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Unsung Masters volume on Rosemary Catacalos (2025) and as Literary Executor for Catacalos’ estate, he is assembling her unpublished work for a volume Sing!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 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

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 TIP Marjorie Maddox of the tongue not tickling the undiscovered decay; of the finger, stubbed into silence; of the #2 pencil, poised and pointed, suddenly stifled, its nonpoisonous lead unable to undo any tabula rasa—mine or yours or my mother’s, who keeps asking with the tongue and the finger and the blank slate of her almost ninety-year-old face, “How old? How old?” How old this silence that faces the poised, the stubbed mother tongue— yours, mine—blank as any tabula rasa before words knew how to rise, or fingers how to point at the poisonous, the decayed, or merely the undiscovered hiding behind the stifled face, ninety #2 pencils unable to answer such sudden questions. How to answer what tickles the stubbed mind, undo the poisonous—yours, mine— face the tabula rasa without pencil or tongue, the blank of silence its own discovery of decay, the pointed “How old? How old?” suddenly stifled, leading back to the undoing: blank slate where ninety keeps asking after itself as the finger points in question, and the poised tongue raises again its unanswered Tip "Tip" was previously published in Southern Florida Poetry Review and in the poetry collection Seeing Things (Wildhouse, 2025). This poem, the first I wrote during a Fall 2018 writing residency, tumbled out the evening that I arrived, the process “tipping” me into a “tip of the tongue” space that writing often pushes through. This time, the process provided insight into the early stages of my mother’s dementia. What, I wondered, did it feel like to her when words became evasive at a more extreme level than common “tip of the tongue” syndrome? “Tip” thus paved the way to other poems on dementia, caregiving, and the shifting roles of memory that eventually became the book Seeing Things (Wildhouse, Feb. 2025). Previous MARJORIE MADDOX has published 17 collections of poetry, a story collection, five children’s and YA books, and two anthologies (co-editor). She is a Professor Emerita of English at the Lock Haven Campus of Commonwealth University. marjoriemaddox.com Next

Siren by Amy Gerstler I have a fish’s tail, so I’m not qualified to love you. But I do. Pale as an August sky, pale as flour milled a thousand times, pale as the icebergs I have never seen, and twice as numb—my skin is such a contrast to the rough rocks I lie on, that from far away it looks like I’m a baby riding a dinosaur. The turn of centuries or the turn of a page means the same to me, little or nothing. I have teeth in places you’d never suspect. Come. Kiss me and die soon. I slap my tail in the shallows—which is to say I appreciate nature. You see my sisters and me perched on rocks and tiny islands here and there for miles: untangling our hair with our fingers, eating seaweed. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue From Bitter Angel, (North Point Press, 1990). "Siren" is an older poem that still has a place in my heart because it dates from a time in my life when I was first realizing I wanted to write about women's lives: even mythical women, my obsession with the archetype of mermaids, etc. and I was trying to work out ways to do that in poems. .................................................................................................................................................................................... AMY GERSTLER has published ten books of poetry and received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Los Angeles. poetryfoundation.org/poets/amy-gerstler Next - The Lure of the Unfinished by Amy Gerstler Next

The First Time I Saw Snow by Jeff Talmadge It was the day I turned five and winter in Texas. My mother woke and walked me to the window at the front of the house, pointing outside, smiling. Look , she said. I asked her what it was we saw, thinking she had brought it for my birthday. She was thirty-eight. Snow , she said. Snow . Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue First published in Miramar . I’m partial to short poems, which this certainly is, and I was happy with how much information and sense are conveyed in such a few lines. Only two words are quoted (one of them said twice). I wanted to convey a sense of the relationship without directly describing it. The scene, short though it is, captures that moment for me. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JEFF TALMADGE was born in Uvalde, Texas, about 70 miles from the Mexican border and grew up in small towns like Crystal City, Wharton, Boling and Big Spring. At Duke University, he won the Academy of American Poets Award, and his poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines. He was a civil trial attorney in Austin before becoming a full-time musician. Jeff has received numerous awards for his songwriting. His most recent record is Sparrow . jefftalmadge.com Next - The Little House: Crystal City, Texas by Jeff Talmadge Next

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

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

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

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

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

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