Automotive by Kevin Prufer I keep returning to the image of a kitten asleep in the engine as a way of understanding the history of my country. So warm under the car’s hood, the hidden sweetness in the dark machinery. + Start the car. + [The sound the kitten makes.] + Happy slaves on a lazy afternoon sleeping in the shadow of haybales. A banjo lying in the sun. Stolen apples. A lithograph on the wall in my father’s office: “The sweet ol’ summuh time.” + My mother bought me a kitten. I brought it home in a cardboard box and how I loved that kitten, the way it purred in my arms and pressed its cold wet nose against my cheek. + Start the car. + In a poem by Jorie Graham, history is a hand grenade lodged in the pulp of a young tree. The tree grows, the tree grows. One day, a farmer chops it down for firewood. Imagine his surprise when the grenade— + [The sound the kitten made.] + My mother promised me a kitten, but it escaped, scurrying into the distant past. + I used to think history moved inexorably forward from villainy into truth, but the kitten was nowhere to be seen. I stood on the porch and called into the wind. Only the car cooled in the driveway, its engine ticking. + All those kittens asleep by the haybales— they had had too much to eat, and now they wanted a warm place to relax. The sun bore down upon them. + The grenade explodes as resentment, as rage, as the final expression of unredressed wrong. When the kitten licked my ear I laughed and fed it treats. + Start the car. + What did I know of evil? My father worked long evenings in his study so I could go to school. I had a safe childhood. Don’t make me feel guilty about that. I’m not guilty of anything here. + [That sound.] + They had stolen the apples and the time, but in the distance you could see their master walking from the barn, scowling— Lazy, lazy. Oh, you lazy…. + Anyway, I loved that kitten and when I couldn’t find it, I panicked not because it was a metaphor for the history of my country but because I loved its little pink tongue, the way it washed its paws— + The engraving hung upstairs, in his study. In the early evenings, the sunlight hit it, a bright red square before I was born. + The grenade keeps exploding into my adulthood. + I’m just going to run to the store for groceries, my mother said. You kids behave. You kids be good until I get back. Its little pink tongue. Its cold nose. The jangle of car keys. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue Automotive appears in my newest books of poems, The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). It’s the only poem in that book not to see magazine publication, partly because it was a last-minute addition to the collection. Its origin comes from two seemingly unlike memories. First, a memory of a 19th century engraving I saw as a child, a troublingly sentimental image of enslaved people apparently happily sleeping and dancing instead of working. That print bothered me and stayed with me in memory. Second, a friend who, not knowing a kitten had crawled into his truck’s warm engine, killed the kitten when he started the truck. I felt sparks between these two memories. Somehow, the fact of slavery made anodyne (and comic) in the engraving felt like that kitten curled inside the engine of American history—a false image of joy and sentimentality paired with its own cry of pain and death. I suppose, finally, the poem is (partly) about the persistence of historic evil in the mind of the state, though we may have sometimes tried to diminish it through sentimentality or willful blindness. .................................................................................................................................................................................... KEVIN PRUFER'S newest books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) and Sleepaway: a Novel (Acre Books, 2024). Among his eight other books are Churches , which was named one of the best ten books of 2015 by The New York Times, and How He Loved Them , which was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book from the American literary press. Prufer’s work appears widely in Best American Poetry , The Pushcart Prize Anthology , The Paris Review , and The New Republic , among others. He also directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to rediscovering great, long forgotten authors. kevinprufer.com Next - 11/8/16 by Joe Sacksteder Next

Mike White < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Stones Mike White 00:00 / 00:36 Stones Mike White The most torn angel came into town and we were dazzled and a little afraid His one shredded wing he held to his side like a secret and for all our asking he would not speak of God An angel fully broken so that when we finally led him up the road (gathering stones as we did) He trusted us like a serious child and asked again for nothing but water and homecoming “Stones,” is an older poem from How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (The Word Works, 2012) that combines a sense of revelatory change with breakage. Previous MIKE WHITE is the author of How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012) and Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser, 2017), winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue The Birdwatcher Stephen Wunderli Lydia turned her head to the window. The sky was pallid. The fire, only a few miles away, had moved on. Angry ember streams pulsing on the face of the Laramie mountains had subsided into slow exhales of gray smoke that shrouded the valley. The wind had roiled across the basin, laying smoke on the town of Casper, an unwelcome night that wouldn’t leave. “It’s the last thing you should do.” “Just to see what’s there if anything. I can’t sit anymore,” Ted said to his wife. “You mean with me.” “Don’t wait up.” The dark skin of Lydia’s Arapahoe body had been sponged quickly for ash and dabbed with iodine across blistered cheeks, the warpaint of the hospital. An oxygen tube fastened beneath her nostrils. She unlaced the leather tie of her ponytail with one hand and hummed hoarsely to herself; dragging her fingers through black hair too stiff for her young age. Out of the other forearm, bandaged tight like a horse’s shinbone, emerged the IV tube – saline for hydration and antibiotics against infection. This was the longest she had stayed in bed since they moved from town to the woods. Ten years of dawn to dusk chores. It’s the last thing you should do . The first words she had spoken since she came out of the burn unit and was propped up in the hospital bed in the hallway because the rooms were for deeper wounds, the kind that left scars like flagellated skin. Her lungs were branded. Her left hand was bandaged from punching through the flaming wall of the woodshed where the dog had somehow got when it ran off in a panic. “It’s my fault,” she had said, coughing, her hand blistered. “The dog wasn’t worth it,” he said back. It had not been a dramatic escape from the inferno a few days earlier. He had chopped a fire line around the house and thrown earth against the timber foundation until it raked down from the slats. But it wasn’t enough. The fire didn’t crawl along the ground, it dropped from the sky, from the deadfall that became airborne with the heat, coals raining down on shake shingles and bare porches. He beat at the flames with wool blankets, shoveled more dirt, but it wasn’t enough. He was the last one to climb in the truck, to cough through the smoke, the engine sputtering for clean air, the old Ford pushing into a traffic jam on the highway where a few firetrucks sprayed down the cars for embers and a water truck wet the shoulder while homes slowly collapsed in flames behind them. “What about James?” “I’ll take him with me. He should see.” “He shouldn’t go with you.” “I’m his father.” Lydia tried to call out to him when he turned, but Ted had already grabbed James by the arm and the two bumped their way through the train of beds parked in the hallway and the press of family beside them and the nurses in blue moving like ticket-takers between stops. “Your mother wants me to see if there is anything left,” he told the boy. James was nine-years old and had just learned to identify quail tracks by their faint scratches in the soft loam and the bowls they dug with their shuddering bodies hoping to draw out bugs. The week before he had crept carefully through the underbrush, uncovering a nest stacked with small eggs under the watch of the mother nearby. “Do you think the quail have got away?” “No. Nothing gets away.” Ted was accustomed to walking uneven ground. Striding across the parking lot made him uneasy, the flatness of it made him mistrust his own footsteps. He guided James to the truck with his thick hand pressing against the back of the boy’s thin shoulder blades. Ted had become more at ease with an axe handle in his hands than the tender arm of a young boy, more at home in the delicate sounds of the woods than the manufactured noises of the Barstow filling station where he grew up, surrounded by asphalt and combustion, the thud of a wrench against his back from his enraged father. Ted could not live with people he mistrusted, and that was most. “The boy doesn’t need fractures to learn lessons,” he told Lydia. “He needs the scuffs of living, not the punishment of some unknown sin.” James looked up at his father but didn’t ask questions. His father was taut as fence wire, his eyes clenched from ten years staring into the wind. “I would never hurt you,” he said to his boy. The boy nodded. The fires had come. It was their season, he expected that much, but the flames had blown past their usual boundaries and come upon the small town like Grendel in the night, torching this home and not that one, this barn but not that shed. Everyone refused to leave. It was home, if it was going to burn, they wanted to stay and fight, do what they could. It was no use; the flames drove them out anyway and clogged the highway with a wave of surrender. Ted had built the home himself, hoisting the beams alone, with a rig of pulleys and hemp rope. He set every post, painted every piece of siding. He would see it catch fire for himself before he finally gave up. Lydia threatened to leave before the fires. “You can have the house,” she’d said. She threw her bag of clothes onto the porch, scattering the quail that had ventured onto the boards where she had spilled cornmeal in her anger. “A boy needs school to learn things. He needs more than scat and velvet antlers to teach him. He needs a few books, Judas Ted! He could use more than your lectures on seed and whorling disease and alkaline soil, and God help us if he finds friends his own age!” The boy was watching the landscape as they moved away from the hospital. “The fire isn’t coming this way. It’s moved on.” “Why did it come after us?” “It’s just how fires are. Unpredictable.” They rolled out of town, crossed the North Platte River and followed a fire road toward the settlement that had become their home away from the sprinkler-piped developments with their food franchises and synthetic stucco. The settlement was a place people could live in solitude with no need for window shades because the space between neighbors was too great to see. And nobody cared about your business unless they had news about a mountain lion or the coming increase in the price of propane. Father and son idled past onlookers in yards set up in lawn chairs like they did on the fourth of July. Damned if anyone of them had ever swung a pick or dug their own well. Ted hated them for being the offspring of ease. He drove defiantly toward the veil of smoke hanging on the settlement. He was stopped on the highway by the fire crew from the next county over. “You can’t go this way.” “Here to run the water truck,” Ted lied, unfolding his volunteer Search and Rescue ID. The man in the clean uniform looked at them both. “Hell of a fire. Maybe tomorrow or the next day.” “I’ve seen worse.” “Not today you won’t. We got a missing smokejumper up there. Wouldn’t be good for the boy if you know what I mean.” “The boy is fine.” “Go back,” the man said. “Wait for the all clear . That’s not an ask, it’s an order.” Ted looked hard at the man. “Well. It’s not you that’s lost everything.” The rear wheels engaged and spun on the shoulder. The nose of the truck dipped down into the ditch, submerged behind a police cruiser and breached the haze beyond and skidded onto the road. “It’s home,” Ted said to James. “Nobody gonna take that away from us. Understand?” James nodded in the passenger seat while he watched the man in the clean uniform fan the dust from his eyes and talk on his radio. They reached the stone bridge that crossed a dry arroyo marking the beginning of the settlement. Everything was charred and still smoldering. This is as far as Lydia had gotten on her first run at leaving. She told him he was stubborn. He told her what’s right is right and everything else is weakness. She wept and stood there alone, eventually walking the gravel road back to the house. “I have nowhere to go,” she told her son. “I need you to love me. I never had a mother to love me. Can you do that for me?” James stared into her eyes. “Are we going?” “I don’t know for sure. I don’t know anything for sure anymore.” James held his mother’s arm and felt the pulse of her body as it held back the currents that wanted to break forth. “I only seen a few boys grow up like this, without schools, in the woods. It didn’t work out for them.” The two sat in the small room with hand stitched quilts draped across the bed posts saying nothing else until Ted stomped up the front porch stairs, kicked the bag she packed across the boards and banged open the front door. He’d been checking coyote traps, something that always satisfied him. “They just feed off the work of others,” he taught his son. “They need to be killed.” He dropped a bent trap on the floor and the chain jangled like shackles. He walked into the small bedroom and stared at the two. “My son needed me,” Lydia said. “He should have come with me to see why the traps were empty.” “The two of us should have left.” Ted took the boy by the arm and told him to go find the dog that had gone off again, rooting in the undergrowth for rodent carcasses. “It’s a waste of time, all these fights,” Ted said. “Up here is harsh enough,” Lydia said. “You don’t have to be harsh with me. I just see his education different than you.” “What else should the boy learn?” “He could learn to talk to other kids his age. It would do him good.” Ted walked out of the room and picked up the trap and made his way to the workshop. The air burned at Ted’s eyes. Only the foundation of the first house remained, blackened bricks and chimney that had fallen over and lay like a shipwreck in the living room. He idled the truck forward across the baked road. James was pale and wide-eyed and moved his head slowly, fixing on porches he used to cross on his honey route that were collapsed and yawing. “A hell of a fire,” the father said. The boy could say nothing. Ashes were making their way into the cab of the truck and swirling like gnats. He fanned them away from his face. Ted wiped the condensation off the inside of the windshield so he could see more clearly. “Love is the only thing that matters,” she had said to her son. “But it works both ways or it doesn’t work at all, so you have to keep looking.” Ted overheard this in the early night while she was sitting on the edge of the boy’s bed, the edge of leaving. He spent the night on the porch with his head on the bag, forming sentences that would bring it all back, like circling around the trap line and ending up home again. The fires were a safe distance then. He could start again. He could say things his own father had never said. But the winds changed and tore at his face. The red lights arrived soon after and the man in the uniform asked him if the bag was the only thing he was taking and if there was anyone else in the house. “I’m not leaving,” he’d said back, not mentioning that the bag was Lydia’s, not his. “It’s the smoke that will kill you,” the man said. “No one is leaving!” Ted yelled at the man. The brakes complained to a stop in front of their house. The timber frame had held, but nothing else. Walls and roof were gone. The sofa skeleton was all that remained inside. Everything else was a pile of smoldering firewood. “Let’s have a look,” he said to the boy, but James was slow to exit. He tested the ground with his boots as if they would explode into flames. The stone steps were still standing. The two kicked up ashen dust as they walked but dared not enter. James edged carefully along the side of the house where the quail had once made their run. Ted squatted on his haunches and surveyed the remains, trying to read the entrails of a sacrificed animal for some kind of sign, an omen that would guide the next thing he should do. “Everything panics in a fire,” Ted taught his son. “Run straight into the flames.” “Look,” the boy said. “Someone is there.” He was pointing to a hundred-foot lodge pole pine undressed by the fire and soot black. It was out seventy yards or so. Up high there was a body knocking against the trunk, stiff and lifeless, unveiled by the parting of smoke. A black shroud flapped behind it. The figure was also blackened and a tangle of rope around the neck and right arm strung around a branch above caused the head to cock to the right. The legs hung freely, swaying like a wind chime. “Who is it?” The boy asked. The father stood and looked. “A birdwatcher,” he answered. “Just a birdwatcher.” “Will he come down?” “Maybe. It’s been a hell of a fire.” “And he just watches?” “It’s all he can do. Watch. And wait for the birds to return.” "The Birdwatcher" was originally published in miracle monocle . Often it is the simple lives that have the most meaning, providing fertile ground for raw feelings to run their course. And alas, breakthroughs sometimes come too late. Previous STEPHEN WUNDERLI is a freelance writer for The Foundation for a Better Life. He is the recipient of the United Nations Time for Peace Award, the Bridport Prize in Literature and an EMMY. Next

Star Coulbrooke < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Aerobics by God Star Coulbrooke 00:00 / 02:10 Aerobics by God Star Coulbrooke It was a class for women only, women in the same church honing their bodies for husbands who told them God said it was good to be fit, and ever since birth control, women could be. So every Tuesday morning they followed a church-approved leader through ladylike routines in new leotards and ballet shoes, embarrassed at the sight of butts and legs they’d never seen before, their shapes always having been covered in Sunday pleats and gathers. Gradually, as confidence crept in with dance steps mastered to such easy routine they could have walked it in their sleep, their thoughts began to wander, endorphins they hadn’t owned since puberty pushing them into loving their muscles, liking their new form–such energy! A few of the ladies quit, went off to the fitness center in town and started working out with weights. They bought cross-training shoes, aerobics and lifting on alternate days. Made excuses for not going out with the family on weekends, went running on Saturdays, hot-tubbing Sunday. They were looking sharp, feeling like they could conquer the world. One ran for public office, two divorced. I burned up a new pair of shoes every six months, got so tight and sinewy I stopped my cycle, no more monthly bleeding, just energy, energy and power. I could carry six bags of groceries to the car myself, no cart, no sweat. I could stay up until midnight baking, doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom. I’d fall into bed, sleep hard until five, get up and go like hell. One day my man voiced his usual complaints and I decked him. All from a church-ladies gentle aerobics class ordered by God. "Aerobics by God" was published in Both Sides from the Middle (Helicon West Press, 2018), Perspective s, Center for Women and Gender online magazine, Utah State University, and Logan Canyon Blend, Blue Scarab Press, Pocatello, Idaho. The breakthrough that made this one a classic to perform was the realization that I could stretch the facts in my poems to get at the truth as well as the humor of a situation. Writing the poem in this style was empowering for me, a divorced woman going back to school in my forties, especially when my mentor, the late Ken Brewer, former poet laureate of Utah, got such a kick out of reading this poem to audiences across Utah. Previous STAR COULBROOKE was the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Logan City, Utah, and is founder/coordinator of the Helicon West Reading Series. Her poetry collections are Thin Spines of Memory, Both Sides from the Middle , and City of Poetry. mappingliteraryutah.org/utah-writers/star-coulbrooke 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 To Make It Now David Romtvedt Grandma stands in the kitchen, still alive. Her first man died in the twenties, forty years later the second went the same way. She stays alive so we celebrate another birthday halfway through her eighties the year I turn thirty. On the lawn her second son plays volleyball with his own grown children. Her eldest son, my father, watches and makes loud jokes. Like we expect when we come to this city, it rains. Everyone plays on, slightly damp. Later there’s a kind of horseshoes with giant darts and a plastic ring. We eat heavy American Food and sit in lawn chairs or on benches at borrowed tables. One grandson brings his two children but not their mother. The aunts call him brave to raise these children by himself, a man alone. Grandma loves her great-grandchildren, their tiny eyes and hands. All afternoon she drinks bourbon and water. I have made my retreat to the kitchen where I wash dishes. My aunt thanks me. Of course it is I who must give thanks. Grandma comes in wanting another drink, aware that now some whisper she shouldn’t. “But why not,” she asks, “Why shouldn’t an old lady drink if she wants?” She tells me I am good and wonders if I think it bad she drinks. I have no answer but pour out more bourbon and wash more dishes. She comes close to me and puts her arm in mine. How odd that I would grow up a poet. My mother has shown her a poem for my other grandmother, dead fifteen years before. “A lovely poem,” she says, “I had to read it twice. I didn’t understand at first how a woman could be a bird or a tree, then the second time I saw what you meant.” I am grateful to her for this and we are quiet. With so many people there are plenty of dishes. Then she says my name, tells me she too would like a poem, that would be something. Grandma sets her glass on the counter asking if I can write a poem before a person is dead? I rinse the soap off my hands and promise I will. “To Make It Now” originally appeared in the Crab Creek Review and in the book A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know (Copper Canyon Press, 1992), a selection of the National Poetry Series. Fifteen years after my maternal grandmother’s death I wrote a poem for her, which my mother sent to my paternal grandmother who then asked if I could write a poem for her, too, but before she died. I had no idea what to write and told the story of this request to an older poet I knew and admired who smiled and said, “But you see, don’t you, that’s the poem right there, the story you just told me.” In writing it down, I began to think in a new way about the making of a poem. Previous DAVID ROMTVEDT is from northern Wyoming. His most recent books are Still on Earth (LSU Press, 2025) and Forest of Ash: The Earliest Written Basque Poetry (Center for Basque Studies Press, 2024). davidromtvedt.com Next

Waiting Around after Walking Around by Pablo Neruda by Trish Hopkinson It so happens, I am tired of being a woman. And it happens while I wait for my children to grow into the burning licks of adulthood. The streaks of summer sun have gone, drained between gaps into gutters, and the ink-smell of report cards and recipe boxes cringes me into corners. Still I would be satisfied if I could draw from language the banquet of poets. If I could salvage the space in time for thought and collect it like a souvenir. I can no longer be timid and quiet, breathless and withdrawn. I can’t salve the silence. I can’t be this vineyard to be bottled, corked, cellared, and shelved. That’s why the year-end gapes with pointed teeth, growls at my crow’s feet, and gravels into my throat. It claws its way through the edges of an age I never planned to reach and diffuses my life into dullness— workout rooms and nail salons, bleach-white sheets on clotheslines, and treacherous photographs of younger me at barbecues and birthday parties. I wait. I hold still in my form-fitting camouflage. I put on my strong suit and war paint lipstick and I gamble on what’s expected. And what to become. And how to behave: mother, wife, brave. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “Waiting Around” has been published in Voicemail Poems , Nasty Women Poets Anthology , Thank You For Swallowing , PoetryPasta , Motherhood May Cause Drowsiness , East Coast Literary Review , Verse-Virtual , and was originally published by Wicked Banshee Press. This poem remains one of my all-time favorites. I wrote it before my first non-university publication and it received second place in a university contest, so this is the piece that really pushed me to seek out publication in literary magazines. I’d say in that way, it also led me to a very important step in my poetry career, which was to start my website to help other poets learn about how to get published. Today it is my most published poem and still a favorite to read at events. .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 - The Problem with Mrs. P by Michael Shay Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Dead Man's Money Michael Henson She was up in the park giving head to some old man in the front seat of his raggedy Chevy, and he was about to do the deed. His back arched, his body stiffened, his hand caressed the back of her head, he rose up two inches out of his seat. Then everything came to a stop. All the starch went out of him. He sank back down, his hand slipped away, he wilted and he sighed. “Come on baby,” she whispered. “You can do it for me.” But he had stopped all his rocking and moaning. He had gone limp as a sock. She raised her head; she was puzzled. This was something new. And strange. Then she heard the cackle. It was a strange, brittle, crackle of a sound like paper when it’s crumpled. From her angle, she could only see the business end of him, but the strange, mocking cackle seemed to come from somewhere else, from above, or to the side, or from deep inside him. She could not tell. It scared her; she sat up and backed away so she could look him in the face. “What’s up, honey?” she asked. “What’s the matter?” But the man would not answer. He clutched at his chest. His mouth gaped; he made little nods; he stared; he pleaded with his eyes. But he did not –could not—speak. Oh my God , she thought.“Oh my God,” she asked him. “Are you gonna die right here?” Was this a heart attack? She tried to remember, what do you do when somebody’s having a heart attack? “Are you okay?” she asked him. “Honey, are you okay?” He said nothing, but his eyes still pleaded. You are , she thought. You’re having a heart attack and you’re gonna die right here. Slowly, his hands relaxed across his chest. Then she heard again the weird cackle. Where did it come from? He shivered; his hands dropped slowly to his lap. His eyes still seemed to plead, but his lids drooped, slowly, like a schoolhouse flag coming down, bit by bit, until they closed altogether. Then his head tilted forward toward his chest and he slowly slid against the car door. She backed away, way up against the opposite door. She was afraid to even touch him. He didn’t breathe and he didn’t move. What do I do? she thought. What do I do? Was he dead? Just like that? She made herself brave and lifted his hand, then dropped it right away. His hand fell limp as a rag. Oh my God , she thought. Oh my God, what the fuck am I gonna do? She had her cell phone, but who would she call anyway? 9-1-1? The police? Her mother? If only she could call her mother. What the fuck , she thought. Please Jesus, what the fuck am I gonna do? There was no one around. They were in a tucked-away nook of a big park that overlooked the river. It was all woods to one side and a picnic area to the other. It was late afternoon in mid-week. A late-November wind kicked leaves around the empty picnic benches. No one was likely to come by here, but they might. The police made regular sweeps. High school kids came here to smoke weed and make out. And the joggers didn’t care what the fuck the weather was. It was an all-right place to conduct a little quick private business, but someone was bound to come around eventually. She couldn’t stay here long . Not with this poor guy sitting next to her dead as a hammer. A car was headed their way, slowly, so she thought it might be undercover. “Okay, darlin’,” she said to the dead man. “I gotta make like I’m talking to you, so don’t you fall down.” She raised his head and turned his shoulders so that he faced her. “Please don’t fall down,” she said. “Please. Please. Please.” He did not fall down, but his jaw went slack and his mouth fell open as if he really were about to speak. And his eyes, having peeped back open, still seemed to plead. What? She wanted to ask, What do you want? The undercover car—if that’s what it was—rolled on by and out of sight. She was ready to get the hell out of this car. But she looked the man over one more time and realized she couldn’t leave him like he was, with his dick still hanging out. He’s probably got kids and all, she thought. Grandkids, probably, from the look of him. She did not want him to haunt her for what they might see if they found him. Carefully, she put him back together decent. She tucked him in like a baby, pulled up his zipper, buttoned his trousers, and fastened his belt. “Now, motherfucker,” she said. “You owe me. No one’s ever gonna know you died getting a blow job from a crackhead. So you owe me.” To collect what she was owed, she first looked around to be sure no one was watching, then reached around him to where he kept his billfold. It took some doing, but she maneuvered it out of his pocket and opened it. Oh holy fuck! Her eyes went wide. The wallet was fat with bills, more than she could count. She fanned through the stack and she saw a thick wad of twenties, fifties, and even a deck of Benjamins. “You must have hit the fucking lottery,” she said to the man. “And I was your celebration.” All that money. It gave her a little buzz just to think of it. She could stay fucked up for a week on this much money. She could pay the rent, buy up some food and pay off her phone. She could send some money to her mother for the kids and still stay fucked up for days. But she knew better than to take it all. Somebody would find him, sooner or later. Somebody would wonder what happened to all his lottery money or back wages or Black Lung money or whatever it was that got a man who drove an old beat-up hooptie a wad of cheese that was thick as a brick. If the billfold was empty, they would think he had been robbed and they would come looking and if they looked long enough, they would find her. “I might be a dope fiend,” she told him, “and I might be a whore. But I ain’t stupid.” Still, he owed her. She took out a bill, thought about it, and took another. Fair enough, she thought, for what she had been through. A couple hundred bucks for an hour’s work. She hesitated a moment more. It was a lot of money to leave behind, a lot of blow jobs on a lot of old men. No, she couldn’t let it all go like that. It was like God had put all that money in her hands and was she going to turn it down? Fuck that . His kids and his grandkids would just have to suck it. None of them was willing to do for him what she did or else he wouldn’t have to come down to the hood looking for the likes of her. So she thumbed through the billfold again. This time, she took about half the bills and stuffed them in a wad into the pocket of her jacket. She shut up the billfold and worked it back into his pocket. She looked around once more to see if anyone was watching. Please, Jesus , she begged. Don’t let nobody come by now . Then she slipped out the door of the car and into the woods. But which way to go? She hardly knew where she was. The park covered many acres and it was looped through with woods and winding roads and hiking paths. She knew better than to try the roads. Too much traffic, too many cops. So she figured she could weave her way through the woods until she was back on some street she knew. Then she could hit the turf again like nothing had happened. Just another evening on the stroll. But first, she had to get off the hill and out of these woods. It would be dark soon. This ain’t gonna be no picnic, she thought. She was dressed for the street and not some wild place like this. She guessed that she was on a trail as she entered the woods, but it petered out quickly and she fought through briars and honeysuckle that scratched her ankles and slashed at her face until she broke free of the thickety stuff and came into a deeper, older woods. It was as quiet in here as a chapel. She paused to catch her breath. She was not used to walking anywhere but the streets, and these were totally the wrong shoes with their thin soles and open toes. There’s got to be a path, she thought. And as she stared into the woods a moment, there it was. Out of the maze of tree trunks, deadfalls, intersecting branches, and littered leaves, a pattern emerged, a deer trail, as if it had just formed itself right before her. Still, it was no easy thing to follow the deer trail. She had to duck under and step over a series of branches and logs, but eventually the deer trail crossed a path laid out by the park people, a clear easy path, soft with mulch. But which way? She had no idea where she was and which direction to turn. She guessed to the right, and she prayed, Please, Jesus, don’t let nobody come down this path, nobody walking his dog, nobody meeting her boyfriend. Her heels kept sinking into the mulch, so she took off her shoes. The ground was cold and she began to sniffle. I’ll catch cold for sure , she thought. Or maybe bronchitis or pneumonia . And when she thought of being laid up with no way to make a living, she regretted the money she left behind in the dead man’s wallet. Winter would soon hammer down onto the streets. It would be sweet to have one of those nice down coats, all bubbled up with feathers inside and warm as toast. She could see herself work the corner in her fine, fly, warm, high-collar coat. But she knew what would happen to her coat. She would have a slow day and she would need a hit. She would sell the coat for a nickel and her coat would go up the pipe. She would stay high for a hot minute while some other bitch walked around all warm in her coat. And she would be straight back out on the street in her little shivery thin jacket that she would never sell because nobody would want it. So fuck the coat , she thought. She was glad to have the thin jacket now, for it was colder in the woods than it had been on the street and colder yet, now that the day was getting late. Her bare feet were cold on this path, but at least she had her jacket. She continued down the path until it opened on an overlook. There was nothing to mark it but a little bench, but the view was clear from off the hill. There was the river, far below, and there were the Kentucky hills on the other side. A barge tilted downstream. Here and there, houses along either shore and way up in the Kentucky hills had winked on their lights. She stood up on the bench for a better view. Directly below her was River Road. Miniature cars and trucks barreled out toward the suburbs. And to the left, there was the pattern of dark buildings and small lights that she knew was her neighborhood. It looked incredibly far away. * For an hour, two hours, she had no idea how long, she walked, scrambled, plowed through the woods and thickets, blind and scared, full of dirt and tears. The darkness had dropped on her like a predator. She lost the shoes somewhere in the thickets. She had left the path once she realized it was taking her right back to the place where she had left her poor dead trick. She knew it when the path started to turn back uphill and she knew it for sure when she saw the lights flash through the trees. So someone had found the dead man and called the police. Their radios squawked and scratched. The trees were slashed with red and blue lights. * For an hour, two hours, she had no idea how long, she scrambled downhill through the dark thickets, away from the dead man and the red and blue lights. By the time she emerged at the fence line of someone’s backyard, she was scratched up in her face and ankles, her hair was strung all out of place and full of leaves and twigs. Her face was streaked with tears, dirt, and snot. Inside the fence, a dog was raising hell and pulling at his chain. Inside the kitchen, she could see a woman fixing dinner, a big, heavy-boned woman with long, straight hair. The woman had her radio going, and she danced around her kitchen and she danced at her counter and at her stove. She stared at the dancing woman until the woman raised her window to yell at the dog. Then she pulled back into the woods. * She had to work through more thickets of tangled briar and intersecting honeysuckle until she came to a string of abandoned houses, dark and empty. She was scared, but there were no dogs to raise hell and no one to watch her come out of the woods and onto River Road. She was used to cold and hunger. She was used to being tired. She was a street hooker, after all. She could pull long hours on nothing but coffee and cigarettes and that blessed hit off the pipe, that oh-so-blessed, blister-lip hit off that smooth glass pipe. She would have stalked straight down River Road like a soldier on a forced march but she was cold and hungry and tired like she had never been before. And she was lonely and she was depressed and she was crying for pity for the poor motherfucker who died with his pecker in her hand. And she was crying for herself, that she was ragged and cold and tired and shoeless out on River Road. She was shivering and fiending for that hit off the pipe. The sidewalks were hard and cold and full of grit, but she slogged one slow step after another. Her feet, by now, were raw, cut up by twigs, gravel, and bits of broken glass. I used to run barefoot all summer long , she thought. Now I can barely walk . She walked barefoot and sore for over a mile past more of the houses with their lighted kitchens and their living rooms warmed by television, past solid blocks of abandoned shops and tenements. Trucks rolled by and shook the ground around her. She saw no one out but a half dozen children gathered under a light by a dock. The children shouted and threw rocks into the river. They flung them far out into the water if the rocks were small, or if they were larger, straight off the dock with a great kawhoosh that made all the children scream and laugh. She stopped by a telephone pole and listened to the voices of the children, their shouts and laughter and the great kawhoosh of the rocks in the water. My life , she thought, is a curse . * She left behind the children at the dock and walked until she came within a hundred paces of her home. Another hundred steps. The block where she lived and worked was just in sight and a hundred steps would get her to her door. She could see the buildings and the lights in the buildings. She knew that the dope boys watched at their stations in front of those buildings. She had not seen them, and they had not seen her. But she could almost feel their presence. She could almost see the gold in their teeth and the gold at their necks. She could almost smell the sweat in their palms. One hundred steps and she could hand over one of her bills and a dope boy would fetch her a big yellow boulder the size of her fist. And she could take the rest of her money and pay the bill on her phone. She could buy some shoes—good shoes—to replace the shoes she had lost. She could give her mother some money for the kids. It would feel so good. It would be so sweet. And yet, she could not move. She knew what would happen. There would be no bills paid, no shoes, no money to give her mother. She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her jacket and she wiped her cheeks with the cuffs of her jacket and she trembled on the lip of the curb. Around the corner and up the street, a hundred steps from where she stood, there was food and warmth and the comfort of the pipe and yet she could not move. Something had ended and something had begun. She trembled and sobbed with her fist balled up around the dead man’s money and she did not know where to turn or whether to turn at all. She teetered like a child on the edge of the curb. She teetered forward and she teetered back; she shivered with indecision. What now? She thought. What the fuck do I do now? "Dead Man's Money" was published in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel , the annual publication of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. In this story, a woman teeters on the brink of a decision to seek a new life. Previous MICHAEL HENSON was born and raised in Sidney, Ohio and came to Cincinnati to go to college at Xavier University. After teaching school in Adams County and completing an M.A. at the University of Chicago, he worked as a community organizer, machine tender and forklift operator in a paper bag factory, union steward, substance abuse counselor, and adjunct professor at Xavier University and other colleges. He is the author of six books of fiction and four collections of poetry. His work includes Maggie Boylan , a finalist for the Weatherford Award for Appalachian fiction; Crow Call , poems in response to the murder of housing activist buddy gray; and The Triumphal Descent of Donald J. Trump into Hell, as Recounted to the Archangel Gabriel, from a Manuscript Discovered, Edited, and Translated from the Original Aramaic , a political fantasy. Henson is a member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative and the Carter Bridge Bluegrass Band. He lives in Cincinnati. michaelhenson.org Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue An Amicable Correspondence Scott Abbott amicable : good-natured, harmonious, cordial, agreeable, good-humored, kind, polite No, none of those. I mean something with more bite, more room for spirited exchange. This amicable correspondence will be between amici , prijatelji , Freunde . amicable : between friends. In 1826, officials in Weimar decided to clean out an overstuffed mausoleum that housed the remains of various notables, including those of Friedrich Schiller, who had died twenty-one years earlier. When they could not identify Schiller’s bones in the chaotic crypt, a doctor named Schwabe gathered 23 skulls to examine at home. Schwabe had known Schiller, he had his death mask, but still he was unable to identify Schiller’s skull with any certainty. He finally chose a skull that distinguished itself by its large size and fine, regular form. Großherzog Karl August recommended that the skull eventually be housed under glass next to Leibniz’s skull in the Royal Library. In the meantime, Goethe borrowed the skull and in the night of September 25th wrote a poem in honor of his friend, exploring the shifting relationships between nature and spirit, between matter and mind. Wilhelm von Humboldt saw the skull in Goethe’s possession and wrote to his wife that Goethe was having a burial vault built in the hopes that he and Schiller could eventually lie there together. In the end, the friends never shared a grave. DNA analysis in 2008 proved that the skull in question belonged to someone other than Friedrich Schiller. I decide to translate Goethe's poem. The dense rhymes of terza rima and the rhythms of iambic pentameter are integral formal contributors to the content, but my attempts to reproduce them in English are a disaster. I opt for a more straightforward form. While Contemplating Schiller’s Skull It was in the somber ossuary that I saw skulls aligned with ordered skulls; old times, I thought, gone grey. They stand fixed in rows, once mutual foes, and stout bones that clashed to kill lie athwart, rest subdued. Dismembered shoulder blades! what they bore now lost, and fine and lively limbs, the hand, the foot, scattered, disjointed. In vain you lay down tired, they left you no peace in the grave, drove you again into daylight. No one can love the desiccated shell, whatever splendid noble germ it protected. Yet for me, the adept, were inscribed sacred meanings not revealed to all, as I, amidst that unblinking multitude sensed an image wondrous beyond imagination, and in the clammy hall’s constriction I was warmed, refreshed, as if life had sprung from death. How mysteriously the form ravished me! The divinely ordered trace, preserved! A glimpse that carried me off to that sea whence figures rise transmuted. Mysterious vessel! Orphic oracle, How am I worthy to hold you in my hand? Lifting you fervently, ultimate treasure, from corruption and into the open air to freely muse, turning myself, devoutly, to the sunlight. What more can one attain in a lifetime than that God-Nature reveals herself? How she lets what is firm pass away to spirit, How firmly she preserves what the spirit engenders. (to be continued) Translating the poem from German to English and from the distance of two centuries, I enjoy an opening of sorts. As opposed to my largely monolingual habitation in the American West where I was born and raised, my friends Žarko Radaković and Alex Caldiero live at linguistic junctures. Žarko, who emigrated from the former Yugoslavia and whose native language is Serbo-Croatian, lives in Cologne with his German wife Anne. An uncompromising novelist, he is also a devoted translator of works by Peter Handke. Alex, who emigrated from Sicily to Brooklyn at the age of nine, lives in Orem, Utah with his Russian / Turkish / American wife Setenay. His poetry performances are legendary and his translations from Sicilian include the delightful “Bawdy Riddles and Tongue Twisters of the Sicilian Folk:” Trasi tisa / E nesci modda — It goes in hard / And comes out soft. !Pasta). I have been the fortunate friend of these emigrant / immigrant / translator / artists for more than four decades. 8 December 2017 I show Alex my new hearing aids. He points out that because his right ear is still his worst one, the fact that I can now hear through my bad left ear won’t change the fact that I’ll need to walk on his right side if we’re walking and talking. He has some technical questions. And then he gets to the heart of the matter: What if this destroys our friendship? What do you mean? What if our friendship is based on miscommunication? What if we’re friends only because I’ve been hearing you poorly and you haven’t been hearing me correctly? While contemplating that possibility, I tell Alex about Goethe’s poem written while contemplating his friend Schiller’s skull. My mother, Alex responds, had a burning desire to see her father’s bones. We were in Licodea, Sicily, and she insisted that we go to the cemetery where the family crypt is. My grandfather’s casket is in the ground-level room of the crypt, directly under the altar. She asked a cemetery official if she could open the casket. You can do anything you want in your family’s crypt, he said. I did my best to dissuade her from opening the casket. You know how close to an emotional edge I live; imagine my mother 100 times closer to that edge. She finally acquiesced and we didn’t open the casket. When Schiller died, Goethe was 55 and Schiller 45. Goethe was 76 when he contemplated Schiller’s skull. Žarko, Alex, and I are 73, 69, and 69 respectively. None of us is likely to write a poem with the other’s skull on our desk. Schiller’s first letter to Goethe (first of more than a thousand letters subsequently passed between them), dated the 13thof June, 1794 and sent from Jena to the neighboring town of Weimar, addresses Goethe as High Wellborn Sir, Highly-to Be-Honored Privy Councilor . The letter is a request for contributions to Schiller’s proposed literary journal Die Horen (The Horae). Schiller mentions co-publishers—idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the linguist and eventual founder of the University of Berlin Wilhelm von Humboldt. He signs the letter Your High Wellborn, most obedient servant and most sincere admirer F. Schiller . Goethe responds on the 24th of June and then again on the 25th of July. He offers a token of friendship and assures Schiller that he is very much looking forward to a frequent and lively exchange of ideas: "I shall with pleasure and with all my heart be one of the party." Several letters follow and in September Goethe invites Schiller to visit him in Weimar. Schiller responds enthusiastically on September 7th, but with a caveat: that Goethe not rely on him to meet any domestic timetables. Cramps during the night disturb him so seriously, Schiller writes, that he finds it necessary to sleep the entire morning and cannot commit to anything at any given hour. "You will, then, allow me to be a complete stranger in your house . . . to isolate myself so that I can escape the embarrassment of having to depend on others. . . . Excuse these preliminaries. . . . I ask for the simple freedom of being allowed to be ill while being your guest." And with that the friendship that proved so valuable to both men was begun. Goethe later told Schiller that he had given him “a second youth and made me a poet again, which I had as good as ceased to be.” Schiller, thinking perhaps of his delicate health and uncertain future, wrote that, “I hope that we can walk together down as much of the road as may remain, and with all the more profit, since the last companions on a journey always have most to say to each other.” Years later, while Goethe was editing their correspondence for publication, he asked “what could be more amusing than to see our letters begin with the pompous announcement of the Horen . . . . And yet, if there hadn’t been that impulse and will to document the times, everything in German literature would now be very different.” If the Serb hadn’t invited the American to contribute to the literary journal Knjizevna kritika , if the Sicilian and the American hadn’t begun neighborly conversations about poetry, and if the Serb and the Sicilian hadn’t conversed one morning in the American’s house, everything in the field of Serbian-American-Sicilian literature would now be very different. This opening section of my half of the book We, On Friendship (Elik Press, 2022), co-written by Žarko Radaković and with contributions from Alex Caldiero, led to a surprising integration of Goethe’s and Schiller’s correspondence into the correspondence between the three of us. For more about the three books Žarko and I have published in both Serbian and English, see our website . Previous SCOTT ABBOTT completed a doctorate in German Studies at Princeton University and is a professor emeritus of Integrated Studies, Philosophy, and Humanities at Utah Valley University. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger. (Common Consent Press, 2022). He has translated works by Nobel Prize Awardee Peter Handke and botanist Gregor Mendel. scottabbottauthor.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Cold Marble, Hot Memories Lev Raphael I was in love with museums before I even visited one. My parents had a small, battered, brown suitcase filled with art postcards from London, Paris, and all across Belgium, where they lived for five years after WWII. They never spoke much about surviving the Holocaust, and the hundreds of postcards seemed to fill that silence for me. Europe was art back then, not death and destruction, and I communed with those images as intently as someone deep in prayer. Sitting on the linoleum-covered floor in front of them, I could have been one of those guys in a science fiction movie opening a mysterious box whose unseen contents give off an unearthly and mesmerizing glow. My Washington Heights bedroom had an unobstructed view of the George Washington Bridge and watching its lights come on at dusk was one of my quiet joys, as soothing as poring over these photos of statues and paintings. But nothing prepared me for the revelations on my first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A fan of Ancient Greek history and Greek myths in elementary school, I was immediately drawn to the galleries of Greek and Roman statues. I already sensed I was different from my classmates and I was electrified by the bold nudity on one pedestal after another, bathed in tender natural light from above, or so it seemed, and lit up more by their own perfection. With my parents off in some other gallery, I wandered and stared and studied--and who could accuse me of anything unwholesome or dangerous? I felt safe there, sheltered, wordlessly embraced. It was a much later piece, though, that changed my life: Canova's Perseus . At the time, this statue loomed on a landing at the top of a mammoth staircase, its placement making the space around it feel like an altar. Shy then, bookish, easily bullied, and living in the shadow of an older brother who seemed to get all the attention I craved, I relished the Perseus, would have gulped it down if it were a drink. Easily three times my size, Perseus was all graceful, cool triumph as he held Medusa's grotesque head away from himself. His strength, his beauty, and yes, his perfect nude body, filled me with longing not just to be him, but to create something, anything. I returned to him on each visit, engrossed, inspired, and many years later wrote a story in which he figures as an icon of gay desire. Every statue from the ancient world that I've encountered since that day, whether in the Santa Barbara Museum or Berlin's Pergamon Museum, reminds me of the discovery of such unparalleled beauty and the nascent discoveries of self that waited for me in my teens. I've even felt Perseus's power at London's Tate Modern Museum, wandering through an exhibition of Brancusi statues which couldn't have been more unlike Canova's work, but their beauty triggered vivid memories of his. And made me cry, which alarmed the nearest guard. I muttered something about being overwhelmed and wandered off, dazed but replete. Published in the Gay & Lesbian Review . I grew up in an immigrant family where money was tight but the love of art and music was the air I breathed. My parents took me to concerts and musicals from a very early age and we visited the major museums in Manhattan so often that I grew to have favorite pieces like Van Gogh's "Starry Night" at the Museum of Modern Art and "Rembrandt Contemplating a Bust of Homer" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. These were works that mesmerized me with their beauty, especially since I had no talent whatsoever myself as a visual artist. But I did have words and the words for the sculpture described here apparently lay dormant until early in the pandemic when in my relative isolation from friends, family and even neighbors, I found myself writing essay after essay as memories filled my days. I was never truly alone. And art was where it all began. Previous LEV RAPHAEL is an editor, mentor, writing coach and the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery. writewithoutborders.com and levraphael.substack.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Mama's Hands Willy Palomo scrub toilets until you can see your face as you piss, until her hugs smell only of rubber & bleach. Her knuckles are rougher than my father’s, tougher than anything behind a dumpster with Timberlands and a metal bat. At nine years old, the sound of her car leaving the garage would wake me up in the morning. Her shift ended at midnight, so at bedtime, I would take out all my toys and wait for her and play with dinosaurs on the couch. But the morning would come with the crank of her engine, again. I’m sorry, Mama , I’d blink, knotting myself deeper into my sheets, but I couldn’t breathe & keep my eyes open at the same time. I’m sorry , I’d stomp, crushing snails after school, I didn’t love you enough to stay awake . When night came again, I’d yawn, pull out my triceratops, and vow to see her before bed. I thought I would never make it. Then one night, the door broke open like a promise, the light behind her head darkening her face as she lifted me numb from the sofa. I twitched, maybe managed a smile, as her hand stroked the left side of my face—rough. Published in Crab Orchard Review , Vol. 23, No. 3. The literal breakthrough in the poem is a door opening and a pouring forth of light, one that also creates a chiaroscuro "darkening her face" in the frame of a promise broken open. 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

< 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