within those many pounds of Detroit excess, I still felt vulnerable. When I replaced the stereo, I actually wondered what Frank Daley would think, what style he would prefer. I winced after it was installed when I realized it didn’t mesh too well with the dashboard, designed at a time when CD players were probably a thousand dollars each and Americans were still getting tangled in their cassette tapes. I didn’t think of the Batmobile as ours even after we made arrangements for Mom to live in a rest home in Western Massachusetts and took the car home to Brooklyn, where we hobbled it with a newly bought “club” on its steering wheel. The maroon monster with the runners on top of the trunk sat parked on Prospect Park Southwest as a persistent reminder of the suburban car culture I had fled. My wife, Cheryl, and I talked about never using it except to visit Mom. That it was a gas guzzler and the size of a small pachyderm and therefore couldn’t be trusted on the narrow, pocked streets of New York. Its very presence suggested that we weren’t really New Yorkers who take the subway everywhere. I wondered what my late father-in-law would think if he knew that his ten-year-old car, which cost more than his pre-fab in a Florida golf village, was sitting on the streets of New York and dodging yellow cabs on the monthly trip up to his boyhood home of Florence, Mass. to see his widow. It was shortly after the Buick’s Brooklyn era started that I found Frank’s auto log. It was in the glove compartment, and in it he had put the history of the car’s maintenance: the lube in 1992 shortly after he bought it at a Ft. Pierce, Florida dealership; the wheel balance later that year; the replacement of this with that. It was detailed, fastidious, and very Frank— the type of man who labeled his Christmas storage boxes with reminders of which ornaments he’d hung each year. I found this log scoffable, coming as I did from a family whose patriarch was lucky to remember to put gas in the car, but months before the stereo got replaced, I found myself adding to the log as the car needed service: Re-set RF wheel speed signal code (2/11/00) Horn button replaced (9/21/00) Inspection (10/03/00) I would return the small pencil—expertly sharpened with the pocket knife I had inherited from him—to the wire rings of the notebook and wedge it back into the glove box as if the car would fail to turn over unless its history were kept intact. Frank Daley’s story was one largely written by the time I met him in 1992. The Buick was barely a year old, and I remember standing with him behind the trunk that automatically closed and locked itself, a cooler of drinks on the runners, watching Fourth of July fireworks over a saltwater river. He had a natural fascination for celebrations, which brokered easy conversation with me, someone I’m sure he thought was just his daughter’s summer boyfriend. She was twice divorced, and I was nearly twelve years her junior. I kept my distance from this short, stocky man. At the pool earlier that day, Frank, white and hairless, was nearly luminescent next to the blue tile, his body a network of scars that crackled from the notch in his throat through his sternum and to his left leg, where they had stripped away a vein. I knew that Frank had developed a seizure disorder late in life and had suffered more than one heart attack, the first when he was just fifty-three-years old, which forced him into early retirement from his work as wonder-boy salesman for Rustcraft Greeting Cards. In Brooklyn, I got a lot of respect driving around in the Batmobile, even though for the first month I had to reassure myself vocally that I had the right to drive this car that wasn’t mine and that my mother-in-law sorely missed. The Buick was sleek, its nose tapered from its grill to the center of gravity over a muscled chassis. Its maroon color was all sheen except for a couple of nicks that Frank had judiciously touched up with a tube of car paint he kept boxed in the trunk along with every imaginable car care and travel item, including a chamois, hub cab cleaning foam, flares, and an impressive first-aid kit. The car’s trunk was big enough to hide not one, but two bodies. Only twice did I wheel my luggage past the Batmobile to the subway for the two-hour commute to JFK International where I was based as a flight attendant. After that, the siren call of convenience lured me to its side, all sheen. As I shot down Caton Avenue and Linden Boulevard, I actually had people flagging me down, thinking that with a town car, I was operating a car service. Other vehicles moved the hell out of the way when they saw me angling into a lane or chasing a yellow light through a busy intersection with Flatbush Avenue. That is, until one day about a year after I started taking the car to work. I was on North Conduit, the final feeder of my trip before hitting the straight shot to the airport, and I was late. The chaos of late afternoon bore down on three lanes becoming one, and the world narrowed to this stream of fenders, a mass migration of diverse species nosing into one another’s paths. A man in a Celica was performing the infamous New York Ace: entering the flow of traffic by assuming that if you ignore eye contact with the driver you’re cutting off, he will have to brake for you. I’m not sure if my aggression stemmed from my anxiety over being late, or if I resented that this four-wheeled gazelle would so easily ignore me, a far superior animal bearing down on it—and with the right-of-way no less. The game ended with the gazelle’s left hoof implanted just behind the right shoulder blade of my leopard, the Buick. There was much honking and yelling while the rest of the herd instantly re-directed itself around the new obstacle. “What happened to the Batmobile?” asked Cheryl, who often claimed that when she wanted to lose weight she sat in the passenger seat of Frank’s Buick while I drove. “Bummer, huh? Somebody hit me in the parking lot at work. Didn’t even leave a note. Gotta love New Yorkers.” Frank would have been disappointed, but not because I lied. One of his many maxims to my wife was, she reported, “Lie to others if you must; just don’t lie to yourself.” He would have been disappointed that first, I was driving his Buick on the streets of an uncivilized city (after meeting his wife in New York City on leave during World War II, he never bothered to visit the city again), and second, that I had been so stupid as to crash a car. That was something his wife did, or a man of lesser character, a man who would never be driving a Park Avenue Buick in the first place. Repairs to right quarter panel (6/04/02) $250.00 deductible. Frank and Mabel had lived well, even after Frank was disabled in the late seventies. One could fairly say that in their salad, G.I. Bill days, Frank made “more money than God.” That they could summer on an island every year even while maintaining their home in Rhode Island was a testament to just how much money there was. That after selling both homes they moved into a Florida don’t-call-it-a-trailer trailer was a testament to the price of his disability. The new Batmobile was the final imprint of the life they once had. When Cheryl and I married, we would visit the folks in sodden Florida, where we seemed to hydroplane in the Buick to go marvel at the manatees, to visit the water locks, to lunch at the crab houses before cruising back to the gated village’s swimming pool in which, at the time, I was technically too young to swim (under thirty-five). “If he’s a writer, why is he still working for the airline?” Frank once asked Cheryl who, by sheer dint of character, would always defend me. For me, the question, even second hand, lodged in my cranium like a foul ball pounded into the metal fence behind home plate. And by sheer dint of character, I defended myself to myself: “Why did he hang onto a town car when he lived in a golf village with a five-mile-per-hour speed limit and refused even to pick us up at the airport?” Frank and I had little, if anything in common. I was almost young enough to be his grandson. I was from the West and Mormon, while he was a Yankee, originally from Massachusetts and Episcopalian. I was a romantic with ambitions to write while Frank was all business—in more ways than one. But a writer is a good listener and a former salesman is a talker. True, at times I had to struggle to decipher his “dole-house” from “doll house,” his “khakis” from “car keys,” but I could listen to my father-in-law, and we could watch TV and I could help him paint the garage door at the island house. It was early January 1997, two weeks after Cheryl had returned from a marathon session of changing her parents’ pre-fab into a hospital-away-from-hospital, that the phone rang. It was Mabel. She told us Frank had died in the night. Congestive heart failure. There was no money, only a few investments, insurance, a double-wide fast losing its value in a golf village. The $35,000 Batmobile. We moved Mabel to the rest home near Northampton, Massachusetts, where Cheryl could visit her. Meanwhile, we invested what was left of the money to keep Mom off Medicaid. Except for a fender bender in Florence, Mass. and my secret one in Queens, the Batmobile remained unscathed. After nearly ten years, it was approaching only 60,000 miles, less than half of what most cars had at that age. Still, even after a full year of driving it, I had to remind myself whenever I drove that I had a right to Frank’s Buick. Perhaps I felt that I deserved Frank’s Buick only when I started getting mail from credit card companies addressed to “Frank Pace,” a creepy confusion in the system resulting from the transfer of funds from Frank’s name to mine. If I had to take his name, then certainly I was welcome to take his car, even if it was one that I would have never selected myself. I couldn’t sell it. For one thing, we needed a car to get to Mom, and this one was paid for. Finally—surprise, surprise—it got over thirty freeway miles to the gallon. The Batmobile sat street-side, braving vandals and snowplows in equal measure until Mom died and we decided to return to the West. It was a year after 9/11; the market had been good to us, including the real estate market for our Brooklyn co-op, and the Batmobile was growing on me. I liked the big engine, the big trunk, and the way it plowed through the snow. I liked how Adam from the writers’ group was clearly impressed with its digital temperature control that beeped like a microwave whenever you adjusted it. I guess I liked it because, for me, it was contact with luxury, even as I rolled my eyes at it as “the clunker we inherited from my mother-in-law.” The trip to Utah was not kind to Frank’s Buick. The moving company lifted it right into the semi behind all of our other stuff, then placed a “protective” false ceiling over it so that boxes wouldn’t fall on the car’s roof. Instead, the Batmobile bounced over 1,800 miles, its top rubbing against the unpadded wood ceiling and grinding it raw. Frank would have been appalled. The moving company dodged any and all compensation, so the roof still sports the bands of paintless metal suffered from the car’s prairie crossing. Despite the Buick’s mounting bruises, my relationship to Frank, now deceased for five years, was improving. Though he made over twenty Atlantic crossings during WWII as a cook on the USS Wakefield —we have a picture of him in the galley with Jack Dempsey—Frank was otherwise not a traveler and would have found it inconceivable that his wonder machine, bought in the twilight of his life, would have survived not only the Big Dirty Apple, but also the 4,500 plus-foot elevation of Salt Lake City. Just the ski rack on top of his beloved Park Avenue would have enraged him. So in my mind, I explained all of this to my postal namesake. How the Buick was now Frank’s vicarious time machine, taking his spirit to places he had read about but for whatever reason, found impossible to visit. How he and I were having an extended conversation with each other as father and son, a conversation that motored beyond time zones and dimensions, beyond my life and his death. I realize now that I’d been conversing with him all along, ever since I took over the Batmobile: those harried rides to work through the heart of Brooklyn; that time in Manhattan when he and I sped up the West Side highway and ogled the runners and rollerbladers along the Hudson River, the hard-bodied men cavorting with bikini-topped women—or more shocking, with other hard-bodied men. I imagined that he sat in the back seat on our way up to Niagara Falls and Mormon Country, when I tried alternately to detail and defend my background to him. I could hear him chiding me on my reckless driving, more than once, through Times Square, as if there were any other way to move through that crossroads of the world without at least appearing reckless. He even wept with me right out of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel when we were detoured away from Ground Zero, but saw Buddhists on the wooden, West Side Highway platform conducting a purifying smoke ritual for the three thousand dead. And then we were in Utah, and I could hear him berating me for thirty minutes for having pushed the car so hard up from Las Vegas and into the high desert that the right front tire gave out and tore a hole in the front panel to the tune of a thousand dollars. But he was also the one prompting me to give twenty bucks to the two penniless sixteen-year-olds halfway home from Las Vegas in a broken-down Monte Carlo they forgot to put oil in. “By the time their Mom makes it down from Brigham City to pick them up,” I remember him whispering to me, “they will have learned their lesson. Meanwhile, they have to eat.” And in the Wasatch Mountains, he forgave me for installing the ski rack when we rounded a corner to Sundance and he saw, for the first time, the mighty scalloped backside of Mt. Timpanogos, cyanic and terrible in the frigid February air. At Arches National Park, I left him at the aptly named, free-standing Delicate Arch, where he insisted on taking pictures of all the hikers and finding out where they were from, and marveling with them: “There isn’t anything like this in the East!” “I’ll catch up with you later,” he said. In the end, we parted company for good out in the desert two hours west of Salt Lake, where the world’s fastest cars shoot across the salt flats at, literally, rocket speeds. It was hard to know what would have appealed to Frank more, the awesome vastness of the desert, or the fact that man had scored it with his fast, rocket-propelled cars. The flats, white and carrying the form of tiny waves in their crystals, extend for miles to the dusty range of mountains below ribbons of high clouds trailing east. The wind is all around in a place like this, solitary tumbleweeds bumping across the hardened surface of an inland sea that in its horizontality must have reminded Frank of the sea off Peaks Island where he summered, or the sea beyond the bulwarks of the Wakefield as it plowed through the Atlantic before it was eventually torpedoed and sunk. In a place like this, even a New Englander—perhaps especially a New Englander—can let go and leave this world, can imagine that unlike the sea, this is the real end of the world, of the hard-baked rock that we call home. From the edge of Interstate 80, I honked the car horn for several long minutes. I motioned him back to me. But he wouldn’t return. I saw Frank Daley standing out there in his flak jacket and cowboy hat he’d taken to wearing since his removal to the West. Finally, he motioned for me to leave. To take his Buick and return to civilization where it belonged. Where it belonged, and where he no longer lived. So I did. The engine turned over, and the Twilight Sentinel flipped on the headlights automatically like it does. A bit of a clunking noise was coming from the back near the gas tank. The muffler maybe? I’d have to get that checked. And get to the paint shop before the roof started to rust. That’s what I was thinking as I babied my Buick up to seventy-five miles per hour, hit the Dynaride cruise control, and settled in. # "Frank's Buick" was first published in Alligator Juniper . This essay follows the author's continuing and somewhat strained relationship with his now dead father-in-law through the inheritance of the older man's prized Buick. When does your deceased father-in-law's car become your own after its title is handed over to you? Answer: years later, on the salt flats of Utah near where you've relocated, two thousand miles-plus from where the car's original owner is buried. Previous DAVID G. PACE is an essayist and fiction writer located in the Mountain West. His collection of short fiction American Trinity: and Other Stories from the Mormon Corridor (BCC Press, 2024) was a winner in the Utah Original Writing Competition, and won the 15 Bytes Award for fiction . Pace holds an M.A. in Communication/Rhetoric and is the recipient of many awards, including two for his first novel, Dream House on Golan Drive (Signature Books, 2015). davidgpace.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue RECONSIDERING GOD Dennise Gackstetter I cannot believe in the god that lurks in the tall tales on the dark crowded pages shuttered between heavy covers of tarnished gilded books. The god I could believe in would dance in the wide margins, skipping from white space to white space until the page’s edge, and then with arms wide take an elegant leap into the unknown. I cannot even use the word “god.” It is too small a word to contain all the possibilities of divinity. It is a stony sounding word, bounded at both ends by two hard consonants that strain to compress the small “o” that is an exhale of delight, the “ahhhh” of wonder, the first sound of joy. "Reconsidering god" was first published in Blue Mesa Review . For years, I sought to understand the possibilities of divinity in this world. After exploring many kinds of religious theories and spiritual beliefs, I left the idea of “god” behind. The path led me back to the muck and mud of our own humanity as the place where holiness arises. I understand now that our ability to open and transform ourselves is the truest expression of divinity. This poem was a breakthrough because it was the first poem that I ever had accepted for publication. This gave me a boost of encouragement that has kept me growing as a writer. Previous DENNISE GACKSTETTER is an artist, educator, and writer. Recently retired from Utah State University, Dennise was a Principal Lecturer in Art Education and the Art Education Coordinator. She was a part of the Writing Team for the new Utah Core Fine Art Standards. She lives happily in Logan, Utah. dennisegclayworks.com Next