Search this site

Jamison Conforto < Back to Breakthroughs Issue BOY Jamison Conforto 00:00 / 01:26 BOY Jamison Conforto When I was a boy it was just the two of us under that hot Utah summer sun, blazing high the smell of rain and warm rabbitbrush heaven a synonym for him, for afternoon And when I was a boy clinging to the fence watching my best friend run away in real time smaller and smaller through the wheat until I couldn't pick him out from the horizon And when I was a boy crying in my bed wishing with all my heart that I had gone with him disappeared together into the wheat instead of picking the coward's way of things I'm no longer a boy crying for the dead but I still think of what could have been if I had traveled through that rabbitbrush if we had run away together when we had time "boy" is a true story from my youth, when I watched my best friend run away. That day has been a landmark event in my past and a keystone of my inspiration for as long as I can remember, so to finally be able to put it into words is a breakthrough for me personally. I like to think the layers of resonance between the stanzas is a breakthrough in the development of my poetic technique as well. Previous JAMISON CONFORTO is a writer and poet from the Salt Lake Valley. His poetry collection, Antelope Boy, received recognition at the Sigma Tau Delta Centennial Convention and in the Utah Original Writing Competition. You can follow his poem-a-day journey at @the_year_365_in_365 on Instagram. Next

Jamison Conforto < Back to Breakthroughs Issue ANTELOPE BOY Jamison Conforto 00:00 / 01:53 ANTELOPE BOY Jamison Conforto Roads work two ways so do phones webs of connection I could go anywhere the threads keeping me here are fragile and yet, so strong If I could sleep below the ocean make the sand my bed and watch the fish flit above If I could climb up a mountain make the rocks my home and hear the antelope run below I joined their herd once sprinting to keep up with their four legs hooves and horns of black ivory We chewed grass and roots on the prairies my teeth not built for rumination and my stomach unable to digest much Their fur is tougher than my skin They see farther than I can but they are dumb as bricks I know the quadratic formula don't know how to use it, but I know it X equals negative B plus or minus the square root of B squared minus 4AC, all over 2A An antelope could never remember that but that's okay, I forgive them just as they forgive my trespasses on antelope life We aren't the same but at the end of the day we are a herd of creatures together "Antelope Boy" was first published by Kolob Canyon Review in 2024, and was then the featured poem of its namesake collection that won awards at both the 2024 Sigma Tau Delta conference and the 2024 Utah Original Writing Competition. It's the first piece I wrote that really made me believe in my own poetry, and continues to inspire me to reach for even greater heights. Previous JAMISON CONFORTO is a writer and poet from the Salt Lake Valley. His poetry collection, Antelope Boy, received recognition at the Sigma Tau Delta Centennial Convention and in the Utah Original Writing Competition. You can follow his poem-a-day journey at @the_year_365_in_365 on Instagram. Next

Nano Taggart < Back to Breakthroughs Issue ON SELECTING THE CONTENTS OF CARE PACKAGE NUMBER THREE Nano Taggart 00:00 / 01:12 ON SELECTING THE CONTENTS OF CARE PACKAGE NUMBER THREE Nano Taggart We can’t help and we can’t help but postpone grief with something. Our hero had given up but hope has again regained hold. Isn’t it strange that zero isn’t nothing? And so we learn you can buy time (once it's running out) with winter’s inversion bearing down so low we could lose the sun if we didn’t know where to look. It's strange to know that zero had to be invented as I notice Natalie’s row of unlit candles has collected a thin skin. What would you mail a twenty-five-year-old who's dying? Hand- written notes from all of us. Knick-knacks of short purpose? We feel as though we’ve cut a larger hole around a hole. It’s stranger still that zero was invented independently and all over. It’s not the same as nothing. We’re making a list. A short list. Originally published in The Shore , this poem addresses the helplessness that hollows us out once we hear the clock's awful ticking on a loved one; in this case, Clark Gunnel (d. June 15, 2012). It went through more drafts than I can count over the course of more than a decade. Previous NANO TAGGART is a founding editor of Sugar House Review , and would like to meet your dog. Next

Robert Okaji < Back to Breakthroughs Issue RELENTLESS Robert Okaji 00:00 / 00:50 RELENTLESS Robert Okaji In my youth I might have stayed there, drinking beer until the cows came in or someone started a fight. But today, one pint and a Caesar salad was all I needed. Then I limped back to the hotel, made a cup of strong coffee, and wrote. What is the point , I ask. Nobody answers, which is, of course, the point. No one hears those fallen trees and poets, except the trees and poets. The cancer is spreading. Thus far I've managed to dodge most of the indignities inherent in this illness. But they're coming. Oh, they're coming. I was diagnosed with a terminal illness some sixteen months ago. Thanks to the wonders of modern science, I'm still here, still breathing, still writing, for Pete's sake! What's the point of it? Who cares? Does anyone? What's the point of anything? But still, I continue doing what I'm doing—writing—sometimes painfully, with a little less grace, and slowly, grudgingly, because it's what I do. It's who I am. Previous ROBERT OKAJI has late-stage metastatic lung cancer, which he finds terribly annoying. His poetry may be found in Threepenny Review , Vox Populi, and other venues. robertokaji.com Next

Lauren Camp < Back to Breakthroughs Issue SIGHT Lauren Camp 00:00 / 01:47 SIGHT Lauren Camp This isn’t how I intended to begin. A woman in a white dress. Comăneci’s routine on the uneven bars. How a friend gets her contacts to the river. The tumor larking an ankle. Why did you come, I ask everyone. Everyone has photos of sunset that summer. Moving away from the plains. A legal brief, a will. How you knew she would say, shouldn’t we? Glass doors into a hotel lobby. Fitting a key to the indifferent frame. That season I babysat for Danielle and her birthmark. A condor laving the canyon. My very first diary: pink with a lock. What are you looking for? Two men taking turns taking photos of selves as a layer, a promise. The couple on the bus in the wobbled tip of an argument, building a fault line. My father’s bald head and why didn’t I run my small hands over it. The spine of a cloud. The courtesy and plop of water as it takes each notch. How many times you write that you miss us together. So small yet I figure you’re hollering. Jupiter through a telescope. My grandmother’s cowbell in Tulsa. The camels in Luxor. Satellite images of the past. And now darkness. First published in In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024) . This poem is one of many I began during a month-long stint as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. My focus was on the pristine natural darkness that spanned across and above this wonder of the world. I often write into a subject somewhat obsessively, interested to see what comes out when I’ve exhausted the easy response.“Sight” takes on a large collection of objects and experiences that continue to unfold and deepen for me. Every one can be summed up as ephemeral, though they left me with residual memory, and with things to turn over and question further. Previous LAUREN CAMP served as New Mexico Poet Laureate from 2022 to 2025. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026). www.laurencamp.com Next

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

Mike White < Back to Breakthroughs Issue DOUBLE LIFE Mike White 00:00 / 01:03 DOUBLE LIFE Mike White No man ever steps in the same river twice. -Heraclitus If anyone and I mean anyone knows where she is . . . pleads her father on the news, and I curse under my breath, releasing incomprehensible hosannas of Good God Good God before invoking his only child, Jesus Fucking Christ, who in my childbrain had once led a secret double life as a lamb. In the early spring, ice can give way, so it does, a red snowsuit here one minute and the next and the next and the next until only the river keeps moving, a river that is never the same . . . up to his waist, a father still calling and calling her name. “Double Life,” is a brand new poem, and comes at the theme with a particularly literal rendering. 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

Andrea Hollander < Back to Breakthroughs Issue LIVING ROOM Andrea Hollander 00:00 / 02:12 LIVING ROOM Andrea Hollander In the cave of memory my father crawls now, his small carbide light fixed to his forehead, his kneepads so worn from the journey they’re barely useful, but he adjusts them again and again. Sometimes he arches up, stands, reaches, measures himself against the wayward height of the ceiling, which in this part of the cave is at best uneven. He often hits his head. Other times he suddenly stoops, winces, calls out a name, sometimes the pet name he had for my long-dead mother or the name he called his own. That’s when my stepmother tries to call him back. Honeyman , she says, one hand on his cheek, the other his shoulder, settling him into the one chair he sometimes stays in. There are days she discovers him curled beneath the baby grand, and she’s learned to lie down with him. I am here , she says, her body caved against this man who every day deserts her. Bats , he says, or maybe, field glasses . Perhaps he’s back in France, 1944, she doesn’t know. But soon he’s up again on his knees, shushing her, checking his headlamp, adjusting his kneepads, and she rises to her own knees, she doesn’t know what else to do, the two of them explorers, one whose thinning pin of light leads them, making their slow way through this room named for the living. Previously published in RUNES , and winner of the RUNES Poetry Prize, selected by Jane Hirshfield, "Living Room" is included in my third full-length collection, Woman in the Painting (Autumn House, 2006 ) and in Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982 - 2012 (Autumn House, 2013. ) Witnessing my father's years-long death from Alzheimer's was overwhelmingly heartbreaking, but observing his wife's unwavering care for him during those sad, difficult twelve years gave me unexpected peace; her compassion and deep love were motivations for this poem. Though I'd written about his disease in other poems, not until I found the perfect analogy of spelunking (a breakthrough), was I able to create this poem that honors both my father and my stepmother. Previous ANDREA HOLLANDER is the author of six full-length poetry collections and has received numerous awards, including two Pushcart Prizes for poetry and literary non-fiction, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. www.andreahollander.net Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue FACING IT Shanan Ballam I’ve lost the ability to walk I can’t do stairs or go uphill or downhill I’ve lost my beautiful penmanship but I can let go of things with my right hand I used to grip so hard the handrail in rehab— I’ve relearned how to use chopsticks I can open pill bottles and La Croix cans I haven’t lost the ability to write poetry I made it up and down little mountain cascades of birdsong and then silence graceful arcs silver spray of sprinklers in the far field three sandhill cranes flying in unison three sandhill cranes dissolved into the mountain a skunk plumes its luxurious black and white tail a deer bounding a monarch butterfly up close for the first time flashing its wings opening and closing its wings perched on an elm leaf mesmerizing near the river perched on an elm leaf opening and closing its wings near the river opening and closing "facing it" appears in my chapbook first poems after the stroke ( Finishing Line Press, 2024) . I survived a massive stroke in January 2022 that robbed me of the use of my entire right side. It also stole my language. It’s been three years since the stroke, and I still have trouble going up and down stairs and up and down hills, but I have regained the ability to write in cursive, which was one of my goals. This is a poem I wrote in the early stages of my recovery, and the breakthrough is that I wrote down all I had lost for the first time. Previous SHANAN BALLAM is the author of the poetry manuscripts The Red Riding Hood Papers (Finishing Line Press, 2010), Pretty Marrow (Negative Capability, 2013) , Inside the Animal (Main Street Rag, 2019) , and the chapbooks first poems after the stroke (Finishing Line Press, 2024) and My Paper Boat (Moon in the Rye Press, 2026). shananballam.org Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue HARD TIMES Lev Raphael Fifty+ years ago, I was bullied in fifth grade, but not by other students: My teacher was the culprit, and she seemed to take special delight in tormenting me. Today I wonder if she knew I was gay decades before I did, given my obvious crush on our dazzling class president, and it revolted her. Thanks to the alphabet and our last names, I sat right across Michael who was tall and curly-haired, with blue eyes and brilliant white teeth. I was nothing like him. Sitting in the row furthest from the door, he seemed to always live in a penumbra of light from the giant windows piercing the nearby wall of our neo-Gothic elementary school. I longed to be his friend without being able to articulate that to myself or understand it could mean something vital about who I was. Mrs. Zir must have observed me fawn over him—when I could—like the time he dropped a pencil and I stooped faster than he did so I could grab the precious yellow cylinder and hand it to him, hungry for a smile. He was kind in an off-hand way. Mrs. Zir herself was scarier than Cruella de Vil though she lacked the sharp angles and swirling robes. Muscular and six feet tall with a large, oval, sneering face and thinning gray hair trapped in a forbidding bun, she loomed above us kids like an adamantine, implacable god. Zir's clothes were almost always some shade of gray that matched her hair and her derisive eyes. In a horror movie today, I think that CGI would be used to make her an alien storm cloud roiling with nauseating thunder and lightning, disguised now and then as a human being. This woman with the harsh last name stalked our classroom in big-ass sneakers you felt could crush you as easily as one of her savage, nonverbal put-downs. When she shook her head at your wrong answer to some question, that gesture said you were hopeless and she was disgusted. Mrs. Zir seemed to especially enjoy humiliating anyone who couldn't think fast when she swept up and down the five rows of six desks each, jamming a cruel index finger your way and demanding an instant answer to a multiplication problem. "Six times six! Five times seven!" It was a tsunami, and if you hesitated, she abandoned you to your ignorance and shame, turning instantly away to torture someone else. Just seeing her start this inquisition left me sweating and breathless because I was so anxious to begin with in her class. Arithmetic was like a black hole to me and written quizzes were my doom no matter how much I studied beforehand: hard-core proof of my inadequacy. The classroom with its scarred wooden desks--so old that they had inkwells--felt like a prison that whole year of fifth grade. Zir bullied me and anyone else whenever she got the chance. She was the queen and we were her lowly subjects, or most of us were. She had her favorites, the pretty girls and handsome boys (like Michael) whose parents apparently flattered her at parent/teacher conferences. Mrs. Zir knew that my parents had lived in Belgium, and when she said something to my mother in French at their first parent/teacher conference, my mother acted puzzled: "What language are you speaking? It's not familiar to me." That reply apparently left my teacher speechless. My mother relished this anecdote when she reported it to me at home because she thought Mrs. Zir was pretentious and a snob—on top of having an atrocious accent. As much as I enjoyed hearing an adult mock my teacher, I quailed inside when I heard what took place at the conference because I knew there would be revenge. It followed swiftly. In auditions for our class's production of The HMS Pinafore , I was cast as Ralph Rackstraw, the lowly seaman in love with the captain's daughter, but Mrs. Zir barely heard a note before silencing me: "You can't sing!" I was crushed. I could have been relegated to the chorus even if I wasn't a great singer, but instead, she gave me a prominent role and undermined it by keeping me mute onstage. Still, the cruelest thing she did was destroy my writing. I was an advanced reader and proud of my poems and little stories. I expected to take them all home when fifth grade was over to start a personal library, but Mrs. Zir wouldn't let me have mine. She said that she was keeping everyone's portfolios, and I was too scared to ask why or report her refusal to my parents. But when I finally steeled myself to venture one floor down to her classroom the next year when I was in sixth grade, she dismissed me with a casual "Oh, I threw all of that out." Decades after fifth grade, I am courageously taking voice lessons with a young graduate student in Michigan State University's College of Music and he couldn't be more different from the severe Mrs. Zir. Fair-haired Felix is relaxed, encouraging, witty, clear-headed, loves to laugh and can sometimes read my mind, as when he notes I might be overthinking a line in a song rather than feeling it. I had almost completely forgotten Mrs. Zir until the day Felix is talking about mental blocks interfering with the free production of sound and I find myself sharing Mrs. Zir's damning verdict that kept me silent. He shakes his head. "But you have a beautiful voice! There's so much music in you!" And I suddenly feel as liberated as if I've been under hypnosis and the magician has just snapped his fingers to bring me out of it. Sometimes opposites can inspire an essay or short story that I write, and that's the genesis of "Hard Times." I take voice lessons at a community music school connected to our local university, and it's staffed by faculty and graduate students from the College of Music. My most recent teacher has been ideal: inspiring, thorough, focused, friendly, and blessed with a great sense of humor. Those qualities have helped me improve my resonance, my legato, and my understanding of the poetry in each song that we work on, whether Schumann or Sondheim. One day during vocal warm-ups, his polar opposite, the worst teacher I ever had, just popped into my head. I hadn't thought about her in, well, what seemed like forever, but realized out of the blue that I was the one with power now because I could use the writer's magic to turn her into words. 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 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 is the author of the novels Before Us Like a Land of Dreams , What Falls Away , and Things I Didn’t Do , published by Torrey House Press. She hails from the Great Basin. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue HOW TO MAKE A BASKET Jan Mordenski for Henry Taylor Take a walk down Canal St. Buy one of those crispy horn-shaped buns from the lady at the corner bakery. Eat it as you watch the two boys dangling their lines off Salmon Weir Bridge. Sit inside St. Benedict’s. Watch the sputtering rows of vigil lights, the way the wax bends the air as it evaporates. Take delight in tangled things: your daughter’s coppery hair, the fading lines of your fingertips, the trail a swallowtail makes as she tastes the asters in the garden. You need not concentrate on strictly rural images. Park across from the power plant; follow the grimy path of one fat black pipe. Keep your eye on the red Trans Am as it volleys down Telegraph Rd. This is easy. Move on, now, to the more difficult preparations. Study openings, memorize the patterns of house windows, the shifting lulls in your conversations. Dwell on one vast vacant area: your own loss of hearing, your inability to understand, the memory of the palms of your mother’s hands. Then go into the field. Find something that grows, something long and aspiring that points to the sky, tries, in fact, to be part of it. Explain to it how it will be better this way. Take it in your hands, not reverently exactly, but with respect. And keep it wet. Remember that little thrush you saw this morning at the edge of the canal? Try to see her now: a disoriented worm in her beak, her claws, two tiny scythes, gripping the gentle mess of twigs and feathers and string into which she put her children. Hold all this as you begin the chosen pattern. "How to Make a Basket" was first published in BLACK RIVER REVIEW . At my father's suggestion, I had enrolled in a few classes in basket-making and that (like many crafts) provided time for reflection - on my homelife, teaching, writing. I came to realize how many separate aspects of life are actually interwoven . This poem celebrates that breakthrough, and one of my poet-mentors, the great Henry Taylor. Previous JAN MORDENSKI was born in Detroit, Michigan. She is the author of the chapbooks The Chosen Pattern (Quadra-Project, 1988) and Blue Prairie of Darkness (Michigan Writers Cooperative Press, 2026 ). Her poem "Crochet" was published in Plainsong and in Ted Kooser's series, American Life in Poetry . poetryfoundation.org/poets/jan-mordenski Next